Wikipedia Deep Dive

Xu Qinxian

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In May 1989, a Chinese general lay recovering from kidney surgery in a Beijing military hospital when his commander arrived with an order: lead your army against the student protesters filling Tiananmen Square. Xu Qinxian asked to see the order in writing. When told it was wartime and paperwork would come later, he replied flatly: there is no war. He would rather be executed, he told friends, than become "a criminal to history."

That single refusal would cost him everything—his rank, his freedom, his party membership, and ultimately his right to live where he chose. But it would also make him something rare in the annals of authoritarian states: a military commander who said no.

The Making of a General

Xu Qinxian was born in August 1935 in what is now Laizhou, in China's Shandong Province. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the fifteen-year-old volunteered for the People's Liberation Army and was turned away for being too young.

He bit his finger and wrote his appeal in blood.

This dramatic gesture—melodramatic by Western standards, but carrying deep cultural weight in China as a demonstration of absolute sincerity—worked. The army relented. After eight months at a communications school in Fushun, Liaoning, he shipped out to Korea as a telegraph operator in a tank regiment.

The unit he joined was the 38th Group Army, and he would spend his entire career climbing its ranks. From telegraph operator to radio operator, then up through command of a communications battalion, regimental chief of staff, and eventually commander of an armored division. By the 1980s, Xu Qinxian commanded the entire 38th Group Army.

This was not just any unit. The 38th was the largest, most mechanized, and best-trained formation in the Chinese military. Based in Baoding, about ninety miles south of Beijing, it served as the capital's primary defensive shield. If Beijing were threatened, the 38th would be the first responders. If the Communist Party needed overwhelming force near the seat of power, the 38th would provide it.

Xu's mentor was Defense Minister Qin Jiwei, a man who would later express his own reservations about using military force against civilians. Whether this relationship shaped Xu's thinking, or whether both men simply shared a similar moral compass, remains unclear. What matters is that when the moment of decision arrived, Xu knew exactly where he stood.

The Hospital and the Square

In March 1989, a grenade training accident sent Xu to the Beijing Military Region Hospital. Some accounts suggest the real reason was kidney stones requiring surgery. Either way, he found himself convalescing in the capital just as history began accelerating outside his window.

The student protests that would become known as the Tiananmen Square demonstrations had begun in mid-April, sparked by the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist Communist Party leader. By May, the protests had swelled into something the party leadership viewed as an existential threat. Hundreds of thousands of people filled Tiananmen Square, and students began a hunger strike that captured national and international attention.

Xu watched the coverage from his hospital bed. According to journalist Yang Jisheng, he wept at reports of the hunger strikers.

This detail matters. Xu wasn't some abstract opponent of government policy. He was a career military officer, a product of the Communist system, a man who had literally written his enlistment appeal in his own blood. But he was also watching young people starving themselves for ideals they believed in, and something in him responded.

The Order

On May 17th, 1989, Li Laizhu, the deputy military commander of the Beijing Military Region, visited Xu in the hospital. The news was grave: martial law would be declared in two days, on May 19th. Troops would mobilize. As commander of the 38th Group Army, Xu's support was expected.

Xu's response was precise and legalistic: he could not comply with a verbal order. He required written authorization.

This might sound like bureaucratic hair-splitting, but it was actually quite clever. Written orders create paper trails. Paper trails establish responsibility. If Xu followed a verbal command to attack civilians and things went badly, he could be blamed. If he had written orders, the responsibility would be shared—or shifted—upward. More importantly, requiring documentation bought time and forced his superiors to commit themselves explicitly to what they were asking.

Li Laizhu invoked wartime authority, promising documentation would follow. Xu pointed out the obvious: there was no war. He refused again.

Then he called the Beijing Military Region's political commissar to formally report his refusal. The die was cast.

The Constitutional Question

What happened next depends on which account you believe, though they all point in the same direction.

According to The Tiananmen Papers—a collection of leaked internal Communist Party documents whose authenticity remains debated but whose details have largely held up—President Yang Shangkun couldn't sleep for days after learning of Xu's defiance. He consulted Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, who insisted that a soldier like Xu could not disobey orders.

Zhou Yibing, commander of the Beijing Military Region, traveled to Baoding to persuade Xu personally. Xu asked a question that cut to the heart of the matter: had all three principals of the Central Military Commission approved the martial law order?

The Central Military Commission was the highest military command authority in China. Its three principals at the time were Deng Xiaoping (chairman), Yang Shangkun (vice-chairman), and Zhao Ziyang (first vice-chairman). Zhao was also the General Secretary of the Communist Party—the top civilian post—and he was known to be sympathetic to the students.

Zhou admitted that Zhao had not approved.

This gave Xu his constitutional ground. Without unanimous approval from the Commission's leadership, he argued, the order lacked proper authority. He requested sick leave. The request was denied, but he still refused to report for duty.

Multiple sources corroborate some version of this confrontation. A People's Liberation Army general interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald through an intermediary confirmed that Zhou personally delivered orders to Xu around May 20th, and that Xu refused when told Zhao Ziyang hadn't agreed.

Another account, from researcher Wu Renhua, suggests Xu didn't immediately refuse but returned to Baoding to arrange logistics for moving his troops—only to then call headquarters, cite his injury, and check himself back into the hospital, where he was arrested.

The details vary. The outcome doesn't. Xu Qinxian refused to lead his army against the protesters, and for this, he was seized.

The Consequences of Conscience

Xu's defiance rippled through the Communist Party leadership in ways that probably made things worse for the protesters. His refusal stoked fears of a potential military mutiny, reinforcing the hardliners' conviction that the student movement represented an existential threat requiring immediate, overwhelming force.

The 38th Group Army's leadership was replaced. Under new command, the unit went on to play a major role in the bloody crackdown that followed on June 4th, 1989. Many of Xu's former colleagues were promoted for their participation.

Xu himself faced a military tribunal in 1990. He remained defiant to the end. "The People's Army has never in its history been used to suppress the people," he declared. "I absolutely refuse to besmirch this historical record!"

In 2025, video footage of his full trial was leaked and posted to YouTube—a platform blocked in China. Six hours of proceedings showed Xu, dressed in civilian clothes rather than his uniform, explaining his refusal. He conceded that the Communist Party controlled the military, but argued that ordering the army to attack demonstrators at Tiananmen Square required deliberation by the National People's Congress, China's nominal legislature. He said he declined to be "a sinner to history."

The leaked footage confirmed what had long been reported: that the order to militarily crush the protests was given orally, without a paper trail. Xu's insistence on written orders had been right all along—there was no documentation because the leadership wanted deniability.

Prison and Exile

The tribunal expelled Xu from the Communist Party and sentenced him to five years in prison. He served four years in Qincheng Prison, a facility north of Beijing reserved for high-profile political prisoners—the same prison that had once held Mao Zedong's widow during the trial of the Gang of Four. His final year was spent in a police hospital.

After his release, Jiang Zemin—who had risen to paramount leader in the aftermath of Tiananmen—exiled Xu to Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei. His military entitlements were slashed to the equivalent of a deputy provincial military commander, several ranks below what he had achieved. He was forbidden from living in Beijing.

For twenty years, no one knew where he was.

The Rediscovery

In 2009, the Hong Kong publication Asia Weekly reported that Xu had been living in Shijiazhuang all along, forced to stay away from the capital. The magazine noted an odd detail: a reference to Xu had appeared in an anthology of poetry published by his friend Li Rui in 2007, somehow slipping past China's censors.

Two years later, Hong Kong's Apple Daily found Xu visiting Li Rui's Beijing home and briefly interviewed him. Xu confirmed his expulsion from the party and his reduced status. He said he could access news and travel between Shijiazhuang and Beijing. Most significantly, he expressed no regrets about his actions during the Tiananmen protests.

The interview infuriated authorities. Xu was confined to Shijiazhuang for the rest of his life, placed under constant guard, and moved to inferior housing.

The Long Decline

During Chinese New Year 2016, Xu developed pneumonia that required hospitalization at the People's Liberation Army Bethune International Peace Hospital in Shijiazhuang. The illness marked the beginning of his physical decline. He lost vision in his right eye and retained only poor sight in his left. He developed cerebral thrombosis—blood clots in the brain. He lost the ability to speak fluently and struggled to care for himself. The robust physique he'd been known for wasted away.

Around 2019, he returned home and his condition briefly improved. But by early 2020, his health began deteriorating rapidly.

On January 8th, 2021, Xu Qinxian died at the age of eighty-five after choking on food. He left behind a wife, a son, and a daughter.

The Weight of a Single Decision

Military officers who refuse orders occupy an uncomfortable space in history. We celebrate them when their conscience aligns with outcomes we approve of—the German officers who resisted Hitler, the soldiers who refused to fire on crowds during the Arab Spring. We condemn them when they undermine causes we support. The principle itself—that a soldier's duty to humanity might supersede duty to the chain of command—remains contested.

Xu Qinxian never led a coup. He didn't shelter protesters or leak intelligence. He simply declined to participate. When ordered to lead the most powerful military unit in China against unarmed civilians, he asked for documentation, pointed out constitutional irregularities, and checked himself into a hospital.

It wasn't enough to stop the massacre. The 38th Group Army, under different leadership, still rolled into Beijing. The tanks still faced down the students. The death toll—never officially acknowledged by the Chinese government—likely ran into the hundreds or thousands.

But Xu's refusal matters precisely because it failed. It demonstrates that even within the most disciplined military structures, individual conscience can assert itself. It proves that not everyone went along. It offers a counterexample to the claim that the crackdown represented a unified military acting on clear legitimate authority.

For thirty-two years after the massacre, Xu Qinxian lived with the consequences of a single moment of moral clarity. Stripped of rank, expelled from the party that had been his entire adult identity, exiled from the city he had sworn to defend, watched by guards in diminished housing—he reportedly never wavered. When asked about regrets, he had none.

He had refused to become a criminal to history. History, it seems, agreed.