TNAG-2717-FCO40-3923-House-of-Commons-Select-Committee-on-Foreign-Affairs-enquiry-1993 — Page 38

certain extent in his recent book. Mistakes were made by the Chinese Government very serious mistakes in not talking to the students, in not allowing them to attend the funeral of Hu Yaobang in allowing masses of people to assemble without enough control. By the end of the episode for three days Peking was without police, and the Peking Party Committee had to go to the centre and say 'I am sorry, we no longer control this city'. There were very serious mistakes on the Government's side, and there were some mistakes on the part of the student leaders. But my overall word for it would be a bungle. It was something that probably was going to happen because of the over-heating of the economy in 1988, because of the high inflation in 1988, because workers were dissatisfied (and the moment the workers were dissatisfied and joined the students it became a very serious situation indeed), and something of the kind was predicted by Deng-Xiaoping himself. He said that was something which would happen as a natural consequence of the reforms, of the releasing of the energies of the Chinese people, and he was critical of his colleagues for not having dealt with the situation much sooner, and allowing it to grow and grow and grow and get out of hand.

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The night was the most horrendous night; anyone who was there at the time will not forget the bloodshed and the chaos of that night. The rationale of the Chinese Government I am not saying I agree with it, but the rationale overall was 'We are embarked on a 20 year programme of economic reform; we must be careful not to let that whole programme affecting the whole country and one billion people be disturbed by an incident in Peking, or loss of control at that time'. It was not quite a pro-democracy movement at the beginning, but it began to acquire the nature of a pro-democracy movement as the situation went on. So it was a mixture of a divided Chinese Government; the Party was divided about how to deal with it; a lot of encouragement from the Western press who were there in strength, and curiously enough the Chinese Government took no steps to keep the press out. One of the odd things about it was watching on CNN the things which were going on outside in the streets of Peking very curious.

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