Rare footage from trial of Chinese general who defied Tiananmen crackdown order leaked online

Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history. The six-hour video of Xu Qinxian’s court martial hearing has been viewed more than 1.2m times online.Photograph: 王志安 | YouTube People in the student-led demonstrations in Beijing in May 1989.Photograph: Chip Hires/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to take his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades. The six-hour video recording of Gen Xu’s court martial hearing the next year sheds light on the rare act of defiance. In the video, Xu said he refused because he did not want to become “a sinner in history”. The video “confirms the legend about Xu Qinxian”, said Zhou Fengsuo, a leader of the Tiananmen demonstrations who now lives in exile in the US. “This is the first time that we have a clear first-person view of this period,” he added. The source of the video is unknown. It was first posted online last month and has more than 1.2m views on one YouTube account alone. Wu Renhua, a historian of the Tiananmen movement who took part in the protests, was one of the first people to share it online. He said it was provided to him on one condition: that he keep his source secret. Wu said the video was “perhaps the most important piece of data that I have gathered in my three decades of research”. He believes it is genuine as many of the details are corroborated by his separate research. The demonstrations that gripped Beijing for weeks in the spring of 1989 ended with a bloody massacre in the early hours of 4 June, when PLA troops opened fire on civilians around Tiananmen Square, the 21.1 hectare (53 acre) central plaza of China’s capital. Hundreds, potentially thousands, of people were killed and the event remains one of the most sensitive in the Chinese Communist party’s rule over China . Discussion of the massacre is censored and there has never been any open or official reckoning with the events or the aftermath. At the time, there were widespread rumours about dissent within the military. Zhou said many uniformed soldiers came to Tiananmen Square before 4 June to show their support for the protesters. When the demonstrations started, Xu, who came from a working-class family of fruit and vegetable vendors, was in hospital recovering from kidney stones. But on 18 May, he received orders to deploy his 15,000 troops to Beijing and impose martial law. In the video of his court martial, Xu explained his reservations. In a gruff, plain-spoken accent he said: “I said I had a different opinion on this matter. I said this was a...

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