Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (114 page)

Instead of personally appearing in front of the students, Zhao sent Yan Mingfu in his stead. Yan, head of the United Front Work Department, met with the students on May 16. As one of the party secretaries in the Secretariat, Yan was sympathetic to the students' demands. Desperate to reach an
agreement, Yan spoke frankly with them about the split within the party; he urged them to leave the square to protect Zhao. He promised to meet them again the next day and assured them that if they returned to their campuses, they would not be punished. Yan Mingfu went so far as to offer himself as a hostage to guarantee their protection.
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His efforts, however, failed.

Although the hunger-striking students were demonstrating for democracy, they did not practice majority rule among themselves. As Wuer Kaixi, a bold student leader, explained, they had made a pact that if any one student wanted to stay in the square, the movement would continue.
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The students remained well-behaved, and when the Chinese flag was raised, they stood up in respect and sang the national anthem. But the enormous outpouring of sympathy from the citizenry had strengthened their determination not to yield. When it became obvious that the students were not going to leave, Yan Mingfu, who understood what this would mean for Zhao's career and had some intimations of what it could mean for the country, was seen in tears.
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Gorbachev Visits Beijing, May 15–18

By May 15, the day of Gorbachev's arrival, the crowds in support of the students had again grown. At about 1 a.m. on May 16—the day Deng was scheduled to meet Gorbachev—the government made a last-ditch effort to clear the square. Loudspeakers in the square broadcast that the government was beginning a dialogue with the student representatives. The official message urged the students to consider China's national interest, end their hunger strike, and return to their universities. The students listened under banners they had made welcoming Gorbachev, whom they regarded as a political reformer worthy of China's emulation. One banner read, “We salute the ambassador of democracy.”
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But they refused to leave the square and more crowds assembled to support them. The government had no choice but to cancel the planned welcoming ceremonies in the square. Instead, a small ceremony was held at the heavily guarded airport, and the meeting between Deng and Gorbachev was held inside the Great Hall of the People, which the demonstrators also tried to crash into, breaking a window in the process.

These changes of venue amid the distractions caused by the hunger strike were humiliating to Deng and the other senior officials who were unable to bring order to their own capital. Yet the meeting between Deng and Gorbachev went smoothly. No Chinese leader had been more centrally involved in the quarrels with the Soviet Union than Deng. He had supervised the
drafting of the nine anti-Soviet letters in the early 1960s and he had represented China in the quarrels with Mikhail Suslov in 1963. But Deng personally had also laid the basis for the improvement of relations immediately after his attack on Vietnam in 1979 and in 1985, when he had asked visiting Romanian leader Nicolai Ceau
escu to convey to the Soviet leadersd the Chinese conditions for normalization of relations. Negotiations between Soviet and Chinese diplomats had continued until February 1989, when the two sides agreed on the wording of a joint communiqué that ended the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia and announced the timing of the visit by Gorbachev to Beijing to launch a new era of friendly relations between the two nations.
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Deng was careful to keep U.S. officials informed so that improvements in relations with the Soviet Union would not come at the expense of relations with the United States. No sooner had the two sides worked out the agreement than Deng, on February 26, 1989, met with President George H. W. Bush. During their meeting Deng assured Bush, who was making a quick trip to China after the Japanese emperor's funeral, that China's improved relations with the Soviet Union would not affect its good relations with the United States. Deng began by tracing the history of Sino-Soviet relations, making it clear that conditions were now very different and that there was no danger that China would develop a close relationship with the Soviet Union similar to that in the 1950s. China, he explained, would continue to seek closer relations with the United States because it was in China's strategic interests to do so.
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In May, on the eve of the Gorbachev visit, Deng sent Wan Li to reassure U.S. and Canadian officials, including President George H. W. Bush on May 23, that the meeting with Gorbachev would not be at the expense of relations with the United States and Canada. And after the visit, Deng arranged to send Foreign Minister Qian Qichen to inform the U.S. government about the discussions.

Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, who sat in on Deng's two-and-a-half-hour discussion with Gorbachev on May 16, reported that Deng was in good spirits, even exuberant, as he healed the breach with the Soviet Union on his terms. Deng and Gorbachev were both reformers; Deng at eighty-four was at the end of his career and Gorbachev at fifty-eight was at the beginning of his. Deng proved disarming when talking about the previous tensions with the Soviet Union. He acknowledged that he had been personally involved in the ideological debates with the Soviet Union, but described the arguments on both sides as “all empty words.”
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He confessed that “we do not believe that
our views were always correct.” Speaking from memory and without notes, Deng then gave a clear, detailed account of the ups and downs in Sino-Soviet relations. The problems, he said, stemmed from the fact that the Soviet Union did not always treat China as an equal. But he also said that the Chinese would never forget the Soviet Union's assistance in laying the industrial foundations for the new China. Deng agreed to end the past disputes and focus on the future, so that China could enjoy friendly relations with its neighbors. Gorbachev had been well briefed on the historical background; he spoke carefully and expressed support for Deng's view that, as neighboring countries, the two should strive to develop a friendly relationship.
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Deng made a thorough and forward-looking presentation to Gorbachev, but at the time he seemed uncharacteristically tense. While on camera during the banquet honoring Gorbachev, Deng, hands shaking, let a piece of dumpling drop from his chopsticks.
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That same day, some two hundred hunger strikers had been rushed to Beijing hospitals for emergency care and there were still some 3,100 hunger strikers left in the square.
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Deng could not easily forget the worsening situation.

When he met Zhao Ziyang later in the afternoon of May 16, Gorbachev said that he had already met with Deng, but now that he was meeting with General Secretary Zhao, all agreements could become official. Zhao explained that Deng was still acting in an official capacity; China still needed Deng's wisdom and experience and “therefore the First Plenary Session of the 13th Party Congress in 1987 made the solemn decision that we still need Comrade Deng Xiaoping at the helm when it comes to the most important questions.”
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When Deng learned about Zhao's statement, he was upset. Zhao's supporters later explained that it was natural that Zhao should try to correct Gorbachev's impression because in fact his meeting with Deng had been official. Zhao later said he was trying to protect, not harm, Deng's image.
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In his diary, however, Li Peng offered a different view: he admitted that Zhao's comments were accurate but he felt that raising them in this context was Zhao's way of laying blame on Deng for the economic problems in 1988 and for the decisions that had led to the worsening of the student demonstrations.
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Indeed Deng, like Li Peng, interpreted Zhao's comments as blaming him for the recent problems.
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The world press, assembled in Beijing to cover the reconciliation between China and the Soviet Union, found the student movement spellbinding; indeed, the dramatic events on the square quickly eclipsed the Gorbachev visit as the center of media attention. For foreign reporters, it was impossible not
to get caught up in the idealism and enthusiasm of the students, who were far more open than Chinese had previously dared to be. With a vast international audience watching, the students grew even more confident that the PLA would not attack. Some, recognizing an opportunity to present their case to the world, assigned English-speaking demonstrators to the outside columns of the marchers, so they could tell the world about their desire for freedom and democracy and the need to end high-level corruption. A few persistent foreign reporters, trying to maintain balance, reported that most students in fact knew little about democracy and freedom and had little idea about how to achieve such goals.
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During the Gorbachev visit, the number of students in the square grew daily. On May 18, the Ministry of State Security estimated that despite the rain, some 1.2 million people were in Tiananmen Square.
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Protests had spread to other major cities as well, and an estimated 200,000 students, from as far as several days' train ride away, had descended upon Beijing. Some students, feeling entitled on moral grounds, demanded free railway passage like the Red Guards had received during the Cultural Revolution. At the last minute, Gorbachev's press conference, originally scheduled to be held in the Great Hall of the People, was moved to the Diaoyutai Guest House because his motorcade could not pass through the square.
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Vast numbers of reporters, however, skipped the press conference altogether to remain at Tiananmen Square.

The Gorbachev visit marked a turning point not only in Sino-Soviet relations, but in the student movement as well. Until then Deng had hoped that the students would heed the call for patriotism and leave Tiananmen Square before the arrival of Gorbachev. For Deng, the end of the Sino-Soviet rift on Chinese terms was too big of an occasion to consider abandoning Tiananmen Square as the site of the welcoming ceremony. But the students were unwilling to back down. Deng did not want to spoil the Gorbachev visit by sending in troops that would have clashed with students. But after the students had been so brazen as to refuse to leave Tiananmen Square during Gorbachev's stay, Deng concluded they had gone too far. He was ready to bring in the troops.

As Deng moved ahead with plans to bring in the troops and declare martial law, Zhao and a group of liberal officials made a final desperate effort to avoid a violent crackdown. At 10 p.m. on May 16, after a meeting with Gorbachev, Zhao chaired an emergency Politburo Standing Committee meeting where he reiterated his view, supported only by Hu Qili, that there would be no peaceful resolution unless the party retracted the April 26 editorial. Outside the Politburo, a group of retired liberal officials on the Central Advisory Commission—including Li Chang, Li Rui, Yu Guangyuan, and Du Runsheng—gathered to make final arrangements for releasing a declaration that the student movement should be declared patriotic. And early the next morning, with his back to the wall, Zhao called Deng's office, hoping that if he could meet privately with Deng, he might be able to persuade him not to bring in the troops. Zhao was told to come in the afternoon. But when he arrived, he learned that he would not be meeting Deng alone; other members of the Standing Committee would be present. Clearly Deng was not about to accept his views.
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Martial Law and Zhao's Departure, May 17–20

Even before Gorbachev arrived in Beijing, Deng had begun considering contingency plans in case the demonstrators did not clear the square. On April 25, the same day he decided to publish the editorial warning the demonstrators, Deng put the People's Liberation Army (PLA) on alert. By the beginning of May, all military leaves had been canceled.
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Later, after the Gorbachev
visit had ended and the most prominent members of the foreign media had left, Deng was ready to make his move. On May 17 at 4 p.m., Deng assembled the members of the Politburo Standing Committee (Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Hu Qili, and Yao Yilin) as well as Yang Shangkun, Deng's liaison with the Central Military Commission (CMC), to decide on the next steps. All the participants were allowed to express their views. Zhao explained that the situation was serious; there were still as many as 300,000 to 400,000 people protesting daily. He believed that unless they retracted the harsh April 26 editorial, the students would not voluntarily evacuate the square.
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