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Tiananmen protests left Hong Kong stunned

RANDOM THOUGHTS By Neville de Silva

I went to work in Hong Kong three months after the student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.

The events that unfolded over a period of six weeks leading ultimately to the confrontation between protestors and the People’s Liberation Army in which at least 214 civilians and security personnel died, left an indelible mark on a complacent and ostentatiously- rich Hong Kong which seemed to consider it different from the mainland . June 4, 1989 was the day that shook Hong Kong, then a British colony but destined to return to China’s sovereignty, out of that complacency. It led to unprecedented protest marches in Hong Kong as millions of people took to the streets in support of their cousins across the border and made the British administration of the day hasten reforms that had been put in the back burner for years.

Those early protests and candle light vigils in Hong Kong I had seen on television in Colombo. As millions all over the world sat glued to their television screens watching the drama being played out in China’s capital, the cameras now and then turned to neighbouring Hong Kong, the media hub of the region and the favourite hangout of China, watchers of all sorts and many countries keen to learn what was happening across the border.

Site of the Tiananmen Square protests of May 4, 1919, 1976, and 1989.

When I arrived in Hong Kong that September, I already knew the names of some leading Hong Kong protestors who had been among the 300,000 that had gathered at Hong Kong’s famous Happy Valley race course for what was known as Democratic Songs Dedicated to China. That was May 27, several days before what the western media later labelled the Tiananmen Massacre.

That crowd of 300,000 swelled the next day into a procession of an estimated 1.5 million, about a quarter of the colony’s 6 million people. Hong Kong had never seen anything like that before in living memory as normally disinterested people whose single minded pursuit of the dollar amazed me in my early years there.

What really surprised me at the turn of political events in Beijing was that two years earlier I had attended an Asian Journalists’ conference and spent a very enlightening two weeks or so in China. Among those who participated in that in 1987 was N. Ram now editor of India’s prestigious Hindu newspaper. This was at the height of liberalization in China sparked by Deng Xiaoping’s reform programme that had at its core the four modernizations. Chinese journalists discussed openly and freely the pros and cons of the new China. In fact I almost took up an appointment in Beijing as a re-write man for Xinhua news agency and as a journalism teacher because the atmosphere seemed so conducive then.

I could not have been more wrong about the permanency of these changes as were so many other journalists in Beijing at the time of the student protests who never thought that the move by some groups from the Beijing University to condole at the death of former party general secretary Hu Yaobang, a prominent reformer, would lead to that awful dawn around Tiananmen Square. When I went to Hong Kong only some names of leading protestors were familiar to me. But before long I was to meet some of them personally. Among them were Martin Lee, a leading QC and Szeto Wah, a school teacher and several others from what might now be called Hong Kong’s democracy movement though at that time it was a nascent politically-oriented grouping which wanted the departing British administration to introduce political reform and direct elections.

During the 10 years I spent in Hong Kong I tried to understand what caused the Chinese leadership to reverse the trend that I had seen two years earlier. I read the newspaper files at the Hong Kong Standard where I worked and spoke to many, many people of different political (to use the word rather loosely) persuasions, journalists both local and foreign and academics.

I must belatedly thank my Scottish editor of the day for assigning me to write a regular sketch on Hong Kong’s legislative sessions because of my long experience covering parliament back home. It brought me face to face with the central figures in protest movement in Hong Kong like Martin Lee and conservative legislators such as Alan Lee and James Tien (businessmen who wanted no change) and the outspoken Emily Lau a strong critic of China. Valuable insights into what happened over those weeks starting in April 1989 with the ceremony to mark the death of Hu Yaobang, came from journalists who had been there in Beijing such as Mike Chinoy, then Bureau Chief of CNN. He almost missed the early story but later scooped all competitors including the BBC and made CNN, then a poor cousin in the electronic media, known the world over.

To millions an enduring image of the Tiananmen Square tragedy ( though much of the violence and deaths never happened in that place) is that of a young white shirted man with a couple of shopping bags in hand standing on the road and defying a column of armoured tanks. But behind that image of lonely defiance is the story of a protest movement that went wrong as it escalated beyond control because it was joined by disparate groups with varying grievances that cumulatively were perceived eventually as threatening the Chinese leadership.

It was not meant to be a challenge to the state or its leaders. It was a desire by students and some intellectuals to see that the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping were hastened and that official corruption brought on by liberalization was ended.

It came to be called a pro-democracy movement later as others with different agendas joined in. Had the leadership responded to those concerns, Tiananmen Square would not have happened. What took the tragic scenes to the four points of the globe was the presence of foreign journalists who had come to Beijing to cover the ice-breaking visit of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that May. They were on the scene when the protests went out of control.

To date nobody could say with certainty how many died in that tragedy. Figures varied from the 214 official figure to 10,000 by the Soviet Union, 7000 by NATO intelligence, 1000 by Amnesty International and 400-800 civilians by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and many more.

Most figures were arbitrary and unverifiable or unverified. It does remind one of the terribly arbitrary figures of civilian deaths in our northeast the other day by the London Times which claimed 20,000 deaths.

The methodology of The Times seems to consist of a mix of clairvoyance and voodoo.

 
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