It’s not hard to understand why the Chinese have absolutely no trust of Clown World or its pet media once one learns the truth of Tiananmen Square. And it does tend to call other Western media reports of China into question.
The US reportedly contacted key leaders among the protesting students and made them an offer—don’t wind down, go harder on the protesting and we’ll give you US passports, CIA-run safe passage out of China, a new home in the richest country in the world, and enrolment in top US universities—Harvard, Princeton, Columbia. Now that was an offer hard to refuse.
In late May, student leader Chai Ling gave her infamously puzzling interview/ talk, where she seemed to predict a Tiananman Square massacre in which she would die. She said she was speaking her last words, as there would be “a massacre which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square” – but she also included the information that she “would not be there” as her new plan was to move to the United States to study there! Years later, she wrote that her remarkable prediction of a coming violent crackdown which would lead to a Tiananmen Square massacre was something she had heard from Li Lu, not her own forecast.
Another person in the leading student group, Kong Qingdong, later recalled how he how he had come across undergraduates using a mimeograph machine to makes copies of personal documents, to give to the US Embassy in return for passports. Two of the top leaders, Chai Ling and Feng Congde, were getting them, he was told by fellow undergraduates.
Kong refused to join the rush to take US passports, saying that the protest was all about making China a better place.
Kong angrily declined to join them. He felt the protests were about standing up for China and enabling socialist modernization for the people—not grabbing passports handed out by a hostile foreign power.
Something else was troubling Kong, which he found hard to articulate. He later said: “I wasn’t fond of the way the forceful way the government spoke. But what they were actually saying was: ‘This is a complex situation. There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord.’ This was the truth.”
Think about that line of agreement between the students and the government: There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord. In other words, some protesters as well as the government knew what was really happening under the surface. But if things were calming down, what changed? How did violence break out? Kong’s answer to that question was cryptic. “When we were little, we watched movies like Guerrillas Sweep The Plain,” he said.
That answer would have meant nothing to a western audience—but it was clear to many Chinese. This was a reference to a classic 1955 Chinese movie in which there are tensions between two groups. They have disagreements but don’t fight. Suddenly, a hidden third body, the Eighth Army, opens fire at both sides and then quickly hides, triggering bloodshed.
And that is what happened. Soldiers and students were sharing food. But on June 3, mysterious thugs, some of whom were said to be from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Mu Xi Di, in the west of the city, attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. The perpetrators were never found.
Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. Other military men arrived and chaotic fighting broke out, with scores of deaths.
This was five kilometers away from Tiananmen Square.
At the Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived and called on students to leave. Student leader Feng Congde worked to gauge protesters’ opinions, and concluded that the majority wanted to vacate the space. “So I announced the decision to leave,” he said. Students left peacefully.
Violence did break out, not in the square, but in the streets around it.
One witness, Larry Wortzel, watched protesters attack a military vehicle and noted how well it was organized—someone had definitely trained them. “This was clearly a tactic rehearsed and even practiced among the demonstrators, since it was used in the same way in separate places around the city,” he wrote.
“All verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully,” said the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews.
Now this is where it gets strange. The next day, a very different story appeared from a few foreign embassies saying that 10,000 people had been killed. This tale said the students in the square had not left. They had stayed and been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers, and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers. This gruesome horror story, supported by no evidence at all, is now viewed by eastern and western historians as entirely fictional.