Tiananmen was a tragedy Beijing won’t face up to, regardless of death toll

Philip Cunningham says whether or not 10,000 is an accurate account of the number killed at the Tiananmen uprising, we know the crackdown was horrific and that Beijing won’t give a clear account

Reading Time:3 minutes

Participants hold candles during a vigil organised by students to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown at the University of Hong Kong, in June 2015. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:21pm, 28 Dec 2017Updated: 7:27pm, 28 Dec 2017

A newly declassified British telegram suggests that the death toll in the Tiananmen crackdown was worse than realised. Relying on a high-level Chinese source, the intelligence document cites “at least 10,000 dead” and some 40,000 injured. Stories of gratuitous violence are included in the report, written after the tragedy by the then British ambassador to China, Alan Donald.

This unexpected exposure nearly three decades after the fact raises questions about Beijing’s failure to come to terms with what it knows about what happened in 1989. Party apologists testily acknowledge a death toll in the low hundreds and perversely pin China’s economic success on the crackdown, while cruelly blaming the victims of violence for the trouble.

So, how many people died?

Journalistic estimates based on hodgepodge fact-collecting in the heat of the moment buttressed by painstaking research point to more than a thousand, but it is difficult to document beyond that.

I freelanced with the BBC during the 1989 crisis, hired for Mikhail Gorbachev’s Beijing visit, but soon the state visit became a sideshow to the peaceful occupation of Tiananmen and I got busier than I bargained for, spending every day and many nights on the square, from the time of the hunger strike in mid-May to the early hours of June 4. I was with a BBC TV crew when troops broke into downtown Beijing, and was on the square, not far from the Goddess of Democracy, when the first armoured military vehicles buzzed the crowd and pandemonium broke loose.