Tiananmen Is Forgotten

Eighteen years ago (June 5, 1989), I walked along the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square, past the soldiers in baggy uniforms burning trash and scrubbing bloodstains off the stones. I was stationed in Asia as a reporter for Newsday in New York.

I was met at the far side, past the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, by a friend, a ranking intelligence officer in the People's Liberation Army. He led me to a railroad siding at the Beijing train station. We stopped at a freight car, one of two dozen or so strung together. He yanked open the door to reveal human bodies stacked like cordwood, three or four courses thick from stem to stern.

"You must write about this," he said, "even thought it will not matter. The world will not remember this. China is a place to make money. China is looted for money; looted by the Europeans, looted by the Japanese, looted by us Chinese ourselves. Every sin is forgotten, everything is forgiven as long as we make money."

No, I said, this time would be different. We journalists had been told at an embassy briefing that morning that President George H. Bush was on the phone with Chinese leaders. Bush had lived in Beijing as U.S. ambassador. He was a former head of CIA; he knew how to get through. He would be able to deliver the message to Deng Xiaoping that the western world would not let this stand.

As I spoke, I realized that he was right. The relationship between the west and China is about money.

The night of June 4, 1989, I stood at the edge of Chang-An Avenue staring across the square which was lit by bonfires and the klieg lights of western television crews. The white plaster-of-Paris statue of "Liberty" looked out over the tens of thousands, mostly students, blanketing the square. Over my shoulder the Mona Lisa-like portrait of Mao looked down on the protests his successors had wrought. He looked unhappy.

The night before, Friday, unarmed troops had tried to muscle their way into the square and roust the protesters. The soldiers, outnumbered 10 to one, were pushed back by the mass of bodies. Female students begged the soldiers to turn back, presenting themselves not as protesters, but as "sisters." The students were demanding "democracy" and "free speech," few articulating exactly what that was or why they wanted it.

Rumors had been rampant that the leadership, meeting in secret in the Summer Palace, had ordered thousands of troops from the Russian border to the capital. These were crack soldiers whose native tongue was a dialect different from the Mandarin spoken by the students. The troops lived in harsh conditions on the frontier, buffeted by cold, wind and the constant threat of better armed USSR soldiers. The students, they were told, were spoiled bourgeoisies.

As the size of the protest grew through the late spring, Western embassies had shown satellite photos to reporters, documenting the troop movement. In the last days of May, I traveled 200 kilometers east, hidden under blankets in the back of a car, and saw a long line of troops backed up by tanks and heavy weaponry. My assistant, fluent in a mountain dialect, flirted with some of the troops. They would be in town in several days and would look her up after they finished "business."

June 4 was a steamy day. Twilight came in the unique way it does in Beijing, a city blanketed by coal dust and dust clouds from the Gobi Desert. There is no sunset, dusk is a fading of ambient light.

Dark has fully arrived as a young boy, maybe five or six years old, rode a brand new bicycle along the Ring Road, spinning around on two wheels for the first time. A dozen relatives and neighbors watched, oohing and aahing and clapping hands, celebrating the child's achievement, disconnected with the student protests across town.

Beijing was mostly a bicycle city then, there wasn't traffic, just occasional passing cars and trucks.

A two-and-a-half ton troop carrier hurtled down the street, its headlights dimmed. The top heavy truck swerved away from the boy at the last second, clipping the back tire of the bike, twisting the frame into a pretzel. The boy was rocketed through the air. Miraculously, he suffered no more physical damage than a broken leg.

The driver stopped and dismounted. "It was an accident," he seemed to be saying, using hand gestures indicating the child had come from nowhere into his path. From my vantage point it appeared that the driver had done nothing wrong.

There was no conversation because of the dialect difference and the anger. The city did not support the protests, but they abhorred the government. The university students were like the boy on the bike, precocious rather than dangerous. If the government just ignored them, the students would eventually go home.

One of the civilians yelled, another cursed. A dozen soldiers jumped from the back of the truck and ran away. The driver and others were grabbed.

Two coils of rope appeared and were tossed over the high branches of the plane trees that line the Ring Road. Crude nooses were tied and put around the necks of two of the soldiers whose hands were tied behind their backs with cloth.

Civilians yanked the ropes like tug of war teams. The first soldier died immediately, his neck snapping with a crack that reminded me of the report of a .30 caliber rifle. The second soldier's neck held. He kicked his feet which dangled four or five feet above the pavement. Someone appeared with a large knife. His stomach was slit open and yards of entrails spilled out. He died moments later. I managed, barely, not to vomit.

Somehow, soldiers recorded the event on film. Prints were made and passed out to the invading soldiers as they hit the Beijing city limits. "This is what the students will do," was the message chanted by the officer corps. "You will be lynched, be disemboweled by these students. They must be dealt with."

I watched the first wave of troops march into the square, rifles at their hips, firing waist high into the crowd "with effect." Every third or fourth round was a tracer, drawing a red line through the air that stopped as the bullet hit a body. The television lights were smashed and the bonfires trampled by students running for their lives and soldiers running to take them. Armored vehicles appeared and the Liberty statue was toppled.

I visited a hospital that night. The blood on the floor of the emergency room lapped over the top of my shoes. Body counts were not possible. Estimates of "thousands" dead seemed reasonable.

Standing at the railroad siding late the next day I looked at the train car stuffed with bodies. I do not know what was in the other cars. There have been more bodies, they may have been packed with "Made in China" goods on their way to American stores or the trains may have been empty. China is one of the biggest economies in the world. Tiananmen is forgotten as Beijing prepares to host the Olympics. Human rights groups with such ironically useless names like the "Anti-Genocide Coalition" or "Students United to Save Darfur" are urging western democracies to pressure the politburo to help end the crisis in far away Sudan.

Tiananmen is forgotten. It's all about the money.