The regime’s deadliest violence struck unarmed workers and citizens in the streets around Tiananmen, not inside it: Robin Munro.

By Probe International

Every year, prominent legal scholar Donald Clarke circulates a corrective to a persistent distortion about June 4, 1989. Written in 1990 by the late British author and human rights activist, Robin Munro, Clarke brings back into focus Munro’s argument that the main killings took place in the streets surrounding Tiananmen Square.

Munro claims the geography of the violence matters because it gave the Chinese regime a loophole to deny that a massacre occurred inside the square, when the bulk of the fatalities happened outside of it and targeted unarmed civilians. Munro’s core assertion is that the regime considered students containable but the threat of independent working-class organizing a menace that had to be crushed. The deaths of ordinary Beijing residents—the workers, bystanders, and citizens who tried to protect the student protesters—revealed the regime’s deeper objective: to terrorize the broader population into political obedience and demonstrate the consequences of challenging Communist Party rule.

According to Munro, the role of the laobaixing is the story the symbolism of the square eclipsed: citizens crossing class lines united in grievance directly challenged the Party’s claim to rule for the working class.

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