Eyewitness in China
The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly
tiananmen square
I went to China to hear and see at first hand this movement in the most populous country in the world, with one quarter of the world's population. I went to exchange experiences, political and organisational, with the cream of the students in Beijing and Shanghai and the cream of the proletariat.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. It was the most magnificent thing I have seen in all the time I've been in politics. I arrived on the Sunday prior to the massacre, the last Sunday in May. After settling down I headed for Tiananmen Square. There was a massive march taking place. Because of this, getting to Tiananmen Square was a battle in itself!
It was a march of about 200,000 people (some of the students, I later discovered, were quite disappointed it was not larger). Many workers, it being a Sunday, were not working and had joined the march. It was along an eight-lane highway, which was absolutely packed for kilometer after kilometer with a mass of red flags with Chinese writing. There were delegations representing the steelworkers, representing universities, representing teachers' colleges, etc., shouting slogans against the government, and all singing the Internationale.
If there is one theme to what I am saying today it is to counter the lies put out by the Chinese Stalinist government, and taken up by the capitalist press internationally, that this movement of the masses in China was "counter-revolutionary" or "pro-capitalist". Because from the beginning to the end I never met one person - student, worker or even peasant - who had any illusions that the way forward for their struggle was to move towards capitalism in any way, shape or form.
Tiananmen Square
After about three hours I managed to get to Tiananmen Square and that in itself was a sight to behold. There in the center of Beijing is this monstrous Stalinist Square architecturally speaking. It is massive, probably about the size of four or five cricket ovals or five or six soccer fields. Flat smack in the middle is this obelisk, the Monument of the Peoples' Heroes, which is quite historic. Many speeches by Mao, many big rallies in the past have been held there. The vast majority of the square was taken up by tents - some locally-made tents, some that the students received from Hong Kong and from the West. Some of the tents still had hunger strikers in, although most of the hunger strikers had finished their strike.
To the north of Tiananmen Square is the Forbidden City, with a big poster of Mao looking down. I don't know what he would have been thinking if he saw what was in front of him! (By the way, that is the only poster of Mao left in Beijing. And, among the youth, there are few illusions in Mao. Obviously there was a massive political campaign by the bureaucracy against Mao after his death. The experience of the Cultural Revolution discredited him. And his wife and the "Gang of Four" are absolutely hated, by the government and the people. For older workers who remember pre-1949, and the early years afterwards, it is different, because they remember when the bureaucracy was more restrained and less corrupt, in comparison with today, when the big bureaucrats and army leaders drive around Beijing in beautiful cars.)
Also in Tiananmen square are three monstrous big buildings to the south, to the west and the east. But they just looked tiny compared to the mass of the people in the square itself.
I felt as if I was at the centre of the world. Because you had the eyes and ears of workers, students, peasants round the world on this Square, every day, on the radio, in the newspapers, on the television - looking at the Square, and hearing what was going on. You had the cream of the world's capitalist journalists there. But, much more importantly, you had the cream of the students and the proletariat of one quarter of the world's population, just there protesting.
Once I got there I thought obviously I've got to go and start discussing with people. In the beginning I was quite apprehensive: how would I be taken? You hear at school about the "Bamboo Curtain", and you wonder what can you offer, somebody from the other side of the planet. What do you know about China? Because obviously these people weren't playing. They were putting their lives on the line, through the hunger strike and through the risk of the repression they were feeling at the time and were to feel in a much greater degree a week later.
But as soon as I started approaching the tents any apprehension went right out of the window. I went up to the first tent and met some students who had come all the way from Shanghai. They had been there for some days. And, luckily enough, some spoke English. I sat down and they asked me: "Are you a journalist?" I said "No, I am a Marxist. I am a socialist from the West. I am here to listen to what you have got to say, because we don't want to depend on the capitalist newspapers to hear the demands of your struggle. We want to hear from you yourselves. I want you to know, you have captured the imagination of workers and youth all over the world with your struggle. We want to learn from you. You are showing us a way forward. But we would also like to exchange some experiences. Because maybe some of the experiences that we have learned overseas, politically and organisationally, might be of help to you."