American tourist and his wife fled Tiananmen Square just before the killing started
John Shackman standing in Tiananmen Square in front of the tents set up by students on June 3, 1989. Within a few hours, he and his wife fled the square in panic as the Chinese military advanced. (Courtesy of John Shackman)
When John Shackman went on vacation to China with his wife, they did not expect to find themselves running from the teargas of soldiers near Tiananmen Square, or rushing to the airport to get onto one of the first planes out of the country after the massacre of students on June 4, 1989.
Shackman and his wife, Lori, were on a holiday around Asia before arriving in Beijing. At their last stop in Bangkok, Shackman had been warned by—of all people—former vice president Spiro Agnew, who he bumped into in the lobby of the Royal Orchid Hotel, that there was instability in China and he should cancel his trip.
Undeterred, Shackman asked the hotel. The response came back in a Telex: “Beijing is very safety now, it’s good season for tourist. Welcome you to Beijing.”
Thousands had gathered in the square on the afternoon of June 3, before the violent crackdown. (Courtesy of John Shackman)
They arrived on June 1 when protests were in full swing, and left on June 4, the day of the massacre.
There were other Americans there at the hotel and in Beijing, though most were in tour groups. Not Shackman. “I like to travel a lot, and I don’t like going with anybody, I like exploring on my own, turning left and right, just to find out what it’s like there.”
Shackman, now 57, used to work in international sales, and traveled a lot. He has not told the full story of his experiences in China to the media until now, nor allowed publication of the photographs he took at the time..
One of the first things they did upon arriving in Beijing was head to the square. They chatted with students, were invited inside tents (which resembled an Occupy Wall Street set-up, Shackman said). He listened to their stories and soaked up the atmosphere.
“It was kind of exciting in a way to see this. You saw it on the news, here we are seeing this.”
That was June 1. The general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Zhao Ziyang, who was later ousted, had already visited the students on May 19 and pleaded with them to clear out. The encampment and its inhabitants were already doomed.
On June 3 Shackman and his wife went back to the square, and were even more impressed. There were many more people from all over the city. “There were kids, families, older people. It was not just students. On this day it was everybody. Everybody wanted to come in and see what was going on.”
Students were excited upon seeing them and again invited the American travelers into their tents. They wanted them to spread the news back to the United States, stuffing into their hands photocopies of political manifestos. Others wrote messages in chalk on the street to explain themselves to the public (there was no Internet in 1989).
The “Goddess of Democracy” stood ten meters tall and symbolized the student movement. (Courtesy of John Shackman)
(Courtesy of John Shackman)
“There was a feeling inside the square, it was exciting, it was almost like what you would expect Woodstock to have been like,” Shackman said. “I’m getting Goosebumps talking about it. It was such an electric feeling. Everybody was in a really good mood. It was exciting to see all of this going on. To see all of this, I don’t think they had experienced anything like this, a movement of everybody getting together for their cause.”
But before long it quickly unraveled. “All of a sudden we had students say ‘you need to leave, you need to leave right now. There’s going to be a lot of blood.’ It got instantly chaotic and thousands of people started running.”
A sign at one of the tents reads “Victory Belongs to Us Forever,” expressing the triumphant spirit of the students that was crushed the same day. (Courtesy of John Shackman)
This was in the afternoon of June 3. “Everyone calls June 4 the critical day, but it actually started on June 3. We were told the troops were starting to come in from the corner of Tiananmen, we could hear what was going on.”
Shackman heard teargas being fired, and smelled it. He caught site of troops several blocks away. They ran back to their car and driver at the Beijing hotel several blocks away and, drenched in sweat, asked to be driven back to their hotel. “I had never run so hard in my life,” he said.
“At that moment the entire city just changed. At that point it became chaotic,” Shackman said.
People were running to and from the square. The holiday was ruined. Shackman and his wife now feared being trapped in China, or worse. “My wife started getting sick.”
Shackman was up all night on the night of June 3 and morning of June 4, when the massacre took place. Poorly disguised plainclothes police in the hotel monitored their conversations. Tanks rolled up and down the streets. Political commissars hung large red banners on their hotel proclaiming the correctness of the Communist Party.
With some difficulty they found a taxi on June 4 and left that night, paying for plane tickets at the airport with a pile of Chinese cash.
Mrs. Shackman had ongoing physical reactions as a result of the stress of the events on June 3 and 4. Mr. Shackman has only recently been able to convince her that it would be okay to return to China.
“If the government let the students just leave, they would wind up with problems later on. So they thought we’re going to go in and end this nasty-like, so we never have problems again,” Shackman says.
The regime was spooked by the interest of a wider demographic in the protests, not just students. “What was happening was everyday people saying ‘you know what, they’ve got something here.’” The Party, on the other hand, wanted to assert its dictatorship. “They needed to say they’re in control.”
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大家都来看”九评共产党” ( VCD, 书)!
Let’s find “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party”(VCD, books)!
快上大纪元声明退出共产党和共产党其它组织(/团/队)，抹去邪恶的印记!
Quit the Evil Chinese Communist Party or its affiliated organizations today!
