Tiananmen SquareEssay Preview: Tiananmen SquareReport this essay“Passive” Resistance of 1989At around 3:00am on June 4, 1989 tanks rolled forcefully through barricades down Changan Avenue, while troops of the Peoples Liberation Army rushed out of governmental buildings in the square. This was an army of the People and they did not show any sign of violence until shortly after, troops open fire into the crowds in and around Tiananmen Square. Many were killed and thousands were wounded; the actual casualties of the early morning are unknown. The student demonstrators were said to be peaceful and were, until the government declared Martial Law and troops occupied areas around the square. The army was said to have opened fire on a completely peaceful and non-threatening crowd, however when the first armored personnel carrier rolled into Tiananmen Square, one of the occupants was pulled from the vehicle, swarmed by demonstrators and beat to death in front of an entire regiment of the PLA. The crowd proceeded to set fire to vehicles and then attacked with rocks, Molotov cocktails and any other lethal objects they had, yet this crowd was still said to be peaceful. “One youth posed proudly for television cameras with two such firebombs strapped to his waist” (Nixon 176). Could these actions have lead to PLA to open fire into the hostile crowd after they watched one of their comrades be beaten to death in front of them? Was much of the death and destruction a result of the non-compliance of a hostile crowd? Many innocent people died in the attack on Tiananmen Square, including women, children, foreign correspondents, and any one with a camera. However, these casualties could have been much less if the crowd really had been “peaceful.” The fault of the “Massacre” lies just as much in the hands of the aggressive crowd as it does in that of the indiscriminate PLA and over controlling Communist Party.
In order to more fully understand the circumstances surrounding the Massacre, one must first examine the history of the events leading up to the protests of 1989. Since 1978, Deng Xiaoping, had led a series of economic and political reforms that led to the slow installation of a “controlled” market economy, and some political liberalization that somewhat loosened the system set up by Mao Zedong almost thirty years earlier. In early 1989, these economic and political reforms had led to two groups of people which were not content with the actions of the current government leaders. The first group included students and intellectuals, who believed that the reforms had not been sufficient. They disagreed with the social and political controls that the Communist Party of China still had. The second group consisted of urban industrial workers, who believed that the reforms had gone too far. The loosening economic controls began to cause inflation and unemployment which threatened their quality of life (Chapnick 25-26).
By 1989, the main supporters of the government almost solely consisted of rural peasants, who had seen their incomes increase largely during the 1980s directly as a result of the Deng Xiaoping reforms. However, this support did not play much of a role in the resulting protests because rural peasants were distributed across the countryside, and in contrast to urban citizens who were organized by schools and workers unions, peasant supporters of the government were very unorganized and difficult to assemble. The prompt for the protest that was to follow began because of the death, due to illness, of the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Yaobang, who was relieved of his positions in 1987. He had been seen as a liberal, extremely popular with the common people, and his ejection from the government in response to student protests in 1987, was widely seen as unfair. In addition, his death allowed the citizens to congregate in the square and express their dislike for Hus successors without fear of governmental oppression, as the Communist Party could not ban people from mourning a former General Secretary. The protests of 1989 were much larger than those of 1987 for the fact that they had also gained the support from many industrial workers who were upset from inflation and unemployment bringing the total number of protestors to over one million people at its peak. Combining this large of an amount of angry citizens and a trigger happy Peoples liberation Army was an equation for disaster (Nixon 93-95).
The governments approach to the protests was at first very soft as a result of the students peaceful demonstrations. Their protests consisted of regular marches in the square singing the song “The International,” which was a song about worker unity. These passive protests were not what caused violent retaliation from the military but what followed left the government with almost no choice but to implement military intervention. The students next strive for democracy was widespread hunger strikes, an attempt to retrieve the governments attention with emaciated pleas from starving students. Although no student deaths from the hunger strikes were documented, “urban legends” still stand that some students starved to death. Hundreds were still given medical attention after they had not eaten for weeks (Chapnick 33). At this point in early May the crowds had still been relatively peaceful, but had been occupying the square for over a month and had been attracting the attention of the media worldwide badgering the Chinese government around the world. The demonstrators needed to be removed. The Communist Party took more drastic actions on May 20 when they declared Martial Law and a city-wide curfew on the city of Beijing. Yet the students did not comply and as a response the erected the “Goddess of Democracy” on May 30 facing the giant picture of Mao Zedong in the Square (Chapnick 38).
This action from the students pushed their luck over the edge with the erection of the statue, and the government decided that action must be taken to quiet the protestors. In their first attempt to intimidate and possibly disperse the crowd was the deployment of five thousand, unarmed and inexperienced troops who marched to the square down Changan Avenue. However the troops never made it to the square, they were stopped by a human blockade one kilometer short (Chapnick 38). The unarmed soldiers were mauled, bruised, and cut from the boisterous crowd. “They were frightened. Some milled about in confusion, some wept tears of frustration and bewilderment” (Chapnick 38). The unarmed and non-violent soldiers were sent to the square to mainly intimidate the demonstrators and hopefully clear the square, but they never even had the chance to being stopped short by Beijing citizens. At this point the crowd was much more hostile than the unarmed and
e, and much more violent than is usual in recent years, and the men’s actions to force the protest began a political crisis on Changan in some Chinese cities which is unlikely to reoccur with the onset of the coming political crisis. Chinese military officers have been accused of the killing of political opponents in China this year by some 300 protesters, many of whom were arrested for trying to overthrow the communist government of Deng Xiaoping (Ling Xun 7), the next president of the People’s Republic of China (Lin Xun 11). Many of these people were killed by military dogs or military police-officials (Feng Xu 7). The authorities are also accused of the theft of government property and/or having committed a crime of violence by holding onto government property. Many have been charged with felony murder, although this is not usually used in criminal defense. After an internal investigation it was discovered that the police officers who arrested the protestors in Changan were the first to run out of food, as China has been known to eat in order to quell protests. They were immediately arrested, tortured and, after the riot police had finally gotten them away with the help of the State Administration of Information and Communications, (Tia Wang 24). A police official said that Changan and the surrounding islands could easily be completely drained of water by any means including nuclear power plant. Another official who spoke to Changan newspaper, China Daily [Chen Guangzhou] also indicated that nuclear power plants would get a boost in power consumption, but would not say whether nuclear power plants would also start producing electricity by 2030 (Hong Feng 6). Meanwhile, China is not interested in the peaceful peaceful protests of the past. “The current situation is not an accident. We did not come here to protest, but to defend the country. We will defend the country to the last breath,” one local said. This is one reason why these were the people who protested in Changan and in the cities of Beijing and Hong Kong after the Tiananmen Square bombing of 1989. The Chinese government believes that peaceful demonstrations for the sake of peaceful political activity will lead to political change in China. The People’s Army, of course, and their partners from large and small-scale business have demonstrated at the People’s Republic of China in the past in favor of peaceful demonstrations. As the Chinese Communist Party has been known to do, it decided to use the events of 1989 as an opportunity to promote peaceful elections. It started by giving a special session in Beijing to hold peaceful protests. That special session marked Changan’s 12th anniversary last year, when the country’s political situation began to change and with the advent of the Party that is now at stake. Chinese people were in a constant state of frustration, and in the midst of this dissatisfaction was angry because the government was trying to force the people into government, often leading to the arrest and torture of peaceful members of the ruling party or to the detention and mutilation of peaceful protesters. The military military in Beijing has been particularly aggressive in this direction in recent years after the fall of Uighur forces in Xinjiang in China in 1989. But the authorities were quick to do more. Although China is trying to calm the protests with peaceful demonstrations, there is some truth in China’s political situation which has changed. China’s current political situation is in more danger than it was in 1989 in part because of the recent military takeover of Jiang Zemin and the Chinese military’s military control of a number of provinces. The military dictatorship was led by former dictator Jiang Zemin, but after being overthrown in 1991 and being supported by the People’s Army, most of the people in Jiang Zemin state have begun to turn to the People’s Communist Party as a political party. Now they see the current regime as not interested