Since April 15, 1989, Beijing – before Pekín–, the capital and heart of the Celestial EmpireIt’s a volcano.
And the erupting crater is the Tiananmen Square (or Gate of Heavenly Peace: at that point, name of bloody contrast), one of the largest in the world: 440 thousand square meters surrounded by bridges, rivers of golden waters, lotuses, monastic silence.
A brave new world… about to explode.
Marching towards its center are from intellectuals who accuse the Communist Party of corruption, to city workers whom economic reforms – capitalist China in red robes – have thrown into the inflation and unemployment.
But Deng Xiaopingleader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978 almost until his death in 1997, called “the little helmsman” because of his political ability and his small stature (1.52), he opposed the background of the protest: a democratic China…
The successive days and nights, until June 4, are like a balloon that exceeds its capacity to contain air, and explodes.
In this case, the trigger is the death (he was very ill) of Hu Yaobang, former general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, expelled from the government for Deng Xiaoping in February 1987 in response to the student protests of that year. For his followers, a difficult duel to overcome…
The call to strike in the universities is not long in coming. Its leaders launch a slogan: “We are Chinese patriots, inheritors of the May Fourth Movement for Science and Democracy“. Too much for an iron dictatorship…
Actually, the Tiananmen Square had hosted a just and illustrious episode: in 1976, the protests achieved the expulsion of the corrupt “gang of four”, con Madame Mao to the head.
But Deng Xiaoping it is not willing to advance beyond the measures of market freedom and state deregulation. The rest, the reform of the State, the battle against political corruption, fair trials of prisoners for committing crimes, freedom of the press and full democracy…, are a utopia vanished between silks and clouds of opium…
Hundreds of students start a hunger strike. The echo reaches Ürümki, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese communities in the United States and Europe.
Huge wave. On May 4, more than one hundred thousand students and workers march to Beijing and ask for dialogue with power. Predictable answer: no!
Nine days later, large groups of students fill Tiananmen Square, and for a week they go on hunger strike.
Powder keg: many sing La Internacional (support for Chinese communism), others smear Mao’s portraits with ink, and there are cases of death by hunger: immolation…
It is urgent to end this. But how?
While the political leaders hesitate between breaking up the revolt at half speed… or at full steam, a group of elders from the Communist Party, fearing that the disorder is a replica of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, orders total repression with a heavy hand. Better a massacre than a mess…
Suddenly, troops and tanks from the 27th and 28th divisions of the Popular Army advance until they take control of the square and the city.
Through megaphones, the government orders all civilians to stay home…watching TV! As children… But not everyone accepts that demeaning option.
Thousands of citizens, on the other hand, erect barricades on the roads to hinder the rapid advance of the tanks.
On the night of June 4, by decision of the leaders of the protest, the square remains empty…, but fighting continues in the streets that surround it.
There is no truce, much less mercy. The army fires its automatic weapons at close range.
bloodbath Withdrawal.
Later, shameful shuffling of victims, as in a game of dice. According to sources, a kaleidoscope of deaths and injuries with more numbers than those of a casino…, and always on the decline.
Until one of the telegrams from the British ambassador to China and witness to the massacre, Alan Donald, reads: “A senior Chinese government official acknowledged that in those nineteen days, from April 15 to June 4…at least 10 thousand people died!”
Figure that coincides with documents already declassified from the White House: “Dead: 10,454. Wounded: more than 40,000“.
The same source of the British ambassador reveals that “those directly responsible for the massacre were the soldiers of the 27th division, 60 percent illiterate, and primitive. For ten days they were not told anything, and then they were told that they were going to perform in… a televised exercise! They received the green light on the night of June 3, and the operation consisted of four phases. Total, 27 armored vehicles opened fire on the crowd before running over it, and without warning. The students had orders to leave the square, but they were attacked just five minutes after receiving it… They smashed them over and over again until they were made into a meatloaf. The remains were picked up by bulldozers, incinerated and dumped down the drains.. A thousand survivors were told they could escape… and when they tried, they were riddled with machine guns. In the massacre there were more than thirty snipers who fired explosive bullets, prohibited by international law. But there were not only deaths and injuries. Many survivors were thrown into labor camps… for political re-education.”
But at the very center of the massacre there is an unforgettable episode. Eternal. The paradigm of rebellion: one against all
On June 5, as a column of tanks advances towards the objective ready to kill, a man – a lone wolf – with nothing but a small bag in his left hand, stands defiantly in the middle of the road.
The tanks slow their march. The shouts of the soldiers do not intimidate him. He goes on like this for half an hour, with dignity, with greatness, until they expel him. Who? never knew.
Magazine Time choose it as “one of the most influential people of the 20th century”.
the british daily Sunday Express risk that it is Wang Weilina 19-year-old student: doubtful identification.
Bruce Herschensohn, an aide to former President Richard Nixon and a member of Ronald Reagan’s staff, says that the character was shot fourteen days after the episode.
Jan Wong, a Canadian journalist with Chinese roots, writes: “He is still alive and hiding in a rural area of the country“.
William Bell, a Canadian writer, swears his name was Wang Aimin, and he was shot on June 9…
I mean, a ghost.
An enigma. A photo.
A mystery that makes the hero more ethereal.
Perhaps remembered long after, when the brutal echoes of the crime fade into the mist.
(* This article was originally published on April 21, 2019).-
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