February 13, 2001	atimes.com

China UNDER REVIEW Tiananmen revisited By Francesco Sisci On May 18, 1989, Deng Xiaoping holds a meeting with some other party veterans to discuss the demonstrations which have been taking place in Beijing for a few weeks. The atmosphere appears tense. The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, is in North Korea on an important state visit and another momentous diplomatic event has just ended - Mikhail Gorbachev, head of the Soviet Union, has just visited China to normalize ties between the two largest communist parties in the world. Gorbachev's visit is an historic event, but Deng, who played a part in the breaking of relations with the Soviets almost 30 years before, is not concerned with it. He is worried that if he doesn't suppress the demonstrations, he and his pals, all in their 80s, could end up under house arrest. Deng and his comrades were veterans of decades of guerrilla war, first against the nationalist troops of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT), then against Japanese invaders, then again against the KMT. They took Tibet and ended the short-lived independence of East Turkestan. Yet, according to one of the most revealing documents of the now rightly famous book, The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership's Decision to Use Force Against Their Own People (Andrew Nathan, Pery Ling, Zhang Liang, with afterwords by Orville Schell), the party elders saw the end of their careers in the hands of a bunch of kids. Had Deng, a professional revolutionary since the age of 16, gone senile? Was he stretching a point? The editors of The Tiananmen Papers do not comment on this, but several readers have noticed it, and think Deng was being paranoid. But was he? Perhaps not. Perhaps his judgement, toughened by the wars and by ghastly personal experiences, including the quasi-assassination of his eldest son who was thrown out of a window by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, was right. In fact, the whole Tiananmen affair ended up with just one party leader under house arrest - Zhao Ziyang, now 82, who, according to the book, put his conscience above party discipline. He disagreed with the crackdown. It was certainly a massacre on the night of June 3 and 4, 1989, whatever the exact number of dead might be. And it is also certainly one of the most tantalizing episodes of modern history. Arguably, it marked the end of the century, perhaps even something more as communism shortly afterward fell apart in Europe. A sea of ink has been thrown on tons of paper and yet ... it is hard to rethink an event that changed the lives of so many people. The three editors of The Tiananmen Papers make a strong case arguing for the authenticity of the documents they present, although the Chinese Foreign Ministry saw fit to dismiss them with a short statement: they are a fabrication, it said. However, as the above-mentioned episode shows, the point perhaps is not whether the documents are a fabrication but the questions they raise. Why, for instance, does the book totally ignore the power struggle going on in the party since the summer of 1988? Then, Zhao lost his economic portfolio and in autumn launched a campaign for a new authoritarianism clearly aimed at taking power away from the group of veterans and concentrating it on the party secretary. Why doesn't the book delve into the issue of Deng's power? The Communist Party is Leninist, and the secretary is, or should be, the boss. Yet Deng retained veto power over politburo decisions - without this power, how could he fire the party secretary? Certainly, a daring volume of some 500 pages can't be judged by what it doesn't say. In the days following the massacre, young soldiers could be overheard talking to each other, shocked and aghast at the courage of Beijing's people: they are not afraid to die, the soldiers were saying aloud, assuming the foreigner passing by could not understand them. The day of the massacre, thousands of students cycled in to die in Tiananmen, the soldiers were saying. At the last minute, however, the students chose not to die. They agreed to pull out, more or less peacefully. Why? Twelve years after the massacre, perhaps it is time for some cool-headed answers and some fair assessments, without trying to make a point for one or other of the protagonists in the drama. Briefly, we can now say that there was a fierce power struggle and by April 1989 party veterans such as Chen Yun and Wang Zhen had been at Zhao's throat for months. The situation was a tinderbox waiting for somebody to strike a match. Many things were strange then, and The Tiananmen Papers doesn't cast any light on them. Why did the effective party structure not call on school party cells to stop the first demonstration on April 27? Why, that morning, were police not blocking the university entrance, but were stationed some 50 meters away, allowing time for the demonstration to gain momentum? Why, at the height of the protest, were there hundreds of thousands of troops around Beijing, including artillery batteries? The artillery was certainly not intended to bombard Tiananmen Square! The documents do not tell anything about these strange events that the modest eyewitness does not already know. Nor do the editors mention them. Perhaps some deeper truth about Tiananmen lies in the answers to these questions. But the answers certainly won't come from the Chinese leadership. They probably won't come from the dissidents either - the answers are perhaps too embarrassing for them. Twelve years ago they were all saints. But life is sometimes more complicated than history, so how can we try to dissect the torments of a soul? Those who died, whose names we hardly know or remember, were certainly heroes. But history has no duty to sentence the villains to death, and it must be dispassionate if some lessons are to drawn from all the suffering in Tiananmen Square. Perhaps it is time to try to be really cool about Tiananmen. (Special to Asia Times Online)

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