This Day in 1989: April 25, 1990, World Economic Herald Shut Down

On April 25, 1990, The Shanghai city Communist Party Committee officially shut down the famous journal World Economic Herald.

Exactly a year ago, the journal, on April 25, 1989, had published a multi-page transcript of many famous intellectuals in a meeting commemorating the death of Hu Yaobang. Two days later, the journal was forced to halt its publication and its editor-in-chief Qin Benli was removed from his post.

Days of 1989

Days of 1989: June 20, Shanghai Executes 3, Bush Pens Secret Letter to Deng Xiaoping

On June 20, 1989, Shanghai sentenced three people to death for participating in riots.

The White House announced its suspension of all high-level Sino-US official contacts. Yet on the same day, President Bush wrote a secret letter to Deng Xiaoping in order to preserve the relationship.


Days of 1989

Days of 1989: June 9, Deng Xiaoping Receives Martial Law Troops

On June 9, 1989, Deng Xiaoping finally appeared in public after the massacre by meeting with a large assemble of officers of martial law troops. He was accompanied by Yang Shangkun, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Yao Yilin, Wan Li, etc. -- an early indication of who among the top leaders had gained the upper hand.

Deng Xiaoping delivered a lengthy speech to establish the official party line on the massacre.

Also on this day, the city of Shanghai mobilized a hundred thousand workers to clear obstacles in her streets. Normal order gradually returned to the city.


Days of 1989

Days of 1989: June 6, Riots in Shanghai, Yuan Mu Announces Casualty Numbers

On June 6, 1989, the martial law troops are gaining full control of Beijing. But riots break out in many other cities. Traffic are completely blocked in Shanghai, and a sit-in on railway tracks turns violent there with an empty train burned up.

Oversea media are propagating unfounded rumors that "Deng Xiaoping is dead, Li Peng is injured, and Yang Shangkun is on the run." Many western countries have launched efforts to evacuate their citizens from China.

The government of Japan halts exchange programs with China but stops short of economic sanctions. The British government announces that the schedule of returning Hong Kong to China by 1997 will not change. The Soviet government is the only one expressing sympathy and support to Chinese government. They denounce diplomatic pressures from western countries.


In the afternoon, Yuan Mu chairs a press conference on which he announces the first version of the official death toll: more than 300 people died, including 23 university students. Zhang Gong, an officer from the martial law troops emphasizes that

Between 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning of June 4, when the martial law troops cleared Tiananmen Square, they absolutely have not killed a single student or civilian. Military vehicles did not crush any person.

This statement is later mis-interpreted in the western press as the government announcing no one ever died during the massacre.


Days of 1989

Pictures of 1989: Continued Demonstrations on May 23, 1989

Students from Anhui province arrive and march in Beijing.

Students from Beijing Film Academy shoot footage of demonstration.

Demonstrations

Slogans on a pubic bus.

Demonstrations.

Demonstrations.

Demonstrations.

Demonstrations.

Demonstrations.

Demonstrations in Shanghai.

Demonstrations.

Pictures of 1989

Pictures of 1989: Intellectuals March on May 22, 1989

Playwright Sha Yexin joins demonstration in Shanghai.

Intellectuals demonstrate in Beijing.

Reporters from People's Daily joins demonstration

Pictures of 1989: Protests in Shanghai on May 4, 1989

Students at Fudan University gather for protest.

Students at Fudan University gather for protest.

Students in Shanghai in protest march, the banner says "Patriotism is No Crime."

Bus passengers are happy to receive pamphlets from students.

Shanghai

Students stage a sit-in at government office.

Students in sit-in broadcast their demands.

Students in sit-in.

Police watch the students in sit-in.

Students sit-in at the government office, with a replica of Statue of Liberty.

Pictures 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

This Day in 1989: May 9, Young Reporters have their Own Petition

The early days of May, 1989, would later be described as the "low tide" days during the student movement. After the excitements of the earlier waves of demonstrations, students were at a loss of what they should do next. Class strike continued only at Peking University and Beijing Normal University. The Dialogue Delegation was waiting for a response from the government to their request. The newly formed independent student organizations were either engaged in infighting or drifting without a clear agenda. To the students at large, the movement appeared to be over.

It was the young reporters in the official media organizations who took some concrete action on May 9, 1989. After joining the students during the demonstration five days ago, 200 reporters organized themselves and published an open letter of their own. Led by Li Datong of the China Youth Daily, they demanded for press freedom and a reevaluation of the decision to shutdown the Shanghai newspaper World Economics Herald. The petition was eventually signed by over a thousand reporters and editors.

The reporters' action put some signs of life in campuses as well. Students announced that they would launch a bicycle march the next morning to support the reporters, as well as to show the city that they had not given up themselves.


Days of 1989

This Day in 1989: May 4, Large-Scale Protest around the Country

May 4, 1989, the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, was a much anticipated date since the beginning of that year. Yet on the heels of the much more recent demonstration of April 27, the anniversary had lost quite a bit of the excitement. Beijing Students Autonomous Federation launched another large-scale demonstration anyhow, in response to the government's refusal of an equal dialogue.

The demonstration on this day was smaller in scale but a much happier occasion than that of the April 27. Students were no longer afraid of a military crackdown. They treated it largely as a victory lap and received, once again, enthusiastic support from Beijing residents. There were only occasional police human barricades, which the students stormed through without trouble.

At Tiananmen Square, students staged an impromptu commemoration of the anniversary by making speeches. In the happy mode, Zhou Yongjun announced that the weeks-long class strike was now over and urged students to resume classes. It appeared that this current student movement had reached its conclusion.

A couple hundreds young reporters joined the demonstration on that day. They rallied to demand press freedom.

In the afternoon, Zhao Ziyang made a keynote speech to the Asian Development Bank conference in Great Hall of People. Without mentioning the April 26 People's Daily editorial directly, he seemed to have reversed its verdict by claiming that there was no, and would not be, turmoil in the country.

Outside of Beijing, large-scale demonstrations erupt in more than a dozen big cities. In Shanghai, students marched and staged a sit-in protest at the city government office.


Days of 1989

This Day in 1989: April 27, the Day of Glorious Protest March

April 27, 1989 is arguably the most glorious day of the 1989 student movement. On this day, hundreds of thousands of college students in Beijing walked out of their campuses, despite that the demonstration was canceled at the last minute under the pressure and in the face of the new People's Daily editorial which accused their movement as a deadly turmoil.

Throughout of years, many people had expressed that this was the date that they remembered most when looking back of the days twenty years ago.

The event of that day is detailed in my book excerpt.

Also on the heels of this demonstration, Liu Xiaobo returned to Beijing from his academic stay in New York. He had heard the editorial while changing planes at Tokyo but decided to carry forward with his plan. Li Lu was on his way to Beijing from his school at Nanjing. Both of them would play significant roles in the latter stage of the movement.

At Shanghai, the outspoken newspaper World Economics Herald was finally shutdown on this day. At Beijing, while the demonstration was still in progress, news broadcast indicated that the government was ready to hold dialogues with students.


Days of 1989

NYT Archive 1989: Death Sentences in Shanghai

The only death sentences in the ensuing crackdown of the 1989 movement came, surprisingly, from Shanghai, where the situation was considerably milder than that in the capital. It came quickly too. On June 16, 2008, New York Times reported three workers sentenced to death there:

In the first trial of Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators since the military crackdown 11 days ago, the Government today sentenced three young men to death for their role in a violent protest in Shanghai.
... ...

The three workers who were sentenced to death today were charged in an incident that began on June 6 when demonstrators held a sit-in on a railway line to block traffic as a protest against the military crackdown in the capital two days earlier. A train rammed the demonstrators, killing six of them, and the protesters then attacked and set fire to the train.

No one was killed in the fire, but some firefighters were beaten, and the burning of nine rail cars forced the closing of the railroad line for two days. It was not clear exactly what role each of the three men was said to have played in the incident, or what evidence there was for their involvement.

... ...
The three workers are Xu Guoming, an employee of a Shanghai brewery; Bian Hanwu, who is unemployed, and Yan Xuerong, a worker at a radio factory. They appeared to be in their 20's or perhaps early 30's, and none were known as leaders of the anti-Government protests in Shanghai.

NYT also reported that a string of students were arrested, including Xiong Wei, who turned himself in. Xiong Wei was relatively unknown before, during, and even after the movement. It was not clear how and why he landed in the "21 Most Wanted List".

NYT Archive 1989: Turmoil Continues

On June 8, 1989, New York Times continued its extended coverage of "Turmoil in China". Most articles focused on diplomatic reactions of other countries and the desperate ways of foreigners trying to get out of China. Beijing was still described as at a brink of civil war.

People in Shanghai continued to protest the massacre by setting barricades in the city and staging sit-ins on railroad tracks to block rail traffic. In a chaotic situation, a train plowed into people on tracks, killing six and injuring six. The train was set ablaze by the anger mob.

In the capital, 200,000 troops were reported in and around the city. Dissident Fang Lizhi and his family had taken up refuge in the American embassy, causing a diplomatic standoff.

NYT Archive 1989: Focus On The Hunger Strikers

On May 19, 1989, New York Times finally focused its attention to the hunger striker students, calling them the heart of China protest:

The hunger strikers have become the focus of a growing nationwide movement for democracy, and while they are bold young people who dared to rebel against the authorities, they are also inexperienced not only in fasting but also in leading a movement that has risen to dimensions beyond what many of them had imagined.

Their fasting has weakened almost all of them to the point that they spend most of their time sleeping. And yet they are still looked upon by their fellow students as leaders. They are still deciding what strategy and tactics the rest of the students will follow in the struggle with the Government.

A group of seven or eight strikers is the driving force behind the movement, working out the policy options that will be put to the hunger-striking students, although they work closely with many other student leaders who are not fasting. Some of them have been catapulted into prominence in the last month: Wang Dan, a Beijing University history student, and Wuer Kaixi, a freshman at Beijing Normal University, are the movement's most conspicuous leaders.

Mr. Wang, like some other student organizers, initially took part in the hunger strike but then was persuaded to start eating again so that he could negotiate more effectively. Mr. Wuer has continued the hunger strike, and its effects on him are showing. In a nationally televised meeting today with Prime Minister Li Peng, he fainted from hunger and exhaustion.

For the record, Wang Dan had denied NYT's assertion and insisted that he had been faithful to his hunger strike oath throughout the entire time. It's likely that NYT had based the report on the rampant rumors and hearsay in the Square.

The story was more about a 21-year-old student by the name of Xie Wanjun, who had by now ended his own hunger strike:

But if Mr. Xie is willing to take on the Government, he is more cautious in dealing with his family. He has still not told his parents that he joined the hunger strike in the capital and kept with it for 84 hours. After he lost consciousness and was rushed to the hospital for the second time, the medical authorities in his school persuaded him to drop the fast, and now he is eating once more and helping the other hunger strikers.

In the meantime, the Premier Li Peng finally met with a few hunger strike leaders, with the meeting broadcast on TV:

The televised discussion on Thursday, while almost universally regarded by students as unsatisfactory, would have been unthinkable just a week or two ago. Prime Minister Li, who is usually shown on television suffused in dignity, had scarcely sat down in the Great Hall of the People when a student leader named Wuer Kaixi - a freshman from the northwestern Xinjiang Province - rebuked him for being late.

Mr. Wuer and another student leader, Wang Dan, also called on the Prime Minister to stop evading the issues and begin a serious conversation, and they warned that the Government would bear the responsibility for any disturbances.

''In the last few days, Beijing has fallen into a kind of anarchy,'' Mr. Li declared angrily. ''I hope you will think it over. What will result from the situation? China's Government is responsible to the people. We will not sit idly by, doing nothing. We have to safeguard people's property and our students' lives. We have to safeguard our factories. We have to defend our socialist system.''

The sharp exchanges marked perhaps the first time that a Chinese leader has been subjected to the public humiliations that politicians regularly endure in the West.

It also reported that the situation was deteriorating all over China. There had been general strikes in a few factories and blockade of railway traffic in a few cities. In his last-ditch gesture and very last public appearance, Zhao Ziyang went to the Square in a surreal manner:

In another gesture of conciliation, Mr. Li and the Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang, went to Tiananmen Square in central Beijing before dawn today to visit some of the 3,000 hunger strikers whose protest has galvanized the nation into mass demonstrations of support.

''We've come too late,'' Mr. Zhao told the students, according to the official New China News Agency. ''You have good intentions. You want our country to become better. The problems you have raised will eventually be resolved. But things are complicated, and there must be a process to resolve these problems.''

Mr. Zhao added that ''the whole of Beijing'' was discussing the hunger strike, and he called on the students to end the fast.

Meanwhile, Mr. Gorbachev wrapped up his much-disrupted visit in Beijing and headed for Shanghai, where demonstrations were also brewing.

NYT Archive 1989: Gathering Storm

April 26, 1989, the day between the infamous People's Daily editorial and the biggest defiance showing in the history of the People's Republic was a very tense day. In the April 27th edition, New York Times captured the mood of the previous day rather well from several perspectives.

First, the banning of Shanghai's World Economic Herald escalated:

In a clear move to clamp down on criticism, the Communist Party dismissed the editor of the nation's boldest newspaper today and announced that the paper would be reorganized.

The decision to dismiss Qin Benli, editor of the World Economic Herald, and reorganize the newspaper seemed certain to send shock waves throughout the country. Mr. Qin, 70 years old, is a Communist Party member whose newspaper, which is based in Shanghai, has for several years been regarded as the most outspoken and perhaps the best newspaper in the country.

The decision was announced in the middle of the night, and so there was no immediate reaction.

A little more than two years ago, in the last crackdown on ''bourgeois liberalization,'' or Western influences, the Government shut down a few local publications, including a newspaper in the southern city of Shenzhen that had urged the retirement of the senior leader, Deng Xiaoping. But the Herald, a weekly with a circulation of 300,000, is far better known and respected than any of the publications that have faced ''reorganization'' in the past.

The newspaper has enjoyed strong support from those in the Communist Party who favor more rapid political and economic change. Such prominent Communist Party members as the theorist Wu Jiaxiang and the economist Li Yining frequently write for the Herald. In the past, the Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang, is said to have intervened to save Mr. Qin from dismissal, but Mr. Zhao is now on a trip to North Korea, and in any case his influence is widely regarded as waning. 'Violations of Discipline'

The official New China News Agency reported that the Shanghai city government had decided to dismiss Mr. Qin ''on account of his serious violations of discipline.'' This probably referred to the present issue, which the Government banned after discovering that it quoted a range of prominent people criticizing the Government and supporting the student demonstrations.

Then, there are signs of the looming confrontation:

The party also summoned urgent meetings of 20,000 Communist Party officers in Beijing and Shanghai to press what it called a ''grave political struggle'' against student unrest.

Despite widespread fears that a crackdown is beginning, university students today planned a march for Thursday that could lead to a direct confrontation with the authorities.

The Government also declared three student organizing committees illegal, and residents of the northwestern district of Beijing, where several universities are, reported that they had seen soldiers moving in the area. There were widespread but unconfirmed reports that at least 10,000 troops from the 38th Army Corps have been moved from Hebei Province to Beijing.

If the troops were indeed moved to Beijing, they were not directly used until early June. For now, the students only had the regular police forces to contend with.

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.

Walking Together in Shanghai

A few years ago, when the internet fad "flash mob" was introduced in China, It went beyond the usual hippy young crowd who practice it just for the fun of it. Rather, ordinary people, who may not even internet-savvy, found very practical purposes, such as gather a large crowd at a certain department store to buy the same appliance. With the crowd, it's easy to negotiate a on-the-spot volume discount for everyone's benefit.

Or a on-the-fly assembly to express an opinion in public, anonymously.

Large assembly or protests are strictly monitored and practically forbidden in China, although it remains as a right in the Constitution. It's extremely risky for anyone to step up and organize such activities, even with government's approval. Therefore, a "flash mob" gathering, with no trace of its organizers or initial agitators, fits the bill perfectly.

Long before the internet, a very low-tech version of "flash mob" has already been in practice, such as the New Year's Day protest in 1987. In more recent years, with the advance of cell phones and the popularity of text-messaging, it's much easier to reach a larger group of people on an upcoming gathering.

Such flash mob style protests have been practiced before. In 2004, thousands of people gathered on the streets of Shanghai, expressing anti-Japan sentiments. In June last year, a large scale demonstration broke out in Xiamen, protesting the building of a chemical factory in residential area.

A few days ago, another such protest broke out in Shanghai, humorously referred as "Taking a Walk Together", as there is no law against walking together. The purpose was to protest the building of a new maglev train line. The crowd is reported to be huge. They even chanted slogans and sang the national anthem together when confronted by police. Police detained, and soon released, a few people but was generally powerless with the crowd, who seem to be dispersing and gathering at random.

What is more remarkable, however, is that this time the event was reported in local media. Today, the main newspaper in the city, the Liberation Daily (解放日报), published an editorial addressing the issue. In a typical condescending tone, it lectured that while the government needs to listen to people's voices, people should use "normal and legal" channels to express them, instead of resorting to "street politics".

It wasn't a harsh editorial. But it has an all-too-familiar title: We Must Make a Clear-Cut Stand Against Street Politics （必须旗帜鲜明地反对街头政治）. It echoes the most (in)famous People's Daily editorial, We Must Make a Clear-Cut Stand Against Turmoil, published on April 26, 1989. That editorial ignited the then-fledging student movement into a full-scale confrontation.

We haven't seen such language being used often since then.