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New story emerges of an infamous massacre
Square standoff decided by vote
It appeared that they might stay. But in what seemed an afterthought, someone, it is not clear who, came on the speaker to suggest taking a vote. "It was ... at the time a stroke of genius" that may have saved thousands of lives, Munro recalled.
Between 5 and 6 a.m. the students left the memorial and filed out to the southwest part of the square, walking behind the banners that marked which college they were from.
"There was absolutely no one killed at the Monument [of the People's Heroes]," said Spanish cameraman Rodriques, who was filming the entire evening, and whose testimony contrasts with 15 years of unattributed rumor. "Everyone left and no one was killed."
"Student leaders had pulled off the most difficult maneuver ... an orderly retreat," Richard Nations said in testimony given weeks later. "The real violence still lay ahead but at that moment the 1989 democratic movement was over, and the next phase began as the column walked off the theater of national politics at Tiananmen."
Mr. Restrepro was on hand as the students departed past a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop: At daybreak "It was one of those extraordinary moments.... The students were carrying their banners.... Some had no shoes. I shall remember this for the rest of my life, the faces of those boys and girls.... At 5 a.m. the first flags coming out... and it took one hour... and as they [left] the people began insulting the soldiers and cheering ... the students. Then some began to throw stones... and it was dangerous."
Residents aid the students
One dynamic that eyewitnesses say played a central role was the relationship between students and ordinary Beijing people. By late May the common people were very impressed, if not a bit smitten with what they called "our" students. By the end of May, as the students tested their resolve through hunger strikes, workers and citizens were sending them water, offering help with sanitation, and medical supplies, and giving general tender loving care.
"The people loved the students because they could see the students loved China," one school teacher who lived near the square remembers now. "That was the thing. We didn't think of them as anticommunist. We could see they were patriots who were for democracy. But after June 4, we could no longer say this."
On June 3 as the Army began approaching the square about midnight - calls went out all over Beijing. Sympathetic crowds numbering in the tens of thousands felt the Army was coming to shoot the students. There are hundreds of accounts of citizens, mothers and sons alike, chasing tanks in bicycles, setting fire to trucks, putting up road blocks. At the Jianguomenwai overpass a set of locals talked an entire truck-full of soldiers into climbing down. But the price paid by the citizens was high, as the troops - many of whom were brought into Beijing from all over China - began to retaliate.
"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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