Square of Heavenly Discord
Part of A Better Guide to Beijing
Tiān’ān Mén Square has been the venue both for carefully staged political set pieces (military reviews, demonstrations in support of Máo, celebrations of National Day, choreographed enthusiasm for the 2008 Olympics) and for truly spontaneous outbursts of dissent long before the violent suppression of the Democracy Movement was beamed around the world on 4 June 1989.
The May Fourth movement of 1919 (known as Wǔ Sì — ‘Five Four’) saw 3000 students gather to protest at the provision of the Treaty of Versailles that at the end of the First World War passed Germany’s influence in Shāndōng Province to Japan.
Though unable to send troops, China had despatched several thousand labourers to France, freeing Europeans to go to the front. Expecting the return of German-occupied territory in China, the Republican government was betrayed by an earlier secret agreement between the British and French guaranteeing Japan possession after the war in return for Japanese naval support during it (which never actually came).
The USA, which had promised to support China at the conference, acquiesced to the handover and was regarded as the greater betrayer, although ordinary Chinese also roundly condemned the weakness of their own government. US President Wilson had given in to Japanese threats not to participate in the formation of the League of Nations, precursor to the UN. The students marched on the Legation Quarter, where foreign guards barred them from entry.
On 9 December 1935, thousands of students rallied to protest against the Republican government’s impotence against Japanese aggression and ever-increasing expansion from their Shāndōng base. The students were hosed with water and clubbed, but the following week almost 30,000 citizens reappeared.
In mid-March 1976 people began to come daily to lay wreaths at the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in a spontaneous outpouring of affection for the memory of the popular Premier Zhōu Ēnlái (周恩来) who, despite supporting Máo throughout, had managed to retain a reputation as a moderate, and who had recently died. Partly they also represented an outpouring of support for pragmatist Dèng Xiǎopíng (邓小平), who was being persecuted by Máo’s wife and her cronies, known as the ‘Gang of Four’, and who were running the Cultural Revolution.
On 4 April, which that year was the date of the traditional Qīngmíng festival for honouring the dead, tens of thousands entered the square and left floral tributes, poetry, and other messages at the monument. This spontaneous ‘mass movement’ was labelled counter-revolutionary, and everything was cleared away overnight.
On 5 April 1976 numbers swelled to over 100,000, demonstrating their anger at the removal of the tributes. Placards compared the Party leadership to the cruel and tyrannical first emperor of all China, Qín Shǐhuáng (秦始皇, 259–210 BCE), and called for a return to ‘genuine’ Marxism-Leninism. Threats over loudspeakers frightened most away, but in the evening several hundred were beaten, arrested, and later sent to prison camps.
Máo’s reaction was to blame the relatively moderate Dèng Xiǎopíng, whose ideas on opening up the economy were both popular and opposed to his own, and to have him removed from all of his several posts. But Máo’s death in September eventually allowed a groundswell of public support to help restore Dèng and make him paramount leader, replacing Huá Guófēng (华国锋), Máo’s protégé, few months later.
Dèng ‘reversed the verdict’ on the 1976 demonstrators, who had been branded counter-revolutionary, but by 1986 faced student demonstrations against his own slow progress towards democracy. In January 1987, despite police bans, Běijīng students held massive rallies in Tiān’ān Mén Square protesting at official corruption and at the role of the ‘princelings’, the male and female offspring of top Party cadres given privileged positions and access to lucrative deals.
Now taking Máo’s role, Dèng in turn used the demonstrations as an excuse to remove another moderate, Party Secretary-General Hú Yàobāng (胡耀邦), and to blame the pernicious influence of foreign ideas. Professors known for their liberal views, such as internationally respected astrophysicist Fāng Lìzhī (方励之), bore the brunt of the attacks as student protests sputtered in the face of imminent exams.
It was Hú Yàobāng’s sudden death from a heart attack on 15 April 1989 that set off the most widely attended, most widely watched (due to the efforts of foreign television crews) and most bloodily suppressed demonstrations in the square’s history. Student demonstrators wanted Dèng to reverse the verdict on Hú as he had the one on the 1976 demonstrations, and they revived the anti-corruption and pro-democracy issues of those earlier protests. The government was taken aback, and was initially prevented from taking firm action by the presence of Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, who was on a state visit.
Eventually, tanks and soldiers were sent into the square on the night of 3–4 June, an incident known as Liù Sì (‘Six-Four’). Party members who had expressed sympathy with the students and workers in the square were purged, and Zhào Zǐyáng (赵紫阳), Dèng’s hand-picked successor, who had gone out into the square to apologise to the students, was sacked and kept under house arrest until his death in 2005.
As with every other figure ever quoted about China, the numbers of those who died in the square vary, from thousands (supporters of the movement) to none (the Chinese government, on the grounds that if any died at all it was in Cháng’ān Jiē, which runs across the top of the square and along which many fled). In the days leading up to the anniversary each year the police and military presence around the square increases, and access to university campuses is more tightly controlled.
In 1999 the authorities handled a worrying conjunction of political anniversaries with an aplomb extremely rare in official public relations. The year marked the 80th anniversary of the 4 May democracy movement, the 50th anniversary of the Communist Party’s rule over China
(1 October — Bā-Yī) and the 10th anniversary of the Tiān’ān Mén Massacre of democracy protestors, all focused on Tiān’ān Mén Square. So the government closed the square in October 1998 for repaving and spent vast sums covering all 170,000sqm (about 1.83 million square feet — yet another different figure) with granite — better able to support the weight of tanks, said some wags. Unsurprisingly the repairs continued until the dangerous anniversaries were past, and were completed just in time for the 1 October National Day celebrations. On the night of 4 June, the only figures hovering at the edge of the square were a few tourists and a lot of plain-clothes police.
When the conjuction of round-figure anniversaries reoccured in 2009, the authorities were out in force, and on 1 October staged the biggest military parade in Chinese modern history.
Dèng Xiǎopíng may have reversed the verdict on the 1976 demonstrators, but refused to do so on the 1989 ones before his death in 1997, and the Party still fears the square as the epicentre of dissent. You’ll note as you take the pedestrian underpasses to reach the centre that there’s many a side door haunted by uniformed police, whose vans also cluster in side turnings outside the Tài Miào and on the west side of the square as well as around various buildings just inside the Legation Quarter. During major political conferences such as the main Party Conference that takes place without notice of the exact dates every five years (next in 2017), everyone entering the square is searched, unless they look foreign.
But even at other times plain clothes and uniformed police hover all day, and within moments of some protester whipping out a placard, or as soon as members of some banned sect take a deep breath and start to chant, the heavies appear, and the guilty (no room for debate here) swiftly find themselves in the back of vans and on their way to a beating and lengthy detention without trial.
People stare, but quickly go back to other occupations such as flying kites in the form of birds, butterflies and carp, some of which are for sale. In 1999 the authorities, in a fine example of the insidious growth of tiny taxes that cause far more resentment than the lack of grand and often only half-grasped ideals like democracy or freedom of religion, tried to institute a kite management office, which would charge ¥20 for an annual permit to fly kites in the square.
There were protests, and on this point at least the decision was indeed reversed.
Return to Tián’ān Mén Square.
Tiān’ān Mén stories: Miraculous Máo, The Shock of the New.
Next: Legation Quarter
Previous: Forward to the Past (walk)
Main Index to A Better Guide to Běijīng.
