Chaos Under Heaven – by Gordon Thomas
Not to be confused with the recent book by Josh Rogin that details the tumultuous trading partnership between Trump-led America and China. This book was written around 1991 and focuses on the Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989. This book was surprisingly good. Great, in fact. I confess that I didn’t really know much about the details of the event when I picked it up to read. This book is a great account of the events that led up to the squashed student protest that gained unprecedented momentum yet was met with disastrous consequences.
In many ways, this books reads more like a novel or screenplay as opposed to a historical documentation. Author Gordon Thomas does an excellent job immersing the reader into the main characters’ lives, which begin several months before the incident. We read of many of the students, the Americans abroad, the political leaders, the journalists, the doctors, and the soldiers. He never allows his readers to become bored. There’s always action brewing, even if it’s just the mood in the air. What is especially rewarding to me is that it seemed very easy to assimilate the many Sino names in the story. This can be hard for my Western brain to assimilate. I run into difficulty trying to keep straight such similar names as Li Peng, Li Yang, Yang Li, and Pang Yi (all of those names are featured in this story). Yet for the most part I was able to keep up and not struggle with trying to remember who was who and what their motivation was.
This book might assume the reader knows much more about the history of China than what is provided here. It’s worth mentioning that during 1989, China’s Octogenarian leader Deng Xiaoping was looked at very highly both from within and abroad. He managed to remedy much of Mao Zedong’s disastrous programs that starved millions of citizens to death while executing a rather large number as well. When Deng came to power in the late 1970s, he realized that China desperately needed to open up its borders to trade with other nations if it were to ever grow and eventually compete with the leading nations. Although he was able to successfully inject some capitalist ideas into the socialist bubble, the one area where he was obdurate about was democracy and human rights for the masses.
It shouldn’t surprise one that such an event detailed here would eventually happen in a suppressed country that holds roughly one quarter of the entire earth’s population. In many ways, you could almost argue that the initial draw of the thousands of students to Tiananmen Square around April of 1989 really began as a happy accident. Without going into details, once the students arrived, they stayed and for the most part, remained extremely peaceful and non-confrontational. These young people weren’t trying to raise anarchy, they were simply wanting to engage their leaders in meaningful dialogue.
Well, as much as Deng Xiaoping was well regarded (all these years later, he still is), he and his hard-liner cronies grew mightily impatient when the students simply wouldn’t leave. It didn’t help when China had their scheduled summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in the middle of this unplanned interruption. The Russian leader was, sadly, really looked at as a distraction once he arrived and felt rather snubbed and out of place in the midst of all of the somewhat well-managed chaos. Eventually, in the beginning of June, Deng had had enough and ended up placing the country under martial law and sent the army in break up the students.
There’s so much more here, though. Again, it’s not the historical narrative that is the main highlight of the reading, but the way the story personalizes the many struggles of the individuals caught up into this sad historic event. Although not a focal point of the book, the author alleges that the democratic world leaders, especially U.S. President George Bush, never condemned the brutal actions of Deng. China had become too major of a trading partner, and it would be a huge economic setback to bite the hand that is feeding your economy. Sadly, though, this behavior is nothing new with world governments. In fact, Bush manages to keep China chummy in the aftermath mainly because he needs their support to go after Saddam Hussein after the Kuwait invasion that happened roughly a year later. Politics is politics.
Another minor drawback is that, as I review this in 2021, this is now a 30-year-old book. And let’s be honest – most Western readers don’t follow world events that much, so most Americans that you might meet on the street probably could tell you very little of this tumultuous event and any kind of after-effects. Well, sadly, there weren’t really any after-effects. Again, although China can be looked at as the enemy of Western Civilizations and the many democratic governments, their place in the world economy is just too overwhelming to alienate. So Tiananmen Square has basically been forgotten and even somewhat forgiven.
In fact, not only has it been forgotten by many in the West, the government of China is trying to eradicate the event from history within its boundaries as well. Most Chinese people who weren’t alive when it happened have very little sources to consult if they want details. It’s too big of an embarrassment, so it’s basically covered up.
This thing was a page-turner. Again, I compare it to a true-life TV series that I would want to binge watch. It was so enthralling that I wanted to keep reading and not stop. Once I finished, it piqued my further interest and I spent hours on YouTube watching and reliving much of the actual event. This was a very sad time that should never be forgotten, and as I mentioned, it sadly has. Governments that are unchecked by the people can be a very dangerous thing. Even if the economy seems to be doing quite well.
