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But let's assume the thing is real. What does the book tell us? It's the afternoon of June 3. China's top leaders are trying to decide how to handle a deteriorating situation on the streets. The day before, Deng had recommended that "the martial law troops begin to carry out the clearing plan and finish it within two days." That failed when ordinary citizens blocked the troops' path, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. A day later, an outraged Premier Li Peng bellows that "in broad daylight and right under our noses, the rioters seized armored cars and set up machine guns on top of them, just to show off." General Yang Shangkun, apparently having just spoken by phone with Deng, pipes in: "The troops should resort to 'all means necessary' only if everything else fails... they are to open fire only as a last resort. And let me repeat: No bloodshed within Tiananmen Square—period... This is not just my personal view; it's Comrade Xiaoping's view, too. So long as everybody agrees, then it will be unanimous." A day later, hundreds, perhaps thousands, lay dead. None was shot in the square: the slaughter took place on the avenues leading to it.
The Tiananmen Massacre, which passed its 11th anniversary last year with little fanfare, suddenly looms large. The Communist Party still officially regards the event as a "counter-revolutionary rebellion," but it's a frightening phrase that suggests treason, and the leaders generally try to avoid it. Instead they tend to refer to the 1989 events a "political upheaval." Yet more is at issue than phraseology. The events of 1989 are like a bludgeon lying on the table during a Politburo meeting. Anybody, at any time, can pick the thing up and clobber his comrades. In practical terms, that could mean airing a public message that the crackdown was wrong, that the students were not counter-revolutionary but patriotic, that the people who were punished should have their records cleared. Deng returned to power in 1978 by reassessing a similar demonstration in Tiananmen Square that had taken place in 1976. When such things happen, every party member in China must immediately choose sides.
The man with the most to lose in a reassessment would be Li Peng, who issued the martial law order as Premier in 1989 and still retains the No. 2 position in the party. Li is the leader that foreign dignitaries most loath shaking hands with. He's the butt of the best political jokes, and vast numbers of Chinese revile him. The Tiananmen Papers won't burnish his image. We're flies on the wall as he manipulates Deng at an early conclave, according to minutes dated April 25, 1989. "Some of the protest posters and the slogans that students shout during the marches are anti-party and anti-socialist," he says to Deng, then adds: "the spear is now pointed directly at you and the others of the elder generation." Deng, then 83, takes the bait: "Saying I'm the mastermind behind the scenes, are they?" The next day, Deng placed a now-famous editorial in the party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily, accusing the students of creating "turmoil." In response, students felt they couldn't leave the square until the editorial was recanted, and an opportunity for defusing tension tragically slipped away.
The man with the most to gain is Zhao Ziyang, the party's former leader who sided with the students and was purged on May 17. Again, we are there. "I think Comrade Ziyang must bear the main responsibility for the escalation of the student movement," says Li. "The political schemes of people with ulterior motives are becoming more and more obvious," seconds Qiao Shi, who has been viewed as sympathe-tic to reformers but appears otherwise in the book. Then Deng says he wants to bring in the army. Zhao demurs. "Comrade Xiaoping," he says, "it will be hard for me to carry out this plan. I have difficulties with it." Deng, outraged, yells, "The minority yields to the majority!" Zhao agrees, saying, "I will submit to party discipline." A day later, he visited students on a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square—and has lived under house arrest ever since.
China's current leader, Jiang Zemin, may be more vulnerable to a reassessment than anybody had previously suspected. Jiang served as Shanghai Mayor through the first half of 1989. He managed to curtail widespread protests there without calling in the army and without bloodshed. Because he remained unstained by the events in Beijing on the fateful June 4, it was widely assumed that Jiang would benefit from any official reassessment of Tiananmen. Yet such thinking will have to change with the release of minutes from an "important meeting" on May 21, two weeks before the crackdown. A party elder, Li Xiannian, is quoted proposing Jiang for the party's highest post: "I like the idea of him as General Secretary." Previously, it was thought that Jiang was considered as a candidate for the top job only after the slaughter was over. "This shows Jiang Zemin was probably in Beijing," according to Wu Guoguang, a senior political reformer who fled China in 1989 after his patron, then-party chief Zhao, was purged, "and certainly knew about the policy-making process leading to the crackdown. Now we can better understand his attitude toward those events."
Jiang is already fighting the battle of his political career. He wants to follow in the steps of his predecessor, Deng, and cling to a few top, behind-the-scenes positions, specifically as chairman of the Central Military Commission. His opposition has already mobilized. Jiang failed recently to place his right-hand man, Zeng Qinhong, onto the Politburo despite an open seat there. "That was a real slap in the face," says a Western diplomat in Beijing. The documents might help explain why. It appears that Jiang operates among leaders who are far less united than most observers believed. The Tiananmen Papers themselves prove that. In all likelihood, no one person could have smuggled so many documents out. It must have taken a coterie of highly placed, highly secretive and extremely well organized people. "The leakage of these papers is a very strong indication of the extent of the internal conflict within the Communist Party," says Liu San Ching of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Movement in China.
In hindsight, the events of 11 years ago are still a great tragedy. But it's also clear that the students actually got a lot of what they demanded, with the exception of democracy. One of their biggest complaints was a job allocation system. Back then, students didn't float resumEs to employers. The state assigned them jobs. For those without political connections, that often meant spending their lives in remote provinces, with little to do and no hope of promotions. Today, nearly all students find work on their own. Their elder cousins in 1989 sensed economic despair, and feared they would be the first to slide through the cracks in the Iron Rice Bowl. That's one reason the Communist Party has so energetically promoted economic development as the last pillar of its crumbled legitimacy. A decade of astounding economic growth has swept student fears away. For today's freshmen with a social conscience, who were seven years old when the army opened fire, worries about the environment far outweigh concern for those in Beijing's graveyards.
It's hard to imagine a replay of Tiananmen in today's China. But the party can still be hard-as-nails. In late 1998, it decimated the Chinese Democracy Party, a network of hundreds of activists who formed the first real opposition grouping in 50 years. Two years ago it began a crackdown on the spiritual movement Falun Gong, and dozens of people have died in police custody for refusing to renounce their beliefs. When threatened, the party strikes hard.
And on the night of June 3, 1989, it struck hardest. As the hours wore on, the Martial Law Command sent "bulletins" to the party's top elders, who gathered in the Zhongnanhai compound as the Thirty-Eighth Group Army attempted to enter the city from the east. "Believing the troops would not use live ammunition, the citizens grew increasingly bold," reads one bulletin. "Infantrymen led the way, firing into the air. Then the soldiers—with the first two rows in a kneeling position and those in the back standing—pointed their weapons into the crowd. Approximately 10:30 p.m., under a barrage of rocks, the troops opened fire." The leaders could surely hear the shots.