The general who refused to crush Tiananmen’s protesters

AS PRO-DEMOCRACY protests swelled in Beijing and cities around China in May 1989, leaders decided that only the army could put a stop to them. But one major-general, in charge of 15,000 troops told to impose martial law in the capital, objected to the order. The Chinese authorities never made this public, nor did they reveal that he was punished with (a relatively lenient) five years in prison. They prefer to gloss over what happened during those tumultuous weeks. But a recently leaked video of the general’s court-martial provides vivid insight into how—even under China’s Communist Party—compliance with the leadership’s wishes is not guaranteed.

Not surprisingly the video, which is more than six hours long, is not available for streaming on websites in China. When the general, Xu Qinxian, died in 2021, censors scrubbed messages from Chinese social media that paid tribute to him. But among Chinese abroad, it is being widely watched. It shows a bespectacled Xu being grilled in a near-empty courtroom at his secret trial, which was held in March 1990, nine months after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) cleared Tiananmen Square of demonstrators, killing hundreds if not thousands of people during the operation.

Xu was in command of the PLA’s 38th Army. As he tells it, his troops (with up to 300 armoured vehicles) were among 50,000 who were supposed to enforce martial law on May 20th. Before a hectoring military judge, Xu calmly and unapologetically explains his decision. It is striking evidence that he possessed moral courage, and was not merely someone who backed the wrong horse amid political confusion.

“Good people and bad people are mixed together,” he recalls saying. “The army and the ordinary citizens are mixed together. I said, how can this be executed? Who should I hit?” Moving in troops would involve “serious consequences”, he says. Xu asserts that he did not want to be judged by history as a “criminal” for taking part. Although he recused himself from carrying out the order, Xu did, however, transmit it, according to his testimony.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was the little-known party chief of a city in the coastal province of Fujian during the unrest in 1989. But the PLA’s crushing of that unrest, and the failure of the Soviet army to do the same in Moscow in 1991, leading to the Soviet Union’s collapse, clearly left a deep impression. He has often referred to a critical lesson from it all: the PLA must remain the party’s army and it must be kept under control. It all helps explain Mr Xi’s relentless “anti-corruption” drives among the high command.

The video was posted online by Wu Renhua, a historian of the Tiananmen Square upheaval who took part in the protests and later fled to America. Mr Wu says he will not reveal how he got it. On X, a social-media platform, he says the leak was “completely unrelated to internal Chinese Communist Party or military power struggles”. On the day after, China announced that the director of the State Secrecy Bureau and his deputy had been dismissed. Speculation is rife that this was related. ■