China, painful moment in the past. Images from the trial of the general who defied the order to suppress the Tiananmen protests

Video footage of Xu Qinxian, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crack down on student protesters in 1989, has been released online.

The images offer an extremely rare perspective on the upper echelons of the army in one of the most tense moments in China's modern history, writes The Guardian, quoted by News.ro.

For decades, General Xu Qinxian's refusal to bring his troops from the prestigious PLA 38th Army, a unit stationed on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital was part of “the legend“Tiananmen.”

The six-hour video recording of General Xu's court-martial hearing the following year sheds light on this rare act of defiance.

The pictures “confirm the legend of Xu Qinxian”

In the recording, the general says he refused because he did not want to become “a sinner in history.”

Registration “confirms the legend about Xu Qinxian”said Zhou Fengsuo, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen demonstrations, who now lives in exile in the US. “This is the first time we have a clear, first-person view of this period,” he added.

The source of the video recording is unknown. The images were first posted online last month and have garnered more than 1.2 million views on one YouTube account alone.

Wu Renhua, a historian of the Tiananmen movement who participated in the protests, was among the first to share it on the Internet. He said it was offered to him on one condition: to keep its source secret.

The general was sentenced to 5 years in prison PHOTO capture YouTube APT

The historian stated that the video is “perhaps the most important piece of data I have gathered in my three decades of research.” He believes it to be authentic, as many of the details are confirmed by his separate research.

One of the most sensitive topics during the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party

Protests that gripped Beijing for weeks in the spring of 1989 ended in a bloody massacre in the early hours of June 4, when PLA troops opened fire on civilians around Tiananmen Square, the 21.1-hectare central square of the Chinese capital. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed, and the event remains one of the most sensitive topics during the Chinese Communist Party's rule over China.

The subject of the massacre is censored and there has never been an open or official assessment of the events or their consequences.

At the time, there were widespread rumors of dissension within the military. Zhou said many uniformed soldiers came to Tiananmen Square before June 4 to show their support for the protesters.

When the demonstrations began, Xu, who came from a family of fruit and vegetable sellers, was in hospital recovering from a kidney stone attack.

“I said I had a different opinion”

On May 18, he was ordered to move his 15,000 troops to Beijing and impose martial law. In the video recording of his court-martial trial, Xu explained his reservations. With a hard accent and direct language, he said: “I said that I had a different opinion on this matter. I said that it was a mass political incident and that it should be solved mainly through political means.”

He refused to carry out the order, although he passed the message on. He said he communicated to his superiors that if martial law failed, the commander who imposed it “could become a sinner in history”.

Xu's testimony shows him struggling to be a loyal general in a CCP-run system. He said that “he feared the potential for a large-scale conflict or bloodshed.”

One of the highlights of Xu's testimony was that he questioned whether the decision to impose martial law could have come from the Central Military Commission, which gave the order, Tiananmen experts say.

In his opinion, such a serious issue should have been discussed by China's legislature, the National People's Congress.

Sentenced to five years in prison

Xu was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and sentenced to five years in prison. He lived the rest of his life in exile, far from Beijing, and died in 2021 at the age of 85.