The Truth About Tiananmen Square

Al Hanners is a retired geologist who worked worldwide for a major U.S. oil company for nearly five decades. He worked in the Middle East for the company in the early 1970s.

The 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in May 2006. Unfortunately as so often happens, Tiananmen Square history has not only been rewritten, but consistently rewritten over the years. Americans have one version, the Chinese another. How do I know? I was there, not at the time of the massacre but when the protesters walked in. But there is much more to the story so I will go back to the beginning.

After working as an oil geologist some 30 years and actually living abroad some 20 years, I retired to Bellingham. My wife and I liked to travel and our children had grown up, so about every two years we would go on what we called a major trip, usually one we booked though a tour agency. In 1989 we decided to tour eastern China. Sometime after paying for the two-week China trip, the company managing the actual trip contacted us. They told us that there was unrest in China. We could cancel our reservations and our money would be refunded, but the tour would take place. I said to Fran, “What the hell!” We’ve lived under a dictator, gone through a revolution, panics, an assassination and curfew. Why don’t we go? She agreed and we went.

After two days in Hong Kong we toured eastern China and ended up in Beijing, the capital. Just about every day we would travel by train, plane, barge on the Grand Canal, or tour bus to a new locality. At each new place, we would get a local English-speaking tour guide. As it turned out, it was a wonderful trip. We found the Chinese friendly. For example, on top of the Great Wall of China, some of them wanted and had their photographs taken with me. Of the 20 or 30 people originally scheduled to go, only about 12-15 actually went on the trip. That gave me an opportunity to talk to the local tour guide while traveling. Most of them talked freely about the unrest. Moreover, each day the tour company would hand us an English one-page summary of what was happening in the protest.

The Chinese government’s rush to industrialize was being financed on the backs of workers in eastern Chinese cities and the protest was widespread. It was not a demand for democracy. It was a demand by workers for better working conditions. For example in Shanghai, the average living space for a worker was 36 square feet! In the two weeks we were there I never heard one word demanding democracy!

Our last day in China was spent in Beijing. We knew that protesters would go to Tiananmen Square in the afternoon. Our American tour manager arranged for us to go to Tiananmen Square in the morning so we could see it, but not return in the afternoon when there might be trouble. We found nobody in Tiananmen Square except Dan Rather of CBS and his cameraman. Rather talked extensively without notes and our tour bus driver moved the bus closer so we could hear what he had to say. What he said made sense in respect to what I had already learned.

We left and continued touring Beijing, but unexpectedly we returned to Tiananmen Square in the afternoon and were trapped by the hundreds of protesters walking to the square. While we sat in our tour bus, I took photos of the people going by. They were not students; they were workers, talking, smiling as they walked. Most of the protesters must have gone home again and only a handful stayed. In retrospect it became evident that the student movement for democracy was a late development, when some students converted a manikin into a statue resembling the Statue of Liberty in New York.

After leaving China, I assiduously used TV to follow what was going on in Tiananmen Square. Why did the protest in Tiananmen Square last so long? There are two reasons. One was that Gorbachev of the Soviet Union was coming for a visit, and second, the structure of the Chinese military. Chinese speak different dialects in different provinces. Verbal communication is inadequate. For that reason the Chinese military is said to be organized according to what dialect is spoken. It’s rumored that the military in Beijing was local and refused to fire on local people in Tiananmen Square, so the government replaced those troops with troops from another area. Regardless of whether that is true, the Gorbachev visit was more important. At the time, I said that after Gorbachev has left, the government will clear the protesters out of Tiananmen Square. That is what happened. §