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Rare footage of a People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters<\/a> has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history.<\/p>\n General Xu Qinxian\u2019s refusal to take his troops from the PLA\u2019s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades.<\/p>\n The six-hour video recording of Gen Xu\u2019s court martial hearing<\/a> the next year sheds light on the rare act of defiance. In the video, Xu said he refused because he did not want to become \u201ca sinner in history\u201d.<\/p>\n The video \u201cconfirms the legend about Xu Qinxian\u201d, said Zhou Fengsuo, a leader of the Tiananmen demonstrations who now lives in exile in the US. \u201cThis is the first time that we have a clear first-person view of this period,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n The source of the video is unknown. It was first posted online last month and has more than 1.2m views<\/a> on one YouTube account alone. Wu Renhua, a historian of the Tiananmen movement who took part in the protests, was one of the first people to share it online. He said it was provided to him on one condition: that he keep his source secret.<\/p>\n Wu said the video was \u201cperhaps the most important piece of data that I have gathered in my three decades of research\u201d. He believes it is genuine as many of the details are corroborated by his separate research.<\/p>\n The demonstrations that gripped Beijing for weeks in the spring of 1989 ended with a bloody massacre in the early hours of 4 June, when PLA troops opened fire on civilians around Tiananmen Square, the 21.1 hectare (53 acre) central plaza of China\u2019s capital. Hundreds, potentially thousands, of people were killed and the event remains one of the most sensitive in the Chinese Communist party\u2019s rule over China<\/a>. Discussion of the massacre is censored and there has never been any open or official reckoning with the events or the aftermath.<\/p>\n