by Robert S. Rodvik, via VoltairNet.com

In the first part of his study of the low-intensity warfare carried out by the United States against communist China since the Cold War, Robert S. Rodvik focuses on the U.S. collaboration with the nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. As a rabid anti-communist, Washington knew it could count on the Generalissimo to be more preoccupied with anti-Communist extermination campaigns than with resisting the Japanese invaders, and complicitly turned a blind eye to Chiang’s massacres and unbridled corruption.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (L) appointed Allied Commander-in-Chief in the China theater in 1942, with his very influential wife, and U.S. General Joseph Stilwell (R) who served as Chiang’s Chief of Staff, and at the same time commanded US forces in the China Burma India Theater.

For as long as I can remember the US has been waging an undeclared war against China, the latter very lucky to have avoided being nuked when it joined North Korea in its battle against the Empire. Considering that millions of North Koreans were wiped out by the bombing, killing, murdering giant, its land devastated by the marauding monster, the mere fact that the Joint Chiefs were unable to get the OK to nuke China seems a rare non-happening of great importance. This doesn’t mean, however, that the US hasn’t continued its covert wars to actually destroy communist China over the years. So don’t be surprised when that scenario actually comes into play; sooner, I believe, rather than later.

At the end of WWII writes William Blum, “The ink on the Japanese surrender treaty was hardly dry when the United States began to use the Japanese soldiers still in China alongside American troops in a joint effort against the Chinese communists.” [1]

Blum was referring to US collaboration with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist army and their plans to repel Mao Tse-Tung’s communist soldiers, at war with the rampantly corrupt KMT. Chiang’s nationalist army hoarded US aid monies, arms and material to such a degree that President Truman wrote that “the Chiangs, the Kungs and the Soongs (were) all thieves” having stolen some $750 million dollars of US funds. [2]

To understand the role of the Generalissimo and the KMT in the long, tortured history of modern China we need to go back in time and examine Chiang’s monstrous role in the country’s development.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen was the respected leader of modern China and the early leader of the KMT. His death in 1924 led to a scramble for power, which, in turn, led to the head of the Green Gang triad, Big Eared Tu (Tu Yueh-sheng) succeeding Sun as leader. Tu was the undeniable head of opium trafficking in China and also the head of worker suppression for the Chinese elites and their foreign counterparts in the International Settlement who found labour turmoil as anathema to profit. In 1925 worker and student unrest was such that police from the International Settlement were called in and a British detachment “fired into the crowd killing twelve workers and wounding fifty others. This ‘May 30th Incident’ precipitated strikes, boycotts, and demonstations,” [resulting in the further killing of fifty-two protestors in Canton] murdered by “French and British machine gunners.” [3] Big Eared Tu and his close drug trafficking sidekick Chiang Kai-shek were on their way to controlling all of China.

In February 1927 yet another worker’s strike took place in Shanghai and along with them student supporters were passing out leaflets on city streets. As Sterling Seagrave informs us in his valuable book The Soong Dynasty, “Police and soldiers fell upon them, dragging them into the middle of streets and beheading them on the spot. In the presumed sanctuary of the International Settlement and French Concession, British, American and French police arrested students handing out leaflets, and expelled them from the barricades into the waiting arms of warlord soldiers—who immediately beheaded them. Two hundred were decapitated that day…In an act of calculated treachery, Chiang ordered his army vanguard [alleged rescuers] to stop twenty-five miles outside Shanghai…The man whose troops carried out these beheadings, Li Pao-chang, was rewarded by Chiang a few weeks later with the command of the Eighth Nationalist Army.” [4]

By now the Western leaders of the International Settlement were closely aligned with Big Eared Tu and the Green Gang with the French Concession becoming the heart of China’s opium and heroin trade-all of which was controlled by Big-eared Tu, Chiang, and the Green Gang. As Seagrave writes, “Each month Big-eared Tu was realizing profits of $6,500,000 and passing $150,000 of this on to French government officials and concession police to guarantee a happy working relationship between the Concessionaires and the Green Gang.” [5] It also helped that the chief of detectives of the narcotics police was Green Gang honcho Pockmarked Huang (Huang Chih-jung). By now Chiang was the undisputed leader of the drug-dealing killer triad, as ruthless as any hoodlum in written history. As Seagrave informs us, “Chiang’s police record in the British-administered International Settlement grew over the years to include murder, extortion, numerous armed robberies, and assorted other crimes. He was indicted on all the listed charges, but was never brought to trial, or jailed.” [6]

Shanghai 1927: Chiang’s execution squad beheading a communist worker.

April 1927 soon became infamous with Chiang’s ‘White Terror’ slaughters of leftists and communists (massacres that would accompany Chiang throughout his murderous career). Throughout April more than 12,000 were killed in Shanghai alone. Two Chinese scholars write that, “In the year after 1927, over 300,000 people died across China in anti-communist suppression campaigns executed by the KMT.” [7] Other researchers estimate the deaths being in the millions, mostly in the rural areas where communists and leftists had retreated from Chiang’s terror.

Publisher Henry Booth Luce of Life and Timemagazine fame (later the leading light, along with wife Clare Booth Luce, of the ‘China Lobby’) became an early apologist of Chiang’s butcher gang and of Chiang himself. In its April 25 edition of Time, Luce would have Time declare that the Shanghai Massacre was merely an example of Chiang “impeaching” the leftists. [8] As Luce was equally a rabid anti-communist I believe it is accurate to say that he was fully informed of the Generalissimo’s Nazi-like operations and therefore, with his defense of Chiang, approved of the massacres undertaken by Chiang and his KMT armies.

Chiang, meanwhile, was extorting massive payments from all segments of society and T.V. Soong, Minister of Finance, was aware that virtually none of this money was going to the national treasury, most of it going into Chiang’s endless pockets. T.V. knew that he was “no match for a military man whose troops enjoyed disemboweling young girls and winding their intestines around their naked bodies while they were still conscious.” [9]

The illicit partnership was consummated when T.V.’s sister Mei-ling (Madame Chiang) married the Generalissimo in a royal wedding in Shanghai. Chiang now had an inroad into the wealth of China via T.V.’s role as head of the Central Bank and Soong stood by helplessly as the silver reserves vanished into Chiang’s personal accounts. Another of T.V.’s sisters, Ai-ling, married wealthy industrialist H.H. Kung, principal agent of the Standard Oil Company of China. Both Kung and wife Ai-ling happened to be personal intimates of Big Eared Tu and FBI reports stated that she was responsible for the assassinations of family enemies.

Now, in the 1930s, Chiang became enamored with Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Thus, when Hitler came to power in 1933 Chiang asked him for help in his ongoing war with Mao Tse-tung and the communists fighting against the massive corruption of Chiang and his warlord armies. Hitler dispatched his top military strategist, General Hans von Seect and his aide Lieutenant General George Wetzell. Together they devised a ‘Scorched earth’ policy for Chiang and the KMT, which brought famine to the mountain populations that provided shelter for the communists. Historian Edgar Snow estimated that “in all a million people were killed or starved to death.” [10]

Chiang became so enthralled with Hitler and the Nazis that he sent his younger son, Wei-kuo, to be schooled by the Nazis. As Sterling Seagrave reports, “Wei-kuo became a second lieutenant in the 98th Jaeger Regiment and before returning to China took part in the invasion of Austria in 1938.” [11]

By now, Chiang, T.V. Soong, H.H. Kung and Big Eared Tu were entirely in charge of China’s opium and heroin trade. “Shanghai police reports indicate that in 1930 T.V. Soong personally arranged with Tu to deliver 700 cases of Persian opium to Shanghai under KMT military protection to supplement depleted Chinese stocks.” [12]

Then in 1931 came the ‘Mukden Incident’ by which the Japanese contrived (Like the Reichstag fire in Berlin) a self-inflicted event thus allowing them opportunity to invade northern China (Manchuria) where it established a puppet state called Manchukuo. Chiang was not eager to fight the Japanese, preferring to continue his war with the ill-equipped communists in their mountainous retreats. Even within his KMT army an uprising against Chiang and his policies gave rise to the ‘Xi’an Incident’ whereby the despised Generalissimo was kidnaped by some of his generals and held in confinement till he agreed to opening another front to fight the Japanese. Chiang agreed, took the generals with him to Shanghai, then had them executed. Killing communists was far more important.

The Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937 and Chiang’s leadership led to the retreat of the KMT towards the interior city of Wuhan. Prior to their flight however, Chiang ordered General Shang Chen to destroy the dams around Nanjing in order to impede the advace of the Japanese army. This resulted in the “killing of 500,000 people in the 1938 Yellow River flood.” [13] Barbara Tuchman elaborates further: “Eleven cities and 4,000 villages were flooded, the crops and farms of three provinces ruined, two million people rendered homeless, and in that vast and sodden wasteland another fund of animosity stored up against the Government.” [14] As Sterling Seagrave notes, “General Ku Chu-t’ung, the author of the atrocity, was eventually promoted to commander-in-chief of all KMT armies.” [15]

Numerous secret files on Chiang et al from this time period seem to have disappeared from US Treasury and FBI archives, nevertheless still leaving a damning indictment via those files still in existence and which author Sterling Seagrave has meticulously researched. What the existing record shows is a continuation of horrifying atrocities that took place up to the time of his death.

With Chiang in virtual control of all of China (except for Mao’s mountainous retreats), the country’s most notorious gangster, drug trafficker, murderer and extortionist, Big Eared Tu, was now “respectable, the director of many banks, companies and exchanges, including the Bank of China.” [16] Sort of like the fox being in charge of the henhouse, but with very sinister designs for the future of China’s wealth.

Mao recruited peasants to join his Red Army. He then trained them in guerrilla warfare. Nationalists attacked the Communists repeatedly but failed to drive them out.

Chiang’s KMT government was so thoroughly corrupt that masses of China’s peasant class willingly joined Mao’s communist army and after a protracted struggle Chiang’s nationalists were handily defeated on the fields of battle, resulting in preparations for the evacuation of KMT criminal forces to the Island of Formosa (renamed Taiwan by Chiang himself). The Generalissimo quickly made plans for the departure. As Sterling Seagrave informs us, “Chiang set his most trusted men to systematically emptying China’s banks, her arsenals, and her museums…[which included]…treasures collected by Chi’en Lung, the Fourth Emperor of the Manchu Dynasty. His reign, from 1735-96, had been a golden age of the arts…The Generalissimo regarded these as his dynastic heritage...[thus]…Nearly a quarter of a million paintings, porcelains, jades, and bronzes ultimately were spirited away to Taipei before the conclusion of the Battle of Huai-hai. Eleven days after the battle ended, on January 21, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek resigned as President of Nationalist China…That February, although he was no longer President of Nationalist China, Chiang Kai-shek arranged for the government’s remaining gold reserves to be removed urgently to Taipei.” [17]

A study of the historical record shows that every ruthless dictator worldwide supported by the US; the Shah of Iran, Marcos of the Philippines, Somoza in Nicaragua and numerous others, all driven out of office, departed with their nation’s wealth, leaving the poor to pay the debts undertaken by these depraved gangsters – all with the approval of their US patrons.

“In Shanghai that April, Big Eared Tu saw Chiang one last time…Chiang’s real reason for coming to town was to get Big Eared Tu and the Green Gang to help him rob the Bank of China…Chiang’s plans for the Bank of China had been laid with considerable care. A dingy freighter was tied up on the Bund, opposite the Cathay Hotel. Its coolie crew, dressed in filthy rags, were hand-picked naval ratings in disguise. Several executives of the Bank of China had been given large bribes and a promise of passage to safety on the waiting freighter, in return for opening the vaults. Nationalist troops had cordoned off an area of several blocks around the bank.” [18] The country’s wealth was being stolen by the leading bandit of the era. All with the USA’s approval.

Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo Conference in 1943. (CNA 11/22/1943)

Native Formosans were appalled at what was happening to their island, suddenly beset by a million thugs in uniform descending unwanted upon them. After WWII “the allies had turned [the island] over to Chiang as part of a secret agreement made during the Cairo talks. [As with Formosa, the US also turned Palestine over to the Zionist thugs and we all know what has happened since, the massacres of thousands of Arabs by the Zionist terrorists] Chiang forced Taiwan to heel. There were massacres: in the first, 10,000 Taiwanese were slain by KMT troops in downtown Taipei. Twenty thousand more were put to death before Chiang was firmly established.” [19]

American statesman George Kerr was in Taipei during this period and had a personal observation of the ongoing terror. He later wrote a book of his experience, Formosa Betrayed, which outlined the KMT’s murder spree against the native islanders. From an upper window in his refuge Kerr saw and reported the following:

“We saw Formosans bayoneted in the street without provocation. A man was robbed before our eyes – then cut down and run through. Another ran into the street in pursuit of soldiers dragging away a girl from his house and we saw him, too, cut down. This sickening spectacle was only the smallest sample of the slaughter taking place throughout the city, only what could be seen from one window on the upper floor of one isolated house. The city was full of troops.” [20]

Kerr continues: “The roadways, the river banks and the harbor shores were strewn with bodies at that moment, and the Nationalist troops were spreading out through the countryside, to bring “peace and protection” a la Kuomintang. In later days when UNNRA members, missionaries, foreign businessmen and our consular staff men could come together to compare notes for that week, the stories were the same from every part of the island. For the government had decided on a policy of pure terrorism.” [21]

“We saw students tied together, being driven to the execution grounds, usually along the river banks and ditches about Taipei, or at the waterfront in Keelung. One foreigner counted more than thirty young bodies – in student uniforms – lying along the roadside east of Taipei; they had had their noses and ears slit or hacked off, and many had been castrated. Two students were beheaded near my front gate. Bodies lay unclaimed on the roadside embankment near the Mission compound.” [22]

The Corruption of USA Politics

Kerr continues: “I shall not forget the wordless appeal in the eyes of four well-dressed young men who passed my gate and my protective American flag at midday on March 13. They were tied together by ropes attached to wires twisted about their necks, their arms were bound, and they were being hurried along toward the execution place on the banks of the Keelung River nearby. The ragged Nationalist soldier prodding them along at bayonet point saw the American flag on my jeep, and gave me the smartest salute he could manage. Here was the betrayal in its most simple terms; the Formosans looked to us for help, we armed and financed the Nationalists, and the Nationalists were making sure, if they could, that there would be no more appeal to the United States and “democracy”. [23] [A fantasy sold to the uneducated at home and abroad].

With Formosa/Taiwan completely under Chiang’s control and fully supported by Henry Booth Luce and General Douglas MacArthur (who in the late 30s was put in charge of unleashing War Plan Red – the invasion of Canada, mostly to take over the immense water resources), [24] the China Lobby promoted Chiang as a model “democrat” and a perfect partner in the US war against Mao and the communists. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson offer more detail about MacArthur and his role in promoting “the Peanut” as General Stilwell called him. Appearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the General extolled the virtues of the Kuomintang government:

“I superficially went through Formosa. I was surprised by the contentment I found there. I found that the people were enjoying a standard of living which was quite comparable to what it was before the war…I found representative government being practiced…I went into their courts. I found a judicial system which I thought was better than a great many of the other countries in Asia. I went into their schools. I found that their primary instruction was fully on a standard with what was prevalent in the Far East…I found many things I could criticize too, but I believe sincerely that the standard of government that he [Chiang] is setting in Formosa compares favorably with many democracies in the world. [25]

Aside from the fact that he was lying through his teeth, one has to wonder how the members of the Senate Committee could accept that MacArthur accomplished all that he stated in the course of his one day visit. We should accept, rather, that he was speaking to a like-minded cast who cared not for the truth and were fully supportive of elevating Chiang into being the USA’s #1 Chinese hero. A glance at the historic record of the MacArthur family demonstrates a vicious set of cutthroats finding a home in US military life. General Arthur MacArthur, Douglas’s father, was, for a period of time, head of the US expeditionary forces invading the Philippines. US atrocities resembled those inflicted upon native American Indians in the US conquest of tribal lands, not surprising since Gen. Arthur MacArthur led military campaigns during the Indian Wars, most notably against Geronimo. Of the Philippine Campaign, MacArthur displayed his ruthless side, declaring that it would take “ten years of bayonet treatment” to subdue the Filipino people. [26]

Gen. Douglas MacArthur established his own appalling record early on in his military career. In 1932 WWI veterans who had been promised a bonus payment, but had not yet received payment, marched on Washington to demand their promised reward, setting up a tent city in the Capital. President Herbert Hoover ordered the estimated 40,000 protestors removed and Douglas MacArthur led troops and tanks to fulfil the job. In 1934 he sued journalists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen for defamation after they wrote that his treatment of the Bonus marchers as “unwarranted, unnecessary, insubordinate, harsh and brutal“. [27]

South Korea’s first President Syngman Rhee, right, and General Douglas MacArthur attend a ceremony for the establishment of the Republic of Korea in Seoul on Aug. 15, 1948.

Pearson and Allen struck back harshly, adding the name Isabel Rosario Cooper to the witness list. MacArthur had met her in the Philippines and she became his mistress. Adding her name to the witness list caused him to withdraw his suit and the reality of his brutality became recorded in history. President Harry S. Truman relieved MacArthur from his command of the Korean War when it was known that the latter was advocating the dropping of nuclear weapons on China. US military entry into Korea took place to protect Syngman Rhee, another of America’s savage, murderous tyrants. And, contrary to most historical narratives, legendary journalist I.F. Stone pointed out in his book The Hidden History of the Korean War that Rhee and his military were the first offenders, attacking the North which led to their responding invasion of the South. Not a scenario that the propaganda press wanted known. Rhee and Chiang had hold of US foreign policy much the same as Israel’s vicious rulers have taken control of Arab destinies in order to rule their US-appointed land (Israel) and serve as America’s Jannisaries in the Middle East. Killers all. The US war in Korea killed some four million people and also involved numerous atrocities in which American forces massacred South Korean civilians, No Gun Ri [28] being but one of the savageries. Only Chiang, to date, could manage as many deaths.

Thus, along with his American pals and also having an abiding hatred of anything communist, Chiang, immediately on being in control of Taiwan, set up a Nazified academy of terror training designed to overthrow leftists across the world. Fellow assassins in numerous countries were invited to Taiwan to enrol in Chiang’s deadly World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in order to apply their terror education against unionists, scholars and civil rights activists, leading to further death and destruction that knew no end. That record is well delineated in the book Inside the League.

It is impossible to believe that the USA was not aware of the entirety of Chiang’s appalling record, what with the OSS and numerous agents reporting his bestiality at every turn (Which is likely why many records are still off limits to researchers, even to this late date). That the US government nevertheless promoted Chiang to all who would listen (as well as supporting dozens of the world’s worst killers and plunderers), tells us all we need to know about a hypocritical, depraved system that sets about bombing the world into submission, while simultaneously extolling their own revolting values to all who have been brainwashed through US media propaganda. USA#1 indeed.

On February 28, 1947, the KMT troops of the Republic of China began a repressive crackdown of a popular uprising on Formosa against the Chinese-imposed local government, which the United States permitted to rule following Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Four decades of harsh martial law followed the 228 Massacre and subsequent White Terror period when it was even illegal to commemorate the anniversary of the 1947 tragedy.Wiki Commons photo

Although Chiang and the majority of his KMT army took refuge on Formosa, massacring the indigenous peoples while doing so, a large number of Chinats (as opposed to Chicoms) fled into northern Burma to the resentment of the Burmese government. Here the CIA organized its drugs army into bands of marauders and sent them into China on various sabotage missions, some of the earliest campaigns against the Chinese people by the USA. Having had decades of involvement in the drugs schemes of Chiang and Big Eared Tu, these KMT leftovers also managed a new drugs empire being run out of the Golden Triangle, the CIA flying the finished product to new homes in the western world. [29]

As William Blum writes: “Burma was not the only jumping-off site for CIA-organized raids into China. The islands of Quemoy and Matsu, about five miles off the Chinese coast, were used as bases for hit-and-run attacks, often in battalion strength; for occasional bombing forays, and to block mainland ports…The Chinese retaliated several times with heavy artillery attacks on Quemoy, on one occasion killing two American military officers.” [30]

In August 1954 the Chinats placed 58,000 troops on Quemoy and another 15,000 on Matsu on the basis of “recovering” mainland China; another of Chiang’s delusions. With the artillery attacks devastating the islands the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the use of nuclear bombs against China, an idea thankfully rejected by Dwight Eisenhower. During this period numerous CIA flights to gather intelligence were conducted against China and many were shot down, with many killed and a few captured, all for little gain.

“Beginning in 1957 or 1958,” writes William Blum, “the CIA began to recruit Tibetan refugees and exiles in neighboring countries such as India and Nepal. Amongst their number were members of the Dalai Lama’s guard…Those selected were flown to the United States, to an unused military base high in the Colorado mountains, an altitude approximating that of their mountainous homeland…[where they were]…trained in the fine points of paramilitary warfare.” [31]

(To be continued…)

Robert S. Rodvik

[1] Blum,William, The CIA: a forgotten history, Zed Books Ltd. (London and New Jersey) 1986, p.15. Reprinted under the title Killing Hope, Common Courage Press.

[2] Bagby, Wesley Marvin, The Eagle-Dragon Alliance: America’s Relations with China in World War II, University of Delaware Press, 1992, p.65.

[3] Seagrave, Sterling, The Soong Dynasty, Perennial Library-Harper&Row Publishers, New York, 1986, p.206.

[4] Seagrave, Soong Dynasty, pp.218-19.

[5] Seagrave, Ibid, p.222

[6] Seagrave, Ibid, p.156.

[7] Barnouin, Barbara and Yu Changgen. Zhou Enlai: A Political Life. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. P.38.

[8] Seagrave, op.cit., p.232.

[9] Seagrave, op.cit., p.237.

[10] Seagrave, op.cit., p.290.

[11] Seagrave, op.cit., p.320.

[12] Seagrave, op.cit., p.332.

[13] Wikipedia, Chiang Kai-shek

[14] Tuchman, Barbara, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. (The Macmillan Company, New York 1970). P.186.

[15] Seagrave, op.cit., p.374.

[16] Seagrave, op.cit., p.329.

[17] Seagrave, op.cit., pp. 437-9.

[18] Seagrave, op.cit., pp. 440-1.

[19] Seagrave, op.cit., p. 442.

[20] Kerr, George, Formosa Betrayed, (Cambridge, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p.293.

[21] Kerr, ibid, p.297.

[22] Kerr, ibid, pp.300-1.

[23] Kerr, ibid, pp.306-7.

[24] On MacArthur’s role in executing ’War Plan Red’, see Rudmin, Floyd, Bordering on Aggression: Evidence of US Military Preparations Against Canada, (Voyageur Publishing, Hull, Quebec) 1993.

[25] Anderson, Jon Lee and Scott, Inside the League, (Dodd, Mead & Company, New York 1986) p. 50.

[26] The Philippines Reader, Edited by Daniel B. Schirmer & Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, (South End Press, Boston 1987) p.14.

[27] Manchester, William, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, (Little Brown, Boston, 1978) p.156.

[28] Charles Hanley, Martha Mendoza and Sang-hun Choe, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, Henry Holt & Co., New York

[29] On the CIA’s drugs operations, see McCoy, Alfred, The Politics of Heroin.

[30] Blum, op.cit., p.19.

[31] Blum, op. cit., p.21.

Robert S. Rodvik

Internet activist and the author of The Balkans: US Covert Activity and American Media Complicity” (1995).

by Robert S. Rodvik, via Voltaire

After decades of covert actions meant to overthrow the communist government of China, in 1989 the CIA launched the first of its so-called “colour” revolutions, which, being unsuccessful, did not achieve a designation of its own, those appellations coming later, in Eastern Europe and Georgia. This action took place in Beijing, where the CIA had trained a coterie of “students” to unseat the government.

The iconic photo of the “tank man”, taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, which consecrated the account of the Tiananmen events peddled by the Western media, portraying them as a massacre of peaceful demonstrators.

Fast forward to 1989 and Tiananmen Square

In one of those fortuitous discoveries of the time I happened on a small sideline article buried on page A20 of The Vancouver Sun dated September 17, 1992 and attributed to the Associated Press. It was a one and only printing which obviously escaped the Gatekeepers that offer us “the only news fit to print.” The article was titled: “TIANANMEN – CIA man misread reaction, sources say.” [1]

Forget the title. All titles are created by someone other than the writer and often have little connection to the content of the story. In this case the story was extremely indispensable to truth, and this AP story was a real eye-opener, so far as truth is concerned. The article starts like this:

“The CIA STATION chief in China left the country two days before Chinese troops attacked demonstrators in the capital Beijing in 1989, after predicting the military would not act, U.S. officials said…The Central Intelligence Agency had sources among protestors, as well as within China’s intelligence services with which it enjoyed a close relationship since the 1970s, said the officials, who spoke this week on condition of anonymity.”

Much more than “sources” however, were the methods being implemented to cause overthrow of the country’s communist leadership, continuing a decades long history.

Is this what a peaceful protestor looks like…? Jeff Widener / Associated Press / June 3, 1989

The article continues:

“For months before the June 3 attack on the demonstrators, the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message, said one official. (Emphasis added) The CIA declined all comment.“

A further article in The Vancouver Sun dated May 31, 1999 and attributed to the Washington Post [2] came shortly after US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. It was an official response to constant US anti-China commentary surrounding the western version of events in Tiananmen. The article starts as follows:

“China accused the United States Sunday of inciting the massive democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which rocked Beijing a decade ago, as part of a strategy to promote political chaos in China“. (Emphasis added)

The Washington Post indicates what it thinks of such a statement, telling us that it had been made by China’s “rubber-stamp parliament.” Naturally we all accept that anything printed by the Post originating from China surely must be delusional, while anything originating from Washington must be beyond doubt. The Postarticle continues with this statement from the Chinese parliamentary source:

“The United States ’played an inglorious role’ in the 1989 protests by ’directly master-minding schemes and giving money and goods to support those making the disturbance’ the statement said…America also spread ’horrifying rumours by using their media to cheat and hoodwink the international community’ it said.

The Post article seems to deplore any and every bit of information emanating from China, closing by saying,

“The government has continued unrelenting criticism of the United States for the May 7 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which it said was intended to destabilize China“. [3]

Imagine that. The Chinese protesting merely because the US bombed its embassy and killed a number of its agents. Imagine a reversal of the situation with China bombing a US embassy somewhere in the world. How long do you think before the B2 bombers would be launched.

Burning vehicles in Beijing

Burned out Armored Personnel Carriers.

Chinese student protestors swarm over a captured PLA tank.

Which brings me to another amazing discovery, actual photos of the CIA’s “students” in their “democracy protest” activities, again disappeared from reality content and shortly thereafter the magazine that printed the photos, China Review, vanishing from the print world altogether. The July 1989 issue contained a number of photographs of violent activity undertaken by the “peaceful” participants – Tanks, personnel carriers, and army trucks demolished and lying in ruins; “students” carrying assault rifles etc. Apparently their CIA training involved more than facsimile machines. [4]

Outside a bus, the body of a soldier burned to death by the rioters.

Body of lynched and burned Chinese soldier hanged from a building by Tiananmen Square.

Burnt down bus and burned to a crisp Chinese soldier.

It so happens that I watched a PBS FRONTLINEdocumentary in 2006 titled “Tank Man.”

Among its participants was Professor Timothy Brook, professor of Chinese History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Professor Brook might as well have worked for the CIA since he was a stalwart promoter of China’s despicable (to him) malfeasance in that docudrama. I managed to reach professor Brook by telephone, certify that I was speaking to the right man, and asked if he knew of the CIA’s involvement in the whole woeful affair, and the destruction of a large part of the PLA’s forces. Professor Brook asserted that no such incident took place. I responded by saying I would mail him copies of my material, which I did. That was the last I would hear from the head of UBC’s China department, demonstrating that the disseminators of information in the university system are very often little but propagandists for western imperialism.

Bombing China’s Embassy

May 7, 1999: the Chinese embassy in Belgrade is bombed ; 3 persons are killed and 20 injured.

Two injured Chinese men sit in an ambulance outside the Chinese embassy after NATO air strikes.Photo by Reuters

On the night of May 7, 1999, three NATO-launched missiles struck a critical corner of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia which contained the intelligence gathering chamber dedicated to electronic eavesdropping. At first the atrocity was attributed by the US to faulty, outdated maps, which didn’t place the embassy in its proper location. That pathetic offering didn’t convince a single person, least of all the Chinese, who exploded in furious reaction over the 26 wounded and three killed in the deliberate attack. Turns out that the CIA had specifically chosen the target which, they claim, was purely accidental due to the outdated maps. It was a “pure coincidence” said an unnamed Pentagon official.

“The mistake here was the original data base. It was outdated. I believe it was a 1992 map when it should have been an up-to-date map.” [5]

In Washington, Defense Secretary William Cohen and CIA Director George Tenet issued a joint statement saying that NATO believed the building housed a Yugoslav military facility, not the Chinese Embassy.

In further explanation of this obviously fraudulent story the reader is offered the following: “Only after the disaster did the C.I.A. turn up in its files two maps that accurately placed the embassy…A final backup also failed when several computerized databases of sites that were off-limits to bombing, including embassies, hospitals and churches, did not have the current location of the Chinese Embassy.” [6] And if you believe any of that come see me. I’ve got a bridge to sell.

Commentary took a different track later in the same year, in October 1999, when The Observer of London challenged the official US account under the heading: Nato Bombed Chinese Deliberately. The article states, inter alia, the following info:

“Nato deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.

According to senior military and intelligence sources in Europe and the US the Chinese embassy was removed from a prohibited targets list after Nato electronic intelligence (Elint) detected it sending army signals to Milosevic’s forces.

A NATO flight control officer in Naples also confirmed to us that a map of ‘non-targets’: churches, hospitals and embassies, including the Chinese, did exist. On this ‘don’t hit’ map, the Chinese embassy was correctly located at its current site, and not where it had been until 1996 – as claimed by the US and NATO.” [7]

If, however, the NATO gang does have such a “non-target” list as earlier cited, then why did they bomb so many hospitals, rest homes, churches, schools and other civilian sites? A historic study of NATO-inflicted terror establishes beyond doubt its criminal contempt for civilians wherever its military apparatus is unleashed against the world. On the same day that the Chinese embassy was struck NATO bombers also struck Nis, the third largest city in Yugoslavia, bombing a hospital and an outdoor market filled with civilians, “killing 15 people and wounding 70.”

The magnitude of a cluster bomb by the city of Nis, 1999

Journalists were taken to Nis, an industrial city 195 kilometres southeast of Belgrade, to view the devastation from the cluster-bomb attack, which hit a market and a hospital complex…Buildings were pockmarked from the bombs, which release explosives that then explode again [releasing smaller bomblets that fan out to kill over a wide radius, scattering the explosives indiscriminately and turning the bombing ground into a monstrous killing field]. [8]

After a lengthy study of the embassy bombing, I find the Observer account of why NATO struck the embassy to be lacking in authenticity. Why would the Chinese pass communications from the capital to Yugoslav troops in the field? What would they gain from so doing? I believe there is a more credible explanation.

The actual reason for the bombing was meant to cover-up NATO war crimes that were taking place almost daily, and the Chinese listening post located in the corner of the embassy that was bombed were intercepting orders issued by NATO which clearly revealed those crimes. The Chinese needed to be silenced and their operations ended, no matter the fallout. Take, for instance, that refugee column of Kosovo Albanians exiting the region on tractors and horse-carriages. The column that the US and NATO bombed, killing dozens. As the Toronto Globe and Mailreports:

Last Wednesday, Yugoslav authorities said NATO planes had killed more than 60 Kosovo Albanians in an attack on a refugee column. A road strewn with refugee bodies was shown on Serbian television and foreign journalists were escorted to the site to film the carnage.

Serb television last night revealed extracts of what it called a taped conversation of a NATO pilot being ordered to attack a civilian convoy in Kosovo last week despite seeing only cars and tractors. It said the conversation was between the pilot and an early warning radar plane [AWACS]. The extract covered the critical moment when the pilot identified the convoy. Asked if there were any tanks in the convoy, he said he could see only cars and tractors. But the other plane responds “This is a military target, a completely legitimate military target. Destroy the target…” [9].

That, I believe, is why the listening post was destroyed. The ability to intercept NATO communications was far more damaging to NATO’s credibility than any other purported reason. AWACS radar planes guide all NATO bombing runs and the ability to record those communications presents a serious predicament to the war criminals busily attacking those non-targets: hospitals, churches, markets, bridges, industry, TV stations, and virtually every target imaginable.

The Chinese, humbled due to their inability to respond, would pay attention and realize that the US and its satrap partners were giving notice that China was a paper tiger without substance, and that they were on the future chopping block of the imperialist aggressors. This, I believe, is when they began to seriously devote larger portions of the budget to develop their military forces. It was, Chinese analysts decided, a wake-up call whereby they realized the need for a far greater responsiveness, surely understanding that without a more effective military, their economy and sovereignty would suffer an attack that might even include nuclear weapons.

With Obama’s shift to the Pacific, I believe it’s only a matter of time!

Robert S. Rodvik

Attached documents

Scenes of devastation at the DIN tobacco factory in Nis after the NATO bombing. (JPEG – 39.9 kb)

[1] The Vancouver Sun, “TIANANMEN – CIA man misread reaction, sources say” September 17, 1992, p.A20.

[2] Michael Laris, “Beijing Blames America For Tiananmen Protests,” The Washington Post, May 31, 1999.

[3] The Vancouver Sun, “U.S. had ‘inglorious role’ in 1989 protest, China says,” May 31, 1999, p.A2.

[4] China Review, July 1989, pp. 31-43.

[5] US Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Shelby, May 10, explaining why the Central Intelligence Agency directed NATO to bomb what turned out to be the Chinese embassy in Belgrade killing four (?) People. (Other accounts say three were killed.)

[6] The New York Times, “In Fatal Error, C.I.A. Picked a Bombing Target Only Once: The Chinese Embassy,” July 23, 1999, P.A9.

[7] The Observer, “NATO bombed Chinese deliberately,” John Sweeney and Jens Holsoe in Copenhagen and Ed Vulliamy in Washington, October 17, 1999.

[8] The Globe and Mail, “NATO bombs Chinese embassy,” Julijana Mojsilovic, Reuters News Agency, Belgrade, May 8, 1999, p.A1.

[9] The Globe and Mail, “Reports on bombing cloud the picture,” April 19, 1999, p.A7

Robert S. Rodvik

Internet activist and the author of The Balkans: US Covert Activity and American Media Complicity” (1995).

Godfree Roberts

via Unz

Scholarship program has been canceled. Student leaders–some sponsored by a shadowy Chinese NGO, and recently returned from Beijing–say the failure to prosecute bankers is evidence of criminal conspiracy and government illegitimacy. The returnees are taunting the crowd for its cowardice, urging them to ignore the snipers on every roof and rush the White House. Inside, nervous staffers with sons and daughters, nieces and nephews among the demonstrators–try to discover which of them have been conspiring with the agitators.

Suddenly, simultaneously, all White House doors burst open and uniformed officers rush out bearing either (a) submachine guns, with which they open fire, slaughtering the children of America’s leading families, or (b) bottles of mineral water, slices of the First Lady’s birthday cake and an invitation to join the President that evening on the White House lawn for a barbecue and serious discussion.

In 1989, fourteen million Americans, six percent of the population were in college. That year two million Chinese kids, 0.2% of the population–the first postwar generation whose education was uninterrupted–an entire generation of its future leaders. The idea that any elite–let alone the child-worshipping Chinese–would murder its own children for demonstrating peacefully over legitimate grievances is even sillier than the notion that they were demonstrating about democracy. They were demonstrating about money and sex. The only ‘democracy’ they wanted was the big character democracy they had learned under Mao: hence the re-appearance of big character posters–not seen since the government de-revolutionized the Cultural Revolution twenty years earlier. Mao had told them what to do when an incompetent government would force them to bear the burdens of its incompetence and corruption: bring out the Big Character Posters. He’d even tried to get big postering constitutionally guaranteed.

1989 was a most uncommon year: the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the centenary of the Second Communist Internationale and the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The USSR was coming unglued and Deng’s Reform and Opening had, says Orville Schell,[1] ‘rammed Chinese society into reverse gear, stampeding the country into a form of unregulated capitalism that made the U.S. and Europe seem almost socialist by comparison’. Radical market-price reforms caused a major inflation and popular, student and worker unrest.

Elizabeth Perry wrote, “The Cultural Revolution left a significant mark on popular protests in post-Mao China. Repertoires of collective political action popularized during the Cultural Revolution—such as singing revolutionary songs, marches, rallies, and hunger strikes—had a great impact on the 1989 protest movement. The haunting specter of the Cultural Revolution also had a crucial impact on the Deng regime’s interpretation of—and thereby reaction to—the movement. Over three decades after China ventured down the path of capitalist marketization, the bleak reality of growing socioeconomic disparity, environmental degradation, massive layoffs of workers in state-owned enterprises, evisceration of social protections, rampant official corruption, illicit appropriation of public property, and exploitation of rural migrant labor has led to the unraveling of the broad but fragile consensus regarding the direction and rationality of post-Mao reforms that dominated Chinese intellectual discussions of the 1980s”. Reform and Opening–as far as common people could see–was a disaster and little was needed to light the fires of protest, according to Suzanne Pepper:[2]

With the multiple economic and political crises of 1988 and 1989, the consequences of Deng Xiaoping’s decade of reform for higher education, at least, might better be categorized as a major tragedy for all concerned. Deng’s decade had begun with great fanfare, high hopes, and the total reversal of Cultural Revolution priorities.

During the spring 1988 academic meetings, the comments of Beijing University President Ding Shisun in particular created a sensation both because of their candor in criticizing official policies, “Some people ask me whether as Beijing University president I fear student protests, but I answer that what I fear most is not having enough money”. This provoked heated discussions among delegates and a satirical demonstration by a handful of student protesters who gathered in Tiananmen Square offering to shine delegates’ shoes.

By then, the imperatives driving the student protest movement had already taken on a life of their own. The most important issues were high prices, widespread corruption and the special privileges enjoyed by the families of high-level officials who appeared to benefit more than others from the new opportunities to engage in trade and travel. The students also began demanding the unhindered right to protest such negative consequences as they saw fit, once it became apparent that the authorities were trying to stop them. Between mid-October and December 1985, virtually every provincial and city Party secretary in the country visited every leading university and personally listened to students’ complaints. Inherent in the popular response was an undercurrent of Maoist mass-line or “work unit” democracy that was obviously different from both the Western and Deng Xiaoping’s anti-bureaucratic conceptions.

Thus while student demonstrators were occupying Tiananmen Square in May, one middle-aged, middle-ranking Beijing cadre remarked to a friend during a visit to Shenzhen that “Mao would have sent someone out to talk to them.”

The cadre went on to explain that workers and cadres alike in her industrial system felt they had much less opportunity to ‘participate’ within that system now than in the 1970s, when meetings were called for every problem and people could raise opinions that today would result in their dismissal. Preparations for the next phase of the student movement were thus essentially in place when Hu Yaobang died suddenly in mid-April and provided the perfect, if unanticipated, link. Later demands would include more pointed references to inflation, the special privileges of cadres, Swiss bank accounts and so on, but the leading concerns throughout were political. Among the first were seven drafted on April 23 by students from nineteen Beijing colleges and universities:

1. reassess Hu Yaobang’s [an official much loved by the students] merits and demerits;
2. allow the people to run newspapers;
3. increase educational funding and raise the pay of intellectuals;
4. reevaluate the 1986 student movement and the opposition to bourgeois liberalization;
5. make public the truth of the April 20, 1989, incident (when police allegedly beat student demonstrators);
6. oppose corruption, oppose bureaucratism and severely punish official profiteering;
7. report truthfully all the events from the death of Hu Yaobang to the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

In April, students and workers began massive demonstrations in Beijing and Shanghai, denouncing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms on placards, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as the cat resigns”.

Dongpin Han, a student at the time, tells how the sudden relaxation of price controls set off bank runs, panic buying and hoarding. Crime was rampant and the country was ripe for destabilization: “Official corruption had disrupted China’s economy. The government, facing bankruptcy, had printed more money in 1984 than in the previous thirty-five years combined. Prices of commodities, previously State-controlled and stable, exploded. Meat rose five hundred percent. My parents had saved two thousand yuan. They’d bought their first house for four hundred yuan then, overnight, their savings lost 90 percent of their value. My mother rushed to the store and bought two hundred feet of plain cloth. Her neighbor bought four hundred pounds of salt and another bought forty TV sets. They believed that war-era inflation had returned and their money would become worthless. People started publicly denouncing corrupt officials and their children’s promotion to high office. Beijing’s Consumer Price Index had jumped 30% in 1988 and salaried workers panicked when they could no longer afford staples. State-owned enterprises were pressured to cut costs. Mao’s iron rice bowl–job security and social benefits ranging from medical care to subsidized housing–were suddenly at risk”.

State owned companies dumped millions of workers into the labor market and inflation consumed their severance pay, designed to last six months, in as many weeks. Graduates found themselves in the worst employment market since the war where, it seemed, only those with political connections got hired. A survey showed that the average university graduate earned less than high school matriculants. Government subsidies were cut to the bone and professors’ incomes reduced. Peasants who followed Deng’s admonition to ‘get rich’ were getting rich, enraging social elites who demanded[3] ‘more money for education and higher pay for intellectuals’. The Toronto Sun’s Eric Margolis wrote, “This reaction to Deng’s policies was reflected not only in the Maoist sympathies of some Chinese students but also in the broad demands put forward by the student movement.The 1989 events were, at their core, a political civil war within the CCP where the weapons used went beyond the back rooms and onto the street: students and workers with real grudges due to rapid changes ended up being manipulated by factions within the CCP and foreign conspirators–and things got pretty out of hand”.

The withdrawal of Mao’s tuition subsidies crushed the dreams of millions of families thirsting for education and the government’s decision to maintain scholarships for African students touched off race riots. Thousands of Nanjing students chanted demands for reform, waved signs like “Kill the black devils!” and rampaged through the Africans’ student quarters, injuring many. The anti-African demonstrations spread to Beijing where, late on the night of April 19, student militants carrying banners saying, “No Offend Chinese Women,” yelling “Kill the foreigners!” and screaming insults at Deng marched on Party leaders’ living quarters at Zhongnanhai.

As eyewitness Lee Feigon relates, “The police seemed remarkably tolerant, unflustered by the constant jeering and screaming. Many who watched doubted that the American Secret Service would have reacted so genially if a similar mob were battering on the gates of the White House in the middle of the night. This was carried to an extreme at about 2:30 a.m. when the police tried to clear the crowd and some of them were pushed back onto a cluster of fallen bicycles. One tough picked up one of the bikes and smashed it over the head of one of the police. He was not arrested”.

Squabbling within the Forbidden City, where opposition to Deng’s Reform and Opening was still powerful among Maoists, reflected the turmoil in the Square. Conservatives and progressives struggled to implement contradictory policies and Hu Yaobang’s unexpected death left no trusted interlocutor. Demonstrations intensified when students marched into Tiananmen Square on April 26 singing the Internationale and holding aloft portraits of Mao. Lee Feigon continues, “The leaders of a prominent student group hung big pictures of Mao in the tents they pitched on the square. They talked openly and boldly about the good old days of the Cultural Revolution. Mao, they felt, had the right ideas although he sometimes used wrong tactics. Now they were determined to use what they considered the right ones”.

Like their American counterparts, whose dreams died at Kent State, China’s New Left knew the value of publicity. They expected repression and openly provoked it but, to their considerable surprise, provoked mostly sympathy. The Party’s reform wing hailed them as ‘bearers of the spirit of socialist democracy’ and The Peoples Daily gave them front-page photo spreads and adulatory coverage with headlines like, ‘A Million from All Walks of life Demonstrate in Support of Hunger-Striking Students,’ ‘Save the Students! Save the Children!’ The Guangming Daily ran front-page stories like, “The conditions of the students and the future of the country touch the heart of every Chinese who has a conscience”. Clearly, the students were not alone.

At the height of the turmoil organizers met with Party leaders and CCTV broadcast the meeting nationwide to millions sympathetic to their demands for an end to corruption and the crime wave Deng’s reforms had unleashed.By May 18, support for the students was so strong that the The Peoples Daily pushed coverage of Russian President Gorbachev’s state visit below the fold to feature their demands. Capitalizing on television coverage of Gorbachev’s visit, protesters blocked the Square and announced a hunger strike. The government responded by sending ten thousand doctors and nurses, one hundred ambulances and teams of sanitation workers and portable toilets.

The hunger strikers insisted on further dialog and, when the government complied, demanded that Deng retire, troops stationed outside the city be dispersed and martial law revoked and presented four demands. (1) better treatment for intellectuals, including more money for education, better salaries and job assignments after graduation. (2) An end to pervasive official corruption and to preferential treatment for relatives of Party officials in getting lucrative jobs and better living arrangements and education. (3) Hu Yaobang’s political reforms, including more government accountability and responsiveness to citizens’ ideas and opinions and broader input into government policy. (4) Respect for constitutionally guaranteed freedoms like freedom to demonstrate, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. (As these reforms were made in subsequent years the government’s trust and approval ratings rose steadily, reaching Olympian heights with Xi’s ending pervasive political corruption.)

The students received large sums of money from ordinary citizens, from foreign tourists and organizations abroad and worker activists claimed to have witnessed a ‘chaos of money’ and accused the leadership of pocketing it for themselves. The size and quality of tents and sleeping mats purchased with donated funds, they noted, ‘were allocated among student leaders according to their relative rank.’ Carried away by self-importance, like the elderly Party leaders they despised, they became steadily less available to the press and their bodyguards refused access to journalists without multiple ID cards and press passes. CNN’s Mike Chinoy[4] recalled, “The bickering students began to display the same bureaucratic and autocratic tendencies in their People’s Republic of Tiananmen Square that they were trying to change in the government”. Vito Maggioli, CNN’s assignment manager, recalled how, by late May, camera crews and producers would come back after reporting on events in the Square, complaining about the bureaucracy the students had created, with some even referring to student leaders as ‘fascists.’

Nor did student leaders welcome those who suffered the reforms’ cruelest effects, common workers. Andrew Walder and Gong Xiaoxia[5] said a member of the Workers’ Autonomous Federation found the students were ‘especially unwilling’ to meet members of the Construction Workers’ Union, whom they drove from the Square, considering them as lowly ‘convict laborers’. They ‘were always rejecting us workers. They thought we were uncultured. We demanded participation in the dialogue with the government but the students wouldn’t let us. They considered us workers to be crude, stupid, reckless, and incapable of negotiating’. In response to their exclusivity, the workers produced their own charter inviting all to join and ‘members took pride in the fact that their leaders would talk freely with city people of all walks of life and peasants as well, and that the ‘democratic forum’ of their broadcasting station was open to any and all statements from the audience.’The workers added that they ‘observed in the student leaders and in their movement many of the faults of the nation’s leaders and their political system: hierarchy, secrecy, condescension toward ordinary people, factionalism, struggles for power, and even special privilege and corruption’.

The situation was volatile, but violence would require a catalyst, and the CIA was ready and eager to provide it. Having overthrown Iran’s government in 1953, South Vietnam’s in 1963 and Chile’s in 1973, the Agency moved its team of coupsters to Beijing. As The Vancouver Sun reported, “For months before the June 3 attack on the demonstrators, the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message, said one official”. The CIA moved Gene Sharp, author of the Color Revolution manual, to Beijing where financier George Soros had incorporated the eponymous Fund for the Reform and Opening of China. CIA Director George H.W. Bush withdrew Ambassador Winston Lord from Beijing and replaced him with James Lilley, an operative experienced in regime change. Bush and Lilley had been close friends since the early 1970s when Lilley was the head of station for the CIA in Beijing and Bush was Chief of Mission and de facto Ambassador. In 1975, as Bush was returning to Washington from Beijing to head the CIA he appointed Lilley National Intelligence Officer for China, the highest-ranked expert on China in the American intelligence community.

Lilley had made contact with Premier Zhao Ziyang who wanted China to adopt privatized media, freedom to organize, an independent judiciary, a multiparty parliamentary democracy, privatization of state-owned assets, the separation of Party and State and market-oriented economic reforms. In 1986 Soros endowed his Fund for the Reform and Opening of China with one million dollars—a huge sum for China those days—to promote cultural and intellectual exchanges with Zhao’s Institute for Economic Structural Reform. In 1988 the National Endowment for Democracy opened two offices in China, gave regular seminars on democracy, sponsored select Chinese writers and publications and recruited Chinese students studying in US. In February 1989, two months before the CIA launched its Tiananmen destabilization campaign, President Bush paid his first and only visit to China.

When the student protests erupted in late April the NED mailed thousands of inflammatory letters from Washington to recipients in China and aroused public opinion through Voice of America (VOA) shortwave radio broadcasts, in Mandarin, across China on the days of the protests. In Nanjing, university students had boom-boxes turned high as the VOA described events in China.

Deng had CIA strategist Gene Sharp arrested and expelled to British Hong Kong, whence he directed the insurrection, as he recounts in his memoir, Non-Violent Struggle in China. Another CIA operative, VOA’s Beijing chief, Alan Pessin, provided encouragement, provocation, strategic guidance and tactical advice in round-the-clock broadcasts and students who were there still talk of the VOA’s promised land of ‘freedom and democracy’.

The Taiwan-funded Chinese Alliance for Democracy issued an Open Letter from New York which, posted in Beijing University’s Triangle on April 26, called for ‘consolidating the organizational links established during the movement, strengthening the contacts with the critics and strengthening support for the movement within all sectors of society’. The Taiwanese government provided $1 million for equipment and flew its most prominent member (and future Nobelist) Liu Xiaobo from Washington to lead the protests. The students’ local leader Chai Ling, secretly holding a US visa, angrily accused Liu of using the student movement to ‘rebuild his own image’.

The stage was set for violence. Moderate student leaders argued that, having made their point, the students should withdraw and live to fight another day but Chai Ling commanded[6] them to stay because, she explained, “Some fellow students asked me what our plans are, what our demands will be in future. This made me feel sick at heart; I started out to tell them that what we were waiting for was actually the spilling of blood, for only when the government descends to the depths of depravity and decides to deal with us by slaughtering us, only when rivers of blood flow in the Square, will the eyes of our country’s people truly be opened…But how could I tell them this? How could I tell them that their lives would have to be sacrificed in order to win?”

Wang Yam, her fellow organizer, publicly supported Chai Ling’s call for violence and gave government conservatives the excuse they needed, asone Long March veteranput it: “Those goddamn bastards! Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen? They’re really asking for it! We should send the troops right now to grab those counter-revolutionaries! What’s the People’s Liberation Army for, anyway? What are the martial law troops for? They’re not supposed to just sit around and eat!”

At midnight on June 3, six weeks after the protests began, troops began moving from the railway station into the city under orders not to fire unless fired upon. An officer later testified at the official enquiry, “If we had been allowed to let ourselves go, one battalion would have been quite sufficient to quell the riot but, with rioters hiding behind onlookers, we had to stay our hand”. On the way in one soldier was seized, thrown from an overpass and killed, another doused with gasoline and set alight, one was clubbed to death and disemboweled and three major-generals were attacked and hospitalized. Rioters looted weapons and ammunition from captured trucks and attacked government buildings. Leaders distributed knives, iron bars, bricks and chains, urging people to ‘take up arms and overthrow the government’. At six the following evening loudspeakers told Beijingers to remain indoors as troops had been ordered to suppress the uprising by force and, when the soldiers moved in, rioters burned hundreds of vehicles, including sixty armored cars and thirty police cars. NYU Professor James C. Hsiung watched⁠[7] the action from his perch in the Beijing Hotel:

After midnight, I saw troops trotting on foot from the East towards Tiananmen Square, without helmets or weapons. As they were approaching the square, they were blocked by huge crowds and were forced to retreat, trotting back in the direction (east) they had come from. On their retreat route, the troops were chased by the crowds, many throwing rocks and bricks. Not long after, troops returned by truck, this time with helmets on and weapons in hand. By then, the crowds had set up more roadblocks. As the trucks were negotiating their way through, the crowds stopped them with a barrage of rocks. This free-for-all went on for some time, during which many soldiers were either killed or wounded; and some lost their weapons to the ruffians. Then came the armored reinforcements spitting sporadic fire, apparently in revenge, into the crowds along both sides of the road. Besides the ruffians and students, many were merely onlookers. The crowds, however, fought back hard. They climbed atop the on-coming tanks. Some even used Molotov cocktails or the equivalents of a flame-thrower against the tanks. One tank went ablaze. As the three soldiers inside opened the latch to run away from the heat, some hooligans shouted: “Kill them, kill them!” A BCC (Taiwan) radio reporter on the scene recorded the shouting. He later told me that he saw the three soldiers killed by their maulers. A Chinese-American friend, in whose house I had been a dinner guest only two nights before, later called and told me that a similar attack took place in front of their apartment building. One soldier’s corpse, lying by an incinerated troop-carrier truck, I was told, was set on fire by his killers, who had poured gasoline on the body. In all the cases we knew, the ruffians were much older than most college students and did not appear to be students at all.

Informed that troops were approaching Tiananmen Square and shooting had started, the students began withdrawing at 5 am and were gone by 6:30. Journalist Che Muqi⁠[8]

recounts his conversation with Kong Xiangzhi, a professor at Chinese People’s University:

At about 12:10 a.m., the troops marched in from West Chang’an Avenue. I was sitting on the steps outside the West entrance of the Great Hall of the People. When the troops marched towards the square, I saw a group of people throwing rocks at them. When a few soldiers went up to them, they ran southwards. These soldiers fired into the air. Then some other soldiers came up but they didn’t shoot at the crowds, otherwise I would have been shot, since I was now on the sidewalk.

I walked to the East entrance of the Great Hall where several hundred soldiers were sitting and some people were talking with them. The atmosphere seemed friendly. When I saw someone binding up a wound for a young soldier, I went up to help and asked him how he had been wounded. He told me he had been hit by rocks. He also told me that many of his comrades had also been wounded. I saw many whose heads, arms or hands were bound with gauze. I told him that I believed that the majority of the students and residents would not do this. He agreed with me. Then, an officer came to talk with us. He said that the troops would never open fire on the masses or the students. At about 3:30 a.m., the troops began to fall in. The officer then said to his men: “We’re going in to clear out the square. Now I want to make clear that no-one is permitted to shoot at the students or people; right now, this is the highest form of discipline”.

About 4:10 a.m. all the lights at the square went out. A lot of soldiers came out from the East entrance of the Great Hall. I sat down to watch under the pine trees, feeling excited and nervous. I was nervous because this was the first time I had seen so many soldiers carrying guns and I didn’t know how they were going to clear up the square. ..At about 4:30, the martial law troops announced over the loudspeaker, “Attention, students. We have agreed to your appeal. We will allow you to leave peacefully”. The announcement was broadcast over and over again. At about 4:50, the students around the monument began to leave. I looked around and saw that there was almost no one in sight. So I came back with the students. That was at 5:05 a.m. This was what I saw at the time. No one was killed throughout the whole process. Some people with ulterior motives who had fled abroad spread rumors that Tiananmen Square had been a blood-bath and that they had had to crawl out from underneath the corpses, which was sheer nonsense.

Famous Taiwanese entertainer Hou Dejian summarized his experience of the finale, “Some people said that two hundred died in the Square and others claimed that two thousand died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I don’t know where those people died. I myself was in the Square until six-thirty in the morning”. Future Nobelist Liu Xiaobo remained to the end and said he saw nobody harmed.

On June 19, Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing delivered the results of the official enquiry. More than 7,000 were wounded or injured and two hundred forty one killed, including thirty-six students, ten soldiers and thirteen People’s Armed Police during a riot in Chang’An Road.

For all its failures, tragedies and confusions, the Tiananmen incident ranks among the most successful propaganda campaigns in history. Long after the massacre story was disproved, foreign journalists–all of whom had left the Square–told readers that students had been demanding Western values in the face of ‘Red Chinese totalitarianism’. Their fabricated massacre gave the West an excuse to embargo China yet again, and to label it an international human rights pariah.

Some journalists, sinologists and officials had second thoughts. “I believe we tried to put a ‘made in the USA’ democracy stamp on it,” said Jackie Judd[9]

of ABC. Photographer Jeff Widener[10] said he took the Tank Man photograph on June 5, more than a day after the students had left the Square. (Associated Press still distributes the image as if it were from June 4, so look for it).

>

 

Widener’s photo shows a man stopping four tanks but another photograph, taken by Stuart Franklin a few seconds earlier, shows nineteen tanks behind Widener’s four and makes it clear that the tanks are leaving the Square, driving east, out of the city.

And the story continued to leak out abroad:[11]

CIA man misread reaction, sources say. Vancouver Sun.

WASHINGTON – THE CIA STATION chief in China left the country two days before Chinese troops attacked demonstrators in the capital Beijing in 1989, after predicting the military would not act, U.S. officials said. China’s government had declared martial law 12 days earlier and moved tens of thousands of troops to the outskirts of Beijing in preparation for removing the demonstrators from Tiananmen Square.

The Central Intelligence Agency had sources among protesters, as well as within China’s intelligence services with which it enjoyed a close relationship since the 1970s, said the officials, who spoke this week on condition of anonymity.

For months before the June 3 attack on the demonstrators, the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message, said one official.

In the weeks leading up to the 1989 bloodshed, the CIA monitored the growing tension closely using its case officers, diplomats at the U.S. embassy, and a network of informers among the students who led the protest. But as the protest lost steam, the chief of the CIA station decided the threat of confrontation had been defused, said one official. The CIA declined all comment”.

The BBC’s Beijing correspondent, James Miles,confessed to having “Conveyed the wrong impression, and that there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops…There was no Tiananmen Square massacre”. But, even after TheColumbia Journalism Review discredited⁠12 the massacre story and WikiLeaks released Ambassador James Lilley’s July 12 (a month after the events) cable, few editors were interested.

OF JUNE 3-4 EVENTS ON TIANANMEN SQUARE

1. CONFIDENTIAL – ENTIRE TEXT.
2. SUMMARY- DURING A RECENT MEETING, A LATIN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT AND HIS WIFE PROVIDED POLOFF AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR MOVEMENTS ON JUNE 3-4 AND THEIR EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF EVENTS AT TIANANMEN SQUARE. ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE. THEY WERE ABLE TO ENTER AND LEAVE THE SQUARE SEVERAL TIMES AND WERE NOT HARASSED BY TROOPS. REMAINING WITH STUDENTS BY THE MONUMENT TO THE PEOPLE’S HEROES UNTIL THE FINAL WITHDRAWAL, THE DIPLOMAT SAID THERE WERE NO MASS SHOOTINGS OF STUDENTS IN THE SQUARE OR AT THE MONUMENT. END SUMMARY. (Emphasis mine – WE)
3. GALLO [Chilean Second Secretary Carlos Gallo and his wife] EVENTUALLY ENDED UP AT THE RED CROSS STATION, AGAIN HOPING THAT TROOPS WOULD NOT FIRE ON THE MEDICAL PERSONNEL THERE. HE WATCHED THE MILITARY ENTER THE SQUARE AND DID NOT OBSERVE ANY MASS FIRING OF WEAPONS INTO THE CROWDS, ALTHOUGH SPORADIC GUNFIRE WAS HEARD. HE SAID THAT MOST OF THE TROOPS WHICH ENTERED THE SQUARE WERE ACTUALLY ARMED ONLY WITH ANTI-RIOT GEAR–TRUNCHEONS AND WOODEN CLUBS… (Emphasis added – WE)
4. ALTHOUGH GUNFIRE COULD BE HEARD, GALLO SAID THAT APART FROM SOME BEATING OF STUDENTS, THERE WAS NO MASS FIRING INTO THE CROWD OF STUDENTS AT THE MONUMENT. WHEN POLOFF MENTIONED SOME REPORTEDLY EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF MASSACRES AT THE MONUMENT WITH AUTOMATIC WEAPONS, GALLO SAID THAT THERE WAS NO SUCH SLAUGHTER. ONCE AGREEMENT WAS REACHED FOR THE STUDENTS TO WITHDRAW, LINKING HANDS TO FORM A COLUMN, THE STUDENTS LEFT THE SQUARE THROUGH THE SOUTHEAST CORNER. ESSENTIALLY EVERYONE, INCLUDING GALLO, LEFT. THE FEW THAT ATTEMPTED TO REMAIN BEHIND WERE BEATEN AND DRIVEN TO JOIN THE END OF THE DEPARTING PROCESSION. ONCE OUTSIDE THE SQUARE, THE STUDENTS HEADED WEST ON QIANMEN DAJIE WHILE GALLO HEADED EAST TO HIS CAR. (Emphasis mine – WE)

The Public Security Ministry issued arrest warrants for twenty-one demonstrators including Liu Xiaobo, Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, Liu Gang and Chai Ling, but the CIA’s Operation Yellowbird had already exfiltrated four hundred leaders to Western countries. Ambassador Lilley claimed that America was involved in ‘almost exclusively legal exfiltrations,’ though it was later proven that Hong Kong’s notorious Sun Yee On criminal triad was involved.

A few months after the event Deng discussed the incident with Chinese-American academic Li Zhengdao, “In suppressing the turmoil we were at pains to avoid hurting people, especially the students; that was our guiding principle” and criticized his colleague Zhao Ziyang whom, he said, “was clearly exposed as siding with the agitators and attempting to split the Party” and reportedly told West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, “the students should not be blamed too much. The roots of the problem lay within the leadership of the Party”.

In The Legacy of Tiananmen James A. R. Miles explained, “A year after Tiananmen, Deng elaborated on his fears of civil war during a meeting with the former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. ‘You can imagine,’ Deng said, ‘what China in turmoil would be like. If turmoil erupts in China, it wouldn’t just be a Cultural Revolution-type problem. At that time (during the Cultural Revolution) you still had the prestige of the elder generation of leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Even though it was described as ‘all-out civil war,’ actually there wasn’t any major fighting. It wasn’t a proper civil war. Now it’s not at all the same. If turmoil erupts again, to the extent that the party is no longer effective and state power is no longer effective and one faction grabs one part of the army and another faction grabs another part of the army–that would be civil war. If some so-called democratic fighters seize power, they’ll start fighting among themselves. As soon as civil war breaks out there’ll be rivers of blood. What would be the point then of talking about ‘human rights’? As soon as civil war breaks out, local warlords will spring up everywhere, production will plummet, communications will be severed, and it won’t be a matter of a few million or even tens of millions of refugees. There’d be well over a hundred million people fleeing the country and the first to be affected would be Asia, now the most promising part of the world. It would be a global disaster’”.

Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew later said he would have shot 200,000 demonstrators to maintain stability and U.S. Ambassador Charles Freeman opined, “I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square combined, while shutting down much of the Chinese government’s normal operations”.

The CIA’s operational analysis attributed the failure to ‘the difficulty of mobilizing young activists in the desired direction due to lack of strong polarizations in Chinese society’ and Chinese analysts attributed the lack of strong polarizations in Chinese society to the Cultural Revolution, which Mao had conducged specifically for that purpose.

Students had discovered their leader, Chai Ling, leaving the square and, accusing her of abandoning them to die, detained her. She escaped and recorded a speech saying that she witnessed at least twenty students and workers being massacred in the Square. She was given a scholarship to Princeton University and nominated for the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. Though he had left the Square hours before the military arrived, another leader, Wu’er Kaixi claimed that he witnessed tanks killing hundreds of protesters by driving over them as they slept.Liu Xiaobo, later awarded the Nobel Peace Prizehelped the students avoid bloodshed and was pardoned. He, too, said that nobody in the Square was harmed.

The vice-president of the Tiananmen student body and leader of the riot in Chang’An Avenue, Wang Yam, was smuggled to the UK and given British citizenship. In 2006 he was tried in London, in the first British murder trial to be held in secret, for bludgeoning to death an elderly man. The Crown Prosecutor demanded that Wang’s trial be held in camera and the trial judge assented and gagged media speculation. Wang Yam was convicted of first degree murder and MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency, admitted that he was their employee.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton discussed the incident with President Jiang Zemin, as John Border⁠13 reported, “The drama of the meeting came in a remarkable 70-minute news conference, carried live on nationwide Chinese television, in which the two Presidents differed sharply on the nature of personal freedom, the role of the state and the meaning of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations that were violently suppressed by the Chinese Government in June 1989…Mr. Clinton flatly told the Chinese leader that his Government had been ‘wrong’ to use force to end the peaceful demonstrations of the spring of 1989 and that broad personal freedom and political expression were the price of admission to the world community of the 21st century. ‘For all of our agreements, we still disagree about the meaning of what happened then,’ Mr. Clinton said in his opening statement, referring to the violent crackdown on Tiananmen Square the night of June 3-4, 1989, that left hundreds of protesters dead”.

Three years after Tiananmen, in response to demonstrations in Los Angeles, President Bush sent in thousands of troops saying “There can be no excuse for the murder, arson, theft or vandalism that have terrorized the people of Los Angeles… Let me assure you that I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order”. Sixty-six people died, eleven thousand were arrested, and the media called the President’s action ‘decisive’. The following year, when President Clinton ordered federal forces to attack a Christian community in Waco, Texas, they killed eighty-one men, women and children. No-one was disciplined.

Notes

[1] Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation. By Orville Schell.

[2] China’ Education Reform in the 1980s Policies, Issues, and Historical Perspectives. SUZANNE PEPPER. 1990. INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES.

[3] China Rising: The Meaning of Tiananmen https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0929587308/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0929587308&linkCode=as2&tag=inpraiseofchi-20&linkId=fe9aef54d84dbb0f5e056169f9f74077.

[4] Mike Chinoy, China Live: Two Decades in the Heart of the Dragon, p.242.

[5] University Workers in the Tiananmen Protests: The Politics of the Beijing Workers’ AutonomousFederation. Author(s): Andrew G. Walder and Gong Xiaoxia Source: The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 29 (Jan., 1993), pp. 1-29.

[6] Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement (Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), p. 327.

[7] When the author queried Dr. Hsiung, he replied, “It could have been in a paper (report) I gave at a meeting in New York. The meeting had been scheduled long before the June 4 1989. I was supposed to give a paper at the meeting. But, since I had come only a few days before when the meeting took place, I did not have the time to write a paper. So, I gave a report on what I witnessed at the Tiananmen Square, instead.

I can assure you that I received very strong, almost tumultuous, reactions in response. One person in the audience even said: “Don’t think you can fool us. We witnessed it too, from the TV shorts”. So, watching TV made him an eye witness, too.

If you can read Chinese, I did have an article written on the 20th anniversary of the June 4th tragedy, titled: “一個天安門事件 ‘變相受害者’ 的喊冤回憶”, (The Painful Reminiscences of a “Virtual Victim“ of the Tiananmen Event, published in Taiwan’s Straits’ Review (海峽評論），No. 223 (July, 2009), pp. 173-178.

The Straits Review can be reached by e-mail at: <sreview@ms47.hinet.net>.

If you write, pls. ask for Mr. Shu-tao FU (福蜀濤）。 He knows me. In fact, he asked me for the article.

[8] Che Muqi: «Beijing turmoil – More than meets the eye», Foreign language press, Beijing 1990, ISBN 0-8351-2459-2; 7-119-01305-X

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0835124592/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0835124592&linkCode=as2&tag=inpraiseofchi-20&linkId=8ae5ac33198984828ff0fdb336af8833

[9] Coverage of the Crisis

TURMOIL AT TIANANMEN

A STUDY OF U.S. PRESS COVERAGE OF THE BEIJING SPRING OF 1989.

[10] Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen, NYT

[11] The Vancouver Sun; Vancouver, B.C. [Vancouver, B.C]17 Sep 1992: A20 (1st Edition)

[12] The Myth of Tiananmen

[13] The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/28/world/clinton-china-overview-clinton-jiang-debate-views-live-tv-clashing-rights.html.