The Chinese government works hard to deprive its subjects of information about Xu Qinxian, a major general who flouted orders to slaughter protesters in Beijing in 1989 and “was punished with (a relatively lenient) five years in prison.” Xu had been in charge of 15,000 troops.
When he died in 2021, some people who knew who he was posted tributes online. The censors deleted them.
The Chinese Communist Party is also censoring a six-hour-long video of Xu’s court-martial that has just surfaced (The Economist, December 4, 2025).
Not surprisingly the video, which is more than six hours long, is not available for streaming on websites in China…. But among Chinese abroad, it is being widely watched. It shows a bespectacled Xu being grilled in a near-empty courtroom at his secret trial, which was held in March 1990, nine months after the People’s Liberation Army cleared Tiananmen Square of demonstrators, killing hundreds if not thousands of people during the operation….
Before a hectoring military judge, Xu calmly and unapologetically explains his decision….
“Good people and bad people are mixed together,” he recalls saying. “The army and the ordinary citizens are mixed together. I said, how can this be executed? Who should I hit?” Moving in troops would involve “serious consequences”, he says. Xu asserts that he did not want to be judged by history as a “criminal” for taking part. Although he recused himself from carrying out the order, Xu did, however, transmit it, according to his testimony.
The publisher of this video is Wu Renhua, who had been one of the protesters. He is now in the U.S. Although he won’t say how he got it, he stresses that the leak is “completely unrelated to internal Chinese Communist Party or military power struggles.”
But soon after he posted the footage, “China announced that the director of the State Secrecy Bureau and his deputy had been dismissed,” the Economist reports. “Speculation is rife that this was related.”
The Vision Times reports that “Tiananmen witness and researcher Wu Renhua—formerly a lecturer at China University of Political Science and Law—released the full recording of Xu’s military trial for the first time on X” on November 25, 2025. “Wu initially uploaded it to the Internet Archive, though the file was removed soon afterward. Copies have since re-emerged on YouTube.”
A rare find
Wu says that the video is “the most important material” that he’s found in three decades of studying the protests and how they were dealt with.
“This recording was extremely difficult to obtain and involved significant political risk,” he says. “The Beijing Military Region Military Court held a secret trial, and the presiding judge said on record: ‘This case involves state secrets.’ To this day, all materials related to Xu Qinxian’s trial remain classified.”
The source of the video requested only one thing from Wu: that he never reveal the source.
Also see:
Human Rights in China: “The General Who Refused the Tiananmen Massacre: Rare Trial Footage of Xu Qinxian” (six hours; in Chinese with English-language subtitles)
