5

55 DAYS AT TIANANMEN

Deep in the bowels of Beijing’s underground city, Dixia Cheng, a ghost train rattled ahead with a dreadful clanging, carrying soldiers in military fatigues, faces smeared in black, armed with 7.62mm-calibre Type-79 submachine guns. Dixia Cheng had never been used to shelter the population in the event of a nuclear attack as Mao had intended twenty years earlier. On this evening, 3  June 1989, a convoy of special troops was on its way to crush the capital’s inhabitants: students, and residents of the hutongs—the alleys around Tiananmen Square—who had come out in support of the protesters. Carved out of polystyrene, the Goddess of Democracy, a ghostly simulacrum of the Statue of Liberty, stared out of the shadows at Mao’s portrait, which loomed swollen-faced and with a proud smile over the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

In silence, the soldiers poured out of the underground tunnels via the exits at Zhongnanhai, the government palace at the Central and South Lakes, to the west of the Forbidden City. This was the regime’s stronghold, right behind Tiananmen Square. The soldiers were paratroopers of the 15th Airborne Division, the vanguard of the Air Force’s rapid response unit and expert in attacking the enemy from behind, as well as in law enforcement. This was the unit that had re-established order in Wuhan in 1967, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. They were supported by the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary police force, whose training had proved insufficient when it came to quelling the student unrest, but who knew Beijing well. Primarily, the paratroopers were supported by commandos from Unit 84835, from the far-flung military district of Ningxia. Their speciality was “decapitation”—the art of taking out an enemy unit’s leader.

Their mission was a surprise raid to retake control of Tiananmen Square, occupied by the protesters. The element of surprise was only relative, given that shootings had already taken place in various different suburbs. To the west of the city, the repeated sound of gunfire suggested the worst.

Thirty years later, the full extent of the tank battle that took place in the heart of the capital has still not been fully understood, nor acknowledged by the CCP.  Tanks from the 21st Corps were firing at tanks of the First Cavalry Regiment, part of the 38th Army Corps, a Beijing unit that was not prepared simply to stand by doing nothing while the Tiananmen Commune was crushed.

Ivan Vladimirovich Grigorov, an advisor at the Soviet embassy in Beijing, witnessed these events. He hurried to the scene on the night of 3–4  June, where he observed clashes between PLA units, confirmed by other witnesses. That night he sent the Kremlin a report, some details of which were supplied by sources at the highest level of the Chinese secret services.1 For the previous fortnight, Grigorov, the KGB rezident in Beijing since January 1987, had been under orders to send Moscow detailed and accurate information, several times a day, about what was going on in the Chinese capital. He was familiar with PRC politics, having been part of the Soviet delegation responsible for organizing a ceasefire with China following the border conflict on the Amur River (Ussuri).

His dispatches were read not only by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, but also by Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev had been deeply offended by the inauspicious welcome the Chinese had afforded him just two weeks earlier, on 15  May. That day had witnessed the first Sino-Soviet summit since the longstanding split thirty years earlier. Yet, instead of receiving Gorbachev with pomp and ceremony in Tiananmen, the Chinese had organized a low-key welcome ceremony at the airport. There was a good reason for this. For the previous forty-eight hours, 3,000 students had been waging a hunger strike at the square.

Tiananmen has been the iconic location of student demonstrations since the protests against the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It was where Mao Zedong had declared the communist victory in 1949. This “sacred ground”, as a senior leader has called it, has frequently borne witness to the struggle between what could be called the yin and yang of Chinese politics: the bright revolt of youth, against the dark forces of communist power. In 1966, young people brandishing their Little Red Books had cheered the Great Helmsman in Tiananmen, unaware of how they were being manipulated by Mao and Kang Sheng. In 1976, Chinese youth had marched there in memory of Zhou Enlai, demanding the opening up of the country—a strategy deployed by Deng Xiaoping to prepare the ground for his return to power. In 1986, young people had demonstrated on the square in support of student movements in other cities. The unintended consequence of those protests had been the fall of the reformist general secretary, Hu Yaobang, who had been forced to resign.

Deng Xiaoping against Mikhail Gorbachev

On 16  April 1989, Hu suffered a heart attack and died. The following day, thousands of students gathered in Tiananmen Square to show their support for his reforms, demanding that his agenda be pursued and the “fifth modernization” continue its progress. As celebrated dissident Wei Jingsheng declared, this was democracy in action. And so began the “55 Days at Tiananmen.”2

The leaders who lived at Zhongnanhai were reluctant to act against the students, many of whom were the children of party cadres, and not least because international television stations, CNN and ABC in particular, were broadcasting these images of China in turmoil around the clock. On television screens around the world young people were shown with their hands outstretched towards the Goddess of Democracy, represented by the gigantic polystyrene statue that stood facing Mao’s enormous portrait.

Unlike his predecessors during the Cultural Revolution, Grigorov was not barricaded inside the Soviet embassy compound. He was able to go out and find out what was going on, with the help of his agents and contacts—from the local newspaper-seller to a scientist at the Academy of Sciences, to the Soviet students there to witness the rebellious spirit of their Chinese companions. Along with Ivan Fedotov, an embassy advisor, Grigorov had been diligently gathering intelligence for the increasingly astonishing reports sent back to Moscow. Some information came directly from the Chinese secret services. Much water had flowed under the bridge during recent years, and there had been a considerable thaw in the formerly icy relations between the Chinese special services and the Russian “organs”, as the KGB and the military GRU were known.

A month of peaceful demonstrations had already gone by. From senior members of the party up to the top brass, with Deng Xiaoping at the helm, the Chinese leadership had underestimated the rise of Gorbachev, a reformer whose policy of perestroika was clearly influencing the younger Chinese generation. Deng wanted somehow to conjure a market economy while maintaining the one-party system, and he feared a Russian-style political revolution. Since 1987, he had had no official position, except for the presidency of the all-powerful CCP Central Military Commission, which controlled the PLA and its 3 million soldiers. Another old-timer, Yang Shangkun, a veteran of the Long March and victim of the Cultural Revolution, was deputy leader of the Commission and the recently appointed president of China. Both Yang and Prime Minister Li Peng—a protégé of Zhou Enlai and a Hakka like Deng—supported Deng’s wariness of the Soviets. Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang’s successor as general secretary of the CCP, felt a great deal of respect for Gorbachev.

Gorbachev himself was not unconcerned by what was going on in the PRC: “I have a lot of admiration for the Great Wall,” he said to a group of journalists during his trip, “but walls are bound to fall sooner or later”. His words were bold, though perhaps not as audacious as those of the journalist who shot back, “Even the Berlin Wall?” Perhaps, was Gorbachev’s response.

Fearing for Gorbachev’s safety, bodyguards from the 9th Section of the KGB decided to cut short his three-day stay in Beijing. He left for Shanghai, where the situation was calmer and the local leader, Jiang Zemin, had a better relationship with the city’s students. (This did not stop him from deciding to shut down a local magazine, considered too reformist by his mistress, the head of propaganda Chen Zhili.)

A drama was playing out behind the scenes. On the eve of Gorbachev’s visit, on 14  May, a secret meeting had been held of the Politburo’s Standing Committee, the five men who officially led the CCP and China. On that occasion, the policy of taking a moderate line with the students, as advocated by Zhao Ziyang, had apparently won out. Why not enter into discussions with them, rather than crack down on them? The party leaders known as the “Immortals”—Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun, Bo Yibo, Peng Zhen and Chen Yun—were responsible for maintaining socialist principles and keeping alive the memory of the Long March; they acquiesced to Zhao’s suggestion. But they remained busy behind the scenes.

Deng wanted to know more. He was receiving information from the all-powerful security coordinator, Qiao Shi, who was getting contrasting but disturbing reports from his agents. He was a practical man: after Gorbachev had returned to Moscow, Qiao went with Zhao Ziyang to Tiananmen Square at daybreak, to talk to the students. On 15  May, the leaders in Zhongnanhai received shocking news from agents of the Gonganbu: 1 million protesters had come out in support of the hunger strikers. A delegation travelled the 800 metres separating Tiananmen from Zhongnanhai, with a list of grievances to be handed to the leadership, but they were set upon by truncheon-wielding Gonganbu agents. In the afternoon, a senior party official, Yan Mingfu, who was director of the United Front Work Department, went alone to meet the demonstrators, promising them that they would be allowed to return to their campuses. He praised them for advocating reform, and even suggested they take him hostage in order to guarantee that they would be able to leave Tiananmen Square without risk.3

Qiao Shi, puppet master?

Grigorov knew Qiao Shi well. Along with Jia Chunwang, the head of the Guoanbu, Qiao was one of his principal interlocutors. It was Qiao, the head of the party’s security services, who had telephoned Ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky two days previously to explain that the welcoming ceremony for Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev would be held at the airport. After the ceremony, a convoy had taken them to the Diaoyutai guest residence, where Qiao himself had kept an apartment, until his recent move to Zhongnanhai with his wife.4 The obvious purpose of this chosen location was to prevent any contact between Gorbachev and the Tiananmen demonstrators, who were waving placards in Russian and Chinese to cheer comrade “Ge-Er-Ba-She-fu” and his policy of reform.

Qiao Shi had been pointing out since the beginning of the year to whoever was prepared to listen—both diplomats and journalists—that “outside forces are at work”, without specifying whether he was referring to the CIA or the KGB.  After Gorbachev’s return to Moscow, Qiao Shi had gone out to Tiananmen Square with a megaphone to tell the students to return home, without success.

I have not been able to consult, as Grigorov did, the huge file on Qiao Shi in the archives at Yasenovo, Russian foreign intelligence headquarters. But over the years I have studied his little-known career in detail, attempting to better understand his growing political importance as one of Deng Xiaoping’s preferred militants, and his complexity as a man who was both ideologically rigid, yet open to the reforms called for by Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. Events were soon to make this clear.5

Aged sixty-nine, with a long face and tortoiseshell-rimmed tinted glasses, perfectly manicured fingernails, a well-cut Western suit and expensive shoes (paired with 5-yuan socks), Qiao Shi was a man of contrasts. He was quite tall, he liked to run and swim, and he had managed to climb discreetly right to the upper echelons of the secret services. Some found him cold and austere, a man of few words with a fixed smile; his appearance suited his position, according to some foreign reporters. But others saw him quite differently, finding him “warm, personable and friendly.”6

Was he a Janus? Qiao Shi—which literally means “the high stone”—was a nom de guerre that referred to his height and impressive girth. Back in 1940, when he joined the underground Shanghai Communist Party and became secretary of a cell, the 16-year-old was still known as Jiang Zhaoming. He was born in December 1924 in the Year of the Rat, in Zhejiang city in the region of Dinghai, south of Shanghai. He swiftly made his way to the top of the Communist Youth League. At St John’s Anglican University (Sheng Yuehan), one of the best-known universities in China, he studied European civilization and learned to speak fluent English. Its alumni include members of the Soong family, and many other well-known figures: Rong Yiren, the communist billionaire who encouraged CCP leaders to negotiate with the students of Tiananmen; the great writer Lin Yutang, author of The Importance of Living, who escaped to Taiwan; Raymond Chow, the Hakka producer of kung fu films by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan; and the Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, who built the Louvre Pyramid in Paris.

Going to university with such impressive classmates was bound to open the eyes of Qiao, as a young student who was curious about everything, as passionate about Shakespeare as about Marx. He was very busy, since he was also operating as an undercover agent at the University of Tongji, whose arts and sciences campus was moved to Shanghai in 1946. In 1943, the Japanese invaded the Western concessions in Shanghai, where the communists had taken refuge from the Kuomintang. Liu Changsheng, one of the heads of the CCP’s intelligence service in southern China, gave Qiao Shi a leg up. Aided by his young wife, Wang Yuwen, Qiao was now active in the sensitive area of “secret party communications”.

Family ties were the traditional gateway into the Chinese elite or power, as we saw in the case of the defector Yu Zhensan. The same was true of Qiao, giving him unexpected opportunities to become an activist. Chen Bulai, a well-known journalist with links to Chiang Kai-shek, was none other than Qiao’s wife’s uncle. He became Chen’s secretary, and thus managed to gather vital information that established his reputation as an excellent secret agent in leading communist circles.

The civil war and the anti-Japanese resistance were the prelude to the eventual communist victory, and this was a useful period for the capable Qiao, now a youth leader in Hangzhou, in his native Zhejiang. From 1954 to 1964, he worked as a technical manager at the Anshan Metallurgical Company, before becoming head of the Institute of Studies at the Jiuquan Steel Company. This was a highly sensitive position, for among its other activities the company was secretly manufacturing weapons for the PLA.  There was just one shadow that fell over this perfect picture: Qiao’s wife—now simply called Yu Wen—was caught up in the turmoil of the anti-rightist campaign in 1957; her imprisonment slowed her husband’s rise.7

The turning point in Qiao Shi’s career came in 1964. Around the time that China detonated its first atomic bomb, he entered the ILD, the central party’s political intelligence service that maintained contact with “brother parties” abroad and, equally importantly, gave support to third-world liberation movements. Qiao owed this post to the backing of his first mentor, Liu Changsheng, who went on to become the president of the China–Africa People’s Friendship Association. Qiao became head of the Chinese–African Solidarity Committee, in charge of aiding pro-China guerrilla movements in Congo, Burundi and Zimbabwe. This was not really about countering Soviet revisionism in Africa, and was still a long way away from the Chinese focus on African investment that has characterized Beijing’s relationship with the continent in the twenty-first century.

In Beijing, the Cultural Revolution had swept away everything in its path. Liu Changsheng was murdered by the Red Guards in 1967.8 As we know, it dethroned Peng Zhen, the Beijing mayor and another of Qiao’s protectors. Happily for Qiao, he had several other cadres from the special services keeping an eye out for him, in particular Luo Qingchang, the untouchable head of the Diaochabu, who had Zhou Enlai as his protector. Strengthened by these various patrons, Qiao Shi was trying to be all things to all people. Ten years later, he turned up as deputy head of international relations, while his wife, Yu Wen, became head of the ILD’s Research Bureau, then deputy director of the party’s propaganda department.

Most important of all, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Qiao Shi had the protection of two former party leaders who had the distinction of being economists developing relationships—guanxi—in the intelligence field: the first was Bo Yibo, who became deputy prime minister in 1978 and was the father-in-law of Jia Chunwang, future head of the Guoanbu; the second was Chen Yun, who invented the concept of economic intelligence. Chen had begun his political life as an activist in Shanghai, working undercover for Zhou Enlai’s and Kang Sheng’s Teke.

Qiao Shi travelled a great deal in the entourage of the new president, Hua Guofeng: to Romania, Yugoslavia and Iran, countries whose own special services were interested in cooperating with the Chinese against the Soviets. The overthrow of the Shah obliged Qiao to renegotiate agreements with the Savama, the new Iranian secret police serving the Ayatollah. But he excelled in behind-the-scenes negotiations, and this minor inconvenience was not enough to stop his rise to the top.

In April 1982, at the age of fifty-eight, Qiao became head of the ILD.9 In this capacity, he made technical-oriented trips to Algiers, Tehran and Pyongyang, where he established a close collaboration with his North Korean ILD counterpart, Kim Yong-nam, and the head of state security, Kim Byong-ha. His rise coincided with that of a veritable “security lobby”, reinforced abroad with the creation of the Guoanbu and at home in the PRC by the founding of the People’s Armed Police (renmin wuzhuang jingcha or PAP), headed by Lieutenant General Li Lianxiu. This paramilitary police force was set up for the internal security and protection of the leadership, working with the central guards regiment under the control of the Central Military Commission.

It is said that it was Qiao Shi who had first suggested this idea to Deng Xiaoping. Inspired by the suppression of demonstrations in Poland and Hungary, he even proposed that the PAP be armed with equipment appropriate for street fighting and the low-intensity curbing of public demonstrations. As violence unfolded in Northern Ireland, he watched newsreels to see how the Royal Ulster Constabulary dealt with nationalist protests, and suggested that the Chinese copy their methods and adopt the same ammunition: water cannon, CS gas, and rubber and plastic bullets.

Qiao Shi was carving out a kingdom within this shadowy realm. A formidable player of the game, he knew better than anyone how to navigate between different factions, managing to gain both the trust of the conservatives (Peng Zhen, Bo Yibo and Chen Yun) and the understanding of the reformers (Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang). On the one hand, he was a supporter of the old order; on the other, he backed economic reform. Qiao Shi—the most conservative of the reformists, and the most liberal of the traditionalists—was biding his time. Most importantly, he was about to gain control of the party apparatus that controlled all the security services.

“Intelligence men are climbing higher and higher in the Chinese hierarchy of power,” James Yi, a Chinese intelligence specialist in the British Hong Kong administration, told me in 1986. “One day, Qiao Shi might well get to be number 1.”10

His powers were indeed rapidly growing. Peng Zhen handed him control of the political committees—in other words, security, as it is understood in the PRC: the Ministries of Justice, State Security (the Guoanbu) and Public Security (the Gonganbu), and the National Minorities Section, whose senior advisors included his wife Yu Wen and Pu Yi, the “last emperor”, recycled into a new role. Among the other areas he controlled were arms sales to Syria, Iran and Korea; backing for the Khmer Rouge and the Afghan Mujahedin; and counter-insurrection in Tibet, as well as special operations against the Dalai Lama in India and other parts of the world. Alternating firmness and flexibility, this man of two faces continued to occupy the best position: the centre. “Qiao Shi is the Emperor of the golden mean,” was the word on the streets. In early 1989, he also took the helm of the CCP’s Central Party School and, exploiting the death of the “Chinese Kissinger”, Huan Xiang—which had gone largely unremarked—he increased his influence within the Chinese national security committee, the International Studies Research Centre, which answered to the State Council (i.e. the government).

Meanwhile, the student demonstrations were just beginning. True to his centrist tendencies, Qiao Shi initially intended to attempt conciliation. Wan Runnan, a reformist businessman and managing director of the Stone computer company, contacted him through Li Chang, an influential member of the Party Discipline Commission, proposing to join the negotiating intermediaries. Qiao Shi, as we have seen, was not against dialogue, and was opposed to a show of force against the students. This was the context in which he went to Tiananmen Square with Zhao Ziyang on 19  May.

But their positive disposition towards the students could not last forever. As head of the intelligence services, Qiao was directly accountable to Deng Xiaoping and the Politburo Standing Committee, of which he was now third in command. Guoanbu correspondents in foreign postings, as well as his own children living in Europe and America, provided him with a sense of the reaction abroad. His daughters were studying in the United States: Qiao Xiaoqian was at medical school in Houston, Texas, where she joined the Tiananmen student support movement; his younger daughter, Qiao Ling, was a high school student, who also enthusiastically supported the protests. His son Jiang Xiaoming—also called Simon X.  Jiang—was studying at Cambridge’s Judge Business School; Jiang’s wife, Qiao Zhoujin, was a producer for the BBC World Service’s China section.

The message from Qiao’s children was clear: a violent repression would horrify the world. However, as a counterpoint, the security services were sure that simply giving in on certain clauses in economic contracts would be enough to appease opinion in the West on the regime’s response. The question was whether Qiao Shi would opt for repression, and how he would advise Deng Xiaoping.

The “blue-haired dogs” and martial law

The briefs that Qiao Shi had received regarding China’s internal situation, handed to Deng Xiaoping and other leaders, had indicated the probability of a large number of demonstrations in Lhasa. In March, martial law had been imposed on Tibet.

Shortly before that, in February, Qiao Shi had issued a warning, in which he mixed rhetoric about the struggle against corruption, smuggling and trafficking with condemnation of “sabotage by foreign intelligence services” and “the small minority of those who brandish the banner of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’, spreading rumours and trying to provoke unrest”. There had been public executions in Canton, broadcast on television to celebrate the Year of the Snake. The “blue-haired dogs” of the Gonganbu, as they were nicknamed, had sent alarming reports from all over China that the “democratic” movement had now spread to 116 cities. Wang Fang, the Gonganbu chief, was a hardboiled man, who had taken over the post at the end of 1986 after Ruan Chongwu’s dismissal for failing first to predict the student protests, then to suppress them with force, leading to Hu Yaobang’s dismissal as general secretary. Wang Fang, who had been a prosecutor at the trial of the Gang of Four, obviously wanted to avoid his predecessor’s fate.

He had sent a memorandum to Qiao Shi containing information on eighty-eight autonomous workers’ organizations, as well as embryonic so-called counter-revolutionary political parties (which were in fact democratic) and the self-defence militias that had recently come into being. “Autonomous workers’ organizations” had emerged in nineteen provinces. In fact, the number was almost certainly higher, because the Gonganbu regional offices were not particularly precise; central government received reports that simply read: “Various autonomous workers’ federations have sprung up in Wuhan.”

These mushrooming organizations had been catalogued as one of four types of structure, which triggered cold sweats in senior officials within the Chinese state apparatus. The largest number were those whose purpose was to protect the protesters. They were called “picket teams” (jiucha dui) or “dare-to-die” units (gansi dui). They would also play an active role during martial law, preventing incitement by the secret services. There were also the “sympathy brigades” (shengyuan tuan): groups of workers who supported the students. The third category were the small parties and groups such as the “patriotic democratic league” (aiguo minzhu lianhe hui).

Finally, there were federations of autonomous workers (gongzilian), mini-unions that not only defended the interests of the working classes in the big cities, but also helped the students to organize. The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation was set up, forming shock groups to provide protection for the burgeoning democratic movement. They were called the “Black Panthers” or the “Flying Tiger Corps”, and would later be seen on the outskirts of Tiananmen Square.11

By mid-May, the worst nightmares of the leaders had begun to come true: students and city workers were in the process of forging an alliance, though the picture was still far from complete.

Qiao Shi was not concealing information, but Prime Minister Li Peng was wary of him. After all, Qiao had tried to negotiate with Yan Mingfu, head of the United Front Work Department (UFWD) and son of the master spy who had once warned Stalin of Hitler’s plan to attack the USSR in 1941. Yan was clearly an intelligence connoisseur. But, like Qiao Shi, he was arguing for negotiation and forbearance towards the students. This would end up costing him dear.

Li Peng was setting up parallel networks in direct contact with the Gonganbu and military intelligence circles, in order to supersede Qiao’s networks. Their coordinator was Luo Gan, a kind of private secretary for the special services (tewu). He was a broad-girthed, energetic man, with metal-rimmed round glasses, who shared with Qiao Shi a passion for swimming and playing tennis, and, also like Qiao, had been trained in industrial espionage. In 1989, he had managed to integrate the entourage around the conservative leader Li Peng, and ended up becoming Minister of Labour, secretary general of the State Council, and a kind of general factotum, overseeing Li’s move to Mao’s former residence in the Zhongnanhai complex, where the new leader loved to swim in the pool. Luo visited him every day to report back.12 A huge fan of foreign cinema, he regularly reviewed footage of student protests set up by fake TV crews in the pay of the Gonganbu. Luo Gan wanted just one thing: for his master to bring about the fall of Zhao Ziyang and give the green light for suppression of the student protests.

On the morning of 17  May, there was a meeting of the Standing Committee at Deng Xiaoping’s home. In addition to Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Hu Qili and Yao Yilin, Deng invited two important senior figures, Yang Shangkun and Bo Yibo. Conversation was tense.

Zhao Ziyang: The fasting students feel themselves under a spotlight that makes it hard for them to make concessions. This leaves us with a prickly situation. […]

Yang Shangkun: Can we still say there’s been no harm to the national interest or society’s interest? […]

Li Peng: I think Comrade Ziyang must bear the main responsibility for escalation of the student movement, as well as for the fact that the situation has gotten so hard to control. […]

Deng Xiaoping: If our one billion people jumped into multiparty elections, we’d get chaos like the “all-out” civil war we saw during the Cultural Revolution.13

It appears from the minutes that Qiao Shi did not utter a word during the meeting. According to other sources, he agreed to the idea of sending the PLA onto the streets of Beijing, but with one caveat: to ensure that no blood was shed. In any case, the vote created a stalemate for the leadership: Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili, a propaganda expert, were opposed to martial law; Li Peng and Yao Yilin, a conservative economist from the Chen Yun school, were in favour. Qiao abstained, which meant deadlock. They had to refer the decision to Deng Xiaoping, who, encouraged by Li Peng, gave the nod. Just as in Tibet, martial law was about to be declared. Despite this dramatic decision, immediately after the meeting, Zhao Ziyang and Qiao Shi, besieged by photographers, went to meet hunger strikers in hospital.

On 19  May 1989, the government announced the imposition of martial law and ordered troops from twenty-two divisions to march in the direction of Beijing. Many generals were extremely surprised, having failed to foresee that armed repression was going to being used against the students. On 20  May, a group of generals sent a message to Deng Xiaoping and the Central Military Commission: “We demand that troops do not enter Beijing, and that martial law not be established in the city.” Deng dispatched officers for a meeting, while Yang Shangkun, president of the PRC, made a series of telephone calls to the generals. The febrile atmosphere calmed down a little.14

On 21  May, in order to reassure the dissident generals, Yang ordered the soldiers not to fire on innocent civilians, even if provoked. The next day, student leaders suggested ending the hunger strike, but their decision was thwarted under pressure from the many protesters who had recently arrived in Beijing from the provinces. Many of the 50,000 students now in Tiananmen Square were from outside the city. Gonganbu reports suggest that, over the course of the three days preceding the imposition of martial law, 165 trains filled with students had arrived in Beijing from other parts of the country, and that 319 schools and universities were represented at the square.

Generals from Yang Shangkun’s faction were growing increasingly impatient. Among them was General Xu Xin, a senior ally of Li Peng, who was deputy chief of staff of the PLA.  He was in charge of intelligence—nominally led by the head of the PLA2, General Xiong Guangkai—and military security, which monitored troops and infiltrated the student movement. Some soldiers began to defect, taking off their uniforms and sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the image of the Goddess of Democracy, but it was impossible to know if they were true children of the people who had naively decided to join the demonstrations, or agents of the secret services. Many of them were both, if one is to believe the testimonies and documents available today.

The military security sector, which monitored the troops’ morale, was under the leadership of General Yang Baibing, head of the PLA General Political Department. Yang controlled the army secret police, called the Security Department (Baoweibu), in liaison with General Chi Haotian, who was not only army chief of staff but also Yang Shangkun’s son-in-law. Within this pyramid of “political commissars”, Yang Baibing exerted a disproportionate influence on the various military regions, and most importantly Beijing. Many commissioners who spoke up against the repression were dismissed from their posts; some were even shot.

But the troops of the Beijing Military Region were a problem. For the moment, they were still hesitant in the face of demonstrators chanting, “You are the army of the people, you must stand by the people!” In any case, they had no ammunition—either because at that point no one wanted things to escalate towards violence, or because they were not to be trusted. General Yang Baibing inspired confidence only within his own faction: he was the half-brother of President Yang, who, like Deng Xiaoping, hated this young people’s movement with a passion, for it reminded them of the Cultural Revolution, when they had both been banished. The two Yangs, as well as Generals Chi Haotian and Xu Xin, constituted the kernel of PLA leadership that would eventually turn its military might against the people.

To be clear: Deng, as a young man, had once been a student activist in France, which got him into trouble with the French police. But the French cop of the 1920s was not as violent as the Chinese “blue-haired dog” of today. In any event, his main memory of a young people’s revolutionary movement was of Red Guards throwing his son Deng Pufang from the top of a building, leaving him a wheelchair-bound paraplegic who was now the head of the China Welfare Fund for the Disabled.

On 21  May, Deng invited the inner circle of retired leaders, the so-called “Immortals”, to talks, since it was becoming apparent that the current younger leadership was not going to be able to bring the situation under control. His decision was blunt and delivered with force: “During the recent upheavals, Zhao Ziyang has quite patently revealed his position,” he said. “It is clear that he stands on the side of the agitators: in plain language one might say that he is actively fomenting divisions within the party by standing with the agitators. He is happy that we are still in control. Zhao Ziyang bears responsibility for this unrest and we have no reason to hang on to him. Similarly, Hu Qili is no longer fit to remain on the Standing Committee.”

It was then that Chen Yun, Kang Sheng’s former comrade in the Shanghai secret service, suggested someone to replace Zhao: “Comrade Jiang Zemin, the mayor of Shanghai, would make an excellent candidate. He is a modest man and very respectful of party discipline.”

It was indeed said that Jiang knew how to deal with demonstrations in his city. But in Beijing the situation was grave. It was imperative that the Chinese leadership begin to rally military officials and prepare to take Tiananmen Square. A little later, Deng Xiaoping went to Wuhan to convince the leaders of the military region and several others that he was in control in Beijing.15

On the morning of 2  June, at Deng’s behest, all the senior figures of the CCP met, though only three members of the Standing Committee remained: Li Peng, Yao Yilin and Qiao Shi. Prime Minister Li shared the latest news: “Yesterday, the Beijing Party Committee and the Ministry of State Security [the Guoanbu] submitted reports to the Politburo. These two reports offer us ample evidence that, following the imposition of martial law, there is a plan by the organizers of this unrest to occupy Tiananmen Square, and for it to serve as a command post for a final confrontation with the party and the government. The square has become the focal centre of the student movement and, in a way, of the whole nation.”

The premier explained what was going on. “Dare-to-die” units had been formed to stop the military, and “thugs” had attacked the Beijing Public Security Bureau. One of the Flying Tigers groups was sending messages fine-tuning the details of their tactics, and illegal organizations including the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation and the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation had set up loudspeakers through which they were broadcasting criticism of the CCP and fake news from the Voice of America. Employees of the US embassy, including CIA agents, were taking advantage of the situation to conduct “aggressive” intelligence missions and liaise with the Student Federation; the Chinese Alliance for Democracy had become an instrument of the United States and was providing secret agents for the Kuomintang to act against China. The aim of these people, the “dregs of our nation”, was to forge “a coalition of reactionary forces, both from within China and abroad, to overthrow the Communist Party and subvert the socialist system”.

“Those goddamn bastards!” burst out Wang Zhen, a veteran of the Long March, who had captured Xinjiang, the Chinese “Far West”, and was a member of the martial law monitoring committee. “Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen so long? They’re really asking for it! We should send the troops right now to grab those counter-revolutionaries, Comrade Xiaoping!”

Deng agreed: “The causes of this incident have to do with the global context. The Western world, especially the United States, has thrown its entire propaganda machine into agitation work, and has given a lot of encouragement and assistance to the so-called democrats or opposition in China—people who are in fact the scum of the Chinese nation,” he echoed Li.

It was left to President Yang Shangkun to detail how soldiers had comported themselves, arms at the ready: “Troops have moved into the Great Hall of the People, Zhongshan Park, the People’s Cultural Palace, and the Public Security Ministry [Guoanbu] compound. The thinking of all officers and soldiers has been thoroughly prepared for a clearing of Tiananmen Square.”

Qiao Shi had now decided on his response: “The facts show that we can’t expect the students on the Square to withdraw voluntarily. Clearing the square is our only option, and it’s quite necessary. I hope our announcement about clearing will meet with approval and support of the majority of citizens and students. Clearing the square is the beginning of a restoration of normal order in the capital.”

Deng Xiaoping concluded the meeting thus: “I agree with all of you and suggest the martial law troops begin tonight to carry out the clearing plan and finish it within two days. As we proceed with the clearing, we must explain it clearly to all the citizens and students, asking them to leave and doing our very best to persuade them. But if they refuse to leave, they will be responsible for the consequences.”16

A tank battle in central Beijing

At the beginning of the siege, around 200,000 soldiers from twenty-two divisions of thirteen PLA corps were transferred to the Beijing area. US satellites and communications intercepted by the National Security Agency, particularly from Australia, can give us an idea of troop movements up to the level of a battalion.17

The soldiers were under the command of the Martial Law Headquarters, which was technically under the command of General Chi Haotian, but was in fact led by three senior party members: Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun and Wang Zhen. Although Deng was eighty-five, he wanted personally to supervise the manoeuvres, first from the resort town of Beidaihe and then from his West Hills home, near to which a mobile command post had been installed.

At 9pm on 3  June, the army was given the green light. Troops were ordered to arrive at Tiananmen Square at 1am, and to have it cleared by 6am. After the first clashes on the edges of the square, including between rival PLA units, the special forces gained entrance to the square through the tunnels of the underground city, via Zhongnanhai. British journalist Gordon Thomas describes how “troops were being ferried by underground train from Zhongnanhai to the Great Hall of the People. All entrances to the nuclear shelter tunnels in the city had been opened so troops waiting there could make their way up into the city.”18

Meanwhile, regular units and armoured vehicles began their assault. The outline of the battle plan drawn up by Chi Haotian and his generals shows an attack from the west by the units of the Beijing military region, from the south-east by the Shenyang and Jinan military region units and the 15th Airborne Brigade of the Canton military region, and from the northern suburbs by Shenyang units.

Fighting lasted throughout the night and into the following day, 4  June. Along Everlasting Peace Avenue, Chang’an Dajie, which bisects Beijing north of Tiananmen, the least experienced soldiers of the 38th Corps became stranded. The 27th Corps, composed of older and more aggressive soldiers, made swifter progress. On the other hand, about fifty armoured vehicles remained immobilized for a long time near Nanyuan airport, on the south–north axis, as did vehicles approaching Tiananmen Square from the south. Battle raged at the Muxidi Bridge, and the PLA lost many vehicles, including armoured tanks.

According to various sources, there were between 200 and 3,000 victims (264 according to the authorities, including twenty soldiers and officers; 2,600, according to the Beijing Red Cross; and up to 10,000, according to reports in the Soviet press). The operation lasted for three days, with men from the security services mingling with civilians in the square in order to hunt down, and in some cases shoot dead, dissidents. At the Minzu Hotel, plain-clothes Guoanbu men chased a Chinese man into the lobby and shot him, without the slightest concern for the terrified clientele.19

Though this marked the beginning of a widespread and brutal repression, it could not conceal the enormous tensions in the ranks of the army and secret services that were beginning to emerge. “Interviews with embassy officials and Russian students studying in Beijing at this time confirm the fact that the night of 3–4  June was witness to scenes of fierce fighting in the city,” according to Iliya Sarsembaev, a specialist in Sino-Russian relations. “The sound of cannon fire from tanks resounded through the streets, and in the morning dead bodies in PLA uniform could be seen lying in the streets alongside burned-out tanks. The Chinese government refuses even today to acknowledge that there was any fighting between PLA regiments. Some Chinese students say that, since the beginning of June, soldiers had been arriving in Beijing who were not [majority-ethnic] Han and spoke little, if any, Putonghua (Mandarin). These regiments came from Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, and the soldiers had neither relatives nor friends in Beijing.”20

This tallies with the description of the command structure sent by the KGB rezident Grigorov and his team on the morning of 4  June. This report to Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, confirmed the messages that were pouring into Moscow of a major schism between the different army units:

Engaged: Initially, troops of the five army corps that make up the Beijing Military Region.

– The 24th Army Corps (based in Chengde, east of Beijing Hebei Province encircling the Beijing area), and their 1st Armoured Division (Tianjin);

– The 27th Army Corps, General Staff in Shijiazhuang (Hebei) including the 13th Cavalry Brigade (tanks);

– 38th Regiment (Baoding headquarters, Hebei), with the 6th Tank Division (Unit 52884), stationed in Nankou, Beijing;

– 63rd Army Corps (Taiyuan headquarters, Shaanxi);

– 65th Army Corps (Zhangjiakou headquarters, Hebei);

– Special protection forces of the government and the leaders: the Central Guard Unit (57003) of the Military Region, under the command of the Central Military Commission.

As the situation has worsened in recent days, Beijing soldiers have received reinforcements from Lanzhou Military District regiments (controlling the Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Xinjiang military districts):

– The 21st Corps, Lanzhou MR Regiment, based in Baoji (Shaanxi);

– Special Units 84835 (Qingtongxia, Ningxia Province);

– Units from Hohhot (Inner Mongolia);

– Border Guard Defense Regiments dependent on Gonganbu;

– Brigade No. 205 with Uyghurs and Mongols;

– Units of the People’s Armed Police (PAP).

Note that the tanks that fired on the soldiers of the RM of Beijing belonged to the 21st Corps. They attacked in particular armoured vehicles of the 6th Division belonging to the 38 Corps.

Journalists had similar information, but sometimes concerning units other than those mentioned in this report. For example, Patrick Sabatier, Beijing correspondent for the French daily Libération, wrote: “People tell me they have witnessed skirmishes, including armoured vehicles, between soldiers of the 28th and 27th Corps in the western part of the city. Others say they have seen wounded soldiers in the south-east of the city. Diplomatic sources confirm that clashes have taken place in the southern suburbs around the Nanyuan military airport, between units of the 27th and 16th Corps. Leaflets have been distributed throughout Beijing, claiming that old Marshal Nie Rongzhen, one of the most senior military leaders in the country and a longstanding comrade of Mao, who survived the Long March, has called the president, General Yang Shangkun, who is also the chief of the martial law troops, a ‘thug’”.21

Nie Rongzhen’s position was all the more significant given that his relationship with Deng Xiaoping went back to their student days in Paris; he had been controller of Zhou Enlai’s clandestine radio base in Shanghai, and was considered the military father of the atomic bomb and China’s strategic missiles.

It was clear even from the scant information broadcast by journalists on the ground, details of which converged, that the mood in the army was anything but unified. Soldiers were defecting, abandoning their weapons and melting into the crowds. The case of the 38th Army Corps is particularly significant because many of these soldiers had family in the city, and many of the students in Tiananmen Square had taught in these units, meaning that soldiers and students were already fraternizing—to such an extent that General Yang Baibing, head of the PLA’s political department, threatened to shoot generals from the Beijing military region, and in particular those from the 38th Corps, if they refused to fire on the students.

The insubordination came from the top: General Xu Qinxian, commander of the 38th Army Corps, had been on sick leave since the imposition of martial law in order to avoid having to lead his troops into combat. He was later court-martialled and imprisoned. Many other soldiers from his unit also tried to take sick leave to avoid being on patrol in Beijing. According to PLA internal security documents, 3,500 officers were investigated in the months following the massacre for insubordination. One hundred and eleven of these officers were punished, as well as 1,400 conscripts who had deserted.22

In contrast, Yang Baibing’s nephew, General Yang Zhaojun, leader of the 27th Corps, was highly dedicated in his duties. He commanded the same group that his father Yang Shangkun had led during the 1979 war against Vietnam.23 These men—many of them former convicts from the Chinese interior who had escaped laogai camps, and most of whom did not speak Mandarin—slaughtered protesters with zealous enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, General Xu Xin’s intelligence services had infiltrated young spies into the student protests to track the movement’s leaders: Wang Dan, the Uyghur Wuer Kaixi and Chai Ling. Wang Dan was picked up by the Guoanbu when he went back to his university dorm to fetch some belongings. The other two disappeared, and were right at the top of the list of twenty-one activists that the security services were desperate to find. These were the same special services from General Xiong Guangkai’s army who, on 3  June, had sought to incite the demonstrators by leaving a bus full of weapons for them to find, in the hope that they would use them. Later on, they left guns next to the corpses of students to make it look as if they had fired at soldiers.

As with the PLA, not everybody in the civilian security and intelligence community reacted in the same way. We have seen Qiao Shi, the coordinator of the security services, vacillating and trying to negotiate with the students alongside Zhao Ziyang, before eventually rallying to Deng Xiaoping’s position. On 5  May, students from the Institute of International Relations (Guoji Guanxi Xueyuan), where analysts and spies are trained by director and Guoanbu advisor Chen Zhongjing, had marched with banners.24 In June, some newspapers criticized the Gonganbu head, Wang Fang, for failing to control his troops. In fact, the “blue-haired dogs” fulfilled their role in crushing the uprising with little if any soul searching. The chief of Beijing Public Security, Su Zhongxiang, refused to attack the students and resigned from his post, but that was all. Yan Mingfu, head of the UFWD, who had a knack for addressing the students, was dismissed.

Meanwhile, the PAP, set up with the specific purpose of suppressing demonstrations, proved incapable of doing so. It underwent a serious purge and its leader, General Li Xianxiu, was dismissed. Qiao Shi was going to have to reorganize it. A few years later, in 1991, the Central Guards Division (Unit 57003), led by General Yang Dezhong, was also reorganized, because too many officers had sympathies for the dismissed general secretary Zhao Ziyang; indeed, in late May 1989 there had been an attempted coup to get him reinstated.25

On 7  June 1989, in an event unprecedented in the history of the Chinese Communist Party, the head of the special services, Qiao Shi, was appointed interim general secretary of the CCP.  However, Qiao did not take long to cede his uncomfortable position to the leader of the party’s Shanghai branch, Jiang Zemin. He knew him well, for it was Jiang who had recruited him into the world of espionage in the late 1940s. In contrast to the top brass, and the “Immortals” who had by now taken over the leadership of the party, Jiang seemed to be the most personable of the ruling elite.

However, what was expected of Qiao Shi was something quite different to the political management of the crisis: he was required to crush the student movement and neutralize dissidents who were fleeing and seeking asylum abroad. Qiao Shi suppressed the uprising with determination, while always thinking forward towards the future. It was a strange dance he was required to perform. If the rumours are to be believed, it was on his orders that the security services allowed some dissidents to slip into Hong Kong—those whose faces had been seen on television and were now familiar worldwide.

Although he had ostensibly pledged allegiance to the new general secretary, Jiang Zemin, Qiao Shi continued to defend his own interests. Prime Minister Li Peng was responsible for keeping to the hard line; Jiang Zemin had the challenge of navigating the situation under the watchful eye of Deng Xiaoping; but Comrade Qiao allowed himself the possibility of switching allegiance at any moment. “The cunning hare has three exits to his lodgings,” as the Chinese proverb has it.

On 9  June 1989, the fifty-fifth day of the Tiananmen revolt, the CCP claimed that order had been re-established in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping appeared on television garbed in a Mao suit—he had not been seen since his meeting with Gorbachev on 16  May—and officially thanked the army, “the Great Wall of Iron and Steel”, for restoring stability in China. But the extent of the massacre was no secret to the foreign embassies in Beijing; a diplomatic cable sent from the British ambassador Sir Alan Donald to the UK Foreign Office on 5  June 1989 (declassified in December 2017) noted a “minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000”. Moreover, Donald added, there had been insubordination in the 27th Army Corps punished by execution, and soldiers had fired dum-dum bullets, even though they are prohibited under international law.26

Operation Yellowbird

The Western intelligence services in Beijing and Hong Kong did not wait for the tragic denouement of Tiananmen and the indignation of world opinion before acting. But political condemnations are one thing, and realpolitik is quite another. Thus the extraordinary episode known as Operation Yellowbird, the rescue of dissidents, was less about professional agents on a mission than about individuals standing up for those demanding democracy.

The rescue of astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian was one case that was in fact approved by the White House. George H.W. Bush’s request to meet the man known as the Chinese Sakharov earlier that year, during his state visit to Beijing, had been refused. A little earlier, in January 1989, Professor Fang had sent an open letter to the Chinese leadership demanding the release of certain political prisoners, including the most famous of them all, Wei Jingsheng, Deng Xiaoping’s “Man in the Iron Mask”. Fang was already in the government’s sights, on the blacklist of people whose arrest had been ordered by Qiao Shi. On the afternoon of 7  June, the professor and his wife managed to get to the American embassy and ask for asylum. Embassy employees explained that this was impossible, but they did give them the phone number of an American journalist, who agreed to hide them in his room at the Jianguo Hotel. The US State Department was immediately informed and the message was conveyed to the uppermost echelons in Washington. The response was categorical: “Send them straight back to the embassy.”

It is not hard to imagine the headache this presented for Ambassador James Lilley, the former CIA agent who had opened the first CIA station in Beijing back in 1973. Lilley’s diplomatic mission was the most closely monitored of all, and now he was being asked to play James Bond in a besieged Beijing, while the current head of the CIA in China had just gone on leave. In conversation with Bill Webster, the CIA chief at Langley, Lilley assured his boss that there was no risk that the army would be sent into Tiananmen Square.

His intelligence reflexes kicked in, and with the plain-clothes marines in charge of the embassy’s security, Lilley managed to locate the Fangs and hide them in the embassy without the Chinese getting wind of it: “Fang’s presence in the embassy was initially top-secret information that was known only to very few people,” Lilley explained in his memoirs. “This was a very sensitive situation for me and it was vital to keep it under wraps until the situation in Beijing improved. So you can imagine my surprise when White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater announced during a press conference that Fang and his wife had taken refuge in the US embassy. Although I thought the Chinese would eventually discover that they were there, I did not expect the US government itself to tell them. Apparently, there was confusion among decision makers in Washington about Fang’s presence at the embassy, and Fitzwater simply thought he was being precise. The Chinese government hit the roof.”27

Relations between Beijing and Washington turned as cold as they had been in the days of the Cultural Revolution, before Nixon and Mao broke the ice. As long as Fang Lizhi was sheltering in the embassy, a thaw was impossible. The question was how to bring out the Chinese professor without anyone losing face. As Lilley reported, relations between the Guoanbu and the CIA had once again resumed, for the purposes of exchanging intelligence about the USSR: all was well so long as nobody mentioned the Tiananmen massacre and its aftermath. However, at the same time, the CIA station in Hong Kong was reporting that a special anti-terrorist unit was apparently preparing to storm the US embassy and seize the dissident couple. The Chinese ambassador to Washington was summoned to the State Department and duly lectured about the dire consequences of such an action, were it to materialize.

Sometime around Halloween, at the end of October, the Chinese special services began to increase their surveillance of the embassy, perhaps afraid that Fang Lizhi was going to try and escape the premises in a mask or disguised as a pumpkin. The reality, of course, was rather more mundane. As a result of the agreement between Bush and Deng, whose purpose was to restore cordial relations, Fang and his wife were eventually able to leave the PRC on 25  June 1990.

One mystery remains, however: the Jianguo Hotel, where the Fangs originally took refuge, was one of the hotels under the direct management of the Guoanbu, and therefore under close surveillance. Had the intelligence service really not known that the dissidents were hiding there? Or was an order given at a higher level to let them slip away? Could it have been on Qiao Shi’s orders?

The French network in Hong Kong

Similar questions also arose with regard to other dissidents, who left via the unofficial French network in Hong Kong that allowed dissidents to flee China. This was quite a remarkable setup, which had only come into existence on 4  June.

In the summer of 1989 a junk entered Macao waters, accompanied by a Portuguese navy speedboat. As a dinghy drew up alongside the junk, the captain explained that there was an injured passenger on board—nothing too serious. A Chinese coastguard had fired on them with a machine gun, and they’d made a narrow escape.

The small boat had in fact made this secret voyage from the mainland several times, but this was the first time it had been hit by a bullet. On the beach, a welcoming committee was waiting. Four Europeans and half a dozen Chinese men helped the injured man to disembark.

The officials—a Portuguese naval security officer, a British Special Branch inspector and two French diplomats—were acting without their governments’ knowledge. The man whom they were welcoming to Macao was a well-known dissident, a film director who had been active in the Tiananmen movement. His name was Su Xiaokang and he was a professor at Beijing University. His television documentary, The Elegy of the River (He Shang), about the backwardness of China, had made something of a splash in June 1988 before later being attacked for its “nihilism”.

Su had taken the ferry to Hong Kong, where, together with the French, Special Branch officers and their boss John Thorpe had given him protection. They were used to debriefing refugees in “conspiracy” apartments: what was your role in the movement? What relationship did you have with the authorities? How did you get here? They had to root out bogus dissidents and the Guoanbu spies who were also using this escape route. British counterintelligence grilled people with the same methods as those used during the Second World War, when they interrogated Resistance fighters from occupied France. After this screening, several people, including two French diplomats, Jean-Pierre Montagne and François Fensterbank, provided the dissidents with fake-genuine passports, before they were flown to France, accompanied by a member of the network.

Dozens of such trips were made, with hundreds of rescued dissidents seeking asylum in Europe, Japan and the USA.  There was no doubt that the Chinese security services could have arrested some of these student or political leaders, but—apparently on the orders of either Qiao Shi in Beijing or Ye Xuanping, the governor of Guangdong and son of the Hakka marshal Ye Jianying—they were allowed to slip through the net. This was the case for one of the most famous student leaders, Chai Ling, who escaped on an Air France flight, carrying a false passport and wearing make-up so as to pass for the accompanying French diplomat’s girlfriend. The Uyghur student leader Wuer Kaixi and his girlfriend Liu Yan, dissident Yan Jiaqi and his wife Gao Gao, as well as many others, fled through Hong Kong with the help of this network.

A few years later in Hong Kong, François Fensterbank explained the context in which this escapade was undertaken: “You have to remember the atmosphere at the time. François Mitterrand declared after the Tiananmen massacre that ‘a government that shoots its youth has no future!’ We deduced from that that we had some kind of moral green light to help fleeing dissidents. But we no longer had a secret service station in Hong Kong. The former head of the DGSE in Hong Kong, a captain who had moved from public service to private industry, came through from time to time, that was it. So that left a few of us to set it up ourselves. Because we loved China and we loved freedom. We had no training as secret agents—we were improvising. Fortunately, I had read some John Le Carré novels and now the British were helping us in real life. But they had to be careful not to draw attention to themselves, and after a while Special Branch made it clear that it was going to have to lower its profile because the Beijing government was attacking London, accusing it of maintaining a subversive base in Hong Kong.”

Contrary to what Chinese leaders claimed, the CIA played only a modest role in Operation Yellowbird, which, although it was attributed to the US agency, was in fact cobbled together by a group of generous-hearted amateurs. Although it was secret, the escape network surfed on a wave of tremendous popular support in Hong Kong immediately after the massacre of 4  June. One million weeping people demonstrated in Hong Kong. Paradoxically, this was an opportunity for the young people of Hong Kong to show that they felt for the first time fully Chinese. It was also a moment to reflect upon the potential danger in Hong Kong’s forthcoming return to the PRC, scheduled for 1997.

Nearly eighty dissidents settled in the British colony, with others fleeing further afield. The Yellowbird network had come together with the help of the entertainment world, some of whose most prominent figures helped to raise money to support the underground resistance. These included film stars and singers such as film producer John Sham, kung fu actor Jackie Chan, and Anita Mui, whose song Big Bad Girl! was a huge hit with Hong Kong teenagers.

It was no secret that many figures from the Hong Kong entertainment business were in cahoots with the Triads. Sham, Chan, Mui and many others were in contact with Charlie Heung, a well-known film producer. Officially, of course, he denied he had anything to do with the largest of the Triads, the Sun Yee On (New Virtue & Peace), which had 50,000 members. Except, that is, for the fact that it had been founded by his father in 1921, and many of the Heung brothers had been involved in criminal Triad affairs, and some even convicted. A British police chief with whom I spoke at the time told me that Charles Heung was the “Dragon Head”, the Big Boss, of the Sun Yee On. He had been refused entry to Canada because of his links with drug trafficking.28

Still, Heung loved to be photographed for the gossip columns, standing with CCP figures like the governor of Canton, Ye Xuanping. Making the most of his links with the security services, the Sun Yee On helped him set up escape routes across China, for a fee. There is every reason to believe that the Sun Yee On was playing for both sides: helping the democrats by aiding fleeing dissidents, at the same time as helping communist leaders who wanted to avoid trials in Beijing of people who, thanks to CNN, had featured in TV news bulletins the world over. Other students and workers were not so lucky. They were either executed or sent to the laogai.

“We found ourselves on Kadoree Road, the street where all the stars live, in the popular district of Mong Kok. We were in Charlie Heung’s sumptuous villa, with the main people behind Operation Yellowbird,”

Fensterbank told me. “That’s where everything was decided. It was astonishing to see the motley crew that ended up helping the dissidents escape—including members of Special Branch and the Triads, who were normally sworn enemies.”

In a striking epilogue, Chun Wong, a Triad boss, was arrested for drug trafficking in 1990. He was a “426”, a senior official of the Sun Ye On, from the Tsim Sha Tsui East neighbourhood, where he had climbed the ladder to the very top of the organization controlling the brothels where young Hong Kong prostitutes worked.

US authorities had demanded his extradition for heroin trafficking, but he was released on an impressive $650,000 bail. The first surprise was that Special Branch gave the green light for his release, contrary to agreements in force between the US and the UK.  Even more surprising were some of the people who contributed money to his bail—figures such as Anita Mui, John Sham and various other Hong Kong celebrities.

The reason for this only came to light in October 1995 after Chun, nicknamed the “Shim Sha Tsui Tiger”, was killed in a motorcycle accident in Thailand after going on the run. Newspapers revealed that he had played a central role in organizing Operation Yellowbird. Figures as controversial as Stanley Ho had given money to the operation and, I was told in Macao, the famous “master of the casinos” had even provided accommodation to fleeing dissidents.

A French intelligence officer, stationed in Asia some time after this episode, confirmed to me in 2007 what an important role the French diplomats had played in saving the dissidents. He also told me that the Chinese services had acted with no compunction against certain members of the Western community in Hong Kong involved in opposition politics. As evidence, he cited the mysterious deaths of the wives of no fewer than three consuls, Swiss, Mexican and American, each of whom fell from a high building in Hong Kong. The first, “Mrs B”, married to the Swiss consul, worked for an NGO in Hong Kong. She had visited Tibet just a few months before her death, where she had witnessed at first hand the repressive tactics of the Chinese regime.29

The global hunt for dissidents

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Chinese special services sent teams of “cleaners” all over the world to neutralize dissidents who had fled abroad. Additional teams were posted in embassies, for not everyone could be trusted: many diplomats posted abroad had expressed qualms about the massacre. Some had thought that the Diaochabu, the CCP’s investigation bureau, had been dissolved in 1983 when the Guoanbu was established; but its representatives were still placed in embassies to coordinate the hunt for dissidents and monitor colleagues who aroused suspicion.30

In West Germany, a delegation of some fifty Chinese officers arrived and asked their local counterparts to help them monitor the dissidents. They went all over the country to gain the support of the LfV, the regional branches of the federal counterintelligence service (Bundesamt für Verfaßungsschutz). But there was little eagerness to help the Chinese on display. In Munich, on the other hand, the BND, in charge of foreign espionage, agreed to take on trainees, and went even further, selling the Chinese bugging equipment, at a time when across Europe there was an embargo on selling arms to the PRC.

In France, at the time of the massacre, appalled DST technicians had carried out an operation on their own initiative: they flooded the Chinese embassy on the Avenue George V with faxes protesting against the repression of human rights in China, on behalf of various fictitious organizations.31

A “diplomat” named Cao Guoxing, accompanied by his driver and second secretary, Bai Zhangde, was very active in the Chinese embassy in Paris. He received reinforcements of some twenty Guoanbu agents, who were sent under commercial or diplomatic cover. Agents from the French DST and the Renseignements Généraux (internal intelligence bureau) kept a close watch on the two men and wondered if the lower-status Bai was not in fact in charge. Whether or not this was the case, he organized some remarkable operations on French soil, including the undercover infiltration of the Chinese students’ union’s local Marseille chapter. In general, Cao and Bai’s methods were efficient: subtle threats when students went to deal with administrative formalities at the Consulate, constant pressure on individuals, a variety of hints and warnings. For Bai, the record seemed satisfactory: over time, students who supported the protests returned to the ranks, or at least significantly dialled down their activities. Having exerted pressure a little too conspicuously on students, Bai was nearly expelled from France.

Meanwhile, “deep-water fish” melted into Paris’s Chinatown. According to the information I was able to gather at the time, they were aided by Chinese gangs who, for tactical reasons, were helping Beijing. This was facilitated by the fact that, in some cases, they had helped the students get to Europe. In addition—and this is to the great discredit of the profession—some journalists posted to Paris, including the correspondent for the Shanghai daily Wenhui Bao, were principally working as Guoanbu agents, to whom the French foreign office felt obliged to give journalist accreditation. Counterintelligence watched, appalled, as the China-loving Parisian press gave them ample column inches to criticize French democracy.

Meanwhile, the comings and goings of the “cleaners” did not go unremarked, as in the case of Liu Wen, who had been head of the Gonganbu Criminal Affairs Bureau since March 1988, and head of the national bureau for liaison with Interpol. He had visited France half a dozen times to oversee the hunt for the dissident “criminals”, and he constantly altered his identity at border crossings, which rather intrigued the officers of the French Air and Border Police, as well as French internal intellgience, since his official status was with the international police.32 The French were more flexible at the time than the American authorities, and they left Liu alone do his job. Zhu Entao, the official delegate to Interpol, was delighted to be able to operate so easily on French soil.

In the United States, the FBI had banned him from entering the country after a spying scandal in which he had been implicated five years before—the FBI believed he was controlling the Guoanbu mole Larry Wu-Tai Chin at the level of Gonganbu counterintelligence headquarters. The Americans were probably right, for the Guoanbu was doing everything it could to try to infiltrate the dissident movement. For example, in June 1989, during a Chinese Alliance for Democracy convention in the United States, a delegate called Shao Huaqiang announced publicly that he had been recruited as a spy by the Guoanbu before leaving China. His recruiters had given him the mission of infiltrating the Alliance and proving it had financial ties with Taiwan.

The hunt for dissidents in the US was complicated by the fact that the FBI was closely monitoring the Chinese diplomatic mission. In 1988 it protested—in vain—against the opening of a consulate in Los Angeles. It was later proved right, when it emerged that, as in France, the consul’s education department was serving as a cover for Guoanbu agents monitoring Tiananmen refugees. This was corroborated in May 1990, when Xu Lin, a third secretary attached to the Department of Education in Washington, defected. He later explained to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress that he had refused to draw up lists of dissidents, as demanded by the Guoanbu. He also explained in detail how China’s secret agents operated abroad.

In Britain, three first secretaries in the Chinese embassy decided to seek asylum from the Home Office. But the latter was being kept busy by other Chinese dissidents. Jiang Xiaoming, Qiao Shi’s son, and his wife had disappeared from Cambridge. In fact, they had been given a safe house by British counterintelligence, who had discovered that so-called dissidents were planning to kidnap them. Qiao Shi was indebted to Her Majesty’s Secret Service—nothing could surprise anyone at this point.

That diplomats and secret service agents were defecting to the West was bad enough for the Chinese. It was even worse when it happened in federal Russia, as with Wang Fengxiang, the Chinese consul general in St Petersburg, in March 1993. The Guoanbu, having learned that he had gone to see the head of the new police force, General Arkadi Kramarev, was trying to get him repatriated. But under Boris Yeltsin, Russian intelligence collaboration with the Chinese was far from consistent. Wang was already in Sweden by then, as the Chinese learnt too late. In Stockholm, they were unlikely to be able to recover him, since in early 1991 the Swedish government had declared personae non gratae three Chinese diplomats who were harassing dissidents; a Swedish diplomat had been expelled from Beijing in turn.

Paris and the mystery of Ma Tao

After Tiananmen the Chinese secret war also got hot in France, which—along with the United States—was considered the main haven for Chinese dissidents. They tended to meet in Paris, either at the Federation for a Democratic China (FDC) or at Democracy House, financed by Pierre Bergé and set up in the summer of 1989 with the support of various public figures including Yves Montand, Lucien Bodard, Simon Leys and Bernard-Henri Lévy.

On 14  July that year, during the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution, Chinese dissidents paraded down the Champs-Élysées in black headbands, one hand raised in a fist, the other pushing a bike like the ones that had been crushed beneath the caterpillar tracks of PLA tanks on Tiananmen Square. The architect Ieoh Ming Pei, who had once been Qiao Shi’s classmate at the University of Shanghai, had just completed the Pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. He had also designed the Bank of China Building in Hong Kong, the colony’s tallest building, and the Xiangshan Hotel, in a suburb of Beijing. Now he excoriated the Chinese leaders: “I have worked in China, despite many frustrations, out of love for my country, and in the hope that things would improve. Will I ever be able to work in China again?”

The authorities in Beijing were particularly irritated by a series of initiatives in France in the spring of 1990: there was the monthly magazine Actuel, and the Paris-based, pro-Taiwanese Chinese-language daily Ouzhou Ribao (Europe Journal). The latter chartered a radio ship, The Goddess of Democracy, to broadcast into the PRC from the China Sea, setting sail from La Rochelle on 17  March. Paris-based dissidents Chai Ling, Wan Runnan, Liu Binyan and Yan Jiaqi gave interviews to the media, and it emerged that a high-ranking Chinese official at UNESCO, Zhao Fusan, had defected.

Several mysterious events took place that spring: a car exploded not far from the Chinese trade mission in Neuilly. A burglary took place at the editorial office of Actuel, and documents and CD-ROMs were stolen that belonged to the journalist Christophe Nick, one of the organizers of the Goddess of Democracy project. Nicolas Druz, editor-in-chief of Europe Journal, claimed that he was being followed. A Paris-based human rights activist working on China and Tibet had his apartment broken into. The French police were on red alert. Something was going on.

More and more evidence suggested that the Federation for a Democratic China (FDC) had been the target of infiltration by undercover agents spying on its members and provoking rivalries within it, through a well-orchestrated whispering campaign. The official Chinese press was publishing vitriolic articles attacking Wan Runnan, the former head of the Stone computer company, who was close to Zhao Ziyang. Wang Fang, the Gonganbu minister, claimed that both Wan and Zhao were CIA agents, because of their contacts with the Hungarian-born American financier George Soros. In Paris, where Wan was president of the FDC, the criticisms were of a completely different nature.33 He found himself under attack for being maladroit, for having confused political activity with business. The rumours were of such magnitude that many dissidents involved in Democracy House wanted him to step down as president. Some even went so far as to suspect him of double-dealing—of maintaining “close ties” with Chinese secret service agents in Paris.34

A detailed report by French internal intelligence in March 1993 analyzed these problems. It described “an investigation into smuggling and Mr  Wan Runnan’s and his relatives’ links with Beijing agents and the community of illegal immigrants, which was entrusted by the FDC’s Board of Directors to a dissident.” Wan was criticized for the opacity of his management of “a vast group of political associations and commercial companies, in which appear both Chinese officials and other members of the Chinese community involved in suspicious activities.”

As well as locking down the management of the FDC, “at the end of 1991, Mr  Wan Runnan launched a support fund theoretically intended to finance the FDC (the Global Fund for Democracy in China) which only increased the tension, with the board of directors questioning the secrecy surrounding the fundraising and the exact destination of the money. … An investigation has established that the foundation has two bank accounts, both opened in November 1991, while that of the FDC proper was closed on 28 December 1990, shortly after Mr  Wan Runnan took office.

“This gives credence to the thesis that funds raised for the benefit of the FDC were diverted by Mr  Wan Runnan (in 1991 and 1992, the headquarters of the FDC in Paris received nearly $200,000, of which $90,000 were destined for ‘secret operations’ in mainland China).”

The report gave precise details of the different Chinese businesses in France linked to the affair, implicating a large number of people from both the political and the business worlds, and even what could be considered a “Chinese mafia”.35

Meanwhile another dissident in Wan’s entourage was attracting attention: a student, born in Beijing on 9  April 1966 in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, who had come to live in France in 1988: “The activities of another dissident, Mr  Ma Tao, a close acquaintance of Mr  Wan Runnan, appear to be particularly suspicious. Ma Tao is a young man, short of stature, who almost always wears a beige raincoat, with a fringe of jet-black hair falling over his eyes. He is very active in the FDC, but, more significantly, he became first general secretary and then president of Democracy House, before being expelled in October 1992. His peers are convinced that he works for the Guoanbu as an undercover agent within the movement for democracy.”

It was about this time that some dissidents, who knew my and Rémi Kauffer’s book The Chinese Secret Service, contacted me to suggest that I investigate the Ma Tao case on behalf of the Tiananmen activists. Either the Paris-based groups that had been set up for the defence of human rights were indeed being corrupted by spies and rumour-mongers, or Ma Tao was the victim of a conspiracy being run from within the Chinese embassy.

At the time I did not have the French intelligence dossier quoted above, so I had to try and work out what was going on through snippets of interviews with dissidents from Democracy House and a few police sources. Apart from having apparently sold testimonies of activists at Democracy House, which would have enabled people to obtain refugee status, Ma Tao was accused of being an undercover agent working for Qiao Shi. It was claimed that he was the son of a senior Guoanbu official, charged, according to the testimony of one of his friends in Beijing, “with training agents before they leave for the West”. Even more incriminating, the young man was discovered to hold a foreign bank account in France at Credit Lyonnais, at the Rue St Dominique branch (account number 73304A 81301)—while domiciled at 14 Dongchang’an Avenue, Beijing, as evidenced by the photocopy of a cheque shown to me by one of the dissidents. 14 Dongchang’an Avenue is the address of both the Beijing office of the Gonganbu and of the Guoanbu Bureau of Foreign Affairs. This was the very same office in Beijing that, on 7  January 1990, had officially banned the FDC from all Chinese territory. It was too good to be true. How could an undercover agent have been so careless?

There was only one solution: to interview Ma Tao as part of a documentary on Chinese dissidents in France. The interview took place on 30  October 1993. I was accompanied by a cameraman who filmed the interview using both a floor-mounted and a shoulder-mounted camera.

Ma Tao explained to me the structure of the Federation for a Democratic China: “The FDC has fifteen branches. In Paris, we coordinate, with our newsletter from the administrative liaison—we keep an eye on things. We have 2,400 members, including 120 in France and 600 in the United States. We are going through a bad patch at the moment. People are less motivated than they were. The FDC remains in contact with underground groups: a Chinese social democratic party, a Christian democratic party, and a Free Trade Union.”

He told me a little bit about his background. “I am twenty-six. I was born in Beijing. While I was at high school, I started studying at the Institute of Foreign Languages. I began learning French when I was twelve, then I went on to study French language and literature at Beida (Beijing University). In the 1970s [when he was only a young person] I went to study in Wuhan (central China), paid for by the French. I then got a grant to come to France to do a DEA [MPhil] in October 1988 at Paris VIII University. I received my degree on 7  November 1989. While I was writing my dissertation I was also going on demonstrations all the time. The following year I became one of the founding members of the FDC.”

At this point, I unfolded an organizational chart of the Gonganbu with the name of his father Ma Jinshuan (马 进 拴) on it, and asked him if it was true that he was involved with the upper echelons of the security services (the Guoanbu and Gonganbu sharing offices, and often personnel, in Beijing). Ma Tao remained unflustered, though he admitted to finding the question a little “personal”.

“My father is a university professor, but previously he was head of the Gonganbu’s ‘management, resources and administration’. That’s right! When he was fifteen, in 1947, he was involved in the anti-Japanese struggle, and he became a member of the CCP.  He went to school in Hebei in a liberated zone. After 1949, he joined the Ministry of Public Security [the Gonganbu]. Now when he writes to me he tells me to concentrate on my studies. He has no idea about my activities with the FDC.  It would hurt him. My mother works in a nursery. I have two sisters. One went to a special engineering school and works in a factory; the other lives in Tianjin, and works in finance and banking.”

As I knew that Ma Tao had obtained a passport from the Chinese embassy, I asked him what he thought of the surveillance that it carried out.

“In 1989 and 1990, a student turned up who had been sent by the Chinese secret service. This was often the case. There were several functionaries at the embassy who were in the services. For example, the embassy driver is actually a spy. Cao Guoxing, from the Education Department, runs the party in France (he studied in Beida before me). I had interviews with him in 1989. He told me: ‘You must be very careful!’ He himself was very uncertain after what happened.”36

Ma Tao was certainly a curious character. I lost track of him after this interview. Was he indeed a spy who had been given the task of infiltrating the dissidents? Or was he just the naive victim of a conspiracy born of jealousy between militants and of rumours deliberately circulated in Beijing, intended to destroy the democratic movement in exile? The answer is surely obvious: Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, Qiao Shi and the others had little to fear from these dissidents. Many of the exiles would have liked to go into business in the West or in Taiwan, or even to return to the PRC.  The evolution of the Chinese economy would soon mean that they could do so—on condition that they drop any pretension of hoping for the “fifth modernization”: democracy.

As I was writing this, I glanced up at a colour photograph showing a large banner. The writing on the banner shows that the picture was taken at a demonstration in Paris in support of the dissident Wei Jingsheng, the inventor of the “fifth modernization”. Dressed in his beige raincoat, Ma Tao is standing in front of the white banner with a microphone in his hand, while a French activist holds a megaphone. The young Chinese man was probably calling for the release of Wei Jingsheng—which took place only in 1997, after eighteen years of imprisonment—and declaring, prophetically, that one day the CCP would collapse, as the communist party had collapsed some years earlier in East Germany.

A setback for Qiao Shi in the GDR and Romania

At the end of 1989, while his services were harassing Chinese democrats and dissidents around the world, the spy-teacher Qiao Shi was recharging his batteries in the various bastions of socialism, which were also going through huge social and political upheavals. But, according to Chinese analysts, they were holding firm.

The previous year, Qiao Shi had toured Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The East Germans were following the situation in China very closely, afraid of a similar scenario, as we can see in documents of the Stasi archives, now accessible to the public. In June 1989, Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi—or the MfS (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), to give it its official name—launched a programme for monitoring potential opponents, focusing particularly on Protestant circles, afraid that pacifists were being inspired by the Chinese protesters.37 Mielke feared that the movement in Tiananmen Square would trigger a wave of revolt behind the Iron Curtain. When the demonstrations did begin, Honecker decided to use the “Chinese method” of repression that had worked so well in Beijing.

But nothing worked in Germany. The Berlin Wall came down, sounding the beginning of the end for communism in Eastern Europe. On 7  November 1989, Berliners marched through the streets of the divided capital with cries of “Die Mauer muß weg! The wall must go!” On 11  November, Defence Minister Heinz Kessler summoned his generals to prepare an offensive: “We must use the Chinese method!”

In the shadow of the East Berlin reformers, the politician Hans Modrow and Markus Wolf, head of the secret services, who had plotted Honecker’s fall with the Soviets, realized that they had lost control of the situation. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East German services were paralysed. As Mielke had feared, the demonstrators stormed Stasi headquarters and began seizing archives. The head of the Stasi in Beijing, a military attaché, defected. He refused to offer his services to the Guoanbu. He was expelled, and later returned as a businessmen working for a company headquartered in reunified Germany. The Chinese still keep him under surveillance, suspecting him of being an “honourable correspondent” for the BND, the German intelligence service.

It could have been even worse. In November 1989, Qiao Shi attended the Romanian party congress at the head of a CCP delegation, and praised the “seventy years of glorious revolutionary struggles of the Romanian Communist Party”, wishing it “renewed success during these new historical developments”. Admittedly, relations between the two parties went back a long way. Kang Sheng, Qiao’s predecessor at the head of the secret services, had established good relations through a former classmate from the NKVD school in Moscow, a Romanian called Emil Bodnaras.

Qiao Shi himself had travelled to Romania in both March and August 1978, as part of Hua Guofeng’s entourage. As we know, one of the main purposes of these trips was to establish a regional intelligence base, in liaison with the Romanian Securitate and the DIE (Departamentul de Informatii Externe), to replace that of Tirana after China broke with Enver Hoxha’s Albania. In fact, in March of that year, Nicolae Ceaus sescu had sent Ion Patan, his deputy prime minister and minister of foreign trade, to Beijing, to propose the establishment of a Sino-Romanian intelligence centre in the West. To which Hua had replied: “You may not believe me, but we do not have any spies in the West, although we do have a great many patriots.”

This was the usual double language of Chinese phraseology. Hua knew perfectly well that the situation was soon going to change drastically. Furthermore, it was clear that he was joking when, during his visit to Bucharest that August, accompanied by Qiao Shi, he had offered the Romanians the latest system for developing photos—conceived by Kodak and copied by Chinese intelligence—in order to save the Romanians from having to buy the licence.38

In November 1989, after a gruelling year, Qiao Shi met up with his Romanian friends again. The trip went well, with Ceaus sescu calling on the Chinese leadership to promote a new summit of communist countries. The events in Tiananmen and the fall of the Berlin Wall had shaken the Romanian dictator. Chinese analysts continued to believe that the situation in Romania was stable—but hardly had Qiao Shi arrived back in Beijing before the situation began to deteriorate, to such an extent that a Romanian Securitate unit came to Beijing to beg Qiao to help save the Romanian regime and draw up an escape plan for Ceaus sescu and his wife.

It was too late: in December the revolution broke out, and Nicolae and Helena Ceaus sescu were executed after a show trial. This was yet another humiliation for the PRC’s leaders, in a year that ended as badly as it had started—particularly after they discovered that the Romanian revolution had not been triggered by dissidents in the West, but by Mikhail Gorbachev’s intelligence services. In Beijing, the KGB rezident Ivan Vladimirovich Grigorov would continue to taunt them.39