Eyewitness in China
The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly
barbarism
So then, that Saturday evening, one student came back from the west of the city and said that soldiers had moved in with teargas. And, about a day before, an army vehicle had crashed into and killed three students. So the temperature was quite high. One student started throwing stones at the soldiers. And that was the first time I saw the barbarism that I was to see again several hours later.
Some of the soldiers in a posse ran out into the crowd and captured the student. They took him and placed him in the middle of the 3,000 troops. They stripped him naked. It was still very hot then, 32 degrees C. They got a wooden bat and they smashed his head. He was still standing up. They made sure he stood up. They split his skull open. He just stood there and he bled to death. About two hours later he dropped dead. It was a horrific sight. He was just forced to stand there naked with blood streaming from his headwound until he died.
But at that stage the workers and students were still confident. And I must say one thing, at this time the workers of the independent trade union took over the planning. They had maps of the city, and were saying: "The troops are here, the troops are there ... we should send battalions of workers here, and there ... the older female workers (who were the best at discussing with the troops and stopping them from shooting) should be sent there, because these are the most atrocious of the troops, who will need the most discussion." They took over from the students as we got deeper into that Saturday night. It was as if they were thinking: "This is our battle now. You students have taken the movement so far, and that's great, but we've got to take over now." At the same time the independent trade union was only in its embryonic stages. It was still only several days old. And because it was formed when the movement was already ebbing and not at the beginning, a lot of workers were still scared to join the union or take a lead from it. But the union's leaders did what they could, bearing in mind that they didn't have a rounded-out Marxist programme, and that they weren't armed.
Midnight was when it all happened. The 27th Army came from the west. These weren't Beijing troops. They had fought in Vietnam. They had repressed the national rights of the Tibetan population. They had been on the Soviet border. They were troops used to killing. And, in the weeks before, you could see, even in the newspapers and on the TV, that the bureaucracy and the commanders had these troops in camps outside the city. They weren't allowing them to read any newspapers. They were just lecturing them: "When you move into the city, the people confronting you are fascists, counter-revolutionaries. They are going to say things to you like the PLA can't shoot the people and so on. But that's only a trick. They don't really mean that. That's just propaganda." So the troops were prepared for what students and workers were going to say to them. They were brainwashed.
There were rumours that they were given injections, drugs. They were told of course that Tiananmen Square was full of diseases, which it wasn't. Before the clampdown official government newspapers admitted that traffic accidents and crime in Beijing - which was basically under workers' control and management or with at least elements of dual power, put it like that - had dropped. There was not one policeman I saw in Beijing before the clampdown, except for traffic police, and they were redundant. They were just standing there while students were directing all the traffic. So anyway, it was rumoured that these troops were on the equivalent of speed or adrenalin boosters. A French journalist who had fought in Algeria told me that when they went out for 24-hour sorties they were all given shots to keep them awake and alert, and reckons these troops got the same.
Now, if what follows is less fluent, that is because I have seen some horrific things in the last week, terrible things that I would never like to see again. And the only guarantee against that is the marrying of the movement with Marxist policies. There's no getting around that question.
Midnight
At midnight, the troops moved in, in the following formation. First, there were those who threw tear-gas. Now there are different forms of tear-gas. This didn't make your eyes water. Rather, it mainly gave you contractions in your stomach and chest. That night some of the students had gave me a tear-gas mask, and I felt very privileged, almost like receiving the badge, because there were very few of these masks. I didn't want to take it, but they insisted, it was just impossible to say no.
After the tear-gas there followed troops with batons. And this is very very ironic: while the bureaucracy talk about the students being pro-capitalist and their government being a "revolutionary government", these batons were from Taiwan. Capitalist counter-revolutionary Taiwan supplied the Chinese Stalinists with batons to beat up Chinese students and workers. And not just batons. These were electric batons, so that not only do you get a terrible thump on your head or wherever they hit you, but an electric shop at the same time.
That was the second layer. The third layer were troops, armed with guns. These were followed by tanks and armoured personnel carriers. And with the armoured vehicles were US-Second-World-War-style jeeps with large aerials, and the commanders in them. There were also helicopters but I don't think they were very useful at night because they didn't have floodlights. They were just to intimidate the people. But the next day they were very useful as far as the government was concerned.
Barricades of buses had been set up at about 6pm along the roads into the Square. The people in the Square set the buses on fire as soon as they saw the troops come. Now every street in the centre of Beijing has got a fence of about one and a half feet high. They dug up all these fences and put them either side of the barricades of burning buses. They dup up the pathways to create rocks. There was a lot of building construction taking place. All the bricks had been taken and split into halves so that they were throwable a long distance. Its no use having a big brick if you cant throw it. And some, but very very few, workers and students had guns.
But the frontline of the battle was political. The frontline was the propaganda. Even when the troops came with the tear-gas people were running forward and shouting "You can't shoot us, you're the peoples' army! How can you shoot the people?" Even on one night, there are stories how some of the troops refused to shoot and that officers had to threaten them with guns to get them to shoot. So, when it happened and they started firing, even I myself, as a Marxist, I believed they couldn't do this. It might sound naive, but at the time, to see a massacre in front of your eyes, was really an absolutely shocking experience. You get influenced by the movement around you and the movement around me was convinced that they wouldn't shoot. When it happened, it was a real shock to the system.