The story of 4 June 1989 wasn’t as simple as we thought at the time: armed soldiers shooting down unarmed students. That certainly happened, but there was another battle going on in Beijing and many other Chinese cities. Thousands of ordinary working-class people came out onto the streets, determined to use the attack on the students as a chance to overthrow the control of the Chinese Communist Party altogether.
When I drove through the streets two days later, I saw at least five police stations and three local security police headquarters burned out. In one suburb the angry crowd had set fire to a policeman and propped up his charred body against a wall. A uniform cap was put at a jaunty angle on his head, and a cigarette had been stuck between his blackened lips.
It turns out the army wasn’t just putting down a long-standing demonstration by students, it was stamping out a popular uprising by ordinary Chinese people.
China’s political leadership, still unable to bury the memories of what happened 36 years ago, is constantly on the look-out for signs of opposition – whether from organised groups like Falun Gong or the independent Christian church or the democracy movement in Hong Kong, or just people demonstrating against local corruption. All are stamped on with great force.
I have spent a good deal of time reporting on China since 1989, watching its rise to economic and political dominance. I even came to know a top politician who was Xi Jinping’s rival and competitor. His name was Bo Xilai, and he was an anglophile who spoke surprisingly openly about China’s politics.
He once said to me, “You’ll never understand how insecure a government feels when it knows it hasn’t been elected.”
As for Bo Xilai, he was jailed for life in 2013 after being found guilty of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power.