Wang Dan, one of the students who initiated the protests, had urged his fellow demonstrators to leave the square the day before the massacre. Police captured him several weeks later. During his years in prison, he felt tremendous guilt for starting the movement that led to the deaths of so many people.37
Exactly how many murders the communist regime committed on June 4, 1989, has been a matter of debate. Estimates of the death toll in Beijing range from the hundreds into the thousands. In 1989 the official line from the Chinese government was that a few hundred people had died following what it called “counter-revolutionary riots,” as if the unarmed students were the aggressors. But in December 2017 the BBC cited newly released British government documents reporting that the Chinese army assault had killed at least 10,000 people. “The figure was given in a secret diplomatic cable from then British ambassador to China, Sir Alan Donald,” reported the BBC. “The original source was a friend of a member of China’s State Council, the envoy says.”38
In 1989, Wu Renhua was a young university lecturer and a protester at Tiananmen. After surviving the massacre, he returned to his university campus, where some of the victims’ bodies were placed on desks in front of a lecture hall, according to a 2019 report in Taiwan’s Taipei Times. “I heard a voice in my mind as I looked at those bodies,” Wu told the Times. “It told me I should never forget this. Never forget.”39
Wu escaped China with help from Operation Yellowbird, a rescue effort based in Hong Kong. Now living in the United States, he has sought to document every detail of the events leading up to the crackdown, as well as the carnage in the square and its aftermath. “Wu also looked into the death toll and said that 2,600, a figure released by the Red Cross Society of China, was credible based on his survey of about 200 hospitals and the more than 100 sites where the troops opened fire in Beijing,” the Taipei Times reported.40
The Chinese communist regime’s killing of thousands of protesting students shocked the world. The news from Tiananmen especially horrified Americans who had been watching television images of the idealistic kids with their homemade Statue of Liberty look-alikes. The students were dreaming of a better life and attempting to exercise basic rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Such rights were also included in the Chinese constitution, but—as with all such documents under Marxist regimes—they were just words on paper.
What is perhaps shocking in retrospect is that the United States of America, where those words really mean something, hardly did anything about it. The Soviet empire hadn’t fallen yet but it was on the ropes. So it was a logical moment to ask how much barbarity we should tolerate in order to maintain Beijing as a strategic counterweight to Moscow.
But in a press conference on June 5, 1989, just a day after the Chinese communist military assault on civilians in their own capital, President George H. W. Bush made it clear that not much was going to change in the U.S.-China relationship. He condemned the regime’s decision to use force, expressed sympathy for the victims, and announced the suspension of some military sales. Then Bush said, “This is not the time for an emotional response, but for a reasoned, careful action that takes into account both our long-term interests and recognition of a complex internal situation in China.”41
In Bush’s defense, he wasn’t simply expressing a cold calculation that China was good for business or that Beijing was a useful strategic asset in the Pacific. He believed that continuing U.S. engagement and expanding commercial ties would feed the democracy movement in China rather than starve it. Throughout history, capitalism has generally been a liberating force. But more than three decades after Bush decided he would look past a horrific crime in the hope of advancing the long-term cause of democracy, it’s fair to say he made the wrong decision. The communist regime is still in power. And the consequences of Bush’s blunder have been both tragic and enormous.
At that press conference in 1989, Bush said that “the budding of democracy which we have seen in recent weeks owes much to the relationship we have developed since 1972. And it’s important at this time to act in a way that will encourage the further development and deepening of the positive elements of that relationship and the process of democratization. It would be a tragedy for all if China were to pull back to its pre-1972 era of isolation and repression.”42 Nearly a half century after Nixon went to China, it’s still a land of political repression. As for the Bush policy, “by its own lights—the aim of encouraging China to become a more open, democratic, liberal society—the decision to let Beijing get away with murder 30 years ago has been an abject failure,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker in 2019.43
The communist government has done its best to erase the bloody history of Tiananmen. When circumstances require the regime to address the massacre, officials have refused to acknowledge any fault.
One can only imagine how history might have turned out differently. Specifically, it’s tempting to wonder what
