V 14 N. 30 Remembering Tiananmen

June 3, 2024 

Take a look at the picture below.  Do you find anything offensive?  It appeared in papers over seven months ago.  It shows two Chinese athletes embracing after a hurdles race.  Apparently it offended authorities in the Peoples' Republic of China.  In some publications the hip numbers were shaded over because the  6 and 4  side by side are a reminder to many people of the date June 4, 1989 when the massacre of Chinese students occurred in Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing.  Tomorrow is the 35th anniversary of that event.  

See article from The Guardian  Chinese Censors Block Image of Athletes Hugging  photograph from Xinhua/Shutterstock

In June, 1989 my family was nearing the end of a year living in Beijing.  My wife had gotten a contract to teach English to Chinese grad students who were preparing to come to Canada to work on post graduate studies.  We lived in a high rise dormitory for 'foreign experts'  on the campus of Beijing Normal University.  After our arrival, I latched on to a teaching job as well.  In February of that year we had been in Lhasa, Tibet at the beginning of a crackdown on Tibetans demanding more independence from China.  We saw the demonstrations first hand and a week later in Time Magazine a picture of The Yak Hotel on fire where we stayed in Lhasa.  

Then in late April Beijing students began demonstrating for more independence and more open government.  They used the word 'democracy' on many of their posters.  It began with posters being hung on the walls on the campus.  We had little or no idea what was going on then but the movement began growing each day.  And soon there were marches on campus, then parades in the streets demanding a more open government.  By mid May the parades were starting on the campuses in town and convening in Tiananmen Square approximately 4 miles away.  We rode our 'Flying Pigeon' bicycles down to the Square and were amazed by the crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands of people from all over the city.  They arrived in groups representing their universities or their work units.   The government was in a state of flux and a power struggle was going on behind the scenes between a group sympathetic to the students and one wanting to crush the demonstrators.  The hardcore Maoists were busy trying to organize a military repression to put down the movement.  But they had to bring army units from other parts of the country into Beijing, because local units were thought to be sympathetic to the students.  That took time, and the demonstrations kept getting bigger each day.  My wife Marie was told not to look out the classroom windows at the demonstrators.  An impossible temptation when she was already in the streets with the students.  We all were there.  The Canadian organization she worked for had to dock her pay for not being on the job.  The letter informing her of the pay cut  came with a lot of reluctance and tongue in cheek regrets.

In mid May, Premier Gorbachev of the Soviet Union was scheduled to visit Beijing.  Heads of state traditionally were brought into Tiananmen  Square for a grand entrance, a military parade and all the trimmings.  .   Gorby had to come in the back door because of the students occupying the Square.  It seemed a triumph for the students at the time.  Everyone was full of hope except the older people we talked with.  They thought it would end in a bloodbath.  

On the night of June 3 the loudspeakers throughout the city began blaring louder than we had ever heard and our Chinese colleagues told us not to go into the streets.  My kids both teenagers and I naively ignored the warnings and accompanied a visitor back to his residence which took us across Chang An Street which runs directly into the north end of the square.  I don't remember the time, but it was pitch black.  Many people were out that night also ignoring the warnings.  Suddenly there was what seemed to be fireworks and green flares going off a bit to the west, and we thought we would go that way to see what was happening.  Then we were told that it was gunfire and to get off the main street.  Fortunately we knew the back alleys or 'hutongs' from 9 months of cycling all over the city and got into one just as the army started its rush to the square.  By the time we got back to our university we found many of the students busy making Molotov cocktails and getting ready to march downtown.  We would learn later that some of them were killed, but numbers are very sketchy because the government would suppress that information.  

We spent three more days in Beijing which involved transfers to several hotels and eventually the Canadian embassy from where we were taken to the airport and flown to Tokyo.  On one occasion we broke into our work unit office and lifted the keys to a van and drove Canadian teachers to the hotels.  The streets were abandoned then and I think we got well over 60 mph in downtown Beijing.  It may still be a speed record there.  By pure luck we never ran into any army patrols and we avoided going through the Square on those sprints.  

Every year this date brings back those memories of those brave students and citizens of Beijing, and we choose to remember them even though the Peoples' Republic of China chooses to forget.