The “amazing and glorious” month I wrote of in my last letter has ended. Deng Xiaoping, the country’s senior leader, who several weeks ago said, “Don’t be afraid to spill blood,” spilled a terrible quantity of it, and the People’s Republic has recaptured Tiananmen Square. And at what an awful cost—not the cost in lives alone (the exact death toll will probably never be computed, though the latest estimates go as high as five thousand, with many thousands injured) but the cost to China. Most of Beijing’s principal intersections are now either guarded by tanks and armored personnel carriers or blocked by the hulks of burned-out vehicles. As a nation, the People’s Republic not only has sacrificed a generation and the good regard of the free world but, with one massive self-inflicted blow, appears to have knocked itself right back into the terrible rituals of the Cultural Revolution. Martial-law restrictions forbidding photographs, interviews, and “note-taking” by journalists are being enforced, and the mayor of Beijing was on television several days ago talking about sending the Army onto the city’s approximately sixty campuses to clean up the “counter-revolutionary”—which here means treasonous —“dregs” of “bourgeois liberal” students who, supported nonviolently by Beijingers, had paralyzed the might of this nation since April 18th, when the first few thousand demonstrators appeared on Tiananmen Square. The Army needn’t bother; the campuses are almost empty already, and so are many of the offices previously occupied by foreign corporations, whose pro-jected investments China had up to now worked successfully to promote. There’s plenty of blame to apportion for this debacle: to the country’s leaders, to the Army, and, yes, to the students as well. They talked about nonviolence, but they, or their supporters, gave an unmerciful bearbaiting to the soldiers trapped by their barricades and, in the end, killed several. It seems to me that they planned their campaigns magnificently but lost sight of what they were campaigning for, and ultimately had no plan for winning.

However, up until a few hours before the People’s Liberation Army smashed through the city to clear the square, at 2 A.M. on June 4th, I—and, I believe, most other Beijing residents— thought they had won. They had humbled the nation’s leaders into promising them the “dialogue” that they had at first said was their principal goal. They had embarrassed Deng Xiaoping at the moment of what was supposed to be his greatest international triumph: the visit of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Most striking of all, they had brought the people of Beijing onto the streets day and night for two weeks to stand with them against Army tanks and trucks. And, finally, even if they weren’t able to formulate concrete goals for their pro-democracy movement, they had come up with a superb symbol for it—a twenty-seven-foot-tall polystyrene-and-plaster-of-Paris “Goddess of Democracy and Freedom,” which on May 29th students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts erected on the square, directly opposite the portrait of Chairman Mao on Tiananmen Gate. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” has been one of the nation’s slogans, and in appearance this was a Statue of Liberty with Chinese characteristics.

Aesthetic concerns aside, she was beautiful—and how the government squirmed over the symbolism! The bureau in charge of the administration of the square called the statue “an insult to the national dignity and image,” and the Beijing Daily condemned it for its obvious similarity to the symbol of America (actually, this statue held her torch with both hands and lacked the spiked crown that distinguishes the Lady in New York Harbor), and warned the students not to “poke fun at China’s patriotic feelings.” When the warning proved unavailing, the Daily published a letter, purportedly from middle-school students, urging the demonstrators to bring down the statue and clear the square in time for the June 1st celebration of Children’s Day, for the sake of the Young Pioneers, who “dreamed of seeing the raising of the national flag, and of asking the uncles of the flag team to teach them the revolutionary traditions.” Also, in a heavy-handed attempt at counter-symbolism, workers were being called out for “anti-democracy” marches in and around Beijing: “work units” in Beijing were widely reported to be offering ten yuan (about $2.30) and a straw hat to everyone who marched —and threatening to withhold the monthly bonus from anyone who didn’t. In one of the staged parades, shown on government television, an effigy of China’s best-known dissident, Fang Lizhi, was burned, although Fang himself has kept aloof from the student demonstrations. “Some people are causing trouble, trying to pressure the government,” a demonstration organizer was quoted as saying. “Fang Lizhi is always doing so. Can this chaos be any coincidence?” (Fang is now inside the American Embassy.) Even on government television, however, these were as dispirited a lot of “demonstrators” as I have ever seen in the Chinese media. Unable to celebrate Children’s Day on Tiananmen as planned, the government found a more ominous form of children’s celebration on June 2nd. Since truck convoys couldn’t get through, it sent perhaps as many as a thousand of its youngest soldiers, out of uniform, unarmed, and on foot, to try to walk in small groups to the square, apparently with the intention of infiltrating the student ranks. Most of these kids, all with crew cuts, were conspicuously dressed in white shirts over their green Army pants, and carried packs containing their canteens and the rest of their uniforms. None of them got anywhere near the square. Leaderless and bewildered—few had any idea of what they were supposed to be doing in Beijing—they were easily rounded up by Beijingers, and harried back to the city’s outskirts. But much of their gear and at least some of their assault rifles, carried in trucks that followed them at a discreet distance, became trophies of war, and were being carried and brandished around the city that evening. Whether or not this “children’s invasion” was a tactical feint, intended to produce overconfidence, its failure did cause euphoria here in the city. I was not the only resident on the streets the following afternoon who began to feel that the student democracy movement might yet topple the national government leaders, who had remained out of sight and invisible. Whatever was going on at high levels seemed to be taking place in the government’s walled compound, Zhongnanhai, just west of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

The front entrance of Zhongnanhai, which is almost never officially used, is on the north side of Chang’an Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, and on the afternoon of Saturday, June 3rd, in an effort to see what was taking place outside it and on the square, a friend, Derek Sidenius, who is an editor for the English-language China Daily, and I set out from my office at Xinhua, the New China News Agency. The wide avenue was covered with rubble, and every hundred feet or so segments of a metal fence, which normally divides the motor lanes and the bicycle lanes, had been ripped out and set up crosswise over both. Half a dozen burned-out trolley cars blocked the entry to Xi Dan, one of the city’s principal shopping streets, and were serving as platforms for Beijingers who had climbed on top of and into them to watch another crowd of Beijingers, who were surrounding two military buses stopped just east of the intersection and hectoring their occupants. One bus contained soldiers, some in full uniform and some in shirtsleeves, and the other their bed-rolls and other gear. On top of this second bus were three young men waving Chinese flags, and also, hewilderingly, a small wooden desk. (I heard later that it had been used a few minutes before to display weapons seized from inside the bus.) At the next corner, Fuyou Jie, where the wall of Zhongnanhai begins, a line of People’s Armed Police blocking Chang’an held a position directly beneath a billboard saying “Welcome to Beijing.” They were under attack by at least twenty stone-throwing young men.

A few of the policemen were picking up thrown stones and throwing them back, and occasionally one or two officers would step forward and fire what turned out to be tear-gas canisters from a round-barreled weapon, but for the most part the situation was static until, apparently on command, the police charged. I ran across Chang’an to flatten myself against a wall, at a point that turned out to be just beyond the police charge but not out of range of the tear gas—a canister landed about twenty feet from me, and before its fumes (short-lived, I’m glad to say) blocked my vision I witnessed three alternating charges by police and young rock throwers. Much has been written (justifiably) about the bravery of the demonstrators here, but the most courageous sight I saw then was a young—and furious—police officer, holding only a truncheon, charging alone into a crowd of young men; they fled at his approach. By the time my vision had cleared, he and the other police had retreated, and students were filling the intersection.

One of several young men who then came over to help me identified himself as a teacher at a scientific institute, and said sternly, “You know, you have just violated Chinese martial law”—as indeed I had, by watching and taking notes at an anti-government demonstration. (In my defense, I’d like to point out that this admonition came from a man holding stones to throw at police.) The admonition was one of half a dozen I received from strangers on the streets in the next two days. One woman pointed at my eyes and simulated a gun with her hands, to indicate that police were aiming at foreigners; another ran up to me on a corner and said over and over the word “Danger.” On this particular occasion, however, with the intersection cleared, Mr. Sidenius and I continued east on Chang’an, past Zhongnanhai (besieged by several hundred demonstrators), and onto the square, where loudspeakers set up near the statue of the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom were playing what has become the demonstration’s unofficial anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Outside a tent erected on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, which had become the demonstration headquarters, four young hunger strikers—one of them a popular singer—were signing autographs and giving radio interviews in which they avowed their determination to stay there until martial law was repealed. North of this monument, perhaps a thousand students (their number drastically diminished from the early days of the demonstration, when as many as twenty thousand occupied the square) were chatting, but not doing much of anything else, in canvas tents that had succeeded the impromptu lean-tos erected there during the first days of the sit-in, in May. A sign propped against one of these tents proclaimed, in English, “Victory Belongs to Us Forever!”

That night, however, tanks and armored personnel carriers came in and blasted away sign, statue, and hunger strikers. (I haven’t heard whether the four survived.) I did not witness the attack, but Peter Thompson, an American colleague of mine, watched from the roof of the Xinhua building as the column of military vehicles swept in from the west along Chang’an. “It began near Radio Beijing,” he said. “We could hear popping sounds, and we thought that they must be tear gas, but then the sound became a quicker pop-pop, and we knew that that had to be automatic rifles. What was shocking was that we heard the roar of crowds and then the firing of machine guns, and the roar would die away but not the firing. I think the most awful moment came when they reached a point a couple of blocks west of the square, just north of our building, and we could hear really large groups of people singing ‘The East Is Red’—an old Maoist anthem —“and the ‘Internationale’, and then we could hear the machine guns, and then the crowd would begin singing again.” The “Internationale” was sung by Beijing Normal Teachers College students, who linked arms and marched forward in an insane and terribly courageous attempt to block the armored column at Xi Dan. Two hundred were later reported killed.

Among those actually on the square when the troops came in was a Canadian editor of China Daily, Sue Bigelow, who had biked down to the square with a friend, Patrick Moore. She told me later that the first sign of gunfire came from an explosion and fire near the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom. “I never did find out what that first explosion was,” she said. “We were walking there to see it when there was gunfire—automatic-rifle fire, I’m sure—coming from the west, and everybody began running out of the square and heading east. I was running along beside a man pedaling a three-wheeled cart on which lay a young man, probably a student, who had a neck wound—he couldn’t have survived. We ran northeast from the square, and we heard the firing almost until we got to the door of the Beijing Hotel, which is where most of us Westerners were heading. After an hour or so, we got adventurous again and edged back toward the square, to where citizens lined up across Chang’an were shouting slogans and singing the anthem at soldiers who were kneeling in shooting position. I was standing on a garbage can when they started firing again, and as I jumped down and ran I could feel the bullets singing past me. A guy in front of Patrick was hit and went down, and Patrick tripped over him. I got back to the hotel, and met up with Patrick later.”

With their bikes now behind Army lines, Miss Bigelow and Mr. Moore walked back northeast to the China Daily compound, in east Beijing. “We were going up Dongdan,” she told me, referring to a street leading north from Chang’an, “and we met twenty-four tanks—I counted them—rolling down. They weren’t firing, but after them came five trucks loaded with soldiers, who were shooting indiscriminately into the streets. I ran into a hutong”—an alley—“crowded with people who were heading for a courtyard. I ran into it with them, but then they all ducked into houses and I was out there alone. Somebody came out with a stool for me, though, and I sat there on it all by myself, shaking, for about five minutes. When the shooting stopped, I went back out and found Patrick, and we started walking again. We made it another couple of blocks, and then another convoy came along. This time, we ducked into a store— there were several old men sitting there, just looking out the window, watching the action. They let us sit there—actually, I dived behind a refrigerator—until the convoy went by, and then we continued on our way home in the dawn.”

My own perspective on the attack was (I’m grateful to be able to say) more remote both in time and in distance. After that dawn, I set out by bicycle from my apartment, in the northwestern part of the city, and headed downtown, circling intersections filled with burned, overturned vehicles. (There were no public buses, of course—it will take Beijing years to replenish the transportation fleets destroyed to make barricades against the Army.) Beijingers who had just learned of the attack gathered in clusters to hear of it from witnesses. To the south, great clouds of black smoke were rising. These, it turned out, came from the bridge west of the Mu Xi Di area, where Fuxingmenwei, the western ex-tension of Chang’an, crosses a canal. Four blackened trolley cars stood on the eastern part of the bridge. Behind them, bumper to bumper, were two tanks and eleven Army personnel carriers, all either burned out or burning. And behind them, also bumper to bumper, extending west across the bridge, were twelve trucks, some of them still being broken apart and set afire by a crowd. All these Army vehicles had been abandoned, I hope successfully, by their occupants, and no attempt was being made to defend them, but behind the twelfth truck was a convoy of hundreds of open trucks, two and three abreast. They were mostly filled with soldiers. Other soldiers, some with weapons and some without, were standing beside their trucks talking, arguing with Beijingers who had flocked to the site from some of the big apartment buildings lining the street. (Windows at the second-floor level of one of the buildings had been shot out.) Some soldiers had aban-doned their trucks and, bedrolls in hand, were walking west—in the direction from which the convoy had come.

I, too, walked west, passing more than a hundred trucks. I went about three hundred yards, to the entrance of the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, where a billboard displayed an advertisement for an exhibition of “Chinese Ancient Arms and Military Relics.” As far ahead of me as I could see, the line of troop-carrying trucks continued, all immobile. I heard later that these hundreds of trucks were ultimately abandoned and destroyed, either by their soldier occupants or by Beijingers.

Tanks, however, had got through. I found eight of them, pointed strategically in all four directions, at the Fuyou intersection, where I had witnessed the stone-throwing the day before, below the “Welcome to Beijing” sign. After a number of detours around such roadblocks, I finally reached the rear of the Great Hall of the People, which fronts on Tian-anmen Square. A burned-out armored personnel carrier flanking the back entrance to the Great Hall was a symbolic object of considerable interest to bystanders. I circled it to the south, and found green-helmeted, rifle-carrying soldiers lining the square and staring, apparently without animosity, at knots of Beijingers who had gathered about ten yards away from them. One soldier, carrying a bullhorn, patrolled in front of the lines, appealing, apparently quite politely, to people to stay away. Yet, although what I saw seemed relatively peaceful, from somewhere behind the soldiers, on the square, came the sound of gunshots. At the northeastern corner of the square, I heard later, soldiers were still firing randomly at spectators. A woman photographer was shot in the back by an officer: he had told her not to take pictures, and fired as she obediently lowered her camera and turned away. So far as I know, however, she is one of the survivors. The Voice of America reported later that at least fifty bodies were counted on Chang’an as a result of sporadic shootings that afternoon. It was also reported that these, along with the bodies of people killed when the square was cleared, were either burned or thrown together into ditches, so the exact number of casualties may never be known.

The last few days have been filled with alarms and excursions. One rumor, apparently now dispelled, was that the Chinese Armies were fighting among themselves. The Twenty-seventh Army (whose former Commanding General and current unofficial leader is the son-in-law of President Yang Shangkun) carried out the attack, but other armies, which are said to have opposed the attack, were reported to be marching on the city to liberate it from the Twenty-seventh. We heard that a rescuing army was coming in from the south. Then we heard that it was coming from the west —a rumor of interest to me, because it would put the Friendship Hotel, where I and many other foreigners live, close to the line of battle. We heard that food supplies in the shops had completely run out. Although hoarding is understandably rampant in the city, this rumor turned out to be false; it was probably sparked by the fact that most shops have been shutting down early. We heard rumors about terrible fighting in other cities, and these, unfortunately, have been confirmed. At five-thirty on Wednesday morning, a neighbor in my hotel woke me up on the telephone, shouting, “Get out! Get out!” We had to leave the city at once, he said, by order of the United States Embassy—his mother had just telephoned him from Los Angeles, where she had heard it on the radio. It is true, of course, that the Embassy was urging Americans to leave. Eventually, my wife, Iris, and my daughter, Mary, and I went out in an American Embassy convoy to the airport. On the way, we met flag-bearing convoys from half a dozen nations. (Ireland was transporting its nationals in an open truck.) At the airport, we faced the decision being made at embassies all over the city, which have been selecting personnel to stay and personnel to go, flying them out on chartered planes. My wife left reluctantly for Hong Kong.

For the time being, Mary, who is also an editor for Xinhua, and I have decided to take luxurious refuge at the Lido, a large hotel operated by the Holiday Inn group, near the airport. Among other amenities it offers which we have not been accustomed to in Beijing is satellite transmission of the Cable News Network, which has enabled us to see for the first time some of the Beijing carnage that has been flashing across television screens everywhere except China. I will not soon forget the remarkable television footage of a brave flag-brandishing man alone on a wide boulevard dancing in front of a whole convoy of tanks in an attempt to stop them. I hope that someday the citizens of Beijing will be per-mitted to see that heroic act. Equally brave, and probably doomed, was a Radio Beijing announcer who broke discipline to denounce the mass slaughter of Beijingers and, before he was suddenly cut off the air, called for the criminal prosecution of those responsible. We heard later that he was shot, but that information has not been confirmed. Nor has the identity of a Radio Beijing programmer who at the height of the political crisis selected, in an obvious act of symbolic protest against China’s elderly rulers, the words ‘dinosaur’, ‘monster’, and ‘extinct’ for the day’s English lesson. Some of the Western radio reports describing Twenty-seventh Army gunners rolling through the city spraying machine-gun fire at important tourist hotels were also remarkable. Four people were believed killed, including a child who was on his way to school. The gunners broke out windows of the Beijing Toronto Hotel, where the American Embassy earlier quartered American students evacuated from Beijing colleges, and they invaded an American diplomatic compound down the street from the hotel, in what they said was a search for a sniper. They found and pulled out of the compound a Chinese man; his fate is unknown.

Yesterday, I went downtown and edged as close as I dared to Tiananmen Square—about a block east on Chang’an—and if the Twenty-seventh Army troops I saw there expected to be fighting any kind of attack or battle they certainly were not preparing for it. Most of those on the east side of Tiananmen had donned red-and-yellow armbands, apparently to distinguish themselves from other Army units, but they weren’t digging defensive fortifications or setting up protective perimeters. Most, in fact, were just sitting around in small groups. In outlying parts of the city, the soldiers I saw were mostly standing around mess tents or policing areas and chatting in more or less friendly fashion with Beijingers crowding up to their lines. I did see, on the Second Ring Road, in the northwestern part of the city, a convoy of five trucks carrying men armed with AK-47s, but these men seemed to be taking part in some sort of formal parade. They stood at attention in the backs of the trucks, their weapons aimed straight forward. Each truck was commanded by an officer, also at attention.

Prime Minister Li Peng appeared on television last night and praised the troops for “fine efforts to safeguard security in the capital,” and called on the student leaders to surrender themselves and face the consequences of what he now termed “a counter-revolutionary plot.” In case there is still any question about who is running the country, today’s China Central Television news broadcast gave extensive coverage of a meeting of the Central Military Commission, presided over by a smiling Deng Xiaoping and attended by Li Peng, President Yang Shangkun, and an array of approximately fifty generals. Qiao Shi, a hard-liner who heads the Public Security apparatus, is apparently the new Party chairman. People’s Liberation Army cameramen are out all over the city, photographing Army trucks delivering rice to Beijing hutongs, battalions of soldiers parading on Tiananmen, and helpful citizens clearing away wrecked vehicles and other debris from the streets. The arrest of students has already begun. On television we see long lines of handcuffed captives.

Right now, after several days of sporadic gunfire, the city itself is strangely quiet. Almost all foreigners have been evacuated. Since foreigners own most of the non-governmental motor vehicles in Beijing, the streets have reverted to the control of bicyclists and pedicab drivers. Most of the markets I’ve seen are open and are selling food, but a number of their stalls arc vacant, so there is presumably a shortage of some supplies. (Watermelons and garlic sprouts remain abundantly plentiful.)

Perhaps because quiet moments have been so precious lately, they are what stand out when I reflect on the past several days—and one moment in particular I know I will never forget. It occurred while I was making my way downtown on Sunday morning: I encountered coming back from Tiananmen a muted, pathetic parade of perhaps three hundred students, walking twelve abreast toward their campuses, in the northwestern part of the city. One waved in the air what was obviously the blood-soaked shirt of a dead comrade; others held up automatic-rifle bullets for bystanders to see. One bystander started to clap, and then stopped, embarrassed, realizing that he was in effect applauding a funeral procession. Many of the students marching by were crying, and so were many of us on the sidewalk watching.

—Fred C. Shapiro