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Mainstream, Vol XLVII, No 25, June 6, 2009

End of Maoist Monolith

Saturday 6 June 2009, by Nikhil Chakravartty

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Anarchy has gripped China. The massacre of unarmed people by tanks and armoured carriers could not bring a semblance of order even in the capital city of Beijing. Instead, the horror of ghastly killings—estimated anywhere between 1000 to 2000 in the course of a single night—has so infuriated the citizens that spontaneous clashes with the Army are reported to be continuing in Beijing. The mood in the city is one of angry defiance.

While the Indians in Beijing are safe, the ambassador, C.V. Ranganathan, has promptly advised them all to come and take shelter in the Indian embassy premises and diplomatic residences. It is learnt that troops patrolling in weapon carriers in the central part of the city are indulging in indiscriminate firing. Even the Chinese personnel in diplomatic missions have to return home early because of the great risk of being fired at.

A diplomat in Beijing told this correspondent on the phone that there was no order anywhere in Beijing today, no government offices were functioning. The Army can enforce its authority only around Tiananmen Square through its sheer physical presence. Transport has stopped and very few shops are open and that too only for short periods.

Reports received in Hong Kong speak of large-scale confrontations in Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Changsha, Canton, Xian and Tiensin.

The authority of the government has practically collapsed. A rift within the party and also in the government is now widely known. Even the People’s Liberation Army is divided. The contingent which had been sent to Beijing since the declaration of martial law to suppress the students did not agree to fire upon unarmed people, thereby nullifying the martial law order. Other contingents were, therefore, rushed in on Saturday to perpetrate a massacre ten times the size of Jallianwalabagh.

In Hong Kong eyewitness reports by daring correspondents, as also live television shots, give an idea about the magnitude of the heinous drama now being enacted in China.

To quote three out of many cases of terror killings, yesterday morning saw a crowd of unarmed citizens watching the Army attack students in Tiananmen. Suddenly soldiers fired upon this innocent crowd without warning. This horror took place in full view of foreign visitors living in the Beijing hotel. Thirty could be counted dead after just one salvo.

A wounded teacher from the Foreign Language Institute said at a hospital that a girl in the crowd heard that her younger brother had been killed. She rushed out, even as other tried to hold her back. The soldiers opened fire and shot her seven times as she was crawling.

A doctor narrated how a four-year-old girl was killed by a bullet as she held her mother’s hand, a few blocks away from Tiananmen Square.

In the British colony of Hong Kong, which is to be turned over to China in eight years from now, the stock market tumbled heavily with shares across the board shedding 25 per cent of their value. Large queues have meanwhile formed in front of the Bank of China and all other mainland controlled banks with people withdrawing their money in protest against China’s military slaughter.

Hundred of thousands of Hong Kong people from all walks of life—Chinese and non-Chinese, including Indians—marched yesterday chanting “Down with Li Peng, Down with Deng Xiaoping”. Workers, students, businessmen, traders, taxi-drivers and others in Hong Kong united to demonstrate their solidarity with the Chinese democratic movement. As a result, the deliberations of the basic law (Hong Kong’s mini-constitution after 1997) drafting have been indefinitely postponed. A general strike has been called for Wednesday (June 7).

More than one report from Beijing says that it was Deng Xiaoping who personally ordered the Army to move against the massive demonstration for democracy while he was in a hospital in an advanced stage of prostrate cancer. The monolith of Mao’s communism is crumbling before our very eyes, with the Army of legendary fame, meant at one time to liberate the people, being used brutally to crush the most phenomenal upsurge of democracy in the world of recent times. (June 5)

THE situation in Beijing has grown more tense in the last 24 hours and foreign nationals have started leaving the city.

Foreign residents from countries friendly to China say that the gravity of the situation can be gauged from the latest steps taken by the military controlling the city. Warnings are repeatedly being broadcast that both Chinese citizens and foreigners must stay indoors and not venture out into the streets. There is heavy concentration of tanks around the diplomatic enclave. And the Chinese Airline services are disrupted presumably because of heavy troop movements. All these point to the probability of serious infighting within the armed forces.

The division within the 34 lakh strong PLA is the most serious development for the integrity of the Chinese state. Even at the height of the turmoil unleashed by the Cultural Revolution, the PLA’s solidarity was never breached. Nor could the “Gang of Four” capture it. Now, by the horrendous decision to stamp out the student-citizen demand for democracy, the dominant section of China’s present leadership has destroyed the unity of one of the pillars of the Chinese state.

There is speculation that a conservative die-hard junta of Generals got Deng Xiaoping to order this massacre, which was planned as just the opening gambit of an all-scale pogrom against reforms and return to Maoist orthodoxy. Hence, the clamour for democracy is being denounced as a “conspiracy” to install “bourgeois liberalism”—a familiar phrase of communist dogmatists everywhere battling against forces of new thinking. It needs to be noted that when tanks were approaching Tiananmen Square, the student protesters, who pleaded with soldiers not to fire, were singing the Internationale.

There is, however, very little chance of a takeover by the primitive hardliners. For one thing, the Army itself looks like having been split. Secondly, the Chinese Communist Party is divided with the General Secretary of the party, Zhao Ziyang, put aside by hardliners. Thirdly, the 11-year-long economic reforms have created conditions by which it is not possible for China to go back to the Maoist days. The Cultural Revolution itself failed and to try to repeat it is most likely to lead China into the abyss of a fearsome civil war.

(June 6)

(Mainstream, June 10, 1989)

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