CHINA: Party Elders Made Key Decisions During Tiananmen Crisis

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 6 2001 (IPS) - Startling internal Communist Party documents appearing in the latest ‘Foreign Affairs’ quarterly, to be released Monday, show that retired party elders, most prominently Deng Xiaoping, were responsible for the key decisions before and after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in June 1999.

The papers, which U.S. scholars obtained from what Foreign Affairs described as a “representative of reform elements” within the Communist Party, describe how the active party leadership was deeply split about how to deal with the student-led pro-democracy movement.

This division existed virtually from the beginning in mid-April when protests broke out after the death of a popular reformer, Hu Yaobang, who had been purged two years before, the documents show.

But they also show that even hard-line forces led by Deng had hoped to avoid bloodshed and insisted throughout the crisis that the Party should try to separate the vast majority of the students and their supporters from what they saw as a handful of “reactionaries” acting in league with foreign powers.

These foreign powers included the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Party’s historic foe, the Kuomintang (KMT) government in Taiwan.

The papers also show the Party elders as motivated primarily by fears that a continuation of the “turmoil” which seized the country during the crisis could have dire consequences for the Party itself, and by resentment over the students’ demands for far- reaching reform, including the creation of a multi-party system.

“These kids don’t know how good they’ve got it!” says Wang Zhen, a senior retired official at a critical meeting just before the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began clearing the Square in what became known overseas as the ‘Tiananmen Massacre.’

“If the students don’t leave Tiananmen on their own, the PLA should go in and carry them out,” he is quoted as saying.

While no one knows precisely how many were killed in the PLA’s clearing operations, most accounts agree that the death toll among students and their backers ranged into the hundreds. Thousands more were arrested in Beijing and elsewhere in the following months.

The incident created a deep diplomatic rift between China and the West and put Beijing in the dock at the U.N. Human Rights Commission for most of the 1990s. More important, it also stopped an already-halting political reform process in its tracks.

The complete set of documents, which are excerpted in ‘Foreign Affairs’, is to be published in a forthcoming book, called ‘The Tiananmen Papers,’ by three well-recognised U.S. China experts, who worked with the anonymous source over a period of months.

They and other China specialists consulted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which publishes ‘Foreign Affairs,’ concluded that the documents were authentic.

In a release issued with the excerpts, the council said the compiler and his associates were motivated by their desire to rekindle a spirit of political reform in China, a process which, according to them, can only be begun by reversing the official verdict on the Tiananmen demonstration as being the work of a “small group of counter-revolutionaries.”

Instead, they believe, according to CFR, that the students should be recognised as patriotic Chinese trying to advance modernisation which was actually begun when Deng himself took power in the late 1970s and initiated far-reaching economic reform.

They believe that shedding light on what took place within the circles of the top leadership will further their goal.

Among other things, the documents disclose that both the ouster of Zhao Zhiyang, the chairman of the Communist Party who favoured a more conciliatory approach to the students, and his replacement by Jiang Zemin, who remains China’s top leader, was decided by the retired or semi-retired Party elders.

These elders were not even on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the only body under the Party’s Constitution with the power to take such action.

The documents reveal the existence of an apparent secret resolution by which all major disagreements in the Standing Committee were to be referred to Deng and the other elders, a group of only eight Party veterans. Like Deng, almost all of them have since died.

According to Andrew Nathan, one of the U.S. experts, the group acted as “China’s extraconstitutional final court of appeal.”

The documents show that Deng’s main interest through the first part of the crisis was to clear the square in time for the summit visit by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. When Zhao’s efforts to negotiate such a removal in time failed, Deng decided that martial law should be declared “to suppress the turmoil once and for all.”

The papers also make clear that the key event leading to the eventual confrontation was the publication by the Party’s ‘People’s Daily’ newspaper of an editorial April 26 which called the demonstrations a “well-planned plot to confuse the people and throw the country into ‘turmoil’,” whose aim was the rejection of the Party and the socialist system.

Zhao, who was traveling outside the country at the time, argued strongly after meeting with student representatives that this view should be revised. But he was outmanoeuvred in meetings with the elders by then-premier Li Peng, who remains number two in the Party hierarchy today.

In one meeting just before publication of the editorial, Li warned the Communist Party elders that the protests were directed essentially against them and their legacy. “The spear is now pointed directly at you and the others of the elder generation of proletarian revolutionaries,” he is quoted as saying.

Similarly, at the critical meeting which preceded the clearing of the square, Li briefs the elders on alleged efforts by CIA and KMT agents to foment turmoil at both Tiananmen and elsewhere in the country.

At that point, Deng himself notes that “causes of this incident have to do with the global context,” particularly in light of U.S. “assistance to the so-called democrats — people who in fact are the scum of the Chinese.”

“Some Western countries use things like ‘human rights,’ .to criticise us, but what they’re really after is our sovereignty,” according to Deng. He goes on to insist that, even after the cracking down on the protests, China’s reform should go forward.”