A former foreign secretary gives an Indian perspective on China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown

Sandeep Dikshit

In the scholarship on the Tiananmen Square crackdown, we have been treated to a treasure trove of books by western diplomats and journalists.

Here, former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale knocks the bottom out of those accounts that were “dubious and conjured”. They painted an inner-party struggle, in which students were pawns, as the stirrings of a mass uprising against the Communist Party of China (CPC).

After recounting innumerable instances, Gokhale concludes, “It is no longer possible for the western media to hide their hypocrisy, and they have lost their credibility.”

As a young diplomat who saw student cyclists and then tanks rumble on the avenue leading to the Square, Gokhale casts a uniquely Indian spotlight on the events of April 15 to June 4, 1989, after which students never ever marched on the streets of Beijing again.

Before the events of June 3-4 — almost nothing happened at the Square; the skirmishes took place far away — Gokhale provides an account of the intense infighting within the CPC as Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping pushed for market reforms.

In 1980, Deng brought in Hu Yaobang as the general secretary and Zhao Ziyang as premier. By early 1985, enter Li Peng, to be later called the ‘Butcher of Beijing’ by the western media. What complicated matters was the ‘Elders’, who remained politically active.

The West missed the warning signs of high inflation and slumping growth in 1985. As the pressure on the CPC grew, the consensus on reforms began fracturing. Hu Yaobang began advocating liberal values which ran into resistance from the hardliners, while Hu’s market reforms were attacked by the economic hardliners.

By 1987, Hu was ejected and Zhao confirmed as general secretary. Students had begun marching in several cities and a section of the Chinese media began rooting for the liberals.

The spark was lit by Hu’s death at a Politburo meeting on April 15. Students began thronging the Square to pay their respects.

Five days later, some students amassing in the Square blocked a gate and the first student leader, Wu’er Kaixi, emerged.

Simultaneously, the CPC saw the rise of Jiang Zemin, who cracked down hard on a liberal newspaper in Shanghai.

The CPC sought to temper the unrest with an editorial in the People’s Daily on April 26. This editorial was to repeatedly become a bone of contention and finally led to the June 4 showdown.

In the student leadership, the centre stage was occupied by the hardliners, who turned down offers for talks. There were marches aplenty and Beijing buzzed with sloganeering. But as long as Zhao was there, no force was used. The western media chased the wrong story by showing it as a democratic revolution when it was an internal power struggle as Zhao wanted to use the students as pawns to show Li Peng in poor light.

Gokhale touches on many turning points. What if Zhao Ziyang had not lost his 1988 fight with Li Peng on economic reforms? What if the historic Sino-Soviet rapprochement had not been upstaged by the students who gate-crashed the Great Hall of the People?

By May 19, Zhao was gone and Li Peng was in charge. By May 30, the Indians were sure the military would act but the western diplomats and media provided a different picture of an impending insurrection.

Deng resolved the political crises on June 2. Jiang Zemin, who had crushed a liberal paper in Shanghai, was the new general secretary. But the US was insisting that the hardliners were not in charge.

There is no accurate account of what happened in the Square on the night of June 3 and the next day. Probably, it didn’t require machine gun fire to disperse the few students who had remained. On June 9, Deng made a public appearance and the curtains were drawn. The late Hu, Zhao (who was to write secret memoirs) and, most of all, the students, had lost.

While the US railed about human rights, it secretly sent diplomats to negotiate. “If this was realpolitik, it was also a searing lesson in how great democracies abandon publicly avowed principles,” writes Gokhale. Within a year, Sino-US ties were back to business as usual.