Published by Senator Jim Munson on 03 June 2009
Twenty years later and it is impossible to erase that horrific picture from my memory. I knew that small armoured vehicle wasn't going to stop.
It was June 3, in the early evening. We were standing on the Chang-An overpass, just a short distance from Tiananmen Square. Crowds were everywhere -- in the square and on the overpass.
They shouted "Long live democracy" in Mandarin and they stood their ground believing the small tank would stop.
It didn't.
I saw the crushed body of the protester. He didn't have the same young face the world associates with the events in Tiananmen Square. He was middle-aged, but had come to join the students in their demands for change in China. I don't think he woke up thinking that he would die that evening. Now he was dead.
Many more would die during the night and early morning hours of June 4. Hundreds were wounded.
As a journalist, my first instinct should have been to run towards the square with my CTV crew, but my first thoughts were about my family and what might happen to me during the night.
I ran into the Jianguomenwai diplomatic compound where my four-year-old and one-and-a-half-year-old sons were sleeping.
My heart racing, I kissed them. That done, I was ready to rush off to Tiananmen.
Nothing is ever what it seems in China. The stories and images from June 3-4 showed a power struggle between tens of thousands of students in the square and government authorities. The images the world didn't see were those of another power struggle inside the Great Hall of the People.
Six weeks earlier, on April 15, a former secretary general of the Communist Party -- an official sympathetic to the students' causes -- Hu Yaobang, had died. A few days later, thousands of students marched to the square to mourn his death.
Meanwhile, within the Zhongnanhai government compound, a fight for the ear of China's paramount leader had begun. On one side, Zhao Ziyang, the popular Communist Party general secretary, and on the other, China's hardline premier, Li Peng.
Zhao Ziyang was a politician who understood where economic and political reform would lead China. He looked just as comfortable in a western-style suit as he did on a golf course.
The paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, had opened China's door to the western world and Zhao Ziyang had all the appearances of a politician who would keep opening the door a little wider. He wanted a softer line with the students. He wanted more dialogue.
These changes created a sense of excitement. Growing numbers of young people were gathering in Tiananmen. By the end of the week, 100,000 people covered every inch of the square. And on one of those warm, good days, we brought our son there. We could feel a sense of celebration and exhilaration -- there was change in the air.
We tried to explain what was happening to our young son -- why all these people had gathered. He smiled when we talked about democracy and the right to vote. He didn't quite understand and asked if he could have a boat, too.
Premier Li Peng would prevail. The mood and the weather would shift from warm to stifling and stormy. Pessimism replaced optimism. And we could almost hear the door that had been opening to greater freedom slam shut.
When martial law was declared on May 20, the sense of liberation we had felt in Beijing, that people could speak their minds, quickly evaporated. Western reporters could no longer file our stories from Central China state television. The censor had returned. We no longer felt comfortable roaming the streets doing our reports. The fresh air of free thought that had swept through Beijing was gone, leaving behind a suffocating atmosphere.
Rumours began to circulate that the army was close by and they were going to put an end to the protests. But nobody wanted to believe that tanks and terror would replace hope.
The Canadian embassy had ordered non-essential staff to leave. Those who stayed behind were buying more food in the street markets to stock their kitchens in preparation for what may come.
I bought tickets for my family to fly to Hong Kong.
In his memoir, which was smuggled out of China and recently published in the west, Zhao Ziyang writes that he pleaded with Deng Xiaoping to take a softer line with the students, but the paramount leader "appeared very impatient and displeased" with his arguments defending the students.
"At that moment I was extremely upset," Zhao continues, "I told myself that, no matter what, I refused to become the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on the students."
He describes the night of June 3, "sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire, a tragedy to shock the world had not been averted and was going to happen after all."
My CTV colleague Roger Smith and I witnessed that tragedy. Twenty years later I have so many unanswered questions.
What happened to the young woman standing on the steps of the Great Hall of the People yelling "Long live democracy"?
The television censor who cut our feeds to Canada. What does he do now?
The young soldiers who engaged Smith and me in a shoving match 24 hours before the massacre. Where are they now?
The undercover police we had to beat back with a tripod. Are they middle-aged and content? What memories do they have of that day?
The older couple who stopped me as I ran towards the square and said in broken English, "Please tell the world what is happening here." Are they enjoying their old age?
A frightened general sitting in the passenger seat of a government car being berated by ordinary citizens -- did he live or die?
And the young man captured in photographs who was arrested for standing bravely in broad daylight in front of a tank column. Will his story ever be told?
History was made in Tiananmen Square during those warm weeks of May and June. But too many unanswered questions remain. I remember the people and the events I witnessed. I know what happened in Tiananmen Square.
I was there.
Senator Jim Munson was in Beijing 20 years ago as a CTV reporter.