The aftermath of Tiananmen Square: a survivor tells his story

Courtesy of Humanitarian China

Tiananmen Square — on June 4, 1989 — teemed with students and civilians peacefully protesting for nearly two months before the massacre, one the greatest shows of public outrage in the history of China.

Editor’s Note: Ji is a pseudonym for a Saratoga parent in this story. The parent didn’t feel comfortable sharing his name. University A and City A are also pseudonyms for a Beijing University and a Chinese city, respectively. 

On June 4, 1989, at 6 a.m., Saratoga parent Ji, who was then a student of University A in Beijing, abruptly awakened to banging on his dorm room door. The noise was muffled by his makeshift barricade of chairs and pans. After struggling to tear down the cluttered mess, he opened the door to see his brother, tense but relieved to see him.

“We have to run,” Ji’s brother said. “It’s a crisis; we need to get out of Beijing.” 

Still groggy, Ji then heard the news that would forever change his perspective on his country’s government: The previous night, the Chinese military rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and shot thousands of peaceful protesters, most of whom were college students. 

That day marked the most recognizable instance of outright military force used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against its own citizens. And despite the CCP’s attempts to stifle the records of the massacre, the story of that night and its aftermath lives on through the memories of those who were there. 

Fleeing the city with the help of sympathetic citizens

Ji was nearing the end of his fourth year of university when the protests began. He recalls they started organically; news and organization traveled by word of mouth — and until late April, almost all demonstrators were university students. 

“University students were really where the new ideas and reform concepts took root,” Ji said. “Students not only had the intelligence and exposure to new ideas, but their youth really set them to think and reach out of the box. That’s why revolutions always start with students.”

Ji came of age during the second communist regime, after the 1976 death of Mao Zedong, the leader of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. At the time, China had just begun to open its doors to more international influence, so during the demonstrations, Ji recalls that most students, other than the most fervent student leaders, were protesting against government corruption and economic reform, rather than human rights such as free speech.

At his university, halls were covered with posters calling for action against corrupt government officials, who were siphoning money from government-owned businesses. According to a study by the University of California Santa Barbara, the Chinese press reported more than 300 cases of “corrupt officials” from 1977-1980. 

Like thousands of his peers, Ji joined the ranks of the student protestors. At the time, protestors had little indication a massacre would occur: No radio channels spewed unusual propaganda, no soldiers roamed the halls of his university campus and no student leaders he knew of were disappearing into thin air. Instead,the protests seemed almost harmless in their commonsense demands. So when the Tiananmen Square protests began in April 1989, Ji and his classmates eagerly missed class to join in.

In early May, he and a few friends walked to Tiananmen Square. After weeks of constant protests, nearby civilians had grown accustomed to the students, offering them free taxi rides, food and water and the occasional free accommodation. Ji himself took a free taxi ride to the plaza and sat and protested at the city center for an entire night. 

“I remember while we were marching on the streets, the residents cheered for us. More and more civilians joined in to cheer or even march with us,” Ji said. “There was a sense of camaraderie of ‘we’re all fighting for the same cause’ that kept us going through the night.” 

However, near the end of May, the CCP had, suspiciously, without threats of violent removal, asked students to return to school. Many, including Ji’s brother, did. 

One day before the massacre, news channels announced an unusual curfew. When Ji returned to his room that night, he noticed all six of his roommates were gone. Out of fear of being alone, he stacked pans and chairs to barricade the door.

He fell asleep, unaware of the massacre occurring just 10 miles to the south, only to wake up to news from his brother that the government had massacred hundreds and possibly thousands of protestors in Tiananmen Square. 

In a panic, Ji and his brother ran to the nearest train station. But every train to their hometown, Da Tong, in Shanxi province, was blocked, forcing them to resort to a train headed to Inner Mongolia. Once there, they were able to seek accommodations from sympathetic civilians in cities they passed through who were aware of what had occurred in Beijing.

Knocking on doors for help filled Ji and his brother with a mix of fear and hope — they were wary of identifying as students fleeing Beijing, but also had hope that, because the Tiananmen protests were such a widely respected movement, they would be protected.

And they were right. As they made their way back home to Da Tong, they were offered free rides by train conductors and found residents welcoming them into their homes.

Ji returns to Beijing and lives under fierce propaganda

Due to the CCP’s propaganda campaigns that isolated citizens from foreign influence, Ji took in the full breadth of the government’s repression and militant actions following the massacre only after he came to the U.S. a year later.

What shocked Ji the most was the Chinese media’s representation of the massacre: News anchors made no mention of the brutal violence and stated that protestors were attacking soldiers with a “secret agenda” to destroy China. They accused international anti-communist forces of manipulating young students and disrupting Beijing peace, he recalled.

In the months following the massacre, when Ji had made it home, he heard stories from other student protestors that when they tried to share their horror stories of the massacre, ignorant citizens who had lived under the “old regime” were so embroiled in the state-generated propaganda that they invalidated victims’ sufferings and dismissed the atrocities that occurred. 

In September 1989, Ji returned to school to finish his degree. 

After graduating and leaving for the U.S., Ji recalls his friends who remained in Beijing being sent to military training camps and factory jobs in the suburbs, moved around solely on the government’s whims. 

“Those places are meant to brainwash you, so they are most times not close to big cities. Not close to your hometown,” Ji said. “You’re not doing the things you learned as a profession. You were really just going there to be trained — marching, obeying orders, firing rifles.”

Now living in Saratoga 30 years later, Ji continues to observe the CCP’s control and manipulation over the information citizens receive. According to Radio Free Asia, a non-profit news corporation working to bring uncensored media to media-censoring Asian countries, most people in China under 40 know little to nothing about June 4th, 1989. 

“The whole human rights concept was very, very new,” Ji said. “But people were starting to realize: ‘me as an individual, as a human, maybe I have certain rights.’”