Student Activist Says Crackdown Crushed Spirit
By TERRIL JONES
The Associated Press
2 July 1989
BEIJING (AP) _ A student involved in China's crushed democracy movement looked out over Tiananmen Square on Sunday and mourned what he said was the death of his generation's campaign for a freer society.
"It was as if I could see all the people, all the tents again before my own eyes," he said with a wistful smile, four weeks to the day after soldiers and tanks wrested the square from pro-democracy student activists.
"It used to be so lively, brimming with energy, people marching here, listening to speeches there, singing over there," he said after gazing over the immaculate _ and empty _ square from the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace. "It feels as though I've died and come back again."
It was four Sundays ago that the People's Liberation Army blasted through hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians and flattened the tent city that had sprung up on Tiananmen, the heart of the movement for democratic reforms.
Martial law authorities opened the Gate and two parks adjacent to it to tourists Saturday to mark the 68th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
Only a few dozen soldiers with automatic rifles ringed the 100-acre square Sunday afternoon. The square was scrubbed clean of all traces of the hundreds of thousands who crossed it during the popular uprising.
The student, one of three representatives from his school who took part in meetings of the banned Beijing Autonomous Student Union, studies social sciences at a well-known college in the Chinese capital. He did not want his name used.
He spent many nights in a sleeping bag and then a makeshift tent on Tiananmen after students began their occupation of it May 13.
Now he says he and fellow students are still reeling from the violence of June 3-4. The government says up to 300 died, but Chinese witnesses and Western intelligence sources say up to 3,000 lost their lives.
"My classmates who took part in the movement _ writing posters, marching at school, chanting slogans _ were completely stunned by the outcome," he said.
Some, he said, are quietly accepting the government line that troops were needed to quell the "counterrevolutionary turmoil," because they want to join the Communist Party to further their careers.
"If a man and woman are equally qualified for a job, work units will want the man, but if the woman is a party member, they'll want her," he said. "It means the person was good in school, is in good health, has the right thoughts and is likely to move ahead in the world."
The student said he had been planning to apply for party membership this year but scrapped the idea after the crackdown.
"I can criticize the student movement, given that the results were hardly what we wanted. But I can't bring myself to trample people underfoot. That's what you have to do to be a party member these days," he said.
During the protests, which began in mid-April, "I thought it was something we must do," he said. "But the result was something that should never ever have happened. I haven't been able to reconcile this with myself yet.
"We didn't think enough. We were very optimistic. We were making noise, being heard, we thought we were adding a little democracy to our system. Now, people have died."
He thinks the crackdown has beaten student voices into silence, at least for a few years.
"The warm spirit of the students has been crushed, they have no political energy," he said, his eyes downcast. "If anyone continues this movement it will be after Deng Xiaoping dies, and it won't be my generation of students."
