Storyville, Tiananmen: The People v the Party, review: Shows there’s so much more to the Tiananmen Square massacre

The massacre in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 was one of the defining moments of world history – not just Chinese. So it’s maybe not too much to ask of a viewer to spend an hour and a half parked in front of a TV watching Storyville (BBC4) in order to learn a bit more about it. Certainly if you want to understand what is happening in Hong Kong today, it is essential viewing.

It is quite an investment, admittedly, though no longer than what you’d spend watching a football match. Anyway, I am glad that I did so. It is by turns moving, informative, intriguing and thought-provoking; the rough equivalent of the now fashionable “long reads” in the papers and on websites, and perhaps we will also see more TV such as this, co-existing with the social media-friendly YouTube clips, valuable as they are.

For so many, the massacre is remembered in a memorable news clip. There is that iconic image of a lone protester standing defiantly in front of a tank, before the picture then fades to black (we assume because he was then horribly killed). The clip is replayed endlessly in the TV news packages, a simple powerful summary: Students protest for democracy; vicious Chinese dictatorship crushes them.

Well, this excellent Storyville treatment tells us exactly how much more there is to this, and the rest of the Tiananmen Square crisis.

Thus, as we see in the extended footage in the documentary, that iconic lone protester didn’t get run over, but clambered up on the tank and danced around for a bit, before being taken away by his friends to safety (and a surprisingly durable anonymity ever since). He was also not the first of the protesters, at the start of the massacre, but in fact, the very last, after thousands had been shot and mown down by the armoured vehicles.

One of the remarkable things about Tiananmen is just how much footage and media coverage, such as this, has survived. Even by 1989, China had opened up to the west sufficiently to allow students to be equipped with video cameras, as well as foreign news crews, who were all free to move around central Beijing to capture the scenes and interview people.

There is an extensive record of it – one that cannot be propagandised out of existence. It is also very handy for filmmakers trying to fill a 90-minute slot, and the producers, Emma Parkins and Ed Stobart, make the best of it telling the long story of the occupation of the square.

As with the events themselves, the film’s long lead-up is a fairly sedate affair, before a sudden overnight outbreak of indiscriminate murder. To witness it unfolding here, in a sort of scaled-down version of the real thing, somehow makes the bloody end all the more upsetting. The feeling of the tragedy and futility of the thousands of deaths is amplified.

It took some seven weeks from the first minor protests to the bloody massacre that made the name of Tiananmen Square synonymous with state terror. Step by step, event by event, the documentary tells us precisely what goes wrong: how the students and the Chinese leadership misunderstand one another and how each underestimates the other’s determination.

There is, for example, an editorial in the People’s Daily (official government paper) in April that condemns the protest as “counter-revolutionary”, but which merely brings more people to the Square. Then there is a declaration of martial law, as early as 19 May – surely a signal for the students to take an offer of “dialogue” (even if bogus) and withdraw. And later, the election of a student committee – with its leaders – who disastrously overplay their hand. The film uses a trove of recently leaked Politburo documents to reveal what was going through the leadership’s mind, and how frightened they are of revolution.

By the end, protestors are too emboldened. So far from being a purely student protest, as the survivors tell us here, many other groups also came out to identify with them – workers, nurses, police. There is a “Citizens Dare-to-Die Corps” of labourers, for example, and, apparently, even the thieves went on strike to show solidarity. “China’s Woodstock”, as one says, but with mass support. I was not convinced by that and we see little of how the vast rural populace reacted to the events, if they even knew of them.

The students comprehended too little about the power struggles going on within the government. The first of the demonstrations were an act of mourning for the (natural) death of a reformist ally of the students, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. In the subsequent succession struggle, the students’ actions were actually used against them by the forces of conservatism – being portrayed as a threat to the unity and stability of the People’s Republic. The interviews with the protest survivors, now in their fifties and in exile, shows how little they then knew about the country they lived in. With their hunger strikes and “goddess of democracy” sculpture pointed provocatively at the massive portrait of Mao, they were brave and idealistic, but painfully naïve. The anger of the likes of writer and activist Rose Tang is loud and acute, and deeply affecting, but the fact is, she and the others did get things wrong.

The students in Tiananmen Square made other mistakes. They rejected any compromises with the government and demanded it stand down in the name of democracy, immediately – an absurdity. So the regime tried repression and it worked. Except that the summary use of live ammunition, and with little warning, was far too rapid an escalation, as far as China’s image is concerned. It left an indelible stain on the reputation of the party and the country and injected some caution into its responses to unrest. Today, in Hong Kong, it would seem at least some of the lessons of 1989 have been learned, and others neglected.

‘Storyville, Tiananmen: The People v the Party’ is on BBC4 tonight at 9pm