Telegram offers timely echo of Tiananmen Square.

Shortly before Christmas, the world received new evidence of the horrors that attended the 1989 People’s Liberation Army massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. It is not, I will add, especially compelling evidence — except as a piece of drama, which is why it attracted attention. The new document is a cable sent by Britain’s ambassador to China, Sir Alan Donald, to the U.K.’s Foreign Office on the day after the slaughter.

The recently declassified cable was discovered in Britain’s National Archives by a Hong Kong news website called HK01. The text of the cable is still available on the HK01 site, but plans for follow-up reporting were apparently cancelled in haste, according to the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association. Even in the relatively free environment of HK, there are limits to discussion of the “June 4 incident.”

The news peg for further Western reports on the diplomatic cable has been the death toll cited by Donald: “Minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000” he reported tersely, claiming to have been informed by a trustworthy friend on China’s State Council. The official Chinese government figure is below 300, but estimates vary, and other declassified diplomatic sources offer a total in the same ballpark. Even if Donald’s figure came from the Chinese state, it could, given early on June 5, be a rough estimate at best — and it might be too low.

What makes Donald’s cable good copy are the unsavoury details. According to Donald, unarmed PLA units from the Shenyang district were sent in first to form a perimeter around the core of the Tiananmen protest in an effort to disperse the students. Then “27 Army,” a North Chinese unit full of “illiterate” and “primitive” recruits, was allowed to follow up with a full panoply of weapons, indiscriminately killing both protesters and comrades trapped in the kettle.

Donald describes students being “mown down” by armoured personnel carriers and crushed into “pie.” 27 Army was “ordered to spare no one,” bayoneting and shooting women and children — as well as wounded fellow soldiers from the Shenyang units. One 27 Army officer is said to have “faltered” and been shot by his own men; another, taken to hospital after crashing his APC, is “now deranged and demands death for his atrocities.”

No one really doubts that the PLA killed thousands of unarmed civilians on June 4, 1989, and the Donald dispatch is honestly not much of an addition to the record on that score. To historians, the material concerning the horrors of the massacre will be better as evidence of diplomatic activity itself than of actual occurrences. The Chinese state is probably none too afraid to let anyone know it is capable of terrible more open parts of the country. Other soldiers could not necessarily be trusted to open fire on civilians. Donald backs this up by describing a psychological softening-up process to which 27 Army was subjected in the days leading up to the massacre. The soldiers were kept in the dark about the chaos in Beijing for a week, then were shown the approaches to the protest areas and told they would be participating in a televised military “exercise.” (“...(W) hich pleased them.”)

Donald adds that the military commander of the Beijing district disapproved of the activity on the perimeter of his city, refusing to feed or house “outside armies.” The ambassador mentions a rumour that other PLA armies had left bases elsewhere in China with the initial intention of “destroying” 27 Army, and even acknowledges a possibility of civil war.

It didn’t pan out. Not that time. Any autocracy relies, at its root, on the existence and control of military formations that can be convinced to kill civilians in cold blood if they should take to the streets. This is the unquantifiable, unpredictable mystery stalking the heart of every dictatorship: does it still possess the power to command extreme violence?

Everything may turn on one colonel’s unexamined, impulsive feelings about the Big Boss. Or about the Big Boss’s wife, or about the brigadier, or about the grub in the mess hall. And moral signals from the outside world can make a difference, too.

At precisely the moment of the Tiananmen massacre, Communist governments in Eastern Europe were tottering, and Romania would put the moral force of Communism to the test in December. Nicolae Ceausescu’s special forces and secret police “failed” the test: they discovered limits to the amount of mass murder they were willing to perpetrate in the name of a discredited idea, and took the side of the people. In 1989, the Chinese Communist Party had 27 Army. And the Islamic Republic of Iran has the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia now. For however much they are worth.