This Day in 1989: June 24, 1989, Government Turmoil Ends with New Leadership

On June 24, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party completed its top-level leadership reshuffle at the conclusion of its 13th Congress, 4th plenary session.

Top officials sacked for sympathizing with the 1989 student movement include Zhao Ziyang, Hu Qili, Rui Xingwen, and Yan Mingfu.

Quite unexpected, however, the new General Secretary is Jiang Zemin, former Shanghai party head. Others who received promotion include Song Ping, Li Ruihuan, and Ding Guanggeng.

Those who stayed put in their positions include Deng Xiaoping, Qiao Shi, Wan Li, and Yao Yilin.


On the same day, Beijing Daily published a lengthy article labeling Liu Xiaobo as the "black hand" behind the movement.


Days of 1989

This Day in 1989: May 18, 1990, Jiang Zemin Interviewed by Barbara Walters

On May 18, 1990, American Broadcasting Company (ABC) broadcast an interview of Jiang Zemin by reporter Barbara Walters. This was the first interview of the new General Secretary by a western reporter. It was also the first private interview by a Chinese leader after the Tiananamen Massacre.

The interview was actually conducted on May 2 at the Beijing Diaoyutai State Guesthouse.

Jiang Zemin stated in the interview that the military suppression of the 1989 movement was necessary and that the strong reactions by western countries was "much ado about nothing."

Walters showed a picture of the "Tank Man," famous in the west and asked for the whereabouts of the person in picture. Jiang Zemin replied that he didn't know where the person was but he did not believe that he had been killed. This confrontation is available on YouTube.

Jiang Zemin also called on President Bush to extend China's "Most Favored Nation" trade status.


Days of 1989

This Day in 1989: February 11, 1990, Ten "Republican Guard" Honored

On February 11, 1990, The Central Military Committee Chairman Jiang Zemin issued an order to award ten more soldiers with the honor of "Republican Guard" for their contributions during the Tiananmen massacre.


Days of 1989

This Day in 1989: November 9, 1989, Deng Xiaoping Retires, Berlin Wall Collapses

On November 9, 1989, Deng Xiaoping announced that he was resigning from the post of Chairman of Central Military Committee. He would be officially "retired" as this was his last official post. Jiang Zemin succeeded him as the Chairman, with Yang Shangkun being the First Vice Chairman.

On the same day, the East German government finally gave in to the pressure of her own people and abandoned restrictions for their citizens to visit the west world, leading to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Days of 1989

People of 1989: Qiao Shi (乔石)

Qiao Shi was born in 1924 at Shanghai. He joined the Chinese Communist Party when he was not even 16 years old and quickly became active in the underground. He helped lead a few student movements in that era.

In the early 1980s, Qiao Shi's political career was reaching its peak. He held the offices of Party Central Chief of Staff, Head of Department of Personnel, Head of the Political and Law Commission, etc., as well as a member of the most powerful Politburo Standing Committee. For many years, he was in charge of the personnel and disciplinary matters of the Party.

In 1988, he had an extended work trip to Tibet, for which he was connected to the execution of martial law in Lhasa in March, 1989.

During the 1989 student movement, Qiao Shi had kept an extremely low profile. He only appeared in public a couple of times along with other Politburo members and never voiced any opinion of his own. In the few days after the massacre when an uncertain power vacuum existed at the top, Qiao Shi was once rumored to be the new General Secretary. However, when the dust settled, the post unexpected went to Jiang Zemin. Qiao Shi later became the Chairman of the National People's Congress and the number 3 leader behind Jiang Zemin and Li Peng in the new leadership collective.

On June 23, 1989, Jiang Zemin (right), Li Peng (center), and Qiao Shi (back) meet Li Xiannian (left).

In November, 1989, Qiao Shi led a delegate of Chinese Communist Party dignitaries to visit a few east European countries. They made to Romania and Bulgaria on the eve of their respective political changes, but was too late for Czechoslovak, whose Communist Party collapsed just days before.

Qiao Shi died on June 14, 2015 in Beijing. He was 91.


People of 1989

People of 1989: Wang Ruowang

The outspoken author Wang Ruowang belonged to the older generation who had joined the Communist revolution in China in the very earlier days. In fact, he got himself in jail for that when he was barely a teenager, sentenced to 10 years under the Nationalist regime in 1934. Fortunately he was released only 3 years later. He immediately made a trip to Yan'an, the then heartland of the communists, and joined the Chinese Communist Party. He was only 19 years old then.

Yan'an did not turn out to be the holy place he had dreamed about. He got himself in trouble quickly there due to his outspokenness and saw one of his friends killed during an ideological purge.

In the 1950s, he was labeled as a "rightist" for some of the articles he published. He was expelled from the Party and sent to countryside to reform through labor. That did not work on him however, for he got into trouble again in 1968 by speaking negatively about the top leadership. This time he was sent to jail for 4 years. It's his second time in prison, but first one under the communist rule.

Like most of his compatriots, Wang Ruowang was rehabilitated in the late 1970s with Deng Xiaoping's reform. He was re-admitted into the Party and assigned to be a deputy editor of a literary magazine in Shanghai. And he started writing again.

Wang Ruowang published a series of novels and articles in the liberating 1980s. But it was an article he published in 1986 that got the most attention, as it was titled One-Party Dictatorship Can Only Lead to Tyranny.

So in January of 1987, Wang Ruowang was named one of the symbols of "Bourgeois Liberalization" movement, along with Fang Lizhi and Liu Binyan. [However, there are credible indications that he was named because of a mistake by Deng Xiaoping.] He was once again expelled from the Party. He was also forbidden to travel abroad.

In early 1989, Wang Ruowang marched in the street of Shanghai in April to protest the purge of newspaper World Economic Herald, an early crackdown engineered by then mayor Jiang Zemin. He marched again in May to support the student hunger strike in Beijing.

After the Tiananmen Massacre, Wang Ruowang was once again put in jail for his earlier actions--the third time he saw prison. He was already 71 years old.

He was finally allowed to travel abroad in 1992 and settled in America. He traveled extensively in North America in an attempt to consolidate the hopelessly fragmented oversea dissident movement. His effort failed miserably.

He passed away on December 19, 2001 in a hospital in New York City. He was 83.

People of 1989

People of 1989: Liu Binyan

The famous journalist Liu Binyan was not in Beijing during the 1989 student movement. In fact, he was out of the country in the United States on a lecturing tour. He watched the movement on television and became a prominent oversea voice.

Born in 1925, Liu Binyan spent his childhood in Northeast China under the occupation of the imperial Japanese army. He had to drop out of school after ninth grade because of poverty but he managed to acquire a lifelong passion for books on his own. Later, the young Liu Binyan joined the underground Communist Party in the 1940s.

After the communists took power, Liu Binyan worked as an editor, investigative reporter, and Party secretary of the China Youth News. It was in that position that he first ran into trouble with the authority in the mid-1950s. His budding work on exposing corruption in the "new China" led him to be branded as a "rightist". He was expelled from the Party and sent to a mountain village to be reformed through hard labor.

Liu Binyan's literate career finally took off a couple of decades later, when he was redeemed in 1978, at the cusp of Deng Xiaoping's reform. He was readmitted into the Communist Party became a special reporter for the People's Daily. Throughout the 1980s, he published a series of investigative reports that gained national fame and international attention. His exposure of corrupt officials struck a chord with the common folks and he was praised as "China's conscience." However, his work also tended to blur the line between facts and fiction, a trend deeply rooted in China's literate tradition.

His outspokenness also irked Deng Xiaoping. In January of 1987 and after a series of student protests, Liu Binyan was once again expelled from the Communist Party as a symbol of the socalled "Bourgeois Liberation" movement, along with Fang Lizhi and Wang Ruowan.

A year later, Liu Binyan was allowed to travel abroad. When he was teaching at UCLA, his host Perry Link remembers him as the only scholar from China who showed no interest in Disneyland. Instead, "for days, his favorite hangout was a used-book store run by the Salvation Army. Already self-taught in English as well as Russian, he bought piles of paperbacks for 25 cents apiece and read them until 3am, night after night, devouring everything from the musings of Malcolm X to analyses of Eastern European socialism."

In 1989, Liu Binyan watched the student movement from across the ocean. While his direct influence to the movement was limited, he became a tireless cheerleader on the American media and always ready to spill out inside information he gathered from "his friends in Beijing" and his own optimistic predictions, many of which proved questionable at best.

During the later years of his life as he battled cancer, Liu Binyan lobbied for returning to his motherland by writing letters to a series of Chinese leaders including Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Wen Jiabao. His appeal fell into deaf ears. He finally passed away on December 5, 2005, in a hospital in New Jersey. He was 80.

Despite his dissent, Liu Binyan remained a loyalist to his ideals which included his belief in the "true" Marxism and socialism. Through one of his most famous works, he named it a "second kind of loyalty" -- being both loyal and truthful at the same time.

He had told his wife that he wished to have the following words in his tombstone: "this Chinese laying here, he had done what he should do and said what he should say."

UPDATE: Five years after his death, his ashes were finally buried in Beijing.


People of 1989

NYT Archive 1989: The Banning of The World Economic Herald

While "it appeared that almost all students at Beijing's universities were honoring the boycott [of classes]", New York Times on April 15, 1989, reported a more startling development in the southern city of Shanghai:

In its firmest action so far to stem the growing student campaign for more democracy, the Communist Party today banned an issue of a popular newspaper that published comments openly supporting the demonstrators.

The latest issue of the banned weekly newspaper, The World Economic Herald, had already been printed and contained some of the boldest criticisms of the Communist Party ever published in a major Chinese newspaper. But the party today prohibited the distribution of the newspaper, according to Chinese familiar with the order.

Qin Benli, the editor in chief of the Shanghai-based newspaper, which has a circulation of 300,000, was not in the office this afternoon. The deputy editor in chief, Zhu Xinqun, confirmed in a telephone interview that the newspaper was not distributed today as it normally is on Mondays. Mr. Zhu declined to say why it did not appear.

Several people familiar with the banning said that a Politburo member, Jiang Zemin, who is also party leader in Shanghai, gave the order that The Herald could not be distributed. It was not clear if the order originated with him or someone higher.

The banned issue of the World Economic Herald contained a six-page long proceedings of a symposium of prominent intellectuals commemorating Hu Yaobang. The speakers have included Yan Jiaqi and Dai Qing. Yan was quoted in NYT as saying, "the main problem China has had, up to today, is the lack of democracy." and "Some people who were in charge of ideology have no right to mourn Hu. They stabbed him in the back. They should be tried by history."

This sweep action by Jiang Zemin appeared to have served himself well. Coupled with a "swift management" of the student movement in Shanghai during the period, Jiang ended up becoming the chosen successor of Deng Xiaoping.