Beijing - Tiananmen Square & The Forbidden City

The Beijing Sheraton was a beautiful facility – one of the newest, most modern in downtown. Once again, Holland America exceeded our expectations. We were up at 5am – the hotel had a huge buffet breakfast set up for our group (just what we needed, right?) which included both Chinese & American offerings. Yes…I strayed from my diet a little. OK…I strayed a lot! They had a selection of pastries that would’ve brought tears to the Pillsbury Dough Boy! While packing, we were listening to CNN news and when the update story about the Hong Kong protests started, the TV went black. We later learned that the government censors anything negative coming from the south. We also learned that the government prohibits Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube – you cannot access them in China…though WE can from the ship because we use different satellites. Amazing…all social media is blocked. Sometimes we take so much for granted back home.

Once on the bus, we headed back to Tiananmen Square. The evening before, although quite chilly, was very beautiful under the lights. We have some photos below of the Imperial Forbidden City with some of the structures reflecting in the moats & channels. As mentioned, it was a huge bonus for us to be able to view the complex both day and night – it couldn’t have been better, although the early morning crowds (as you’ll see in the photos) were mind-boggling.

The third largest city square in the world, Tiananmen Square has great cultural significance as the site of many events in China’s history. The 109-acre expanse is named after Tiananmen Gate, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace, that separates it from the Imperial Forbidden City to the north. More on that shortly. Tiananmen Square was originally designed and built in the mid  1600’s, but has been enlarged four times since - its current size dates from the 1950s when renovations started with the aim of making the space capable of accommodating half-a-million people.

I think most all of us remember where we were and what we were doing when Kennedy was assassinated or when the twin towers were destroyed.  I remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre this way:

First, students protest for democracy in Beijing June of 1989. We were living in Houston at the time. The Chinese government sends troops and tanks to Tiananmen Square, then the student protesters were brutally massacred.

In essence, this is a fairly accurate depiction of what happened, but the situation was much longer-lasting and more chaotic than my recap suggests. Cheryl and I attended a pre-arrival lecture and learned the detailed sequence of events. For those of you who may be interested, read on, but if not, scroll down to the photos...we won't be offended!  

The protests actually started in April of 1989, as public demonstrations of mourning for former Communist Party Secretary General Hu Yaobang. A high government official's funeral seems like an unlikely spark for pro-democracy demonstrations and chaos. Nonetheless, by the time the Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre were over less than two months later, up to 7,000 people lay dead.

So...what really happened that spring in Beijing?

Background to Tiananmen, according to our lecturer:

By the 1980s, the leaders of China's Communist Party knew that classical Maoism had failed. Mao Zedong's policy of rapid industrialization and collectivization of land, the "Great Leap Forward," had killed tens of millions of people by starvation. The country then descended into the terror and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), an orgy of violence and destruction that saw teenaged Red Guards humiliate, torture, murder and sometimes even cannibalize hundreds of thousands or millions of their compatriots. Irreplaceable cultural heirlooms were destroyed; traditional Chinese arts and religion were all but extinguished.

China's leadership knew that they had to make changes in order to remain in power, but weren't quite sure what reforms should they make. The Communist Party leaders split between those who advocated drastic reforms, including a move toward capitalist economic policies and greater personal freedoms for Chinese citizens, versus those who favored careful tinkering with the command economy and continued strict control of the population. Meanwhile, with the leadership unsure of which direction to take, the Chinese people hovered in a no-man's land between fear of the authoritarian state, and the desire to speak out for reform. The government-instigated tragedies of the previous two decades left them hungry for change, but aware that the iron fist of Beijing's leadership was always ready to smash down opposition. China's people waited to see which way the wind would blow.

A gentlemen named Hu Yaobang - he was a reformist, and he served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1980 to 1987. He advocated rehabilitation of people persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, greater autonomy for Tibet, rapprochement with Japan, and social and economic reform. As a result, he was forced out of office by the hardliners in January of 1987, and made to offer humiliating public "self-criticisms" for his allegedly bourgeois ideas. One of the charges leveled against him was that he had encouraged (or at least allowed) wide-spread student protests in late 1986. As General Secretary, he refused to crack down on such protests, believing that dissent by the intelligentsia should be tolerated by the Communist government. He died of a heart attack not long after his ouster and disgrace, in April 1989.

Official media made just brief mention of  his death, and the government at first did not plan to give him a state funeral. In reaction, university students from across Beijing marched on Tiananmen Square, shouting acceptable, government-approved slogans, and calling for the rehabilitation of his reputation. Bowing to this pressure, the government decided to accord Hu Yaobang a state funeral after all. However, government officials refused to receive a delegation of student petitioners, who patiently waited to speak with someone for three days at the Great Hall of the People. This would prove to be the government's first big mistake. Hu's subdued memorial service took place not long after, and was greeted by huge student demonstrations involving about 100,000 people. Hardliners within the government were extremely uneasy about the protests, but General Secretary Zhao Ziyang believed that the students would disperse once the funeral ceremonies were over. Zhao was so confident that he took a week-long trip to North Korea for a summit meeting. The students, however, were enraged that the government had refused to receive their petition, and emboldened by the meek reaction to their protests. After all, the Party had refrained from cracking down on them thus far, and had even caved in to their demands for a proper funeral for Hu Yaobang. They continued to protest, and their slogans strayed further and further from the approved texts.

With Zhao Ziyang out of the country, hardliners in the government such as Li Peng took the opportunity to bend the ear of the powerful leader of the Party Elders, Deng Xiaoping. Deng was known as a reformer himself, supportive of market reforms and greater openness, but the hardliners exaggerated the threat posed by the students. Li Peng even told Deng that the protesters were hostile to him personally, and were calling for his ouster and the downfall of the Communist government. (This accusation was a fabrication, by the way.) Clearly worried, Deng Xiaoping decided to denounce the demonstrations in an editorial published in People's Daily. He called the protests dongluan (meaning "turmoil" or "rioting") by a "tiny minority." These highly emotive terms were associated with the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than tamping down the students' fervor, Deng's editorial further inflamed it. The government had just made its second grave mistake.

Not unreasonably, the students felt that they could not end the protest if it was labeled dongluan, for fear that they would be prosecuted. Some 50,000 of them continued to press the case that patriotism motivated them, not hooliganism. Until the government stepped back from that characterization, the students could not leave Tiananmen Square. But the government too was trapped by the editorial. Deng Xiaoping had staked his reputation, and that of the government, on getting the students to back down. Who would blink first?

About that time, General Secretary Zhao returned from North Korea to find China transfixed by the crisis. He still felt that the students were no real threat to the government, though, and sought to defuse the situation, urging Deng Xiaoping to recant the inflammatory editorial. Li Peng, however, argued that to step back now would be a fatal show of weakness by the Party leadership. Meanwhile, students from other cities poured into Beijing to join the protests. More ominously for the government, other groups also joined in: housewives, workers, doctors, and even sailors from the Chinese Navy! The protests also spread to other cities - Shanghai, Urumqi, Xi'an, Tianjin... almost 250 in all. By early May, the number of protesters in Beijing had topped 100,000 again. On May 13, the students took their next fateful step. They announced a hunger strike, with the goal of getting the government to retract the April 26 editorial. Over a thousand students took part in the hunger strike, which engendered wide-spread sympathy for them among the general populace.

The government met in (what they term) an emergency Standing Committee session the following day. Zhao urged his fellow leaders to accede to the students' demand and withdraw the editorial. Li Peng urged a crack-down. The Standing Committee was deadlocked, so the decision was passed to Deng Xiaoping. The next morning, he announced that he was placing Beijing under martial law. Zhao was fired and placed under house arrest; hard-liner Jiang Zemin succeeded him as General Secretary; and fire-brand Li Peng was then placed in control of the military forces in Beijing. In the midst of all this turmoil, Soviet Premier and fellow reformer Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in China for talks with Zhao on May 16. Due to Gorbachev's presence, a large contingent of foreign journalists and photographers also descended on the tense Chinese capital. Their reports fueled international concern and calls for restraint, as well as sympathetic protests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and ex-patriot Chinese communities in Western nations. This international outcry placed even more pressure on the Chinese Communist Party leadership. Early in the morning on May 19, the deposed Zhao made an extraordinary appearance in Tiananmen Square. Speaking through a bullhorn, he told the protesters: "Students, we came too late. We are sorry. You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary. The reason that I came here is not to ask you to forgive us. All I want to say is that students are getting very weak, it is the 7th day since you went on hunger strike, you can't continue like this... You are still young, there are still many days yet to come, you must live healthy, and see the day when China accomplishes the four modernizations. You are not like us, we are already old, it doesn't matter to us any more." It was the last time he was ever seen in public.

Perhaps in response to Zhao's appeal, during the last week of May tensions eased a bit, and many of the student protesters from Beijing grew weary of the protest and left the square. However, reinforcements from the provinces continued to pour into the city. Hard-line student leaders called for the protest to continue until June 20, when a meeting of the National People's Congress was scheduled to take place. On May 30, the students set up a large sculpture called the "Goddess of Democracy" in Tiananmen Square. Modeled after the Statue of Liberty, it became one of the enduring symbols of the protest. Hearing the calls for a prolonged protest, on June 2 the Communist Party Elders met with the remaining members of the Politburo Standing Committee. They agreed to bring in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to clear the protesters out of Tiananmen Square by force.

So on the morning of June 3, 1989, the People's Liberation Army moved into Tiananmen Square on foot and in tanks, firing tear gas to disperse the demonstrators. They had been ordered not to shoot the protesters because afterall, most of them did not carry firearms. The leadership selected this particular Army because they were from a distant province; local PLA troops were considered untrustworthy as potential supporters of the protests. Not only the student protesters, but tens of thousands of workers and ordinary citizens of Beijing joined together to repel the Army. They used burned-out buses to create barricades, threw rocks and bricks at the soldiers, and even burned some tank crews alive inside their tanks. So you see, the first casualties of the Tiananmen Square Incident were actually soldiers.

The student protest leadership now faced a difficult decision. Should they evacuate the Square before further blood could be shed, or hold their ground? In the end, many of them decided to remain. That night, around 10:30 pm, the PLA returned to the area around Tiananmen with rifles & bayonets. The tanks rumbled down the street, firing indiscriminately. Students shouted "Why are you killing us?" to the soldiers, many of whom were about the same age as the protesters. Rickshaw drivers and bicyclists darted through the melee, rescuing the wounded and taking them to hospitals. In the chaos, a number of non-protesters were killed as well. Throughout the night of June 3 and early hours of June 4, the troops beat, bayoneted, and shot protesters. Tanks drove straight into crowds, crushing people and bicycles under their treads. By 6 a.m. on June 4th, 1989, the streets around Tiananmen Square had been cleared.

The city lapsed into shock during June 4, with just the occasional volley of gunfire breaking the stillness. Parents of missing students pushed their way to the protest area, seeking their sons and daughters, only to be warned off and then shot in the back as they fled from the soldiers. Doctors and ambulance drivers who tried to enter the area to help the wounded were also shot down in cold blood by the PLA. Beijing seemed utterly subdued the morning of June 5. However, as foreign journalists and photographers watched from their hotel balconies as a column of tanks trundled up Chang'an Avenue (the Avenue of Eternal Peace), an amazing thing happened. A young man in a white shirt and black pants, with shopping bags in each hand, stepped out into the street and stopped the tanks. The lead tank tried to swerve around him, but he jumped in front of it again. Everyone watched in horrified fascination, afraid that the tank driver would lose patience and drive over the man. At one point, the man even climbed up onto the tank and spoke to the soldiers inside, reportedly asking them, "Why are you here? You have caused nothing but misery."

After several minutes, two soilders rushed up to this young man and hustled him away. His fate is unknown.

However, still images and video of his brave act were captured by the western press members nearby, and smuggled out for the world to see. Many news photographers hid the film in the tanks of their hotel toilets, to save it from searches by the Chinese security forces. Ironically, the story and the image of this young man and his act of defiance had the greatest immediate effect thousands of miles away. Inspired in part by his courageous example, people across the Soviet bloc poured into the streets. In 1990, beginning with the Baltic states, the republics of the Soviet Empire began to break away. The USSR collapsed. Nobody knows how many people died in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The official Chinese government figure is 241, but this is almost certainly a drastic undercount. Between soldiers, protesters and civilians, it seems likely that anywhere from 800 to 7,000 people were killed according to our lecturer. The Chinese Red Cross initially put the toll at 2,600, based on counts from local hospitals, but then quickly retracted that statement under intense government pressure. Some witnesses also stated that the PLA carted away many bodies; they would not have been included in a hospital count.

The protesters who survived the Tiananmen Square Incident met a variety of fates. Some, particularly the student leaders, were given relatively light jail terms (less than 10 years). Many of the professors and other professionals who joined in were simply black-listed, unable to find jobs. A large number of the workers and provincial people were executed; exact figures, as usual, are unknown. Chinese journalists who had published reports sympathetic to the protesters also found themselves purged and unemployed. Some of the most famous were sentenced to multi-year prison terms. As for the Chinese government, June 4, 1989 was a watershed moment. Reformists within the Communist Party of China were stripped of power and reassigned to ceremonial roles. Former Premier Zhao Ziyang was never rehabilitated, and spent his final 15 years under house arrest. Shanghai's mayor, Jiang Zemin, who had moved quickly to quell protests in that city, replaced Zhao as the Party's General Secretary. Since that time, political agitation has been extremely muted in China. The government and the majority of citizens alike have focused on economic reform and prosperity, rather than political reform. Because the Tiananmen Square Massacre is a taboo subject, most Chinese under the age of 25 have never even heard about it. Unbelieveably, websites that mention the "June 4 Incident" are blocked in all of China – just like our TV went black in the hotel when the Hong Kong protests were discussed. Our good friends (Harry & Marylyn) asked their tour guide where the tank was positioned in the Square…and she wouldn’t provide an answer.

Even decades later, the people and the government of China have not dealt with this momentous and tragic incident. The memory of the Tiananmen Square Massacre festers under the surface of everyday life for those old enough to recall it. Someday, the Chinese government will have to face this piece of its history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

   

   

     

     

 

 

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

     

   

   

   

     

 

Some information about the Forbidden City: Lying at the city center and called Gu Gong in Chinese, it was the imperial palace for twenty-four emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It was first built throughout 14 years during the reign of Emperor Chengzu in the Ming Dynasty, and according to my notes, (1368-1644). Ancient Chinese Astronomers believed that the Purple Star (Polaris) was in the center of heaven and the Heavenly Emperor lived in the Purple Palace. The Palace for the emperor on earth was so called the Purple City. It was forbidden to enter without special permission of the empeor. Hence its name 'The Purple Forbidden City', usually just... 'The Forbidden City'.

Now known as the Palace Museum, it is to the north of Tiananmen Square. Rectangular in shape, it is the world's largest palace complex and covers 178 acres. Surrounded by a 160-foot-wide moat and a 30-foot-high wall are more than 8,700 rooms. The wall has a gate on each side. Opposite the Tiananmen Gate, to the north is the Gate of Divine Might (Shenwumen), which faces Jingshan Park. The distance between these two gates is 2800 feet, while the distance between the east and west gates is 2300 feet - do you really care about that?! There are unique and delicately structured towers on each of the four corners of the curtain wall. These afford views over both the palace and the city outside. It's divided into two parts. The southern section, or the Outer Court was where the emperor exercised his supreme power over the nation. The northern section, or the Inner Court was where he lived with his royal family. Until 1924 when the last emperor of China was driven from the Inner Court, fourteen emperors of the Ming dynasty and ten emperors of the Qing dynasty had reigned here. Having been the imperial palace for some five centuries, it houses numerous rare treasures and curiosities. Listed by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage Site in 1987, they say the Palace Museum is now one of the most popular tourist attractions world-wide, and when you see the photos, the crowds will amaze you.

They tell us that construction of the palace complex began in 1407, the 5th year of the Yongle reign of the third emperor (Emperor Chengzu, Zhu Di) of the Ming dynasty. It was completed fourteen years later in 1420, and then the capital city was moved from Nanjing to Beijing the next year. It was said that a million workers including one-hundred-thousand artisans were driven into the long-term hard labor. Stone needed was quarried from Fangshan District. It was said a well was dug every 150 feet along the road in order to pour water onto the road in winter to slide huge stones on ice into the city. Huge amounts of timber and other materials were freighted from faraway provinces.

Ancient Chinese people displayed their very considerable skills in building it. Take the grand red city wall for example. It has an 25-foot-wide base reducing to 20-feet-wide at the top. The angular shape of the wall totally frustrates attempts to climb it, though our oldest son could probably do it! The bricks were made from white lime and glutinous rice while the cement is made from glutinous rice and egg whites. These incredible materials make the wall extraordinarily strong.

Since yellow is the symbol of the royal family, it is the dominant color in it. Roofs are built with yellow glazed tiles; decorations in the palace are painted yellow; even the bricks on the ground are made yellow by a special process. However, there is one exception. Wenyuange, the royal library, has a black roof. The reason is that it was believed black represented water and could extinguish fire.

 

  

  

 

  
 

 

   

   

   

   

   

   

     

     

     

   

   

     

     

As you can tell, it was a very long day for us, particularly in view of the short night…but so worth it! We started back toward the ship at 3:00 and pulled into the pier at 6:30. We were told our passports would be brought & distributed to us before leaving the bus. We waited. No passports. We were then told the passports were already on the ship. Oh boy…here we go! After gathering our luggage, we went through customs, then metal detectors, followed by immigration, then normal security screening on the ship. We were supposed to turn our passports in to ship security at that point (as is normal procedure) but had to explain what happened during our Day 1 experience and mix-up. The front office was called and sure enough, our passports were there…safe & sound…but what an aggravation. 

 

That situation aside, our two days were totally awesome in every other respect.