The 1989 Tiananmen Square slaughter may have disappeared into the annals of history and lost memories, but now it appears that the death toll was closer to ten-thousand deaths, thousands more than what was known at the time, a declassified British document has revealed.
The report, reported by the Independent UK, said that the document was written the day after the slaughter and it shows that a significantly higher loss of life than the known reported loss of around three-thousand who perished after being gunned down by the Chinese army. The document on china and its crime, horrific in nature, detailing wounded female Chinese students were stabbed to death with bayonets as they pleaded for their lives and that all human remains were washed away down storm drains.
In another methodical case of many, a mother was fatality shot as she sought to tend to her injured three-year-old daughter.
Tiananmen Square massacre
The date of the report was June 5, 1989, and authored by British Diplomat, Alan Donald, who at the time, was the British ambassador to China. While the report was in the UK National Archives at Kew, a website named, HK01, recently discovered its existence and was released to the public. Donald’s account of the massacre was based on information he received from an unknown source. That source had conversed with a best friend of his that was a member of the Chinese State Council when the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred.
He stated that the State Council member informed him that what was widely reported in the news at the time was simply not true, that thousands more had died than what was reported.
Donald told London that the “brutalities” against thousands of pro-democracy protesters in and nearby Beijing’s Tiananmen Square had been synchronized by the 27 Army of Shanxi Province, China, in which many of those troops, as he described, as being sixty percent ignorant and made up of nothing more than a bunch of primitives.
Initially, many of the Chinese troops arrived unarmed to diffuse the situation of protesting students, but as the world witnessed, Chinese 27th Army armored personnel carriers showed up, commenced fire on the crowd, and then ran them over with their tanks, afterward. The students were originally told that they had one-hour to vacate the area, but that turned out to be a lie as the troops in the personnel carriers began firing a mere five minutes later.
The Chinese Government reasons
The document further stated that the reason for the violent actions occurred after a few members of China’s State Council had come to the conclusion that an internal civil war was forthcoming to try to overthrow the government possibly. The Chinese government had purposely chosen the 27th Army division, as they felt the troops were the most trustworthy and submissive. As a result, that division spared no one, and in the end, it became the Tiananmen Square massacre, one of the worst the world had ever seen during the 1980s. Medical personnel and vehicles were not excluded from the massacre and were fired upon, upon arrival.
As the massacre continued, the document also proved that no one was spared, in which the troops also shot and killed one of their own officers, as they felt that that the officer was derelict with his duties.
In the end, the last statement in the Tiananmen Square massacre document by Donald said, “Minimum estimate of civilian dead is ten-thousand.”
The government of China has always characterized and insisted that the response to the Tiananmen Square protests was a legitimate defense against what they referred to as a counter-revolutionary riot or rebellion against the Chinese government, but as the released document has shown, that was certainly not the case.
Lastly, the report indicated that back in 2014, a restricted U.S. government file was found where it stated that a military source in China had indicated that the Chinese government’s own internal review, in relation to the Tiananmen Square incident, showed that ten-thousand, four-hundred and fifty-four (10,454) Chinese citizens had been killed on that fateful day, not the 200 to 300 deaths that the Chinese government initially released and maintained as fact ever since.
