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report. Western journalists were “aggressively collecting” information and
“spreading it” to the “whole world.” They were working overtime to depict
the student struggle as heroic, thereby inflaming and encouraging the stu-
dents. “US personnel and organizations” like the Committee on Scholarly
Communications with the People's Republic of China, led by Princeton
University professor Perry Link, were maintaining close contact with stu-
dent movement leaders. Organizations in the United States were facilitating
telephone and fax exchange between proreform Chinese student organiza-
tions in the United States and student movements at Chinese universities.
The MSS report also raised the specter of Western military intervention to
help China’s antigovernment forces topple the CCP. The MSS reported that a
“China Study Group” of the US Department of State had recommended in a
May 1989 report that the United States prepare to provide weapons to China’s
floating population in order to create an antigovernment armed force.^22
On June 2, the day after the MSS report was delivered to Politburo mem-
bers, the very senior but elderly party leaders that Deng had edged out of
power and replaced by younger, more reform-minded leaders in the 1980s,
a group known as “the elders,” met to discuss the increasingly tense situ-
ation. Deng had eased these “elders” out of active leadership as part of his
leadership reforms of the first decade of reform, but brought them back to
active leadership as he mobilized elite support for use of necessary force to
repress the challenge to party authority. As the elders met, movement of PLA
forces to Tiananmen Square to implement martial law was being blocked by
demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of Beijing citizens, and
the question to be decided was whether to authorize use of “all necessary
force” to achieve swift military occupation of the square. After hearing Li
Peng reprise the MSS report and hearing similar reports by Beijing Party
Secretary Li Ximing and Mayor Chen Xitong, the elders vented their anger.
Li Xiannian—who along with Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun was one of the
three most senior elders—put the situation this way:
The account that Comrade Li Peng just gave us shows quite clearly that
Western capitalism really does want to see turmoil in China. And not
only that; they’d also like to see turmoil in the Soviet Union and all
the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. The United States, England,
France, Japan, and some other Western counties are leaving no stone
unturned in pushing peaceful evolution in the socialist counties.
They’ve got a new saying about “fighting a smokeless world war.” We
had better watch out. Capitalism still wants to beat socialism in the
end. None of their plots—using weapons, atomic bombs, and hydrogen
bombs—ever succeeded in the past. Now they’re turning to the Dulles
thing. [Peaceful evolution] We can’t do anything about other coun-
tries, but we have to control things in China. China can’t do without