15 Years Later, Tiananmen Square Remains 'Elephant' in Chinese Politics
An interview with Nicholas D. Kristof
source: nytimes.com
Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl Wudunn, were Beijing-based correspondents for The New York Times when, on June 3-4, 1989, Chinese authorities brutally cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. The government line on the protestors remains that they were dangerous counterrevolutionaries. Looking back, Kristof says the deaths of what he estimates at between 400 and 800 people, many of them students, remain "the elephant in the room of Chinese politics" even as the country's economy is booming. "If you're the Chinese government, you can kill Chinese peasants and get away with it, but you can't kill Chinese students and get away with it. At some point, that is going to have to be redressed. The moment there's a greater relaxation of the political climate, there are going to be politicians and ordinary people who use [the killing of students] to demand that--to use Chinese parlance--the verdict on Tiananmen be reversed and that it be proclaimed, in a way, a patriotic student movement."
He says it is difficult for the current regime to "liberalize, which in some ways it would like to, because then there would immediately be attempts to change the ruling on Tiananmen and that goes to the legitimacy of many of the present leaders."
Kristof, now a columnist for the Times, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on May 28, 2004.
Q: I was re-reading the book you co-wrote with your wife in 1994, "China Wakes," and I was struck by two things. One, your reportage on the buildup to and the events of what the Chinese call the "incident at Tiananmen Square." And two, your prescient views on China's economy. Looking back now, what do you remember about Tiananmen Square?
A: The most powerful memory I have has to do with the idea that poor, uneducated societies aren't ready for democracy. Obviously, there's something to that, but that night at Tiananmen Square, the very bravest people I've ever seen in my life were these rickshaw drivers who came in from the countryside. When the troops began firing and we were all driven back, there would be a pause in the shooting, and it was those rickshaw drivers who would pedal their rickshaws out toward the troops, at incredible risk, and pick up the bodies of the kids who were killed and injured and drive them back with tears streaming down their faces to the hospital. It left a deep impression on me that, sure, those people could not have articulated what they meant by the democracy they wanted, but they were willing to risk their lives for it and took much greater risks than almost anybody else. It becomes a lot harder to be patronizing, after seeing that, about who is ready for democracy.
Q: In your book and in your reporting, you estimated that between 400 and 800 people died in Tiananmen Square. Have historians or anybody else come up with more exact figures since?
A: Not really. The initial estimates tended to be much, much higher. The State Department was throwing out numbers of at least 3,000 killed, and in general, the numbers that scholars, journalists, and diplomats were putting out tended to be in the low thousands. I'm pretty sure that was wrong for several reasons. One is that we know there was no massacre in the middle of Tiananmen Square, and a lot of those high estimates were based on the idea that there were many, many students killed in the middle of the square. Second, while there may have been some bodies burned that were not taken to morgues, we do have a vague knowledge of what the ratio was between the wounded and the dead. The wounded were, pretty much, taken to hospitals, and by talking to doctors around town, we know that there were a few thousand injured, but it wasn't a vast number, like more than 10,000, who'd been shot. You would normally get a ratio of somewhere between five and ten injured for every person killed. So if there really had been several thousand killed, then there should have been up to tens of thousands injured, and that was just not the case.
Q: It occurs to me that many readers probably don't know much about Tiananmen Square. Can you compare it to, say, Times Square or Trafalgar Square?
A: Tiananmen Square is a grand communist monument--I guess your readers may not know what a grand communist monument is either. It's a huge square, multiple football fields in size, right in the center of Beijing outside the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the Forbidden City. And it's also the political focal point of the country. There were demonstrations there for justice throughout Chinese history.
The great lesson of Chinese history is that regimes can kill peasants with impunity; they can kill workers and pretty much get away with it; but they should never dare to harm students because there's a real reverence for education and students. And although there were only a few hundred students killed at Tiananmen, the political ramifications of that are much greater than, for example, the 30-odd million people who died in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward [Mao Zedong's failed economic modernization program of 1958-60].
The demonstrations began in April 1989. They were led by students, although other people joined in, and you had more than 1 million people on the streets of Beijing, completely paralyzing any kind of economic action. That led to a split within the leadership. The reformers, who wanted to respond to some of the protestors' demands, were pushed out, and then hardliners ordered the troops in. I don't think they expected as many deaths as occurred, but they were willing to put up with that risk.
Is there any question today that China's de facto leader, Deng Xiaoping, personally ordered the shooting? You left the question open in the book.
This evidence we have now, and a lot of those historical holes have been filled, is that the senior leadership, including Deng Xiaoping, essentially ordered the military to take all actions necessary to restore order and recover Tiananmen Square. So they didn't exactly order the army to kill kids, but they essentially authorized it, and it was pretty clear that's what they were expected to do.
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). The stock market was totally battered. One of the candidates quipped that if, after the handover of HK, Beijing tried a similar thing, Taiwan would start firing missiles into HK harbour and see what it did to the Hang Seng index.
