At the time of Tiananmen, veteran China-watcher Jonathan Mirsky was confident that "China would never be the same again"

NYRB caption: "Some of the two hundred thousand pro-democracy student protesters face to face with policemen outside the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, April 22"

by Ken

Last night I teased you with the piece that longtime China watcher Jonathan Mirsky has posted on the New York Review of Books blog on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, "Tiananmen: How Wrong We Were."

Since Mirsky's title, presumably intentionally, doesn't reveal what it is that "we" were so wrong about, I tried to do the same, and offered this slightly ellipsized quote:

How wrong we were -- foreign reporters (I was a correspondent for The Observer in those days), China-watchers abroad, and many Chinese themselves. . . . I wrote several opinion pieces for my paper . . . surer about Chinese affairs than I had ever been.

The obvious question that drew me to the piece originally was: What the heck was it about the whole Tiananmen mess that Mirsky, not to mention all those "foreign reporters, China-watchers abroad, and many Chinese themselves," were so sure and so wrong about?

Well, here's the start of the piece, up to the point of last night's tease.

Twenty-five years ago to the day I write this, I watched and listened as thousands of Chinese citizens in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square dared to condemn their leaders. Some shouted “Premier Li Peng resign.” Even braver ones cried “Down with Deng Xiaoping and the Communist Party.” Before long, on the night of June 3–4, the People’s Liberation Army crashed into the square, rolling over the tents pitched there by industrial workers who had joined in the protests, and mowing down unarmed demonstrators. Until then, crowds in the square had walked wherever they pleased rather than standing on one of the numbered paving stones in that vast space. For decades, those who went there to see and hear national leaders were instructed to stand on a particular stone and shout prescribed slogans. But in May 1989, students and ordinary people were engaged in something the Communist Party has never been able to tolerate: zifade, “spontaneous” demonstrations.

That spontaneity spread from Inner Mongolia to Guangzhou. In Beijing, instead of the usual greeting between acquaintances, “Have you eaten yet?” people asked, “Have you demonstrated yet?” Police and soldiers had almost disappeared, and the staff of the Party’s newspapers appeared in the square holding high a banner bearing the words “We don’t want to lie anymore.” A few days before the killings, thousands of unarmed soldiers marched towards the square only to be scolded by elderly women and shamed into turning back. A column of tanks had been stalled on the edge of the city, where young men urinated on their treads while local women offered the crews cups of tea. In late May, I and several other journalists watched those tanks turn away, along with truckloads of soldiers, who had been blocked and rebuked in the suburbs before they, too, drove off. Now I really thought the Party was finished. How wrong we were—foreign reporters (I was a correspondent for The Observer in those days), China-watchers abroad, and many Chinese themselves. During a television interview in the square I said that, while I couldn’t predict, I was confident “China would never be the same again.” I wrote several opinion pieces for my paper saying much the same, surer about Chinese affairs than I had ever been.

And here's a bit more:

On the night of the army’s entry into the center of Beijing I stood on one of the marble bridges under Mao’s portrait over the gate into the Forbidden City that faced onto the square. Shots sounded ever louder and as the army advanced under the dark red walls of the City a young man next to me shouted that the streaks in the darkness, even the sparks flashing off the stones, were “blanks.” Seconds later he slumped over the railing with a widening red circle on his t-shirt. No longer the China-expert, I turned to leave. My way was blocked by some Armed Police, who said, “You motherfucking foreign journalist,” knocked out five of my teeth, and fractured my left arm. Their officer was shooting people they had beaten to the ground and would have shot me if the Financial Times’s Robert Thompson had not bravely walked over and led me away.

The next morning, Sunday, June 4, I cycled back to the edge of the square just in time to see soldiers mow down parents of students who had come to look for those who had not returned home and who were feared to have been killed and their bodies burned. While I lay in the grass at the side of the avenue, doctors and nurses from the Peking Union Hospital (where my father had briefly worked in the early Thirties) arrived in an ambulance and in their bloodstained gowns went among the fallen; the soldiers shot them down, too. I managed to fly back to London later that day.

So what Mirsky was so sure about, "surer about Chinese affairs than I had ever been," was that the Chinese Communist regime was done for. And as he notes later in the new piece, his confident prediction that "China would never be the same again" actually did come true, but hardly in the way he meant it at the time. So what happened? Let's look at that a little more tomorrow.

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