deng xiaoping ruled china during the tiananmen square protests of 1989.
deng xiaoping ruled china during the tiananmen square protests of 1989.
who ruled china during the tiananmen square protests of 1989?
deng xiaoping
the tiananmen square protests of 1989 saw a massive redeployment of people's liberation army (pla) troops into and around beijing. after the declaration of martial law, the pla mobilized at least 22 divisions from 13 armies, which converged on beijing . this force far exceeded the local garrison, with troops being sent in from across china. altogether, roughly 300,000 troops were involved in the campaign to quell the protests. by their end, the pla had proven that it was largely willing to enforce party decrees with lethal force. multiple significant breaches of military discipline occurred after the imposition of martial law. some cases involved officers or entire units being unwilling to obey directives from farther up the chain of command, others related to the misuse of military equipment, and some were responsible for casualties incurred during the night of june 3 (when the pla finally reached tiananmen square). it is unclear when, how, or even if some pla units received orders to open fire on the protesters, and so knowing whether or not an incident amounts to insubordination is difficult. if the pla as a whole received orders to use lethal force, deng xiaoping must have given his assent to it. yang shangkun's orders to the central military commission on the 20th of may 1989 explicitly deny troops the authority to use lethal force during martial law, even when their lives are threatened by the protesters. according to li xinming's report to the politburo on june 19 however, 10 pla soldiers did end up dying, along with 13 from the peoples armed police. for these 23 dead, they inflicted 218 deaths on the protesters, although some sources place this number in the thousands.
insubordination in the pla during the 1989 tiananmen square protests
in the decades since the tiananmen square protests the ccp has attempted to prevent any remembrance of the protest movement and the subsequent crackdown. while the government initially tried to justify its suppression of the protest, releasing official statements and creating museum exhibits on the events of june 3–5, it now denies that such suppression ever occurred. in 2011, an opinion piece, "tiananmen square a myth", was published in china daily, the ccp's english-language newspaper. the article claims that, "when eventually troops were sent in to clear the [tiananmen] square, the demonstrations were already ending. but by this time the western media were there in force, keen to grab any story they could." there is no mention of a counterrevolutionary rebellion, as earlier government accounts refer to. as louisa lim notes in her book, "the people's republic of amnesia: tiananmen revisited", many young chinese know almost nothing of the tiananmen square protests. in an informal survey, lim showed the iconic photo of tank man to 100 chinese university students; only 15 correctly identified it as being an image of tiananmen square. perry link, a chinese language and literature scholar, writes, "the story of the massacre is banned from textbooks, the media, and all other public contexts." in 2014, gu yimin, a chinese activist, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for attempting to hold a march on the anniversary of the tiananmen square crackdown. after filing a request to hold the march in 2013, he was charged with "inciting subversion of state power." activist groups such as the tiananmen mothers have faced intense government surveillance for their attempts to hold the ccp accountable for the losses of their family members.
reactions to the 1989 tiananmen square protests