The General Who Said No: A Leaked Trial Breaks China’s Silence

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A secret court-martial video reveals how Gen. Xu Qinxian refused to crush Tiananmen protesters—and paid for conscience with prison and erasure.

By TRH World Desk

New Delhi, December 19, 2025 — When China’s rulers ordered the People’s Liberation Army to crush pro-democracy protests in Beijing in 1989, one senior commander refused. Gen. Xu Qinxian said no—and history buried him for decades.

Now, a leaked six-hour video of his secret 1990 court-martial has punctured that silence. As reported by The New York Times, the footage offers an extraordinary glimpse into rare dissent inside the Chinese military at the moment Deng Xiaoping prepared to unleash force that would kill hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed civilians.

In the grainy courtroom footage, General Xu appears not as a rebel but as a professional soldier guided by conscience and judgment. He tells the judges that deploying armed troops against civilians would lead to chaos and bloodshed. A commander who executed such orders poorly, he warned, would become “a sinner in history.”

It is a devastating line—not because it is dramatic, but because it proved prophetic.

Xu had risen from humble beginnings to command the elite 38th Group Army. Yet when martial law was imposed in May 1989, he refused to personally lead 15,000 troops into Beijing. He argued that the crisis demanded political resolution, not brute force, and suggested that such a momentous decision should be debated by senior party leaders—and even the National People’s Congress.

That suggestion alone bordered on heresy. The idea of a military accountable beyond the Communist Party remains taboo even today.

Xu did not plead for mercy. He accepted dismissal. “My superiors can appoint me, and they can also dismiss me,” he told his commanders, knowing the cost. Silence followed. Then punishment.

Cut off from his troops, detained, stripped of rank, and sentenced to five years in prison, Xu vanished from official history. Under a new commander, the 38th Army went on to become one of the most feared units during the Tiananmen crackdown, firing on protesters and bystanders alike.

Xu died in 2021, unrehabilitated but unrepentant. “I have no regrets,” he later said.

The leaked video matters because authoritarian systems depend not just on force, but on forgetting. Seeing Xu—alone, guarded, unapologetic—forces a haunting question, as historian Jeremy Brown tells NYT: What would I have done?

China still censors June 4. But conscience, once recorded, is hard to erase.