Foreign Correspondent: June 3

Tonight Foreign Correspondent hears from former Australian Embassy officials who were in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 25 years ago.

Before this China of billionaires and boom-times, tear-away development and rampant commerce and consumerism there was the China of Tiananmen Square.

In the weeks leading up to June 3, 1989 tens of thousands of students massed in Beijing’s enormous central square, drawn together by the death of liberal Communist Party figure Hu Yaobang and their collective desire for significant and immediate change.

They wanted their hard-line leaders to yield and reform.
They wanted a free, fairer China.

For China’s communist rulers it was a great affront to their authority. A provocation. They answered with soldiers, tanks and wholesale slaughter.

“We went to see the two major student leaders and that’s when one told us crying that that night the soldiers would come, that there would be a lot of bloodshed, that a lot of people would die.” PETER EVERETT Defence Attaché, Australian Embassy Beijing, 1989

A lot of people did die. Precisely how many, we’ll never know. And to this day many Chinese themselves don’t even know the massacre took place. Despite the warp-speed advances in China’s economy and – to a limited extent – its openness, Tiananmen is still an officially forbidden subject.

Until now the collective perspectives of Australia’s witnesses to Tiananmen have pretty much stayed under wraps as well. But in this extraordinarily revealing Foreign Correspondent key Embassy staffers have assembled for the first time to give their accounts of what happened.

“The British Ambassador had standing instructions that if anybody sought asylum, he was not to spend the night on the Embassy premises. But we had no rules about this you see, so I just made it up as we went along. Mostly I think we were right.” DAVID SADLEIR Australian Ambassador, Beijing 1989

They tell of dodging bullets, offering sanctuary to key targets including noted dissident and – later – Nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobo and even their part in spiriting confronting and defining images of the conflict out of China and into the hands of the global media hungry for news and pictures.

“I had this suit which had been made for me. It was a double-breasted, pin stripe suit and it was ideal for taping the cassettes of video tape to my body and putting them inside my shirt, buttoning it up and looking a little tubby and then going straight out through the customs and immigration barrier out to the the departure lounge, and the accosting people who I thought looked brave enough to take them down to Hong Kong for someone waving a sign saying ‘Western television’.” GREGSON EDWARDS Media Officer, Australian Embassy Beijing. 1989.

So many things have changed in China in the 25 years since Tiananmen Square, but the massacre remains an indelible stain on a nation’s heritage that at some stage will demand to be addressed and reconciled.

“I think that everyone is smart enough to know that one day there’ll be an account and a reckoning. It’s a matter of time.” GEOFF RABY, Economic Counsellor , Australian Embassy, Beijing 1989

8pm Tuesday on ABC1.