Eventually Gorbachev got his chance for a few words. He said that he saw things differently but did accept ‘a certain culpability and responsibility on our part’ for the very recent past. All the rest – especially the territorial shifts of the early twentieth century – belonged already to history. ‘How many states have disappeared, and new ones have appeared? … History cannot be rewritten; it cannot be remade anew. If we took the road of restoring past borders on the basis of how things were in the past, which people lived in which territory, then, in essence, we’d have to redraw the entire world. That would lead to a worldwide scuffle.’ Gorbachev stressed his belief in geopolitical ‘realities’ – the ‘principle of the inviolability of borders gives stability to the world’ – and reminded Deng that his own generation had grown up ‘in the spirit of friendship with China’.
These mollifying words seemed to snap the old man out of his historical reverie. ‘This was just a narrative,’ Deng muttered. ‘Let us consider that the past is over with.’ ‘Good,’ replied Gorbachev. ‘Let’s put an end to this.’ After some final vague words about the ‘development’ of their relations, the meeting came to a conclusion. It was as if they had settled the past, but without any clear sense of the future.[136]
This was indeed the case. When Gorbachev had tried to discuss Sino-Soviet trade and joint economic projects with Li Peng, he had made no progress. He could offer the USSR’s usual export staples – oil and gas – but the Chinese were not particularly interested. When asked for Soviet investment, Gorbachev was in no position to provide anything. And as for advanced technology, especially IT, Li made clear that China looked to the United States and also Japan. There were no other substantive talks.[137] In fact, on his last day in Beijing Gorbachev was largely marooned in a guest house on the outskirts – unable, as originally scheduled, to reach the Forbidden City or attend the opera because of the protests. After a short visit to Shanghai, he returned home on 19 May with very mixed feelings about the whole trip: real satisfaction about the normalisation of relations – ‘a watershed event’ of ‘epoch-making significance’ – but also profound uncertainty about the future not only of Sino-Soviet relations but of the People’s Republic itself.[138]
The moment Gorbachev had left Beijing, Deng turned his mind to sorting out the students. Their brazen refusal to leave Tiananmen voluntarily had humiliated the Paramount Leader but, while his Soviet guest was around, Deng’s hands had been tied. Now his anger boiled over. The Chinese capital had become virtually paralysed with over a million protestors sitting in the Square and marching down the boulevards. The students had been joined by workers, shopkeepers, civil servants, teachers, peasants – even recruits from Beijing’s police academy dressed in their uniforms.[139] Order was crumbling; the regime itself seemed in danger.
Over the weekend of 20 May, Deng declared martial law in Beijing. The government brought in thousands of troops armed with machine guns and backed by tanks, tear gas and water cannons.[140] It imposed tight media censorship and forced out Zhao, the liberal chief of the party, because of his conciliatory approach to the protestors. The hardliners were now in charge. But it would take another two weeks of heightened tension before the crisis was resolved. The mere presence on the streets of the People’s Liberation Army was not enough: the men had in any case been briefed not to cause bloodshed. The students, certainly, were not cowed and they used techniques of non-violence to keep the troops at bay. Even though their numbers had diminished by late May to perhaps 100,000, they continued to hold the Chinese communist leadership hostage, both politically and ideologically.[141]
State power and human vulnerability
What the protestors stood for was summed up, at least for the global media, in the ‘Goddess of Democracy’. This ten-metre-high white pâpier-mâché and styrofoam statue resembling New York’s Statue of Liberty was erected on 29 May at the heart of the Square in front of the Imperial Palace. Press photographs showed it as if eyeing defiantly the great picture of Mao. Democracy – on the US model – had become the celebrated symbol of the demonstrators’ demands. The Chinese government issued an official statement ordering the statue to be taken down, calling it an ‘abomination’ and declaring ‘this is China, not America’.[142]
Beside himself with frustration, Deng finally ordered the military to use force on those who, he said, were trying to subvert the nation. His justification was that China needed a peaceful and stable environment to continue along its reform path, to modernise and open up to the capitalist world. But reform, he insisted, did not mean doing away with four key principles: upholding socialism, maintaining the CCP’s leadership and party monopoly, supporting the ‘people’s democracy’, and adhering to Marxist–Leninist–Maoist philosophy. Pure ideology, enforced by autocratic party rule, was there to stay.[143]
At dawn on Sunday 4 June, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers flooded Tiananmen Square and the surrounding streets, firing their sub-machine guns into crowds of men and women who refused to move out of the way. Scores of students and workers were killed and wounded. Several thousand on the edge of the mayhem left the Square peacefully, though still defiantly waving their university banners. Their encampment was then destroyed: armoured personnel carriers ran over the tents, ruthlessly driving over individuals who had chosen to stay put. When some of the protestors retaliated by toppling army vehicles and stoning the Great Hall of the People, the soldiers used tear gas and truncheons. Soon the city’s hospitals were inundated. ‘As doctors, we often see deaths,’ said one medic at the Tongren Hospital. ‘But we’ve never seen such a tragedy like this. Every room in the hospital is covered with blood.’[144]
The precise death toll remains impossible to establish: estimates vary from 300 to 2,600. Chinese state news on 4 June exulted in the crushing of a ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’ and highlighted the casualties among police and troops. The demonstrators were soon airbrushed out of China’s official history. But what really mattered was that the country’s brief and traumatic battle for democracy had been immortalised by the world’s media. In addition to the reports of the carnage and the civilian deaths, images emerged of the crackdown that became truly iconic – fetishised by reformers around the world as symbols of China’s lost 1989. The two most notable icons were the photo of a lone man apparently defying a line of tanks, whose fate remains tantalisingly unknown. He would become the classic emblem of global 1989 – the power of the people. And the Goddess of Democracy captured in an eye-catching way what the protestors had struggled for. On the morning of 4 June the statue was quickly reduced to shards and then washed out of the Square by the clean-up troops amid the debris of a failed revolution. But the world would not forget.[145]
Tiananmen – The tanks take over
And so China reinvented communism – by force. In the process, as the tragedy was played out in real time on TV, the students became identified in the Cold War context with Western ideals of freedom, democracy and human rights. The Chinese government’s use of tanks against unarmed students also evoked memories of 1968, not just student protests around the world but the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Red Army – which had shaken European communism to its core. Deng was now widely seen as the villainous enemy of freedom and many asked whether Gorbachev would stay true to his UN speech, when he had renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine and championed ‘freedom of choice’. With unrest mounting in the Soviet bloc and the USSR itself, would Gorbachev go the way of Deng? Would the tanks now roll in Eastern Europe?
*
Five days later Moscow issued a limp statement of ‘regret’ over the bloodshed and expressed the ‘hope’ that common sense and continued reform would prevail in the PRC. Soviet government spokesman Gennady Gerasimov admitted that Soviet officials were surprised at the brutality with which the Chinese leaders put down the student demonstrators. ‘We hadn’t expected this.’[146]