"Tiananmen Square...an eerie feeling"

After lunch in a Hutong we went to Tiananmen Square (Tiananmen guangchang) which is in the heart of the city opposite the Forbidden City, the home to the early rulers of China. Tiananmen Square is huge and was featured on most television news stories depicting Chairman Mao, when he would address the Red Guards. On occasions more than one million people would assemble in the square at any one time. The last major incident to take place here was in 1989 when the Pro-Democracy demonstrators where cut down on the orders of Deng Xiaoping. There were approximately one hundred and fifty thousand students and other activists in the square and had been demonstrating for the introduction of a democratic state in China. As the weather warmed up during the month of May, students flocked to the city to camp out in the square and the number swelled to nearly one million. Workers, even the police joined in, and around three thousand or more went on hunger strike for democracy, which with the arrival of the international media, was televised all over the world. The communist party showed surprising restraint at all this demonstrating and this was later put down to the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev, the President of Russia was due to make a visit from 15th to the 18thMay. Soon after his departure on 20th May, Martial Law was declared and troops were deployed into Beijing to break up the demonstration.

When they tried to enter the city they found their way obstructed by huge crowds who had set up road blocks to halt them. A plan to deploy the troops via the subway system was stopped when workers turned off the power! As troops surrounded Beijing the enthusiasm began to recede and the crowd camped out in Tiananmen Square reduced to approximately ten thousand. The military assault came in the early hours of 4th June 1989 when tanks entered the square at 2.00am. exactly what happened next has been disputed. The government states the students attacked the troops with rocks, clubs and petrol bombs. The students say the tanks ploughed into the crowds and opened fire. Since the attack took place at night and there were many thousands of demonstrators and troops in the square, the foreign press on the scene had a job knowing who did what. The true number that died will never be known. At first the government claimed there had been no deaths, but observers estimated the death toll to be around three thousand! Many of the losses took place in the hutongs around the square and these included soldiers as well a civilians, however, the number was not reported by the authorities, and of course never will be.

Violence broke out all over the city during the next few days and foreign journalists managed to capture much of it on video tape to broadcast it around the world. It soon turned world opinion against China’s government, and condemnation followed from all the Western leaders. No sooner had the violence been quelled, and the blood washed away  from the streets, than large scale arrests and executions started to take place throughout the country. The official government version of the events are that the ’anti government riot’ was the work of Counter-Revolutionaries and foreign agents in the USA, Taiwan and elsewhere. Next there was a complete news  blackout, all foreign publications were banned, and the government started jamming the transmissions of the BBC and the Voice of America. In an attempt to get news into the country and break the blockade, Chinese students around the world bombarded companies in China with fax messages so that the civilian population knew what the world was saying.  Many people feared that China would close its doors once more to the West just as it had done for a period of thirty years up until the late 1970’s.

On the occasions that I visited Tiananmen Square, despite the fact it was very peaceful, there was always an eerie feeling of something terrible that had happened not too long ago.

Read Neils complete adventure here.