The Tiananmen Square Rebellion: An Inside Story

June 4, 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the violent suppression of protests of youth in Tiananmen Square and workers in other parts of Beijing by China’s new capitalist rulers. The following are excerpts from a 1999 interview with Li Minqi in the Revolutionary Worker (now Revolution newspaper). Li Minqi, who was involved as a student activist, brings a unique perspective to the massacre carried out by the Chinese government against workers and students in Beijing. We urge all our readers to read the whole interview, “The Tiananmen Square Rebellion: An Inside Story,” online at revcom.us.

Li Minqi: I was a student at Beijing University studying economics in 1989... At that point in time the Chinese regime was trying to pursue a kind of capitalist development. On the ideological front, Marxism-Leninism was regularly being replaced by the dominance of bourgeois ideology. So that dominance of bourgeois ideology also happened among the university students.

I was part of that. I accepted pro-West, pro-capitalist ideology. I believed in Western-style democracy and Western-style capitalism. I entered the movement with that kind of consciousness when it broke out on April 15, 1989.
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Li Minqi: ...I think probably the most important form was for the workers in each factory to come organized by their work unit... They came out more or less spontaneously. For example, when they heard the news that the army was going to enter the city, they spontaneously went into the streets to stop the army.

RW: This was a very challenging situation.

Li Minqi: ...Anyone with a sane mind could see that the conflict between the government and the movement was already fundamentally unsolvable: it must be solved either with the defeat of the government or with the defeat of the democratic movement. But nevertheless the student leadership created the illusion that without mass mobilization you could still achieve the goals of the movement in a “peaceful and rational” way; success or not, you had to stay on this “peaceful and rational” course. Moreover, they created the illusion that this problem could be solved within the legal framework. So, for example, between May 20—this is crucial for the final phase—and June 4, the student leadership did not do anything effectively to bring out their own forces.

RW: Why did [the government leader] Deng Xiaoping react as brutally as he did to this movement?

Li Minqi: I was not surprised. When the ruling class’s rule over the country was actually threatened, it would resort to any possible means.
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Li Minqi: In the movement, I already sensed that something was wrong. The student leadership did not dare to mobilize the workers, did not dare take steps to organize to take political power, and that resulted in the failure of the movement. So I began to rethink what I had believed, what I had taken for granted—Western ideology and Western-style democracy. I began to think maybe some alternative ideas are needed. And the most obvious alternative idea is Marxism.

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