New story emerges of an infamous massacre

"By June, the ordinary people identified with the students 100 percent," Munro remembers. "Beijing people are outraged when the soldiers leave their barracks. They said the soldiers planned to kill 'our' students, as they put it."

The bulk of departing students who left the square in a column took several turns and eventually crossed the Avenue of Eternal Peace just west of Tiananmen. At that point, one of the worst incidents involving students took place, as APCs fired on and ran over at least 11 students. AP reporter John Pomfret, traveling in the column, saw students remove seven bodies, and soldiers began to shoot tear gas into the student ranks, according to the Munro-collected testimony.

The Tiananmen Square protests were the apogee of a push toward openness in China and the adoption of more Western and international standards. The precipitating event was the death of beloved reformer Hu Yaobang on April 15. The genesis of the protest is thought to have begun in the party history department of Beijing University. According to the historian Spence, it was the children of high-ranking party members who saw a need for change - a perception corroborated here in Beijing by sources pointing out that no major operation like the Tiananmen protest could have been engineered by "someone on the street."

The protest became a kind of referendum on China's future, and its leadership. On May 15 Mikhail Gorbachev came to Beijing as a new type of Soviet leader preaching a new message of change. By that time, the square was so jammed that Mr. Gorbachev could not get through to the Great Hall of the People. But students immediately identified with him, as did Zhao Ziyang, then the party secretary. On May 19, days after Gorbachev left, Li Peng declared martial law and Zhao was out - itself angering the Beijing population. The Tiananmen Papers make clear that premier leader Deng Xiaoping felt that a glasnost style reform would cause damaging instability in China, and he advocated taking strong measures to put down the protest, despite the anticipated outrage in foreign lands. The die was cast: China outlined a path in which political reform would only come after economic reform.

A number of later discredited accounts of a "massacre" in the square came out in the days following June 4. Student leader Wuer Kaixi claimed "2,000 perished" and claimed to have seen two rows of students killed, though it is later shown he left the square about 4 a.m.

A Hong Kong student leader was quoted as saying "a thousand" were killed, but later admits under questioning that he has actually seen no killings.

Roderick MacFarquhar, a history professor at Harvard University, says the estimates of the final death toll range from 800 to 1,000. But, one eyewitness in Beijing who later wrote a book on Chinese nationalism points out that the actual numbers or locations are not crucial 15 years later. "Whether the figure is 900 or 2,052, is not the issue," he says.

"We don't want to start bargaining with the lives of victims. What now matters is a serious confession that it happened, and then an accounting of what happened. That's what we still don't have."

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