Eyewitness in China
The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly
massacre
They just opened up fire, and bodies dropped. Bodies just dropped, time and time again. People would get up again and they would go forward, with red flags sometimes, sometimes with bricks, sometimes just shouting. They would go down again. They would get up again. The troops were shooting everybody.
I saw a three-year old with a bayonet through the chest. I saw a pregnant woman, who had been bayoneted to death in the stomach, and the embryonic baby was lying on the ground beside her. It was absolutely barbaric what they were doing.
I must say one thing. There was this half-hour convoy of an offensive army moving forward, fighting through the barricades against the students and workers. But they had formed up in the mid-afternoon in working class. And, as soon as they started moving - and they all kept together because none of the soldiers wanted to be isolated in the back - at the end of this half-hour convoy, there came thousands of workers, unarmed, including women workers, some of them on bicycles. And this mass of thousands of workers following the troops could not fight them, but they sang the Internationale. The troops at the back just didn't know what to do. Occasionally they would shoot, and everybody would drop, and you didn't know how many were killed because the people each time got up again, and the dead would stay lying among them on the ground. It was almost like waves on the beach just coming in, time and time again, just singing the Internationale.
As the night got deeper, the people got more bitter, they started shouting "fascists, fascists" at the soldiers. Anyone who has the gall to say that the movement was counter-revolutionary just had to be there for five minutes.
Even the bourgeois journalists couldn't believe what they were seeing. And I must say, while some of these journalists were scared and ran away, some were quite brave. The journalists have more suss than the reformist leaders of the labour movement in the West because they are sent by their papers from flashpoint to flashpoint and they build up a world analysis, they see the world revolution taking place right in front of them. But even these people, some of them, couldn't believe what they were seeing.
When the troops got to Tiananmen Square, the center of the revolution, they surrounded it, and they all sat down. The students and workers were surrounded from the north, east and west. Only to the south was there a possible escape route. The troops gave the students one hour to get out. It was at that time that I left Tiananmen Square with three students who helped me escape to the south. And then a whole lot of the student leaders got together and formed themselves into a square bloc, like a Battle of Waterloo-style military formation, and walked through the troops. Of course as they walked through the troops they got a hell of a battering, but none of them were killed.
But some of the workers and students stayed in the Square. And the troops just mowed them down. They shot them dead. They just shot them. There were dead and wounded lying in the square. Then the tanks came in and rolled over them, and flattened them. And then the soldiers got these bulldozers, and picked up all the bodies and the tents, and put them in a pile and burnt everybody and everything there. Some of the people were still alive I'm convinced when they were burnt, though I've got no proof of that of course. And all of these people are officially classified as missing, not dead.
This was early Sunday morning. And right up to mid-day Sunday there was fighting through the streets of Beijing. When I went back towards Tiananmen Square about 6am on the Sunday morning I saw the other side of things, because it wasn't a one-sided battle.
Street-Fighting
In one instance, the troops were tear-gassing students in the streets. The students fled, many trying to climb over a fence. Eleven of the students who got the brunt weren't able to get over it. So a tank came up, and scraped along the side of the fence, and scraped them to death. They came out as flat as a matchbox, dead. But that tank got separated from the main body of tanks. And the workers surrounded it like ants on a dead rat. They wrenched off the lid. And inside there was a commander, not just an ordinary tank driver. They took him out, beat him up and burned him alive, there and then, as we saw in the 1984-86 uprising in South Africa. Then they strung him up to show him to the troops further down the road as a warning to them. In fact, once the massacre started, when people managed to get hold of soldiers they were ripping them apart, limb from limb. There was no alternative, absolutely no alternative to that at this stage.
I must say if the workers had been armed and if a few more examples like that had been made earlier on in the struggle, things could have been different. An example, I mean, not of every single person captured, not of every single spy who happened to be sent into Tiananmen Square and who was scared silly. There would have been no use in something like that. Obviously, in such cases, give them a bit of a beating, make them apologise, and make a propaganda thing out of it. But when troops are killing like they were killing then, randomly, barbarously, you have got to be brutal in response. This was revolution or counter-revolution taking place right in front of everybody's eyes, and something like that had to be done.
On that Sunday the mood was of anger not depression. It was a frustrated anger: "How can this be happening?" I felt the same. I had meetings organised for the Monday in the Square, and it took me a full six hours before I could convince myself that Tiananmen Square was cleared, that overnight what seemed to me the center of the world revolution, had moved from revolution to counter-revolution, and that Tiananmen Square now was a blood bath full of the 27th Army butchers. And I considered myself to be a relative experienced Marxist, who had seen a lot of things, got around! But I felt like a fool, because it must have taken me six hours. I was saying to people: "But surely the students are still there. I have got to go on Monday for discussions". And people were laughing at me and saying "Don't be stupid. They are dead. It is gone. It is finished."
And if I felt like that can you imagine how the Chinese workers and students felt who had put their lives, everything, on the line for what the movement in Tiananmen Square represented. It meant everything for them. And then to be crushed like that. But it all shows you the importance of ideas. All they needed was a clear programme based on clear perspectives. All they needed was clear leadership, and none of that need have happened.
As I was moving with the students in the streets of Tiananmen Square, I got myself a little bit tear-gassed. Now, obviously, since the minute that things hotted up I had felt scared silly. I would be lying if I said anything different. Anyone who goes to war and comes back saying it was great is a fool or a liar. We were all scared. But that Sunday morning it was different. We were getting shot at, we were getting tear-gassed. But because there were dead all around us, and because of the anger that we felt, all of us, even myself, would have done anything.
At least ten of the people I had been discussing with in the previous days were dead. And there was a girl that I had been talking to with the "lumpen youth" the previous evening. She was 18 years old with John Lennon-style round glasses and a black and white printed dress - a very slight girl. We were joking around and chatting. The next day I saw her dead body.
Because I was the only westerner in the streets at the time and I had my camera, the students were taking me from one dead body to another. "Take a photograph of this. What do you think of this? Can you go home and tell people what's going on?" (In fact some students gave me the badge of this commander they had killed, and his buttons. That may seem bizarre, but it didn't at the time. Some days later, when I was on the way to the airport, the troops were stopping cars and I thought ... I've got photographs of this bloke getting killed, photographs of him dead, his insignia, a tear gas canister, as well as the badge of Tiananmen Square. So I dumped all except the badge in the road.)
The day of the massacre, in the course of moving in the streets I must have held about six or seven street meetings. Each time I said: "This day, the 4th of June 1989, will go down in the history books. Everyone who died today is a martyr for the world revolution. They will never be forgotten. Every worker and student over the world has learned a lesson, and that lesson is very simple. No longer will any thinking worker, any thinking student, anywhere on this planet, ever, ever again have any illusions in the so-called Chinese Communist Party government. It can no longer claim to be a revolutionary government. Any government that has got the blood of the Chinese workers and students on its hands is not a communist government. It can no longer claim to be a revolutionary government. And from today on the workers and the students of the world are going to be with the Chinese people."
The response to this speech was absolute frenzy. Sometimes people tried to lift me up onto their shoulders. That is when I really got scared! - there were bullets flying around then. But at that stage if I had stood up and said that what is needed in China is a mass revolutionary workers' party based on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, you would have just mopped up left, right and centre. Any illusions at least in that wing the Communist Party had implemented this decision the night before had disappeared forever.