The New York Times’ Chris Buckley reports on the recent emergence of footage from the trial of General Xu Qinxian, who refused to lead the PLA’s 38th Group Army into Beijing to confront protesters in late May, 1989, and was subsequently imprisoned for five years as a result. Xu’s fate remained unknown until Apple Daily located him in 2011. He died in 2021. CDT Chinese has posted a copy of the six-hour video, as well as a transcript of around 70,000 characters. From Buckley:

In the trial footage, General Xu explains that he refused the order as a matter of individual conscience and professional judgment. He tells judges that sending armed troops against civilians would lead to chaos and bloodshed, saying that a commander who carried out martial law poorly would go down as “a sinner in history.”

[…] “It is one thing to read about General Xu taking a stand and following his conscience. It is another to see him sitting in such a vulnerable position in court,” said Jeremy Brown, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada who wrote a history of the Tiananmen protests and crackdown. [Brown discussed the book and its subject in an interview with CDT.] “To see Xu explain how he decided to refuse to follow a bad order from his well-informed military perspective forces the observer to think: ‘What would I do in this situation?’”

[…] General Xu, perhaps like other generals, was summoned individually to hear the orders. It may have been an effort to prevent them from sharing any concerns, said Wu Renhua, an independent historian from China who now lives in Taiwan. Mr. Wu, who has written several studies of the 1989 pro-democracy uprising and crackdown, also noted that General Xu’s trial showed how the martial law orders were delivered orally, leaving no paper trail.

“This counts as the most important material I have come across in over 30 years of collecting material on June 4,” Mr. Wu said of the trial video. [Source]

Buckley previously reported, with Andrew Jacobs, on Xu’s story and related accounts in 2014:

“I’d rather be beheaded than be a criminal in the eyes of history,” [Xu] told Yang Jisheng, a historian.

[…] In an interview, a former party researcher with military ties confirmed the existence of a petition, signed by seven senior commanders, that called on the leadership to withdraw the troops.

“The people’s military belongs to the people, and cannot oppose the people,” stated the petition, according to the former researcher, Zhang Gang, who was then trying to broker compromise between the protesters and the government. “Even less can it kill the people.”

There were fewer episodes of outright military defiance, like that of General Xu. No dissident, he had written a letter in blood during the Korean War begging to join the army as an underage youth, according to Mr. Yang, the historian who was among the few people to interview him after 1989. The elite 38th Group Army, which General Xu commanded from a base about 90 miles south of Beijing, was a bulwark protecting the capital.

Having witnessed the student protests during an earlier visit to Beijing, where he was receiving treatment for kidney stones, he feared the consequences of quelling them with troops trained to fight foreign invaders. Sending armed soldiers onto the streets, he warned, would risk indiscriminate bloodshed and stain the reputation of the People’s Liberation Army.

“If there was a conflict with ordinary civilians, and you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, who would shoulder responsibility for problems?” he later said, according to Dai Qing, a Beijing writer who had access to separate interview notes with the general. [Source]

The Economist reported earlier this month on the newly leaked video and its provenance:

The video was posted online by Wu Renhua, a historian of the Tiananmen Square upheaval who took part in the protests and later fled to America. Mr Wu says he will not reveal how he got it. [Wu later told The New York Times that he shared it publicly only after seeing others do the same.] On X, a social-media platform, he says the leak was “completely unrelated to internal Chinese Communist Party or military power struggles”. On the day after, China announced that the director of the State Secrecy Bureau and his deputy had been dismissed. Speculation is rife that this was related. [Source]

Xu is remembered with respect for his resistance, but his decision affected subsequent events in ways he could not have anticipated. In a 2018 interview with RFA, Xu’s former driver described the immediate repercussions, including the 38th Group Army’s particularly aggressive subsequent conduct:

I joined the army in October 1982, and I worked for the 38th Army for 10 years in all. During the June 4th incident, our commander Lt. Gen. Xu Qinxian refused to implement the high-level massacre plan and was persecuted for it. I was implicated in the loss of this combat plan and was persecuted for a long time. At the end of 1992, I was prematurely decommissioned on the grounds that I was no longer fit for the armed forces. […]
 
[…] The refusal of Lt. Gen. Xu Qinxian to carry out those orders made a number of people in the Central Military Commission very unhappy, even furious. The commanding officers of the 38th Army were very worried about future repercussions over Lt. Gen. Xu’s rebellion, and that it would prevent anyone in the 38th Army from receiving any medals. The other army chiefs were not particularly sympathetic to him but were very annoyed, because many people felt that they would lose out, and that they would inevitably be implicated in any future investigations. After Lt. Gen. Xu was relieved of command, the new army leadership demonstrated its determination by carrying out the crackdown orders with particular resolve. [Source]

Jeremy Brown also discussed the unintended consequences of Xu’s overt refusal in his book: "On May 19 or 20, 1989, Xu Qinxian had no way of knowing that his lonely, individual refusal to enforce martial law might have been counterproductive, in that it convinced his superiors to strictly enforce discipline and warned his replacement about the cost of disloyalty. If Xu Qinxian had stayed on the job, continued to lead the 38th Army until June 3, and behaved like [28th Group Army commander] He Yanran, moving slowly and pretending that he had never received orders to shoot, who knows how many lives might have been saved?"

Read more voices on June 4 and coverage of official efforts to stifle them via CDT.