Rare footage from trial of Chinese general who defied Tiananmen crackdown order leaked online | Tiananmen Square protests 1989

Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general defying orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual look at the military’s upper echelons at one of the most alarming moments in modern Chinese history.

General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to lead his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army on the outskirts of Beijing to the capital has been the subject of Tiananmen lore for decades.

Six hours of video recording of Gen Xu’s court-martial trial sheds light on the rare act of defiance next year. In the video, Xu said he refused because he did not want to become “a sinner in history.”

Zhou Fengsuo, the leader of the Tiananmen demonstrations who now lives in exile in the United States, said the video “confirms the legend about Xu Qinxian.” “This is the first time we’ve had a clear first-person view of this period,” he added.

The source of the video is unknown. It was first published online last month and More than 1.2 million views only on one YouTube account. Tiananmen movement historian Wu Renhua, who attended the protests, was one of the first people to share it online. He said that this was granted to him on one condition: that he keep its source secret.

Wu said the video was “perhaps the most important piece of data I have collected in my three decades of research.” He believes it to be real, as many of the details have been confirmed by his own separate research.

The demonstrations that gripped Beijing for weeks in the spring of 1989 culminated in a bloody massacre in the early hours of June 4, when PLA troops opened fire on civilians around Tiananmen Square, the 21.1-hectare (53-acre) central square of China’s capital. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed, and the incident remains one of the most sensitive episodes of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule over China. Discussions of the massacre are censored, and there has never been an open or official reckoning with the events or their aftermath.

At the time, there were widespread rumors of dissent within the army. Zhou said that before June 4, many uniformed soldiers came to Tiananmen Square to show their support for the protesters.

When the demonstrations began, Xu, who came from a working-class family of fruit and vegetable sellers, was in the hospital being treated for kidney stones.

However, on May 18, he received orders to deploy 15,000 of his troops to Beijing and impose martial law. Xu expressed his reservations in the video of his military court. He said in a harsh and plain accent: “I said that I had a different opinion on this issue. I said that this was a mass political incident and that it should be resolved primarily by political means.”

Although he eventually delivered the message, he refused to carry out the order. He said he told his superiors that if martial law failed, the commander who implemented it “could become a sinner in history.”

Joseph Torigian, an associate professor at American University and historian of Chinese elite politics, said the video shows the extent to which senior figures in China “exist in fundamentally uncertain political environments.”

Xu’s statement shows that he is grappling with what it means to be a loyal military general in a system run by the CCP. He said he was “concerned about the potential for large-scale conflict or bloodshed.”

Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping said that “whether a person is loyal to the party or not should be judged by their implementation of the party’s ideological and political line,” even if they made a mistake, and talked about the importance of the party listening to different views. Torigian said Xu “seemed to be struggling with himself about when exactly the correct answer was.”

Tiananmen experts say one of the most significant aspects of Xu’s testimony was that he questioned whether the decision to impose martial law could have come from the Central Military Commission, which gave him the order. He said such a serious issue should be discussed by the National People’s Congress, China’s legislative body.

In the years since the massacre, the CCP has tightened its grip on the PLA and made clear that the military serves the party and not any other authority. Torigian said: “The party knows and understands that the PLA is the last line of defense for the security and survival of the regime.”

Loyalty to the PLA remains a concern for the CCP. In recent months, China’s leader and commander-in-chief of the military, Xi Jinping, has purged several senior military leaders over alleged corruption abuses.

Xu was expelled from the CCP and sentenced to five years in prison. He lived the rest of his life in exile from Beijing and died in 2021 at the age of 85.

Additional research by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu