Eyewitness in China
The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly
shanghai
On the day after that meeting - historic because it launched the first independent trade union in China since the 1949 revolution - I went to Shanghai. There I had some excellent discussions at the university with the students.
I must just say a couple of points on the lifestyle of the students. You might have the impression that students in China are in some sense a privileged elite who have moved into struggle because they are disgusted about the conditions they see around them, rather than conditions they experience they experience themselves. That is a false impression. Most students at Shanghai University live on campus - and in dormitories that are terrible. They live 10 to a dormitory, with no carpet or even tiles, but a concrete floor, concrete walls. There's not even any paint. There is no heating. And the food that they are given ... the smell was the worst. I mean you could swallow it, but the smell was such that it was very difficult to eat. And the grant that they get from the government as university students is extremely low. They do experience a lot of economic hardship. Any privilege they have is just the privilege of having a chance to study and learn.
In the evening the students organised a meeting for me to speak at, with a hunger striker who was due to leave for Beijing the next day. It was a 500-strong meeting, surrounded by students armed with sticks, because the university administration had banned the meeting. I outlined the links between the struggle in China and the struggles in the other Stalinist countries, in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Once again the internationalism of the students came out. As soon as I internationalised their experiences, that was when the real response came out. They weren't interested in candle-light vigils outside the Chinese Embassy in London or New York. They wanted ideas, they wanted some kind of direction as to the way forward for the movement. That was worth a thousand tears so far as people from overseas were concerned. At least, that was the impression I got from them.
Little did I know that while I was talking to what I thought was a protected meeting of 500, the speech was being broadcast live over the student radio to the 50,000-strong numbers at the university! So the following day I went back to Beijing - very quickly, I must say. And on the Saturday I was back in Tiananmen Square ... the day before the massacre. As before, on that day I had some excellent discussions with various groups of students, similar in content to the previous discussions.
Saturday, June 3
Towards the Evening I went back up to the Monument, just to sit down. It was a warm, balmy night. There were thousands of people around. It was Saturday night and everybody was having a bit of a rest. Tomorrow would be a new day ... and the workers always came down on Sunday. Everything seemed to be fine. Early in the evening, there was some slight tension in the air. The students immediately sent for what they called "lumpen-youth", ex-jail birds as they said, who supported the students, but were really rough and ready. Real nice kids, actually. They came down armed with pitchforks and batons. They were sitting down near me. They didn't speak English. But one of them gave me a drink of water, and I took it ... and it turned out to be like Irish poteen, it wasn't water at all, it was the strongest drink I'd ever had in my life! Thinking it was water, I had a good sip. But I didn't cough, so they thought, "he's all right, you know"!
At the same time, during the course of the Saturday there were a few things that happened that gave me some of the students the idea that something was going to happen that night. First of all the government had sent spies into the square. Now the Chinese government hasn't reached the sophistication in repression that, if you have read The Great Game or Out of the Night, or have visited East Germany, you would know. The repression is cruder, bloodier. For example these spies all had green khakis and white shirts! They were obviously instructed to walk separately, but once they hit the square they were so scared that they stood together! What happened was that the students would capture them and drag them up to the Monument of Peoples' Heroes and beat them up. They wouldn't kill them, just beat them up. Then they would stick them in front of a microphone, and you would hear "huh, uh, huh, uh ... ooh ... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do this, I was forced to come hear". Then they would give them another beating and let them go. It was quite good tactics.
The students and workers in the Square weren't armed. In previous days and weeks, workers from the armaments factories, who had been on strike, had offered guns to the students. The students refused. On that Saturday itself, as the 27th Army was moving towards Beijing on the west, two armoured personnel carriers - actually full of arms, not personnel - stopped and offered the students those guns. The students again refused. The students only had batons. A few students had handguns, but they perceived themselves to be terrorists. They wanted to shoot Li Peng. They weren't interested in sharing their guns: it was like a privileged thing, they were sort of proud of the fact they had a gun. And they only had 6 or 7 bullets.
Just before it got dark, around 5pm, about 3,000 troops moved into the Great Hall of the People, to the west of Tiananmen Square. They took over the building. Behind it they all sat down in a circle, different layers of a circle. Most were unarmed, but some in the middle were armed. All the students surrounded them, and discussed with them. Some of the discussions went quite well. Some of the soldiers were crying, and saying "we don't want to be here".
An important point that must be made about the army, the whole army, is that it is a peasant army. As at all times of Chinese history, it is a peasant army. From a factory of a thousand workers, for example, three will be called up. You are very unlucky if you are an industrial worker to have to go into the army. If you go to university you are almost certain not to be called up. But most peasants want to go into the army, because after you serve for three years you are allowed to live in the cities - which is not the case for peasants in general. So even the "Beijing troops" means peasants from the area around Beijing rather than Beijing industrial workers and students.
This is a conscious policy of the bureaucracy, not to base the army on the industrial workers. But even so, on the previous occasions when soldiers (unarmed) had been sent in to try to clear Tiananmen Square, the peasant troops responded to the appeals of workers and students, who surrounded the troops and their vehicles, and persuaded them to go away.