Dan Snow's History Hit - The Tiananmen Square Massacre

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

In 1989, Beijing's Tiananmen Square became the focus of large-scale demonstrations as mostly young students crowded into central Beijing to protest for greater democracy. On June 4, 1989, Chinese troops stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing into the crowds of protesters. The events produced one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century - of ‘Tank Man,’ an unidentified protester who stood in front of a line of army tanks.Louisa Lim is an award-winning journalist who grew up in Hong Kong and reported from China for a decade. Louisa joins Dan on the podcast to discuss what led to the protests and how they grew, the turmoil that ensued and why the events remain a highly sensitive topic in China.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. At the beginning of June 1989, the Chinese People's Liberation Army opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the capital of China, killing hundreds of people. It was an appalling crime, and it was one of those events that we knew at the time was a moment of deep historic importance, and as the years have passed, that impression has only grown. It was a turning point. It seems like a time when the Chinese government turned away from a particular course of slow opening up, of gradual political liberalisation, and instead a far more hardline approach was adopted, one that has intensified, if anything, to the present day.

To get the lowdown on what happened over those weeks in the build-up and on the night itself, I've gone to Louisa Lim. She's an award-winning journalist who reported from China for NPR and the BBC. She's a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. She's written two extraordinary books, one about Tiananmen Revisited and the other one about the Chinese government tightening its grip on the city of Hong Kong. She is a fantastic person to go to. She's done some amazing first-person research, and as you'll hear, has some quite shocking stories about what she has uncovered, about the memories, about the history of Tiananmen, how it's remembered in China. Here is the excellent Louisa Lim talking about Tiananmen, how it's remembered in China. Here is the excellent Louisa Lim talking about Tiananmen.

Louisa, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's such a pleasure. Thank you for asking me. Talk to me about Deng Xiaoping's revolution of the 1980s. Well, it turns out one of the most important things that's ever happened to the human race, we now know. But what was going on in China in the 80s? Well, what was going on was Deng Xiaoping decided that he wanted to kind of kickstart China's economy. So in the early 80s, he did the southern tour where he kind of went down to Shenzhen, the area just over the border from Hong Kong. And he began this sort of liberalization of the economy, economic reforms that ended up transforming life and the economy for more than a billion

Chinese people. So for people who had been in a very strict state run economy, it changed everything. And it changed the way in which people worked. What did it do about information and speech? I mean, it did all kinds of things, you know. And of course, once the economy started to be liberalised, there was also more corruption, more anxiety. Suddenly all the kind of old certainties of life were removed because in the past your salary came from a work unit and you didn't really have to worry about that. Everybody was vaguely on the same kind of level and suddenly people were seeing other people becoming fabulously wealthy and they were feeling left behind. And so it produced all of this anxiety. And then

it also began a discussion, which grew and grew in the late 80s about political liberalization and whether that should go hand in hand. And people started discussing ideas that they hadn't really thought about before. So there was suddenly this feeling of excitement, of a new kind of era of discussions of ideas that people hadn't really discussed before. So is the economic opening up linked to the student activism that we see towards the end of that decade? Is the latter dependent on the former? Yes, to a certain extent. They're all linked together. I mean, the students started holding salons where they discussed ideas, they made links with each other. They discussed ideas like democracy and freedom of the press and ideas like this. There was this

building excitement about those ideas. And at the same time, there were discussions among the upper echelon about whether there should be moves towards political liberalization and how far those should go. So there was a link. There were protests in Shanghai before 1989, and they were almost like a precursor. And those were sort of clamped down on. One of the things that happened was the premier at the time, who the students were quite keen on, who's someone who was thinking about liberalisation, he was removed from his position. And that was one thing that they were uneasy about. And so you've got the students agitating a bit. By 1989, it's come to Beijing, has it? Yeah, all those pressures were building. And then in the middle of April 1989, Hu Yaobang, who had been the general secretary of the Communist Party, the man who the students had found sympathetic, but who had lost his position because of the student demonstrations in Shanghai, he died suddenly. And that was the start of everything.

It was at his funeral, was it, that the thing started to really happen? It was before his funeral. After he died, students marched to Tiananmen Square. And at first, it was an expression of mourning, a memorial. Very, very quickly, it turned into a political statement because they were making demands for things. And over the days that followed, the marches continued and they just grew within a week. There were 100,000 students gathering in Tiananmen Square. And a week after he died, they had a state funeral for Hu Yaobang inside the Great Hall of the People. And there were these sort of extraordinary scenes where the square was full of students. And these three students were kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People as all the leaders met inside,

and they were ignored. They were holding up a petition, and they were just on their knees with this petition. And as time passed, and nobody came out, they were weeping. They felt forsaken. You've got to remember that 1989, this was actually one of the first mass movements that was televised, that was covered by television. And these kind of scenes were so televisual, you know, just the sight of these students like petitioners weeping on the steps, waiting for government officials to notice them. These were scenes that were really noticed worldwide. Is Tiananmen Square a particularly significant place within Chinese history and politics? Absolutely. I mean, Tiananmen Square is the political heart of Beijing.

It's the political heart of the country, and it always has been, right? So beyond Tiananmen is the Forbidden City, where the emperors originally ruled. And in Tiananmen Square, that's where Chairman Mao's mausoleum is, where his mummified body still remains. So it's this incredibly important site, and it has been throughout Chinese history. It's also been the site where petitioners have historically gone people who felt that they've been wronged by the state or the emperor they go there and they sort of bow down and ask

the emperor to redress wrongs and that's what the students felt they were doing right at the beginning you know when they were there at Hu Yaobang's funeral. How did this snowball? How did it spiral? So a couple of days after that funeral, the students formed a union called the Beijing Autonomous Federation of Students. And this was really important because it was coordinating between the universities and organizing. And it began mobilizing. There was a class boycott, and that meant that students were kind of free all day to do nothing but protest. And then on April the 26th, there was this really pivotal moment where the state-run newspaper, the People's Daily, had this editorial. And in this editorial, they labeled the student movement

as turmoil. And so this was a real turning point because this was the moment that the students realized that the die had already been cast, right? What they were doing had already been labeled as turmoil, as something bad, as something that would get them in trouble. And so they kind of felt like they were already done for. It didn't really matter what they did from now on. They had already been charged as guilty. And so it just continued. And in fact, the act of labeling the demonstrations as turmoil ended up just fanning the flames. And there were even bigger demonstrations after that. And by the 4th of May, there were a million people coming out, marching in the streets. And yeah, by May

the 13th, that was when the students began hunger striking. It just grew and it grew. And it's a mistake to think that it only happened in Beijing. This was a nationwide thing. There were protests happening and marches happening in cities all around China. And it wasn't just students. It started off as students, but bit by bit, other people joined in. It was quite organized. You'd see, for example, state-run work units who were marching and they were carrying banners saying things like Beijing radio or the meteorologist's department. And so it was a whole of society movement that happened all over China. But I think that we tend to forget that because of what happened at the end. We only remember what happened in Beijing.

But actually, that underplays just how big a movement this was. How much insight do we have now into what was going on inside the corridors of power, But actually, that underplays just how big a movement this was. How much insight do we have now into what was going on inside the corridors of power in terms of debating the response to this agitation? Yeah, that's a tricky question. I mean, we do have some insight, but there's always been controversy ever since about how much we know and how we know it. Various documents have been released and you're never really going to get someone who's going to confirm, oh, these were real documents. Later on, we began to see these senior leaders writing down their own versions of these discussions and these events. But again, how reliable are these accounts? It's really hard to say. In many ways, some of these accounts are attempts by leaders to

justify their own positions. So it's quite hard to know exactly what happened. I mean, you know, there are facts that we do know. So we know that the Secretary General of the Communist Party at the time, Zhao Ziyang, was very sympathetic to the students. And he actually went on a state-run visit to North Korea. And that was also a sort of pivotal moment. And it probably allowed the other leaders a chance to strategize about what should happen next. And he was on this trip to North Korea. And when he came back by May the 19th, the decision apparently had already been made. And he made his last public appearance in the very early hours of the morning of May the 19th when he visited the students who were on hunger strike at the square. And he said,

I've come too late. And he had tears in his eyes. And after that, he was disappeared from public view and he spent the next years until his death under house arrest. So he was purged. He was removed from his position because of his sympathy for the students. He never lived as a free person again. So whilst we think of Tiananmen Square as a street fight, there was also a really important struggle within the Chinese government that proved enduringly important. important struggle within the Chinese government that proved enduringly important. Absolutely. And that struggle pitted the reformers like Zhao Ziyang, who were sympathetic to the students and the idea of political reform and liberalization against the hardliners, like Li Peng, who was the premier at the time. And as we know, the hardliners won out. And then there was also

in the mix were these much older leaders, the revolutionary generation, people like Deng Xiaoping, who didn't necessarily have formal positions, but who really made all the decisions. And they, at a certain point, decided that the protests should not continue. And the other thing that was happening at the time that really turned this into a massive international affair was the fact that a Russian leader was visiting, Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting Beijing. That happened mid-May. And it was this sort of pivotal moment, because there'd been this Sino-Soviet split, I think, in 1956. And this was the first visit to China by a Soviet head of state since then. So it was a sort of important

historical moment. But from another perspective, it meant that there were a whole load of journalists, international journalists who were in Beijing to cover that moment. And when they got there, of course, the big story was the students in the square. That was a much more interesting story. And those journalists just ended up staying there and covering exactly what happened all the way to the bitter end. And of course, that turned Tiananmen into the first televised news event, global news event. And I think that also meant it had a much bigger impact on people because it was being beamed night after night into their front rooms, through their television sets, like no matter where they were in the world.

For old enough like me, we remember those pictures, the excitement, the drama of the time. The decision was made mid-May to crack down. Initially, what, just declaring martial law and hoping everyone would go home? So martial law was originally declared on May the 20th. And you know, this really interesting thing happened was that they sent troops in to Beijing after that. So around May the 20th, 21st. And what happened was there was such public opposition to this deployment of troops that people came out from their homes and they stopped these convoys. You know, they literally lay down on the road in front of these convoys of Jeeps. They surrounded them. They slept under the wheels of these Jeeps. And after three days, by May the 23rd, the troops had actually

had to withdraw. They'd pulled back. And the students and the people thought at that point that they had won. They thought it was over. And in a way, that dynamic then led to the sort of final denouement because, of course, at that point, the state realized that the only way that they could end this was with overwhelming force. Their answer, from a tactical perspective the state decided that oh you know the mistake they had made was not that they had sent in troops it was they hadn't sent in enough troops and i think that was one of the factors that led to the sort of ferocity of the crackdown when it actually happened in early june we're talking about the Chinese government's brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. More coming up. Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters

were real people? It's so fascinating, isn't it, that some of the Three Musketeers are also based on real soldiers. That Sir Walter Raleigh wasn't all that he's been cracked up to be. Chemist, poet, scholar, historian, courtier. He could have been great in all these different things. And that if your name is Dudley, you better watch your back. For the Tudors, each one of them took something from the Dudleys, either by working with a member of the Dudley family, or of course, by having one executed. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and I'm learning all this and much more,

bringing you Not Just the Tudors, twice a week, every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Talk to me about the crackdown. I remember at the time there was a sense that the Chinese army, there were units that were unwilling to do... Is there any sense now with the hindsight of history

that there was different units brought in from different parts of China? Or was there any problems within the deployment of those troops? Yeah, you're right. There was. It was actually very interesting. There was one detachment where the general actually refused to allow his troops to be part of it. He was removed pretty quickly as well. So there was, you know, even within the establishment, there were people who were not on board. What then happened was that they brought in troops from outside Beijing to do the state's bidding and the troops that they brought in. So when I was writing my book, I interviewed one man who was one of those soldiers who was brought in to carry out the crackdown. It was

really interesting hearing his account because he was from the countryside. He was very young, you know, 17 or 18 at the time. And what they had done was they kept these troops pretty much in isolation for a period of time beforehand, a couple of weeks. And every day they had just done a lot of ideological work on them, almost brainwashing them, talking all the time about how bad the protests were and how much danger the state was in. Then they brought them into Beijing, these young, scared country boys who were sort of trucked in. And even when they deployed them, the orders that they gave were really quite vague. They had guns that were put into their hands and they were kind of given these verbal orders, do what needs to be done, but quite ambiguous. There was a lot of fear amongst the soldiers as well. And for me, it was a really interesting moment hearing the other side of the story, because I think we tend to have this picture of the kind of ferocious Chinese army

just mowing down anything or anyone that was in its way. But it wasn't actually the case. They were very, very young and they didn't really know what they were doing. And from the inside, I think it looked very, very different from the way that we tend to perceive things. And those of us who remember it, the way that we perceived it at the time. It was on the 3rd and 4th of June that the troops moved in. They faced barricades. When and how did the shooting start? Well, the shooting started very early on. And actually, most of the people who died didn't die in Tiananmen Square, although, you know,

we remember it as Tiananmen Square massacre. Actually, most of the killings happened quite far from Tiananmen Square on the approach, the sort of westward approach to Tiananmen Square as the troops were coming in. And there was a lot of quite indiscriminate shooting as they rolled in, as these columns of tanks rolled in. People were killed in their apartments, in their kitchens. There's some official apartments where very high level officials live on that road and people were killed, high level officials in their apartments, just because there was so much indiscriminate fire at that time. A lot of people who were killed were also people on the streets. They were observers, people trying to take photographs.

In many cases, it wasn't even the student protesters who were killed. It was these onlookers, passers-by, people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And as the troops rolled in, the students were in the square itself. And they were having these kind of really panicked discussions about whether to stay or whether to leave. And they were all huddled on the steps of the monument to the people's martyrs, which is in the square itself, trying to decide what they should do. And eventually they took this voice vote about whether to stay or whether to leave. And they did decide to leave and they filed out the last remaining students. But all along the way, there had been people who were killed as the troops came in. And there was a lot of shooting. There were a lot of bullets flying around. Although the Chinese government

has said nobody was killed within the square, there is evidence that people were killed in the square as well, but it wasn't the main area where killing happened. Talk to me about the tank man. That moment actually happened later. It happened on June the 5th. And what happened with this column of tanks was coming down the Avenue of Everlasting Peace, Chang'an, and a young man wearing a white shirt, black trousers, white plastic shopping bags in either hand, He came out from the trees and he stood in front of this line of tanks. And all the foreign media were holed up in the Beijing hotel. And so they were all shooting this scene. And the shot that we remember, the shot that's so familiar to us is of this very skinny man standing in front of the tanks. But actually, if you zoom out a

little bit, it's even more stunning because he's not standing in front of three or four tanks. It's a convoy of dozens of tanks. And there's this moment where the front tank tries to maneuver to get around him. And he's moving as well. He's moving with the tank. And if you keep watching the footage, not only does he stand in front of the tank, he actually climbs up onto the tank. And he looks down into the turret of the tank. And he actually shouts some words. And nobody knows for sure, but the rumor has it that he shouted, leave my people alone. And then some people appear on bikes and they kind of hustle him off. And it's not clear who he is. It's not clear what happens to him. It's not clear whether they're arresting him or saving him.

But that moment, I think, is emblazoned in people's memories just as a moment of sort of sheer human courage and sheer human courage in the face of an advancing brute force. One of the most famous photos of the 20th century, and no one knows who it's of or where he is. That's right. And it might be one of the most famous photos of the 20th century, but it isn't one of the most famous photos of the 20th century at all in China. In China, many people have never seen that picture before and they don't know what it is. It means nothing to them. And I know this because when I wrote my book, I took that picture around four Beijing universities because I just wanted to know how much people really knew about Tiananmen. And I was really surprised that out of 100 students, only 15, one five, 15 students

could identify what that picture was and where it was taken. It's an extraordinary stranglehold on the internet and images that Chinese government have. Contrary to what we all believed in the 90s when the internet was invented, we thought, oh, this will just spread images like that all over China. Nothing anyone can do to stop it. Speaking of free information, 2017, the UK released diplomatic cable at the time that said the ambassador to China suggested 10,000 people had died. Is that seen as an accurate figure? That's probably much too high. I don't think that figure is accurate, but the honest truth is no one knows how many people died. The initial Chinese figure of casualties was 241, which is much too low. One of the best estimates at the time came from a Swiss

diplomat who went around the hospitals. And he suggested that, according to his calculations, around 2,700 people died. But then this figure was released. And then for whatever reason, and I don't know what the reason was, after a few days, they then pulled back on that figure and said, maybe it's not correct. So it's really unclear how many people died. It's interesting, when I was doing the interviewing for my book, I interviewed the mother of a young man who had died, and she went to the morgues. And about two weeks later, when she went to bury her son at the morgue, she said that there were still bodies everywhere. And that, you know, her belief was that many more people had died than anyone knew.

There have been groups like the Tiananmen Mothers, which her name is Zhang Xianling, she set up together with another woman called Ding Zilin. And they have tried to track down all of the people who died and name them. And they're at something like 270. So I think there's still a lot of uncertainty. It's just not clear how many people died. What does it mean? What does Tiananmen mean today? Clearly, to young Chinese people, it means virtually nothing from your experiences.

It's been successfully repressed within China, but what do you think it means? Tiananmen was a massive turning point in Chinese history. It was the moment that political liberalization died in China. So ever since that moment, there've been no political reforms in China. And indeed, what happened at that time has been kind of used as justification for a lack of political reform. The idea that if you start, you might lose control, that liberalization and reform is dangerous. I think that has become really deeply ingrained in Chinese officials' psyche. It's a turning point in other ways as well. So it's the start of this stability maintenance machine, a sort of huge machine designed to ensure internal stability, to crack down on any protests, to stop this from ever happening again. So if there was to be a small protest somewhere to stamp down on that before it spreads to anywhere else. Figures indicate that China

has at certain points spent more on its internal stability than on its military and its external stability. So it's clear that Chinese leaders think the threat comes from inside rather than outside. And it's also the moment that China unleashed this kind of wave of nationalism. And that was really happened in the aftermath of Tiananmen, because people really lost faith in so much that they'd believed in. Until that moment, they'd believed in the Communist Party. They'd believed that the state was working in the interests of the people. And that moment when the People's Liberation Army turned its guns on the people itself, that was a huge betrayal. And people, they were devastated. They felt cheated. They were upset. They didn't believe in the Communist Party

anymore. And so the Communist Party needed something else. It needed a different ideology to depend upon. And so that was the birth of the kind of nationalistic China that we see today. So they promised stability, material well-being, and a healthy dose of nationalism. It's a heady cocktail. It's a heady cocktail, isn't it? And it's worked quite well for all this time. So when you talk to older people in China, young people, it's not talked about, they don't know about, they haven't been able to learn about it in school or through the internet. Old people know about it, right? I mean, is it talked about in quiet moments? It really depends which people and where, you know. I think the situation is slightly

different in Beijing where people saw it happen with their own eyes. But there's also this instinct for self-preservation, this real idea that people understand that talking about and remembering those moments, not only is it not helpful to them, it's actually harmful. It could be bad for them. So when I was researching, I stumbled across the second massacre that happened outside Beijing. It was in Chengdu in Sichuan province, and it also happened on June the 4th. And it happened after the killings in Beijing, because the people in Chengdu, which is a place which is kind of known for the fiery temperament, the revolutionary ardor, people there are quite rebellious. So when they saw what happened in Beijing, they came out on

the streets to protest at the killings, and then they themselves ended up being suppressed, and people ended up dying there as well. And I tracked down a lot of people who were there. I tracked down people who had taken photographs of it. And I found all this evidence, including documents from Sichuan, official documents that proved that people had died there. It was really interesting because when my book came out, I was invited to speak at loads of places and often universities in the UK, the US, Germany, elsewhere. And I just remember this one talk that I gave where there was a member of the audience who was very quiet and she watched everything really, really quietly. I could tell there was something going on with her, but I just couldn't tell what it was. And when it got to question time, she said, I just want to say,

I come from Chengdu. I was there when all those things happened. I saw them with my own eyes. And until this moment, I did not remember that I had seen them. And it was such a stunning moment. It really showed you the sort of power of state-sponsored amnesia that someone who was there, who was relatively open-minded, who was working in academia, who had moved overseas, had somehow managed to reformat her own memory and remove this. And it wasn't a moment, all the weeks leading up to the moment, as well as the moment itself, and had not remembered it for all those years. Well, that is bad news. I think we're in trouble if that's the case. That is very disturbing indeed. On that terrifying note, Louisa, thank you very much. You've got a wonderful book out about this,

but also a new one about Hong Kong. Tell us what both titles are called. So this book is called The People's Republic of Amnesia, Tiananmen Revisited. And my Hong Kong book, which is about to come out in the UK, is called Indelible City, Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong. We can talk about that disturbing story another time. Thank you very much, Louisa. Thanks for your insights. Extraordinary stories and research. Thank you.

Well, thank you so much for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finish.