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                                The following excerpt is taken from 
   Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy Movement, 
 by George Black and Robin Munro (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993), pp. 234 -
                                                   246. 

      The phrase "Tiananmen Square massacre" is now fixed firmly in the political
      vocabulary of the late twentieth century. Yet it is inaccurate. There was
      no massacre in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. But on the western
      approach roads, along Chang'an Boulevard and Fuxingmen Avenue, there was a
      bloodbath that claimed hundreds of lives when the People's Liberation Army
      found its path blocked by a popular uprising that was being fueled by
      despair and rage. To insist on this distinction is not splitting hairs.
      What took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers
      and residents - precisely the target that the Chinese government had
      intended.

      "Tiananmen Square massacre" is the shorthand that observers in the West
      distilled from the hours of dramatic television footage and thousands of
      column inches of press reporting. Although hundreds of journalists were in
      Beijing that night, few were present for the army's climactic clearing of
      the square itself in the predawn hours of June 4. Many of the press were on
      the real killing grounds of western Beijing, several miles away, and they
      reported vividly and accurately on what they saw. Some who tried to remain
      in the square were arrested and did not see the final PLA assault. Others
      were pinned down behind roadblocks. Still others were working in their
      hotels to meet early-morning filing deadlines for media in distant time
      zones. But most of the reporters who remained near the square after one
      o'clock in the morning, when the first army units got there, left in haste
      and out of legitimate fear for their safety.

      The lack of eyewitnesses was the first problem in establishing what
      happened on that fearsome night in Beijing. But there were other, more
      profound questions about how the foreign media saw their role in the
      Beijing spring. (1) The pacifist idealism of the young students triggered
      memories of the 1960s and America's civil rights movement, and the
      students' adept use of Western symbols, like headbands inscribed with
      Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death," riveted Western
      attention on the students, which caused the crucial role of the workers and
      the laobaixing to be largely overlooked.

      There was more: some predisposition, perhaps, to believe in the massacre in
      the square, even though no one actually saw it. Whether or not it happened
      in reality, it was the necessary consummation of an allegory of innocence,
      sacrifice, and redemption. To this, the rhetoric of the students themselves
      contributed mightily. On the first day of the hunger strike, they declared,
      "Our bodies are still tender and not full grown, and the prospect of dying
      frightens us all; but history calls and we must go." Chai Ling, such a
      magnetic presence for the foreign news cameras, spoke of sacrifice in
      almost mystical terms. On May 28, with the students in disarray over the
      issue of withdrawing from the square, she said that "it would take a
      massacre, which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square, to
      awaken the people." One Western sinologist recalled a student telling him
      in the final hours: "We are now ready to face death, and we don't want you
      to have to be part of that. Please go home."' And the media, for the most
      part, did so.

      Imagination filled the gaps. Into the vacuum rushed the most lurid tales of
      the supposed denouement in the square. Wu'er Kaixi, flamboyant to the last,
      reported that he had seen "about two hundred students" cut down by gunfire
      in the army's predawn assault, but it was revealed later that he had been
      spirited away to safety in a van several hours earlier. A widely recounted
      eyewitness report, purportedly from a student at Qinghua University, spoke
      of the students on the Monument being mowed down at point-blank range by a
      bank of machine guns at four in the morning. The survivors had then either
      been chased across the square by tanks and crushed, or clubbed to death by
      infantrymen. But it was all pure fabrication.

      By the time historians began to correct the record, the episode was
      enshrined in myth: Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students had died in a
      massacre in Tiananmen Square. As Tom Hayden would write in the Los Angeles
      Times, it was the equivalent of the slaughter of the entire graduating
      class at the United States' top universities.

      No one had been listening to what Peng Zhen said: The students were not the
      problem. Indeed, the Party's line never varied after Deng Xiaoping first
      defined it for the April 26 People's Daily editorial. "Emotionally excited
      young students" were never the issue. The official conspiracy theory
      demanded other threats and other scapegoats - "outside elements" with
      "ulterior motives." This meant dissident intellectuals and workers. After
      their ruthless repression under Mao, the intelligentsia had been granted a
      kind of historic compromise by Deng. But by the spring of 1989, they had
      come to be seen as the agents of bourgeois liberalization, of China's
      "peaceful evolution" toward Western-style pluralism. After Tiananmen, they
      would be singled out for punishment. The working class, meanwhile, had
      become the carrier of an even more dangerous virus - the Polish disease.

      The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation, tiny though it may have been,
      was the "cancer cell" the authorities feared. The Goddess of Democracy
      represented the arrogant intrusion of decadent Western values into the
      symbolic heart of Chinese Communism, rupturing the sacred cosmology, the
      feng shui of the great square. But the crude red and black banner of the
      BWAF, less than a hundred yards away, signified the more terrifying power
      of the workers awakened.
      The students initiated the Tiananmen movement, and they brilliantly
      outmaneuvered and embarrassed a leaden-footed government. But after the
      mass demonstrations of mid-May, the threat from the students was dwarfed by
      the intervention of much broader social forces. This threat was like a
      pyramid. At the base were the laobaixing, with their outpouring of
      spontaneous human sympa-thy, a million or more ordinary people, like L�
      Jinghua with her cold drinks and her pork dumplings. The second level was
      the ideological defection of the Party apparatus itself. By mid-May, much
      of the Chinese press had rallied to the cause of democracy; even sections
      of the Public Security service, the law courts, and the military - the very
      backbone of the People's Democratic Dictatorship - had begun to break free
      of the Party's iron grip.

      Faced with the crumbling of its power, the Party imposed martial law on May
      20. But again it miscalculated. Its inner defections had progressed further
      than anyone realized; it did not even have control over its own secrets,
      and it failed to anticipate that its tanks would be halted by a human wall
      of protesters. Age, and years of unchallenged authority, had atrophied the
      Party's judgment, leaving it incapable of foreseeing the action groups that
      now formed spontaneously throughout Beijing. After May 20, the pickets, the
      Dare-to-Die squads, and the Flying Tigers virtually took over the
      day-to-day running of the city. The PSB and the traffic police disappeared
      from view. (3) And, finally, there was the apex of the pyr-amid: the
      specter of an incipient organization of all classes, symbolized by the
      Capital Joint Liaison Group.

      The students, in the final analysis, were marginal to the threat. But
      ironically, one of their main arguments for prolonging the occupation of
      Tiananmen was that they had nothing to lose: Since they were the heroes and
      focal point of the movement, the incarnation of all the government hated,
      it therefore followed that they would suffer the fiercest repercussions.
      Chai Ling had been shaken by a conversation with a plainclothes police
      officer in the early days of the movement. She had asked him what the
      maximum sentence was for counterrevolution. Seventeen years, the man
      answered. (4) Chai Ling gasped. Seventeen years? She would be forty by the
      time she got out.

      But the government saw the matter quite differently: To deal with the
      students, it was enough to drive them from the square and herd them back to
      their campuses. Mass self-criticisms would follow, and probably bad job
      placements. In the case of the more obstinate ringleaders, those who
      refused to repent, short jail sen-tences might be necessary. But the larger
      threat could be eradicated only by the application of brute force, terror,
      and exemplary punishment. The specter of organized popular unrest had to be
      exorcised not for a year or two, but for an entire generation.

      . . . The northern end of the square was now almost deserted. (7) Another
      APC, its tracks jammed with iron bars, blazed in the northeast corner, near
      the Goddess of Democracy. Three of its crew had been beaten to death; the
      fourth was escorted to safety by student pickets. Several dead bodies lay
      under the portrait of Mao on Tiananmen Gate.

      The students' tent city appeared abandoned. The southern part of the
      square, below the Mao Mausoleum, was littered with burning cars and buses
      but empty of people. In the north end, almost the only sign of life was the
      emergency tent of the Beijing United Medical College. Surrounded by a thin
      circle of student pickets, doctors worked feverishly to save a steady
      stream of casualties. By then, almost all the students had withdrawn to the
      three tiers of the Monument: between three thousand and five thousand of
      them, perhaps, huddled tightly together. They seemed calm, almost resigned.
      Some quietly wrote their wills. There was no sense of panic, though the
      steady chatter of gunfire could be heard on the fringes of the square and
      in the darkness beyond. Abruptly, the remaining loudspeakers burst to life
      with an endlessly repeated warning: A "serious counterrevolutionary
      rebellion" had broken out; everyone was to leave the square immediately.

      The main invasion force, entering the city from the west, arrived at the
      smoldering ruins of the BWAF tents at 2:00 A.M. The first column of troop
      transport trucks entered the square hesitantly, moving forward at walking
      pace. Groups of infantry escorted them, at first just a thin line, but soon
      increasing to a dense column, thousands of troops, all wearing steel
      helmets and carrying assault rifles. They took about an hour to deploy
      fully along the northern edge of the square. Several hundred troops moved
      across from Tiananmen Gate to seal the northeast entrance to the square. A
      student named Ke Feng, one of the main organizers of the Goddess of
      Democracy project, was hiding in the small park outside the Museum of
      Chinese History. In the first five minutes or so, he saw about twenty
      people in the vicinity of the pedestrian underpass hit by stray bullets,
      including "five people who fell and couldn't get up again." The soldiers,
      Ke Feng recalled, were "jumping for joy, as if playing a game." The PLA
      sealed off the entire square by 3:00 A.M. Thousands of silent troops, each
      carrying an AK-47 and a long wooden cudgel, positioned themselves along the
      steps in front of the museum. On the other side of the square, in front of
      the Great Hall of the People, it was the same. Only a small exit corridor
      in the southeast would be left open.

      At the stroke of 4:00 A.M., all lights went out . . . . But still the
      attack on Tiananmen Square did not materialize. For a quarter of an hour
      after 4:00 A.M. there was nothing but darkness and silence. The students
      remained seated on the Monument, as before. No one made any move to leave.
      Noiselessly, as if in a dream, a busload of student reinforcements appeared
      from the southeast. The loudspeakers on the Monument crackled back on and a
      voice announced - deadpan, as if reading a railroad schedule - "We will now
      play the Internationale, to raise our fighting spirit." The famous words,
      "Arise, ye starvelings of the earth," floated across the square to the
      soldiers, who had been taught to sing them by the Party.

      At about 4:15 A.M., an array of lights suddenly came on all across the
      front of the Great Hall of the People, filling the west side of the square
      with a soft, luminous glow. At the same time, floodlights went on along the
      facade of the Forbidden City. Next, the southernmost doors of the Great
      Hall swung open, releasing a river of gun-toting troops, many of them with
      fixed bayonets. These soldiers formed an L-shaped blocking line across to
      the front of the Mao Mausoleum. Troops fired warning shots at the Monument
      from the steps of the Museum of Chinese History, and sparks flew from the
      obelisk, high above the students' heads.

      Just after 4:30 A.M., the loudspeakers came on again, and someone who
      introduced himself as a leader of the Beijing Students Autonomous
      Federation took the microphone. "Students! We must on no account quit the
      square. We will now pay the highest price possible for the sake of securing
      democracy in China. Our blood shall be the consecration." There was a tense
      pause, and another voice, less educated, rang out. It was an anonymous
      leader of the BWAF. "We must all leave here immediately," he cried, "for a
      terrible bloodbath is about to take place. There are troops surrounding us
      on all sides and the situation is now extraordinarily dangerous. To wish to
      die here is no more than an immature fantasy." The struggle between
      immolation and compromise - or, as some of the students would have it,
      between principle and surrender - continued to the last.

      On the government side, every vestige of reason seemed to disappear. But in
      the end reason triumphed, after a fashion, among the protesters who held on
      in the square. For that, the four members of the seventy-two-hour hunger
      strike could take the greatest credit. In the final predawn hours, they
      went among the crowd at the Monument, persuading some demonstrators to
      surrender their sticks, chains, and bottles, arguing with them that
      resistance was futile. To their horror, they discovered one
      fifteen-year-old at the foot of the Monument with a machine gun, hidden in
      padded quilts, trained on the advancing army. The boy was incoherent with
      grief. Someone said they had killed his brother. The gun was wrested away
      from him, and Liu Xiaobo, the professor who had recently returned from New
      York, took it and smashed it to pieces.

      The hunger strikers then confronted the ragged remnants of the student
      leadership - Chai Ling, Feng Congde, and Li Lu. They told them that there
      was no choice but to negotiate with the army. The rock singer Hou Dejian
      and the economist Zhou Duo, an unlikely pair, walked across the darkened
      expanse of the square to seek out the officers in command. (8) Chai Ling
      declined the invitation to go with them. She was commander in chief, she
      told them; she could not abandon her people.

      Two men came forward to meet Hou and Zhou. They introduced themselves only
      as Commissar Ji and Commissar Gu. "There is only one way the troops will
      not, by mistake, do any harm to the students in the square while carrying
      out our orders," they told the hunger strikers tersely. "The students and
      other people must leave unconditionally. You have until daybreak. The
      southeast corner of the square has been left open. If you could persuade
      the students to leave," the officers added, "you will be praised."

      While the negotiations went on, Chai Ling and Li Lu made their final
      appeals to the students. Li Lu, feeling helpless, urged everyone to be
      calm. "We will stick to the principle of nonviolence to the very end," he
      said, echoing what the BWAF leader had said four or five hours earlier,
      what seemed like a lifetime ago. "We won't swear when sworn at, we won't
      hit back when hit." But Chai Ling's last speech was more wrapped than ever
      in the mystique of blood. "There is a story", she began, "about a clan of a
      billion ants who lived on a mountain. One day there was a terrible fire on
      the mountain. The only way for them to escape was to hold each other tight
      into a ball and roll down the mountainside. But the ants on the outside of
      the ball would be burnt to death. We are now standing on the Monument. We
      are the ones who stand on the outside of our nation. Only our sacrifice can
      save it, only our blood can open the eyes of our people and the rest of the
      world."

      Zhou Duo and Hou Dejian came back. They told the students the outcome of
      their talks; there was no option but to leave immediately. They had no
      bargaining chips left. Too much blood had already been shed. Hou promised
      that the hunger strikers would guard the retreat and would be the last to
      leave. There was a mo-mentary silence, then furious shouts of "Shame!" and
      "Surrender!" From the northern sector of the square came a distant rumble;
      the tanks had started their engines.

      Minutes passed with nothing to break the spell until Li Lu proposed taking
      a final vote. Given the darkness, a show of hands would not work. They
      would have to make do with a voice vote. There were two choices:
      "Evacuate!" or "Stand Firm!" Some swear to this day that the "Stand Firm!"
      voices were louder; others say opinions were equally divided. But Li Lu,
      opting this time for wisdom over the clamor of the masses, announced that
      those who favored evacuation had won. The occupation of Tiananmen Square
      would end.

                                                   NOTES

      1. The most comprehensive analysis of the performance of the foreign media
      (though extremely guarded in its criticisms) is a study of eight U.S. news
      organizations conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press,
      Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
      Harvard University. The center's report, entitled "Turmoil at Tiananmen: A
      Study of U.S. Press Coverage of the Beijing Spring of 1989," analyzes the
      television news reporting of the American Broad-casting Company (ABC), the
      Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and Cable News Network (CNN); and the
      print coverage of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington
      Post, the Associated Press, and Time magazine.
      2. This comment was made by the scholar Ross Terrill of Harvard University
      during an interview on a June 29, 1989, ABC-TV special by Ted Koppel.
      Koppel, to his credit, noted that the bulk of the killing had not taken
      place within the physical confines of Tiananmen Square, but he downplayed
      the distinction as a "loophole" that could be exploited by the Chinese
      government.
      3. In one of the lesser but more startling images of the Beijing Spring,
      the city's growing contingent of thieves and pickpockets declared a
      temporary halt to their activities after the imposition of martial law.
      4. A technically incorrect answer, in fact. Some counterrevolutionary
      offenses are punishable by longer sentences, even by death.
      . . .
      7. The account that follows is drawn largely from the personal observations
      and recollections of Robin Munro, who remained in Tiananmen Square during
      the entire night of June 3-4, leaving with the final departing columns of
      students at dawn. His memories are supplemented in places by the freelance
      journalist Richard Nations. Munro's complete account, "Who Died in Beijing,
      and Why," was published in The Nation, June 11, 1990, pp. 811-22.
      8. Hou Dejian eventually published an extensive account of the final hours
      in the square that was published in a number of overseas Chinese
      newspapers. Extracts also appeared in People's Daily, since Hou's account
      tended to give credence to the government's narrow contention that there
      had been no killing in Tiananmen Square itself. The complete text of Hou's
      account, entitled "Blame Me If You Want!", is included in Yi Mu and Mark V.
      Thompson, Crisis at Tiananmen: Reform and Reality in Modern China (San
      Francisco: China Books, 1989) pp. 239-49. 

          Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy
        Movement, by George Black and Robin Munro (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
          Inc., 1993), pp. 234 - 246. Excerpted by permission of publisher, John
                Wiley & Sons, Inc. To order a copy of this book, please call
                        1-800-225-5945, or visit your local bookstore.