Originally published 4 June 2019.

In the immediate aftermath, I was unwilling to speak about my experience of Tiananmen. In Beijing, where I stayed until the end of 1990, there was no need to talk about it. Everyone knew what had happened. Later, back in Australia, I was careful not to say too much, partly not to cause trouble for Chinese friends, partly not to complicate things for my Australian colleagues.

When I published an account of my interaction with Liu Xiaobo in Chinese whispers in 1995, I felt I should not identify him by his full name. As one of the thinkers who best articulated the alternative China that many people envisaged in the late 1980s, Liu had played an important, courageous role in the events of 3–4 June 1989. I was with him when he made the fateful decision not to take refuge in the Australian embassy. That same night he was picked up while riding his bike along a nearby street and taken away. When he was released from detention 18 months later, he went on with his reasoned critique of the Chinese system, eventually authoring Charter 08, a call for reform, for which he was arrested again and heavily sentenced in 2009.

He was in prison when he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, which he dedicated to ‘the Tiananmen martyrs’, and in prison at the time of his cruel, state-sanctioned death in 2017, aged 61. His ashes were scattered at sea, preventing the site of his remains from becoming a shrine. It is hard to believe that one individual could so enrage the powerful Chinese Communist Party. It is hard to understand why China would destroy one of its best and brightest for advocating non-violent reform in legal and constitutional ways.

When the 25th anniversary of 4 June 1989 came around, I decided that any self-imposed statute of limitations was over and I agreed to an interview with Stephen McDonald for ABC’s Foreign Correspondent. It was a way to draw attention to Liu’s plight in prison in China. Now the 30th anniversary has come around and he is dead. I feel I owe it to his memory to keep speaking.

Tiananmen remains unfinished business for China. The more extreme the attempt to erase all knowledge of it within China, the more unfinished the business becomes, and the more interest there seems to be. If I mention to Chinese acquaintances that I was in Beijing in June 1989, they unfailingly ask what I saw. They are sometimes a little embarrassed that they have to ask a foreigner. They often reciprocate with their own stories, or stories they’ve heard. Despite China’s immense capacity for propaganda and information control, the silencing has not worked entirely.

That’s not to say I haven’t heard the line that the bloody suppression of the demonstrations was necessary to stop the country from descending into chaos. Killing the chickens to frighten the monkeys. Or that the demonstrators were naive, manipulated for a faction fight on high. Such views reflect a complex and opaque situation. The spectre of the Cultural Revolution was still raw for many. But they also imply that the Chinese political system had no means of responding to a crisis except with brute force.

The resort to sheer power has been the CCP’s modus operandi for a long time and is now a hallowed legacy. The party-state has sought to redefine sovereignty along those lines. If you’re powerful enough, you must do what it takes to maintain that power. This form of Kissingerian realpolitik melds with notions of Confucian benevolence from the top and deferential fealty from below. How plausible or sincere this is in the long run remains to be seen.

After the catastrophe of 3–4 June, a brilliant generation put their heads down and drove the economic engine hard. Their idealism gave way to pragmatism. As they jumped into the sea of business, there was value in partnering with the party. One commentator, describing the contemporary art of those times, dubbed it ‘cynical realism’. The results, as we know, have been spectacular. Determined Chinese turned a forced U-turn into a superhighway. We in Australia are beneficiaries, and complicit. But along the way something has gone wrong too. The amoral option, adopted as the only choice, has produced injustice on a far grander scale than brought people onto the streets 30 years ago. In response, the government is more totalitarian than ever in its rhetoric and its surveillance.

One of Liu’s most penetrating insights was to understand how the problems that assail China are really proxies for China’s own problems. The Tibet problem, the Xinjiang problem, the Hong Kong problem, the Taiwan problem—issues of self-determination at the margins reflect issues of freedom and human rights at the heart. China’s long century of self-reflection began in 1919 with radical calls for science and democracy. This led, at high human cost, to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Then, after years of disaster, came the questioning of the Democracy Wall movement in 1979 followed by the far larger protests a decade later.

For the process of self-reflection to continue now, in order to achieve the best for China, it will take serious intellectual work. Embedded in historical progression, the 4 June anniversary date only becomes more insistent each time it comes around. More information is becoming available as the 1989 generation hands over its demand for reckoning to those who come after. Much is at stake, not only for the past but for the future.

Ironically, the relationship between Australia and China was at its closest in 1989. Australia had tentatively opened the door to Chinese students. It was early days for the international education industry that is now worth billions of dollars and on which our universities and national research agenda depend. In 1988 young, enterprising Chinese were sending money they had scraped together to Australian diplomatic posts hoping for a visa for short-term study in Australia. There was optimism all round. Political engagement was advancing and the foundations were being laid for a trade relationship that would boom.

By the end of June 1989, the student visa applications overwhelmed the posts. There were already many thousands of Chinese students in Australia when Bob Hawke, shedding tears for Tiananmen, promised they could stay. The promise extended to many more who came soon after, some of whom were refugees too, fleeing retribution for their political activism in China. It was a strong, self-selected cohort, with a multiplier built in through family reunion. Talented and determined as a group, the Tiananmen migrants have contributed hugely to Australian society as businesspeople, scientists, researchers, artists and community members.

The first gunshot of 1989 is said to have been fired by the artist Xiao Lu as part of her installation and performance work at the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition in Beijing in February 1989. After 4 June, she sought refuge in Australia, where she lived for eight years. She is ranked now as one of the most significant artists of her generation. Because of her close ties to Australia, the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney staged a retrospective of her work earlier this year, recalling her trajectory from 1989. That’s just one example of how intimately what happened in China 30 years ago has become part of Australia’s historical record too.

What that means, today, for our engagement with the Chinese state remains unfinished business.

We live in an era that lionises a love of beginnings. It is what the media—and through it, imagination—strive for. But discovery, no matter how novel, is never original. It draws on the past. The challenge for the writer is to acknowledge that his or her story is rebuilt from the perspective of the present.

This is what Sigmund Freud called ‘afterwardness’, memory as reprinted in accordance with later experience. It’s what I have wrestled with in trying to convey the events that took place in the heart of China 30 years ago. I was there on the sweltering night of 3 June 1989 when scores of Type 59 tanks rolled through Beijing crushing residents. People standing on street corners were torn apart by tracer bullets, run over or clubbed to death. It was a slow, deadly procession that began after dark and finished at dawn.

The bodies fell in laneways and houses, beside shops and offices, and finally, in a huge ceremonial space six times the size of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This was Tiananmen Square and it soaked up most of the blood. Standing on the apron of the square, beside the vermillion walls of the Forbidden City, and later next to the Great Hall of the People, I watched it unfold. It was life and death in three-quarter time.

The military precision of troops as they encircled student protesters seemed choreographed in the humid air. I was mesmerised and bewildered: would the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army, protect the people, or would it slaughter them in front of Western media and mortified onlookers?

It is a long time ago, but in another way, it is ever present. Such were the scale and brutality of the crime that we keep coming back to it. At least, those of us with a memory do. For most of China, the massacre never happened. The government denies it occurred, and those with knowledge of the event remain silent on threat of jail or torture. Or they did. Recently, as reported in the New York Times, a former soldier has broken ranks and spoken of that night.

Jiang Lin, 66, was a lieutenant in the PLA with a firsthand view of the massacre. She says the brutality she saw was like watching her mother being raped. Speaking up last week to call for a public reckoning, she wondered how fate could suddenly turn so that tanks and machine guns were used against ordinary people. ‘To me, it was madness … If you can deny that people were killed, any lie is possible.’

Jiang’s account tallies with what I wrote about the night when at around 10 pm I heard faint rumblings and dull retorts, like a car backfiring. Along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, old men, women, students and children shored up barricades of bins as flashes of tracer fire shadowed them. Even with the dim street lighting, I could see soldiers in battle gear firing. The noise was deafening. I heard the thud of people being hit before I saw them fall. One youth was squashed into the bitumen; his organs fanned out around him. The grotesque remains of his body were dwarfed by the bulk of the tanks, each with guns swivelling beneath a red star.

People rubbed their eyes and held cotton masks to their faces. They recoiled and then regrouped. And then came the crashing sound of an armoured personnel carrier that had separated from the main force as it careered over road dividers, its tractor wheels tangled in concrete and metal.

A young man lobbed a burning petrol bottle, which forced open the carrier’s metal canopy. A young soldier leapt out, only to be set upon by the crowd. When a student wearing a democracy headband tried to shield the soldier he was shoved aside. Two more soldiers emerged and were beaten to death.

I turned and ran back to the top of Tiananmen Square, where troops and tanks were beginning to encircle the remaining protesters. Students had been here seven weeks, and had erected tents, stalls and loudspeakers. There was a young girl with a long plait waving her arms and talking loudly. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I saw her shudder and then her limbs fly out from her body. Her classmates, their hair lifted by a light breeze, grabbed her and stumbled towards a Red Cross tent. She was laid in a line of bodies. Through it all, loudspeakers repeating the martial law declaration competed with the sobs and screams of those trapped in the square.

By 2 am, hundreds were dead. The troops and tanks had massed on the northern apron and prepared to roll over the tent city of 3,000 unarmed student protesters and half a dozen hunger strikers. The soldiers kept firing, hitting those standing even far away from the square. I heard student leaders urging their followers to flee. Many walked out singing the national anthem; others were murdered.

The students had been waiting for this; so had the foreign media. But while it was a grand finale bestowing a kind of appalling recognition for the students, it was something else for us. We were not participants but to cover the story we had become players. At dawn, as I sat staring at the telex machine that would transmit my story, I wondered how I was going to write about what had happened.

In fact, I wasn’t as certain as some of the sentences I wrote. I’m not talking about facts in the sense of what can be known. The death toll, for instance, is a number. No one could be sure about it, but only because the army refused to reveal how many bodies it scooped up with the blood it scrubbed from the square. I put the figure at 3,000—the estimate of the Red Cross—rather than the 300 claimed by the government.

What troubled me was what can’t be known but can be explored. Because journalists tend to see themselves as in the know, rather than just plain curious, this can be hard to find. Is it because journalism encourages accounts that simulate reality rather than interrogate it? If so, this disguises the disjointed nature of what we witness. Rough seams are smoothed out.

My account of the massacre aspired to be eyewitness history without understanding enough about the subject who does the witnessing. I didn’t rely exclusively on journalism’s formula—but I leant heavily on it and that let the account down. But not completely. While a better starting point would have been to acknowledge that language always begins from speechlessness, and that all stories are in part subjective, it is instructive, all these years later, to have the tragic intent of that night confirmed by a real participant. Former soldier Jiang Lin has proved braver than anyone at the helm of China today. By confirming, as suspected, that some PLA generals opposed the massacre, but were compelled to it by China’s geriatric despots, she has shone a light on who pulled the trigger.

If there’s any doubt about the currency of the lessons from Tiananmen for the Chinese people and the governments that engage with the party and the PLA, hearing China’s defence minister, General Wei Fenghe, speak at yesterday’s Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore should remove them. On Tiananmen, he said, ‘How can we say China didn’t handle the Tiananmen incident properly? That incident was political turbulence and the central government took measures to stop the turbulence which is a correct policy.’

Sadly, despite all the progress in the Middle Kingdom, not much has changed.