MCLC: army discord

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: army discord
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (6/2/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/world/asia/tiananmen-square-25-years-late
r-details-emerge-of-armys-chaos.html

Tales of Army Discord Show Tiananmen Square in a New Light
By ANDREW JACOBS and CHRIS BUCKLEY

BEIJING — On a spring evening in 1989, with the student occupation of
Tiananmen Square entering its second month and the Chinese leadership
unnerved and divided, top army commanders were summoned to headquarters to
pledge their support for the use of military force to quash the protests.

One refused.

In a stunning rebuke to his superiors, Maj. Gen. Xu Qinxian, leader of the
mighty 38th Group Army, said the protests were a political problem and
should be settled through negotiations, not force, according to new
accounts of his actions from researchers who interviewed him.

“I’d rather be beheaded than be a criminal in the eyes of history,” he
told Yang Jisheng, a historian.

Although General Xu was soon arrested, his defiance sent shudders through
the party establishment, fueling speculation of a military revolt and
heightening the leadership’s belief that the student-led protests were
nothing less than a mortal threat to the Communist Party.

The new details of the general’s defiance and the tremors it set off are
among a series of disclosures about the intrigue inside the Chinese
military preceding the bloody crackdown in Beijing on June 3 and 4, 1989,
some contained in army documents spirited out of China in recent years and
others revealed in interviews with party insiders, former soldiers and
other people directly involved in the events 25 years ago.

Contrary to rumors at the time, the documents show that army units did not
fight one another. But they show that General Xu’s stand against the
threatened use of lethal force fanned leaders’ fears that the military
could be dragged into the political schisms and prompted party elders to
mobilize a huge number of troops.

Even after a quarter-century, the night of bloodshed remains one of the
most delicate subjects in Chinese politics, subjected to unrelenting
attempts by the authorities to essentially erase it from history. Yet even
now, new information is emerging that modifies the accepted understanding
of that divisive event.

At the time, Deng Xiaoping, the party patriarch who presided over the
crackdown, praised the military for its unflinching loyalty, and the image
of a ruthlessly obedient army lingers even in some foreign accounts. But
the military speeches and reports composed before June 4 that year, and in
the months after, show soldiers troubled by misgivings, confusion, rumors
and regrets about the task assigned to them.

“The situation was fluid and confusing, and we underestimated the
brutality of the struggle,” Capt. Yang De’an, an officer with the People’s
Armed Police, a paramilitary force, wrote in one assessment found among
military documents acquired by the Princeton University Library
<http://library.princeton.edu/projects/ea/toc/3149645.32101059034296.29-Con
tents.pdf>. “It was hard to distinguish foes from friends, and the target
to be attacked was unclear.”

Some former soldiers and officials who agreed to talk about their roles in
the crisis said they were alarmed by the state-enforced censorship and
silencing of witnesses that have left a younger generation largely
ignorant about one of the most devastating episodes in modern Chinese
history.

“I personally didn’t do anything wrong,” said Li Xiaoming, who in 1989 was
among the troops who set off toward Tiananmen Square, “but I feel that as
a member, a participant, this was a shame on the Chinese military.”

While official secrecy makes it difficult to confirm elements of the new
accounts, scholars who have reviewed the army’s internal reports,
including unit-level descriptions of mobilization as well as detailed
accounts about the violent confrontations with protesters, say they are
authentic. An earlier attempt to pierce the party’s imposed blackout, “The
Tiananmen Papers,” a collection of documents published in 2001, has been
dogged by controversy about its intent and authenticity.

A Petition Circulates

The interviews and documents show that even at the time, few in the
military wanted to take direct responsibility for the decision to fire on
civilians. Even as troops pressed into Beijing, they were given vague,
confusing instructions about what to do, and some commanders sought
reassurances that they would not be required to shoot.

In an interview, a former party researcher with military ties confirmed
the existence of a petition, signed by seven senior commanders, that
called on the leadership to withdraw the troops.

“The people’s military belongs to the people, and cannot oppose the
people,” stated the petition, according to the former researcher, Zhang
Gang, who was then trying to broker compromise between the protesters and
the government. “Even less can it kill the people.”

There were fewer episodes of outright military defiance, like that of
General Xu. No dissident, he had written a letter in blood during the
Korean War begging to join the army as an underage youth, according to Mr.
Yang, the historian who was among the few people to interview him after
1989. The elite 38th Group Army, which General Xu commanded from a base
about 90 miles south of Beijing, was a bulwark protecting the capital.

Having witnessed the student protests during an earlier visit to Beijing,
where he was receiving treatment for kidney stones, he feared the
consequences of quelling them with troops trained to fight foreign
invaders. Sending armed soldiers onto the streets, he warned, would risk
indiscriminate bloodshed and stain the reputation of the People’s
Liberation Army.

“If there was a conflict with ordinary civilians, and you couldn’t tell
the good guys from the bad guys, who would shoulder responsibility for
problems?” he later said, according to Dai Qing, a Beijing writer who had
access to separate interview notes with the general.

In the end, General Xu agreed to pass the orders to his officers, but not
to lead armed troops into the capital. He was arrested, expelled from the
party, and served four years in prison, Mr. Yang said.

In poor health, General Xu lives in a sanitarium for military officials in
Hebei Province in northern China, according to another researcher who
interviewed him and demanded anonymity for speaking. The general declined
to be interviewed for this article.

According to an internal history of the army among the Princeton
documents, his act kindled rumors among soldiers that officers of the 38th
Group Army had resigned en masse and that the army had refused to enter
Beijing. To counter the hearsay, officers of the 38th were assembled to
condemn their former commander and pledge unyielding obedience in
enforcing martial law, according to the army documents. But General Xu was
not the sole dissenter within the military elite. Col. Wang Dong, a
People’s Liberation Army officer and aide to a respected veteran
commander, organized the petition of military leaders opposed to martial
law, said Mr. Zhang, the former researcher. With Colonel Wang now dead,
Mr. Zhang and others decided that the time had come to step forward with
details of his role organizing the petition.

Mr. Deng and his allies were so alarmed by spreading misgivings about
martial law that they disconnected many of the “red phones” that allowed
senior officials to speak with one another, Mr. Zhang said. But Colonel
Wang offered to use his elite connections to organize a show of dissent
from within the military.

Copies of the petition spread around Beijing that May, but its origins and
authenticity were unclear, diminishing its impact. But Mr. Zhang, who had
contacts with senior military officers, now says that he wrote down the
statement and names during a phone call from Colonel Wang and then passed
it on to friends who made copies.

In interviews, several of those who took part in back-channel efforts to
defuse the crisis described how Colonel Wang held a secret meeting with
Wang Juntao and Zhou Duo, two liberal intellectuals who were trying to
avert a military assault, even as they chided protesters for
disorganization and naïveté. Both men recalled a long night in Mr. Zhou’s
home when they peppered Colonel Wang with questions about attitudes in the
army. He played down the risk of mass bloodshed, both men recalled.

“He said, ‘If the Communist Party fires on and kills ordinary people, then
wouldn’t the Communist Party be committing suicide?’ ” Mr. Zhou, who lives
in Beijing, said in a phone interview. He said they “absolutely never
imagined it would turn out as brutally as it did.”

A Connection With Residents

Even as the petition circulated around Beijing, 180,000 to 250,000 troops
from across the country were mobilizing to enforce martial law. Although
the resistance by ordinary Beijingers is well established, the documents
and interviews describe the dismay, frustration and rumors that unsettled
the military when residents were galvanized into defiance, rather than
being cowed by the rush of soldiers clutching guns.

Many Beijing residents were swept up by the idealism of the students and
their grievances over corruption, inequality and inflation. From May 19,
as word of impending martial law leaked, tens of thousands of them poured
out of their homes to stop the troops at key intersections, pleading with
them to understand the students’ demands.

One soldier, Chen Guang, then 17, from rural Henan Province, said his unit
was enveloped by students after its convoy of 10,000 soldiers was halted
on Chang’an Avenue on May 20.

For three days, as the weary, marooned soldiers clutched their rifles in
the wilting sun, he recalled how residents and students brought them food
and escorted them to toilets, all the while bombarding them with the
message that theirs was a just cause. “Even in the restroom, there was no
reprieve,” Mr. Chen said in an interview. “If one student would go hoarse
yelling, another would take his place.”

Rattled by the impasse and worried that troops might waver in their
loyalties, the commanders ordered their withdrawal, the documents say. “We
wrote our names and addresses in their notebooks and there were quite a
few tears as we pulled out,” Mr. Chen said, recalling banners that hung
from windows hailing their loyalty to the people. “It felt like a victory
after a battle.”

Over the next 10 days, several former soldiers said they were fed a
confusing diet of indoctrination at their encampments on the outskirts of
Beijing. They studied the speeches of Mr. Deng and were told the
demonstrations were the work of a subversive minority bent on toppling the
Communist Party.

Even as the troops imbibed the propaganda, the notion that they might have
to shoot the demonstrators appeared remote, recalled Mr. Li, who was then
25 and a radar operator in the 39th Group Army. “Our unit was educated
that we mustn’t fire the first shot at students, and if we fired the first
shot at the public, we’d be responsible to history,” he said in an
interview from Australia.

Even after over a week of such training, commanders worried about the
commitment of the troops to take the square.

Doubts Among Soldiers

“They’re baffled why so many members of the public have taken part in the
demonstrations,” Gen. Yang Baibing, whose older brother was a confidant of
Mr. Deng’s, told military officers on May 31, according to a compilation
of party and military speeches at Princeton. “Some comrades have all kinds
of views and doubts about stopping the turmoil.”

The messages of restraint were jettisoned on June 3, when the troops
received orders to retake the square by early the next day “at any cost,”
former soldiers said.

“Reach Tiananmen or die,” party members from one battalion declared in a
ceremony before they set off, according to one entry. In some units,
troops recorded their determination with oaths signed in blood. But amid
the bravado, there was also fear and confusion, magnified by rumors of
mutinous units who might turn on other armies, according to soldiers who
were there and the military documents.

“At that moment, some officers and soldiers experienced some mental
turmoil,” read an account by the 63rd Group Army, based in Shanxi in
northern China, which was one of the principal forces mobilized for the
crackdown. “Some felt the situation was grim and experienced some panic.
Some felt that they had already tried to go in twice, and going in this
time would be perilous.”

When troops from the 39th Group Army’s 116th Division left its temporary
base in far eastern Beijing, Mr. Li, the radar operator, recalled his
biggest fear was that they might have to fight the 38th Group Army, whose
loyalty had been thrown in doubt by General Xu’s defiance and rumors of
wider defections. He grabbed a semiautomatic rifle and extra ammunition
just in case.

As the troops set out with their orders to take the square and other
important positions, they lacked standard tools for crowd control as well
as clear instructions about how and when to use their guns.

“There was a lack of protective equipment and nonlethal weapons,” read one
People’s Armed Police assessment of the crackdown in the documents.
“Imagine if they had tear gas, flash grenades, shields, helmets and other
protective equipment.”

Mr. Li said he was spared the decision of whether to fire by his
divisional commander, Xu Feng, who ignored instructions to plow toward
Tiananmen. Instead, after learning of the unfolding bloodshed, Commander
Xu kept his troops in the eastern suburbs, where the turmoil was less
intense, and pretended his battalion’s communication radio had
malfunctioned. Mr. Li can still recall the frantic calls: “Division 116,
Division 116, where are you?”

In the precincts where there was large-scale killing, confusion dogged the
troops at every turn, the documents suggest.
Chinese leaders approved the use of live fire around 9:30 to 10 that
night, according to Wu Renhua, a scholar who took part in the protests. He
has written two books about the crackdown and now lives in Los Angeles.
Passed down orally, he said, the directive lacked guidance on when or how
to shoot and it most likely did not reach all units.

“Whether the shooting should be into the air or into the crowd was left
unclear,” he said in a telephone interview.

Wang Yongli, who was riding with the 38th Army, described how some
civilians threw bricks and bottles at the troops and then attacked
military vehicles with iron bars. He said that the soldiers, shaking with
fear and rage, first shot into the air, but at some point, the rifle
sights were aimed at the crowds. “No one said to shoot, but it was, like,
‘We’re going to teach them a lesson,’ and then those soldiers unleashed
their fury,” he said. “You pulled the trigger and bang, bang, bang, it was
like rain, the noise shaking the heavens.”

Although an accurate death toll may never be known, estimates of the
number of civilians killed by gunfire or crushed by tanks range from the
hundreds to more than 1,000. The government estimated that 300 lives were
lost, many of them soldiers.

The next day at dawn, Mr. Yang, the historian, then a reporter with the
Xinhua news agency, made his way to Muxidi, a neighborhood west of the
square that was the scene of some of the fiercest resistance to the
military attack.

He saw a tangle of abandoned bikes, charred vehicles and drying pools of
blood. “Everywhere you looked there were bullet holes,” he recalled. But
perhaps the most chilling sight, he said, was the crimson-colored graffiti
slathered across a wall. “People’s Blood!” it read. “People’s Blood!”

Correction: June 2, 2014
A photo caption in an earlier version of this article referred imprecisely
to Wen Jiabao. Mr. Wen retired as prime minister in 2013; he does not
currently hold that office.