China’s Monsters

As shocking as the Tiananmen 2.0 documentary is, it is very mild compared to what actually happened at Tiananmen Square. The home movies were surreal. The machine guns mounted on vehicles mowing kids down by the hundreds and thousands. Tanks running over children like they were weeds in a pasture. The man standing in front of the tank supposedly was screaming for the tank to run him over as they had run over the children.

The Army Generals refused to kill their own children. “The Old Men” brought the Mongolians in to kill the kids. After the massacre the Communist Chinese exhaustively went through houses, homes and hotels in Beijing tearing up places looking for film, videos and the protest leaders. Then they went through all of China looking for evidence, participants, their families and most importantly the organizers of the protest.

People from all over the world helped smuggle the protest leaders, film and the videos out of China. They helped the student leaders even with the CCP issuing death warrants for anybody who helped the student leaders. The CCP went through the whole world looking for the student leaders. They killed every one they found. They killed the people who helped them. There were reports that the CCP killed the families members of the leaders.

The man in front of the tanks. The original film was taken by two correspondents. When they came back to America from China they gave several interviews where they described the video and how they had to smuggle the film out of China. It had audio. What you hear is the guys talking. You also hear the man in front of the tanks screaming (in shear anguish) at the tank soldiers.

The videos we see today are vastly different from what I remember about the videos back in 1989. On June 3, 1989 the tanks and the soldiers made their way through town. They amassed near the square. They sat there and waited until just after midnight. At about midnight it looked like they were given the orders to move into the square. The tanks and the soldiers moved into the square killing everybody in sight.

The videos we see now days of the massacre shows burned out tanks with violent student protestors throwing molotov cocktails. That’s not what I saw in the home movies. What I saw was peaceful young people terrified. They seemed to be in shock that the government would actually use military force against them. The kids were fleeing. The tanks were running over the kids. Soldiers with machine guns and vehicles with machine guns were shooting the young students. The students were fleeing away from the military. A group of students were chased to and around the “Goddess of Liberty.” Young people were fleeing and running every where. There was a small group of students at the base of the statue. A guy with a machine gun shot them. There was a young girl. When she was shot she just folded up like a wet cloth and laid-slumped down. There was no dramatic music. She did not go into big hyper-exaggerated motions. She was shot. She just slumped down and quietly died.

How did I see the home movies? My wife and I were students at California Baptist College when all of these events occurred. One of our very close friend’s mother was a supporting member of our church. Her and some of her friends smuggled out of China one of the organizing leaders of the Tienanmen Square Protest. We were taken to a house to meet the leader and to watch the videos. (Even being a veteran, It was hard to watch the videos.)

_{© Don Horn 2025}