EMPIRE OF THE SENSELESS

John Simpson recalls his experiences in Tiananmen Square four years ago and urges the West not to put its trust in Deng Xiaoping

IN THE VASTNESS of Tiananmen Square, as empty of people as Deng Xiao- ping's Communism is empty of ideas, the bullet-damaged stonework of the monu- ment at its centre has long been replaced. Outside China the memory of what hap- pened there four years ago is fading: west- ern governments have slipped back into an easier relationship with the regime, compa- nies are doing business, tourists are return- ing. We are starting to forget the glimpse we had into the hatred ordinary Chinese people felt for Communist dic- tatorship. When the sys- tem collapses — as it will — we may find ourselves as unprepared as we were for the fall of Com- munist dictatorship in Europe.

On 13 May 1989, as I walked across the empty square towards the mon- ument, a policeman was shouting into his walkie- talkie. There was a sound of singing from They stayed there for 22 days and nights, sitting outside their makeshift tents, talk- ing, playing musical instruments and argu- ing endlessly about politics. You had to edge your way between the tents, kicking the empty plastic bottles of drinking water Which lay everywhere, smelling the acrid smells of the camp, being asked, as a west- erner, to sign people's notebooks or even their T-shirts. They knew little enough about the democracy which they were call- ing for. To them it simply meant the free- dom to say what they wanted, and an end to surveillance and uniformity. They sang the Internationale because it was the only good tune the authorities had taught them.

At first it seemed certain that the demonstrations would succeed. By Thurs- day 18 May a million or more people were marching along Chang'an Avenue to the square: policemen, soldiers, civil servants, teachers, journalists, judges. The Party leadership, paralysed, had locked itself up in its residential compound, Zhongnanbai.

Slowly, though, it became clear that Deng Xiaoping and the saurian octogenarians who supported him had kept their nerve; and after two attempts to get the military to intervene (both of which ended when ordinary people blocked their way and the soldiers themselves refused to fight) Deng managed to persuade one particular gener- al to take his men to the square and clear it with gunfire. Many of us who reported from the square during the demonstrations tended to focus on the students: they had ideas, they made the running, and they were edu- cated and decent. We often ignored the rougher element, the fiercer and more alienated workers from the slums of Peking who hung around the edges of the demon- stration. Yet they were far more represen- tative of the general feeling. A few days before the massacre there was a fresh rumour that soldiers were being sent to clear the square. Accompanied by a camera crew and an interpreter, I headed for the route the soldiers were expected to take. We found the entire motorway, overpasses and all, blocked off by a silent, determined crowd. When I asked some of them what they would do if the tanks came, they said they would fight. They clearly meant it.

These were not the peaceable, non-violent, earnest young people of Tiananmen Square. They were the prole- tariat, of whom Chinese political literature has so much to say; and now there was a chance to get rid of Commu- nism they were anxious to take it. The older ones amongst them had endured the dreadful years of the Cultural Revolution, when par- ents were prisoners in their own houses, frightened that their children would denounce them to the authorities. Things had got better since the arrival in power of Deng Xiaoping. But he was still a Commu- nist, and they had had enough of Commu- nism.

The tanks did not come that evening, but the bitter anger of the crowds remained. On the night of the massacre itself there was even greater evidence of this bitter, instinctive determination to get rid of the system once and for all. That night I was with the working-class section of the crowd in Tiananmen Square, and saw the weapons they had brought with them. When the army began to move into the square my colleagues and I watched and filmed as the crowd trapped and set fire to an armoured personnel carrier, and beat two of its occupants to death in front of us. When the students heard about it they raced round in a bus and managed to res- cue another of the soldiers. That was the difference between the students and the working-class demonstrators: the students were non-violent, and the others wanted the chance to kill the representatives of the regime which had oppressed them so long.

When I left Peking a couple of days later I drove through streets where Communist Party buildings had been wrecked and burned-out tanks lay abandoned by the roadside. It was worse than anything I saw later that year in Rumania. For most peo- ple, the picture they remember from Tiananmen is the lone student with his shopping-bags standing in front of a col- umn of tanks in Chang'an Avenue; for me the picture which sums it all up best is the terrible one of the burned body of a soldier propped up against a bus; someone has mockingly set an army hat at a jaunty angle on the blackened, agonised head.

Deng Xiaoping never seemed to under- stand the thrust of this anger. He too was a victim of the Cultural Revolution: he had been deposed, beaten up and humiliated, and the Red Guards threw his son from a window and broke his back. Now Deng seemed to think the students of Tiananmen Square were a new form of Red Guard, led astray by evil outside forces. The feeling was no doubt reinforced by the security police, even when the Party leadership was paralysed with shock and incapable of giv- ing orders. Throughout the Tiananmen Square demonstration police agents with cameras were everywhere, and when they staged obvious provocations, like the deliv- ery of a lorry containing weapons and ammunition to the students' headquarters, they filmed the results. I was amused to see myself later on a Chinese government video justifying the massacre. In one set of pictures I was talking to a group of stu- dents; soon after, by the video-editor's art, they were unloading the weapons as though I had given them their instructions.

Deng's revenge for the shock the students gave him was savage. Most of the people who were sen- tenced for their part in the demonstrations are still in gaol. Only those whose names were known in the West were released after relatively short sentences; for other prisoners, the repression is as harsh as ever. Each province of China con- tains labour camps as dreadful as anything in Stalin's Russia. Death from hunger, from cold, from beatings, from shooting, is common- place. Estimates vary, but there may well be 3 million political and 'social' prisoners in the camps, people who do not conform to the shifting norms of Chinese Commu- nism. Many of the products in western shops, said to be part of the Chinese 'eco- nomic miracle', are the output wrung from these political prisoners.

Communism is on its last legs in China now. Deng Xiaoping will be 90 next year, and Li Peng (his faithful henchman during the massacre) is officially said to have a serious cold. He has cancelled all his appointments for the indefinite future; not a good sign in a Communist state.

There is in any case little enough of Marxism-Leninism left in China, apart from the systems of control and repression. The profit motive is permitted to operate in some sections of the country; an elabo- rate network of corruption, running to the very top, exists wherever there is money to be made. The People's Liberation Army, the Party organs, the security police are involved in hugely profitable property and trading deals. Since no one believed in the system any more, it took only five days of open protest in May 1989 to bring the entire structure to its knees and render it powerless to govern, once the very people for whom it was supposed to exist, the workers with hand and brain, came out against it.

Deng Xiaoping clung to power because he kept his nerve and managed at the third attempt to find a general willing to open fire on unarmed demonstrators. The anger and the demand for change which we saw in 1989 have not gone away. The next time the system stumbles they will manifest themselves again. If there is a European parallel, the results may well be more like Rumania than Czechoslovakia: people will want to get even for the dreadful things that have been done to them all their lives.

As for the West, a great deal of expertise will be rendered useless on the day Chinese Communism is overthrown. Some British diplomats and their French and American counterparts find it hard to conceive of any alternative to the present system, and therefore prefer to assume that none will emerge. Precisely the same thing happened to British and American policy in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown in Iran: the prospect was so awful that no one in authority could bring themselves to think about it constructively. It was much easier to close the eyes and assume that the old firm would somehow carry on. Britain's tardy recognition of the Baltic States sprung out of this same inertia; in that case an inability to recognise that the Soviet Union was a political carcase.

The British Government, more than most, still has to deal with the Communist authorities in Peking as the de jure govern- ment of the country; it cannot simply dis- miss them as illegitimate or unlikely to be around when Hong Kong is due to be handed over. Yet Britain is no longer quite as nervous of China as it was.

Tibet is the clearest test of Britain's approach to China. Invaded and annexed illegally in 1950, it is the victim of a greater and more successful form of ethnic cleans- ing than anything in Bosnia: Chinese social engineering via birth control and sterilisa- tion and the constant influx of officially sponsored Chinese settlers is diluting native Tibetans into near-extinction. They now form only 30 per cent of the popula- tion of Lhasa, the capital, and are in a minority (6 million Tibetans compared with 7 million Chinese) in the country as a whole: Britain, nervous about giving offence to China, used to ignore this pro- cess. No doubt influenced by her foreign policy adviser Sir Percy Craddock, the most ruby-buttoned of the Foreign Office's Chi- nese mandarins, Mrs Thatcher was careful to avoid offending Peking's susceptibilities. When the Dalai Lama came to Britain she refused to meet him: not one of the nobler moments in British foreign policy.

Now, though, the older China hands are gone and there are some signs of change even on Tibet. John Major duly met the Dalai Lama last year, though the Archbishop of Canterbury was on hand to give him cover there so the Foreign Office could tell the Chi- nese that the visit was primarily a religious one. This week, at last, Dou- glas Hurd had a formal meeting with the Dalai Lama in his capacity as the political as well as the religious leader of Tibet. On Hong Kong, too, there is a greater willingness nowadays W take on the Chinese, though it seems clear that Chris Patten, as the colony's governor, has had to give ground on the issue of Hong Kong representation on the team negotiating with Peking. He also annoyed Tibetan human rights campaign- ers by asking President Clinton not to with- draw China's most favoured nation status. Nevertheless he is taking a line over Hong Kong that no recent governor of Hong Kong has been able, or willing, to follow.

There is a growing sense, strongest in the United States but present to a lesser extent in London too, that China's record can no longer be ignored.

Even big business, which previously, in the words of an aerosol manufacturer, saw China simply as 'a market of 4 billion armpits', has decided it is now pragmatic to be ethical. Last week the American jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss decided to ter- minate its contracts with Chinese clothing manufacturers for this reason, citing the country's 'pervasive violations of human rights'. The makers of Reebok shoes and Nike sports goods and the American retail chain Sears are all following this lead. They do not regard it as a self-defeating act of otherworldliness, but as an investment in a future which cannot now be far away. Peo- ple in China are increasingly well- informed; 2 million of them watch the BBC's world television service every day. They, and others, will remember which companies and which governments chose to distance themselves from an old, hated, discredited regime.

John Simpson is a contributing editor of The Spectator.