Remembering Tiananmen

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Thirty-four years ago this week, I heard a knock on my office door in the Senate Hart Building. Although my assignment addressed issues in other parts of the world, my colleague Bill, an expert on Communist China who had the office next to mine, was out sick for the week. So the Foreign Relations Committee staff sent our surprise visitor from China to talk to me.
He was a young man, perhaps in his early 30s, quite dignified and very polite. The first five minutes of our conversation were rather slow-going, until my musical ear finally sorted out his accent. With that accomplished, I was simply blown away by the fellow’s erudition and truly brilliant command of the English language. I asked him how he had come by that mastery. He explained that he had studied English by reading Shakespeare.
He had studied with the greatest English writer ever, and the results were impressive.
And so was the story he had come to tell. Tiananmen Square was blowing up half a world away that week, but Washington was relatively quiet, and our conversation continued for a good while. My guest was a professional in a serious field. I hesitate to say anything more specific: The Chinese Communist intelligence forces in the United States today are capable of tracking down almost anyone anywhere. Once they find their target, they can simply, and apparently legally, haul him off to one of the many Chinese Communist police stations in major cities in the United States and imprison him there (I pause to remark that the fact grieves me as I write it, but it is true nonetheless).
Well, my very congenial and loquacious visitor had grown up in China. He had been quite young in 1966, but he had vivid memories — quite unforgettable, in fact. In May of that year, the “Cultural Revolution” erupted — spreading like wildfire from the moment that Nie Yuanzi, a young philosophy professor at Peking University, publicly denounced her university president as a bourgeois revisionist.
Like a prairie fire the movement spread, with students denouncing professors, each other, and eventually, by the millions, even denouncing themselves, as Chairman Mao ordered his ruthless “Red Guards” to guarantee purity of thought among the masses.
Red Guards targeted every Chinese school, factory, and workplace. They forced bourgeois “enemies” to stand, heads bowed and beaten, in the middle of a screaming crowd, on a stage, or in front of a class. Throughout the country, tens of millions of such violent spectacles erupted. Known as “struggle sessions,” they featured speeches, epithets, and beatings. Yesterday’s leader might be tomorrow’s “renegade” victim, and yesterday’s victim tomorrow’s tyrant.
No one was exempt. Today Xi Jinping is Mao’s successor and China’s all-powerful “Dear Leader,” but as a child, he was repeatedly subjected to “struggle sessions” after his father, once Mao’s trusted comrade, was humiliated and purged.
All too often, physical violence was “required” as the revolutionary fervor of the “consciousness-raising” crowd intensified. At Jinping’s session, his mother was among those forced to shout denunciations of her son’s “deviation” from “pure thought.” One of his sisters died after being tortured at a “struggle session.”

“The Death Of A
Thousand Cuts”

Altogether, some twenty million Chinese were killed during the “Cultural Revolution.”
My Chinese visitor on Capitol Hill recalled one of them.
Like America’s “woke” educational institutions and their burgeoning ideological fervor, schools in China during the Cultural Revolution were centers of both education and revolution.
The cadres of the Red Guards ravaged them all.
One of them, a distinguished girls’ school, was located near my visitor’s home. That school was eventually targeted by the Red Guards.
When they arrived, the cadres demanded that the headmaster call an assembly of all the students in the auditorium. There the Red Guards took the stage to condemn the headmaster’s “bourgeois elitism” and his lack of a “patriotic consciousness.”
After beating him and stripping him of his outer garments, they called the young girl who was the elected leader of the student body to join them on the stage. After she added her own vicious rant to theirs, the Red Guards ordered the students — all of them — to form a line in front of the podium.
They then handed the student leader a pair of scissors. She used them to cut into the headmaster’s arm until it bled.
One by one, the students were called to the stage to add their own cut to hers.
Hundreds of them.
After the last student had inflicted her wound, the headmaster was left to bleed to death on the stage as the students returned to their classrooms.
My visitor added a troubling postscript to the story. The woman who was that student leader 23 years before now held a prestigious post at a major American university.

Meanwhile, Back In Beijing

While my visitor and I chatted in my Capitol Hill office, history was happening live in Tiananmen Square, the plaza next to the mausoleum housing Mao’s tomb. Steven Mosher, author of several books on China, and I have discussed those events many times over the years, and this brief account draws on those conversations.
In February 1989, Chinese students began demonstrating peacefully in the square. They called for democracy, human rights, and an end to the one-party dictatorship. They held signs bearing quotations like Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”
At the time, Premier Deng Xiaoping had promised to open up China to the outside world. These young people were quoting George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. They had seen what life was like in the outside world. They had tasted freedom. Students who had studied in the United States came back aspiring to liberate China.
For a while, China had the chance to open up to the West in the same way that Eastern European countries were doing, even before the wall fell in October of 1989. For seven weeks in the spring of 1989, hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating in Beijing in pursuit of “freedom” and “human rights.”
Deng Xiaoping took it personally. He saw those demonstrations as a repudiation of his rule, an act of outright defiance of his authority. By the end of May, a million or more people filled Beijing calling for an end to corruption, bureaucracy, and dictatorship.
That was too much for Deng.
The Chinese army in Beijing refused to attack the students, so he brought in the 38th Army, comprising thousands of Mongolian troops, and ordered them to quell the “revolution” that “threatened to overthrow the Communist Party.”
On the night of June 4, as the West watched in horror, the troops opened fire on unarmed demonstrators with automatic weapons and rolled over them with tanks and armored personnel carriers. By morning, the dictatorship of the proletariat was once again firmly in control.
“The hospitals were overflowing with the dead and wounded,” Mosher writes. “But the next day, the hospitals were emptied out. The wounded were taken away in army trucks and never heard from again. They were ordered to destroy the evidence, so they did.”
This past Sunday, on the 34th anniversary of the massacre, Joe Biden sent a high-ranking delegation to China to discuss “key issues in the bilateral relationship,” the State Department said.
When confronted with outrage from human rights advocates, NSC spokesman John Kirby said they were “making a whole heck of a lot out of nothing.”
Let that sink in.
You can bet the Biden team didn’t lay a wreath at Tiananmen Square in honor of the thousands whose were killed seeking freedom.
No, “Kow Tow” doesn’t mean “pay your respects to the fallen.”
It means “Hit Head” — on the floor, nine times. Loudly enough to hear it.
You can bet Xi Jinping heard it — and smiled.