Tiananmen still haunts China

Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin examines why, on the seventh anniversary of the Beijing Massacre, China shows no sign of coming to terms with the event. He also explains why it is almost certain there will be a day of reckoning.

HONG KONG (JP): Seven years after the events leading to the Beijing Massacre on June 4, 1989, there is still no sign of a long-awaited "reversal of verdicts" movement within the Chinese Communist Party.

The official verdict then was that the violent action by the Peoples Liberation Army was necessary to quell "counter- revolutionary turmoil" by a "very small number" of troublemakers. The number of those massacred was severely downplayed. Many hundreds -- almost certainly a couple of thousand -- Chinese were slaughtered.

Just about the only way the official "verdict" was correct was in its assertion that there were very few deaths in Tiananmen Square. By far the greatest killings took place as the PLA fought its way through Beijing suburbs in its effort to reach Tiananmen Square -- and as residents of Beijing sought to inhibit the army's descent upon the student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

This often-neglected fact is why this correspondent always refers to those terrible events as the Beijing Massacre. The majority of killings did not take place only in Tiananmen Square.

But the adjective "Tiananmen" (Gate of Heavenly Peace) is forever linked with the June 4 savagery because the events of May and June were played out on the television screens of the world. In part, this was because the Chinese government had sought to play the Soviet card against the Americans by inviting then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for a visit signaling Sino- Soviet rapprochement.

Gorbachev's movements around Beijing were heavily circumscribed by the still-growing demonstrations. Foreign television crews and cameras arrived to cover one major event and stayed to cover the next.

While the CCP has been responsible for quite a few massacres during its brief reign -- brief in terms of previous Chinese dynasties -- June 4, 1989, was the first (and possibly the last) which was seen live and in color on television screens around the world.

The overconcentration of foreign attention on Tianamen Square led to another popular distortion of the truth. Beijing was not the only place where there was a major demonstration in April, May or June 1989.

In fact, there was an upsurge of popular unrest throughout China -- a fact easier to appreciate in Hong Kong where news of demonstrations in parts of China distant from Beijing was readily available.

A friend of mine, who just happened to be in a mid-sized town in central China, was amazed to witness a sizable demonstration involving most of the local citizenry demonstrating against their corrupt communist officials.

While there were further cases of violent suppression elsewhere in China during June and July, the Beijing Massacre, by its sheer brutality, served a political purpose. It intimidated the Chinese people enough to restore order under CCP rule throughout China.

Student extremists in Tiananmen hoped that the bloodshed of suppression would "open the people's eyes" but the overwhelming majority of Chinese chose to close their eyes instead. However, outer apathy should never be confused with inner forgetfulness. Much bitter remembrance will surface within China whenever a reversal of verdicts campaign finally gets underway.

No doubt within party circles, their restoration of order helps explain why no visible debate has yet been re-opened on the events surrounding June 4, 1989. In the following two years, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe crumbled one by one, as did the Soviet Union, the communist motherland since 1917.

These developments created a paranoia within the CCP leadership which is still visible. China seeks, often stridently, to close down every last vestige of dissent not only at home but also in Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and even in democratic Taiwan.

This paranoia also helps explain why no voices have been raised, in what amounts to a traditional format in Chinese politics, trying to reverse the verdict so summarily and inaccurately pronounced in 1989.

Through dynasty after dynasty, and especially when one dynasty is being forced to give way to another, factions have sought to take power from those holding it by showing recent or distant history in a different light. More than in any other country, history has been politically used within China to indicate future directions rather than to reveal truths about the past.

Verdicts, in other words, are reversed primarily to suit the political interests of power seekers.

Deng Xiaoping, China's ailing and out-of-sight paramount leader, consolidated his grip on power between 1979 and 1982 by partially, and cautiously, reversing the verdict on the leadership of Mao Zedong.

As the day draws nearer when a successor to Deng has to be found, it is reasonable to expect that the next claimant to paramount leadership will seek to reverse the verdict on Deng.

Even more important, bearing in mind the profound unpopularity and corruption of the CCP, a future leader might seek popular legitimacy by opening a case against both Deng and Mao.

When Chinese President Jiang Zemin purged Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong in 1995, the speculation naturally arose that Jiang was already beginning to do this.

Chen Xitong was the first person to render the CCP's initial harsh verdict when he justified the Beijing Massacre to the National People's Congress on July 6, 1989. In purging him, was Jiang also beginning to erase that verdict? Evidently not, for while Chen has been removed, his verdict stays.

Whatever happens in the next few years, when the day for historical revisionism finally dawns, the Beijing Massacre is bound to be in the political firing line.

But hard-liners are currently in charge and political reformers are the ones who are more likely to seek, one day, to change the official verdict. So far, there are no visible signs of any such movement.

This time last year, such a movement appeared in the offing as several dissident and intellectual groups penned petitions to the Chinese authorities asking for a reversal of verdicts on the Beijing Massacre.

It seemed natural to ask if these groups knew someone that had escaped the outside world? Did they know there was a faction within the CCP pushing in the same direction as they wished to go?

As the petitions went unanswered, and as some of those signing them were penalized or imprisoned, a Beijing contact had a different explanation: The petitions were sent because those signing them were desperate. They did not know of any faction even halfheartedly maneuvering towards the truth.

This June, after another year of continuous suppression, there are fewer petitions; only one has been reported so far.

The CCP seems closer to its unrealistic and unrealizable goal of reducing the largest nation in the world to a single opinion on a crucial event.