From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

39. Tiananmen
In May 1989 the world watched a bizarre drama unfold in Beijing. It was shown
live on satellite television because the Western media were there in strength with
their cameras in position to cover the Deng-Gorbachev summit. Students had
gathered in large numbers in orderly fashion at Tiananmen Square in front of the
Great Hall of the People. They carried banners and placards to protest against
corruption, nepotism and inflation. The police were benign. The general
secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) himself, Zhao Ziyang, made
encouraging noises, that the students wanted the party and the government to
reform, and had good intentions. As the crowds swelled, the banners and slogans
became more critical, anti-government and strident. They started to denounce the
government and Premier Li Peng by name. When nothing happened, they
targeted Deng Xiaoping, ridiculing him in satirical doggerel. When I saw this on
television, I felt that this demonstration would end in tears. No emperor in China
can be lampooned and ridiculed and continue to reign.
Tiananmen was a strange episode in China’s history. Li Peng was telecast
reading out the declaration of martial law. I watched excerpts of Beijing
television relayed by satellite via Hong Kong to Singapore. One vivid pre-
martial law episode showed representatives of the students in the Great Hall of
the People arguing rudely with Premier Li Peng. They wore jeans and T-shirts.
Li Peng was in an immaculately pressed Mao suit. The students scored heavily
against Li Peng in that TV encounter. The drama reached a climax when soldiers
tried to march into the square and were repulsed. Finally, on the night of 3 June,
tanks and armoured personnel carriers rolled in while the world watched on
television. Some researchers who have sifted through the evidence were
persuaded that there was actually no shooting in Tiananmen Square itself, that
the shootings took place as troops accompanying the tanks and armoured
personnel carriers were forcing their way through the streets leading to the
square.
It was unbelievable. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had turned its

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guns on its own people. I felt compelled to issue a statement the following day, 5
June:
“My cabinet colleagues and I are shocked, horrified and saddened by this
disastrous turn of events. We had expected the Chinese government to
apply the doctrine of minimum force when an army is used to quell civil
disorder. Instead, the fire power and violence used caused many deaths
and casualties. They were totally disproportionate to the resistance
unarmed civilians offered.
“A China with large sections of her people, including her best-
educated, at odds with the government means trouble, with people
resentful, reforms stalled, and economy stagnant. Because of her size,
such a China could create problems for herself and her neighbours in
Asia.
“We hope wiser counsels will prevail to pursue conciliation, so that
the Chinese people can resume the progress which the open-door policies
have brought them.”
I did not condemn them. I did not regard them as a repressive communist
regime like the Soviet Union. A certain momentum had been built up by mass
demonstrations in those two months.
The reactions of ethnic Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and
Singapore were markedly different. People in Hong Kong were distressed and
terrified. They had watched the tragedy unfold on television almost 24 hours of
the day. They identified themselves with the students. Some Hong Kong youths
had even camped with them in Tiananmen Square. That was a time when China
had encouraged Hong Kong and Taiwanese journalists and visitors to get closer
to China. When the shooting took place Hong Kongers were distraught at the
prospect of coming under the control of such a cruel government. There were
spontaneous outpourings of grief and rage. A million people took to the streets
soon after the scenes appeared on television. For days they continued
demonstrations outside the Xinhua News Agency, the unofficial PRC presence
in Hong Kong. They helped protesters escape from the mainland through Hong
Kong to the West.
In Taiwan, there was sadness and sympathy for the students but not fear.
There were no mass demonstrations of protest or grief. They were not about to
be governed by China.

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Singaporeans were shocked. Few believed that such fire power was
necessary, but nobody demonstrated. People knew China was different, a
communist country. A delegation of students from the universities presented a
protest letter to the Chinese Commercial Representative’s Office.
It was an instructive moment, highlighting the different positions,
perceptions and emotional involvement of these three groups of ethnic Chinese,
placed in varying degrees of political proximity to communist China.
But for his part in ordering the PLA to clear Tiananmen, Deng would have
been eulogised in the West when he died in February 1997. Instead every
obituary was laced with heavy criticism of the brutal crackdown on June 4 and
every TV soundbite included a playback of the same scenes of Tiananmen. I do
not know how Chinese historians will evaluate his role. I consider Deng a great
leader who changed the destiny of China and of the world.
He was a realist, practical and pragmatic, not ideological. Twice he had been
purged by Mao, but he came back to power to save China. Twelve years before
the Soviet Union collapsed he had known that the centrally planned economy did
not work. He opened up China to free enterprise and the free market, starting
with the special economic zones on the coast. Deng was the only leader in China
with the political standing and strength to reverse Mao’s policies. Like Mao,
Deng fought to destroy the old China. But he did what Mao did not do. He built
the new China, using free enterprise and the free market “with Chinese
characteristics”.
A veteran of war and revolution, he saw the student demonstrators at
Tiananmen as a danger that threatened to throw China back into turmoil and
chaos, prostrate for another 100 years. He had lived through a revolution and
recognised the early signs of one at Tiananmen. Gorbachev, unlike Deng, had
only read about revolution and did not recognise the danger signals of the Soviet
Union’s impending collapse.
Twenty years after Deng’s open-door policy, China shows every promise of
becoming Asia’s largest and most dynamic economy. If it avoids disorder and
conflicts, either domestic or international, it will become a giant economy in
2030. When he died Deng left the Chinese people a huge and promising legacy.
But for him the People’s Republic of China would have collapsed as the Soviet
Union did. If China had disintegrated, the Western media would have
sympathised with the Chinese people as they have done with the Russians.
Instead, the West has to weigh the prospect of a powerful China in 30–50 years.
Three months after Tiananmen, on 24 August, Hu Ping, China’s minister of

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commerce who had accompanied me on my provincial tour in 1988, called on
me. Premier Li Peng wanted him to brief me on the “6-4” incident (“6-4”, June
4th, is a Chinese shorthand – they refer to big events by the month and day on
which they occurred). The situation was now stable, but the impact on China had
been great. During the 40–50 days of turmoil, China had lost control of the
situation. The students had used the problems of corruption and inflation to rally
people to their cause. Their police lacked experience and were not able to deal
with such demonstrations as they did not have water cannons and other riot
control equipment.
He said that by early June, the students had militarised themselves by
robbing weapons and equipment from the PLA. (I had not read of this.) The
troops tried to enter Tiananmen Square on 20 May but were obstructed. They
were withdrawn and “re-educated”. On 3 June the troops began another push.
Some were armed, but many were not. All had orders not to fire. In fact, the
ammunition pouches of many of the troops contained biscuits. They had no
rubber bullets. The day after the incident, he himself had toured Chang-An Road
(road of eternal peace), the stretch from the Military Museum to the Diaoyutai
guesthouse, and seen the smoking wrecks of 15 tanks and armoured cars. The
troops had acted with great restraint, abandoning their vehicles and firing shots
into the air. His ministry was located near the square and he saw the million-
strong demonstration. In fact, 10 per cent of the staff of his ministry and of other
ministries had joined the demonstrators. They were also against corruption and
were sympathetic to the students. Casualties, Hu Ping insisted, were caused
when the troops were trying to get to Tiananmen Square, not in the square itself
as the foreign press claimed.
Since then, foreign businessmen and their Chinese staff had returned to
work. He believed that their foreign friends would gradually understand. Some
young Chinese had links with an intelligence agency of a Western country and
had spread Western opinions and information through advanced equipment. (I
took this to mean the fax machine.) Although Western countries had now
imposed sanctions, China would never allow foreign interference in its internal
affairs. But most of these countries, including international banks, had not taken
sanctions further. Contacts were being restored. He hoped Singapore-China
bilateral relations would stay good because they were on firm foundations.
“6-4” was a shock to me and the people of Singapore, I replied. We had not
expected to see the use of such tremendous fire power and force. We were
accustomed to seeing on television, almost nightly, clashes between South

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Korean police and workers and students, white South African policemen beating
up blacks, and Israelis using tear gas, rubber bullets and other weapons against
Palestinians, with occasionally one or two deaths; tanks and armoured cars were
never used. Singaporeans could not believe what they had seen – a Chinese
government that had been so reasonable, forbearing and tolerant in May,
suddenly turned brutal, using tanks against civilians. Singaporeans, especially
ethnic Chinese, could not understand this and felt deeply shamed by such an
uncivilised action. There were deep mental scars.
China had to explain to Singapore and the world why it was necessary for the
demonstrations to be put down in this way, why there was no other way. To go
overnight from “soft” to “hard” was not explicable. China’s real problem was
not with countries in Southeast Asia which had neither the wealth nor
technology to help China modernise. Its problem was with the United States,
Japan and Europe. The United States especially, through the World Bank and the
IMF, had done China many good turns. China had to erase the bad impression it
had created. I suggested they get some American public relations firm to help in
this task. Americans were an emotional people. Television had a tremendous
impact on them. Senators and congressmen controlled the president and money;
China must pay close attention to them. Fortunately for China, President Bush
had lived in China for several years and knew it better than most Americans. He
had been trying to calm down Congress.
I cautioned that if China stopped sending students abroad because of the
added problems they had caused through faxing their ideas to their friends in
Beijing, China would shut itself off from knowledge and technology. The loss
would be incalculable.
He assured me that their policies on students and on opening up would not
change. Many businessmen from Taiwan were coming in to invest. Their policy
towards Hong Kong and Taiwan also would not change. But the situation in
Hong Kong was more complicated, he said. The slogans people had coined in
Hong Kong had changed from “Hong Kong people rule Hong Kong” to “Hong
Kong people 
save
Hong Kong”. He did not refer to the enormous outpouring of
fear and sympathy in street processions of a million Hong Kong people in
protest against “6-4”.
A sad memory I have of Tiananmen Square, packed with demonstrators
sporting slogans on headbands, is of Zhao with a megaphone, almost in tears,
pleading with the students to disperse, telling them that he could no longer
protect them. That was on 19 May. It was too late. The CCP leaders had decided

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to declare martial law and use force if necessary to break up the demonstrations.
At that stage, the students had either to disperse or be forcibly removed. Zhao
had not shown that toughness needed in the leader of a China on the verge of
luan
(chaos). Orderly protesters had been allowed to become defiant rebels. If
not firmly dealt with, they could have triggered off similar disorder throughout
the vast country. Tiananmen is not London’s Trafalgar Square.
Communist China has adopted the Soviet practice of the “non-person”.
However powerful a leader has been, once he is out he becomes a non-person
and is never mentioned in public. Although I would have liked to meet Zhao
Ziyang on my later visits to China, I could not raise the subject. A few years
after Tiananmen, I met one of his sons and was given a glimpse of what life had
been like for Zhao and his family after his fall from grace. Zhao had had to move
out of Zhongnanhai, where all party leaders lived, to a house occupied by Hu
Yaobang (the former general secretary of the party) when Hu was a director of
the organisation department of the CCP. For the first few years Zhao had a
sentry at the entrance and his movements were monitored. Later, the surveillance
was relaxed. He could play golf at a Chinese-owned golf course in a Beijing
suburb but not on a foreign joint-venture golf course. He could visit inland but
not coastal provinces, to minimise contact with foreigners and the resulting
publicity. Zhao’s children were overseas, except for one daughter who worked in
a Beijing hotel. His living conditions were comfortable. His family could visit
him. By Soviet standards of treatment for non-persons, he was not badly off. He
was better-treated than Krushchev had been by Brezhnev, or Gorbachev by
Yeltsin.
The man who publicly carried the international and domestic odium for the
declaration of martial law and the forcible dispersal of the crowd at Tiananmen
was Premier Li Peng. In fact the decision was made by Deng, supported by
several of the Long March veterans. I first met Li Peng in Beijing in September
1988. He had taken over as premier from Zhao Ziyang who had become general
secretary. Li was not as outgoing as Zhao. A Russian-trained engineer in his
mid-60s, he had a good, capacious mind and was always well-briefed and careful
with his words. He was not the back-slapping type and could take offence when
none was intended. I adjusted to his temperament and we got on. After I came to
know him better, I found him a sensible if conservative man.
He was the son of a leading communist and had been adopted by Premier

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Zhou Enlai. He has no provincial accent at all, because he lived where the CCP
headquarters were, with the Zhou family in Yenan, and later in Beijing. His wife
is more outgoing, an easy conversationalist with an attractive personality. Unlike
most Chinese leaders’ wives who kept in the background, she frequently played
hostess. She spoke English for social purposes. Choo found it easy to talk to her
in English without interpreters.
At our formal discussion Li Peng asked about Singapore’s business
developments in China. I said Singapore investors faced many difficulties. Too
many had lost money and become discouraged. The word had got around that
there was confusion in China, so investments had slowed down. They could not
understand why Chinese managers and supervisors could not exercise discipline
over Chinese workers. Singapore-and Hong Kong-owned hotels needed to
employ their own Chinese as supervisors to discipline the staff. Even so there
were problems. For instance, workers sacked for removing materials from a
hotel had to be reinstated because other workers created trouble. Labour
relations had to change if China wanted progress. They should allow investors to
manage their own enterprises, including hiring and firing workers.
He replied that foreign investors were welcome to make money, but China’s
policy was to ensure that they did not make too much money. (I took this to
mean that, whatever might have been agreed, if in their opinion profits were too
high, they would find some way of making the division of profits more
equitable.) China’s taxation policies in the special economic zones were better
than those in Hong Kong. But he admitted that foreign investors faced low
efficiency in the government and much red tape. China had great difficulty in
solving this. Many state-owned enterprises were overstaffed and making losses.
They had to care for retired workers. With the free market, China’s wage system
had become absurd. A senior professor in a well-known university had a salary
of about 400 yuan. The professor’s daughter, an attendant in a foreign enterprise,
received as much. No one could say that the contribution of the daughter was as
large as that of the father. The entire wage system would have to be changed, but
he could not raise the salary of the professor because the government had
insufficient resources. China had achieved much since it initiated the policy of
opening up to the outside world, he said, but inflation had been very high and
had to be controlled by slowing down the rate of investments in construction.
China would not reverse the reforms. He was confident they would overcome
their difficulties.
Asked for an assessment of the security situation in East Asia, I painted an

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optimistic picture of growth and stability, provided there were no security
upsets. The Soviet Union was contained by both the United States and China.
The US policy was to coopt Japan with its economic strength to supplement its
own while providing security for Japan. As long as this arrangement prevailed,
there was no need for Japan to rearm. Japan did not have nuclear capability, but
it was possible that Japan would go it alone if the United States proved no longer
dependable. In that case the threat to all countries in Southeast Asia would
increase. Most Japanese leaders of the older generation wanted to continue this