Leaked video shows trial of general who refused Tiananmen Square order
Major General Xu Qinxian faced a court-martial for failing to send in his troops during the crackdown of June 1989.
In a rare leak, a video showing the court-martial of the Chinese general who refused an order to send his troops into Tiananmen Square to put down the 1989 student protests has been posted online in full.
The six-hour video shows Major General Xu Qinxian sitting in the dock the following year as he is accused of failing to obey martial law orders after the Communist Party leadership decided to end the protests by force.
“I said I had a different opinion,” Xu says in a quiet voice, using a series of polite circumlocutions to describe his refusal. He recounts his conversations with the political commissar of the Beijing military region and other officers who were trying to persuade him to send in the elite 38th Group Army, which he commanded and was situated just south of the capital.
“I said this is a mass political movement, and that mainly we should use political means,” he says. Later, Xu says the party constitution allowed for members to question and debate, and pointed out that “errors” in its history – a reference to the Cultural Revolution – had come about because “many opinions were not reflected”.
Although the Chinese Communist Party constitution also stated that once a decision had been made it should be followed, there was an exception for “an emergency where execution causes immediate serious consequence”.
When it became clear that his superiors were determined to act, he asked them to find someone else. Xu is thought to have been the only general to refuse orders during the crackdown.
A longstanding story says that as he bowed before his fate, knowing he would be punished for his refusal, the general commented that he would “rather be beheaded than judged a criminal by history”.
Credence is given to this in the video. The presiding military judge asks Xu: “Did you really say that action must stand the test of history, and history will be the judge?” Xu says he thought this, but cannot remember when he said it.
The judge goes on: “Did you really say, ‘Am I really winning praise or becoming a sinner to history?’.” Xu replies simply: “I said it.”
Despite live television coverage broadcast around the world, much about the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 3-4, 1989 remains a mystery, not least the number of those who died. Estimates range from the official Chinese count of 241 to several thousand.
Most of those who were killed were not in the square but trying to block the army as it progressed towards it down the Avenue of Eternal Peace from the west.
It was already clear there were arguments at the highest level of Chinese politics. Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, who tried to negotiate with the students, was fired at the behest of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Xu’s refusal to act sent panic through the regime, particularly as it led to rumours of a wholesale mutiny within the army.
The video shows the arguments were messy. Xu was being treated in hospital for kidney stones at the time the decision to impose martial law was taken in mid-May. Officers were sent to persuade him to carry out his orders, or at least transmit them to his subordinates. He refused.
In the trial he wears civilian clothes and comes across as a friendly retired uncle rather than a veteran army officer who joined up during the Korean War as an under-age teenager in 1950 and worked his way through the ranks.
The video was posted online by overseas dissident group Human Rights in China. It was obtained by Wu Renhua, one of the leaders of the student protests, who fled afterwards by swimming to Macau. He now lives in California and is one of the movement’s most prominent historians.
“While the world knows the ‘Tank Man’, few know the story of the ‘general who said no’,” the HRIC said. “General Xu, commander of the elite 38th Group Army, famously stated that the People’s Army should never fire on its own people.”
HRIC executive director Zhou Fengsuo said Xu also tried to speak up for other officers who showed doubts about the use of force and paid for it with their freedom.
Xu was convicted and jailed for five years. The prosecution claimed he had been influenced by “bourgeois liberalisation”, while the indictment called his actions “vile” and said they “incited the arrogance of the rioters”.
He was later sent to live in internal exile in the city of Shijiazhuang, south of Beijing. As time passed, he was allowed to visit friends in the capital but after he used the opportunity to give an interview to Hong Kong-based newspaper Apple Daily an outraged party leadership sent him back and he stayed under virtual house arrest until he died in 2021, aged 85.
“The video confirmed that General Xu was a true hero, true to the legend,” Mr Zhou told The Times. “And from what I learnt over the years, he represented many within the military force who were against deploying troops under martial law.”
The Times
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