I picked these up from a student protester on 6-4 after he was beaten up by soldiers
I have had these two mementos for a long time, 20 years, stashed away in an old box. The day after 6-4 I was at the military’s perimeter of the Square with a friend. A student beside me started chastising the soldiers. The soldiers grabbed him, threw him on the ground, beat him up and dragged him away. These two objects fell out of his pocket and I picked them up. Though I am not at all knowledgeable about guns, I knew these were shell casings.
To say I am not very knowledgeable about guns is an understatement. Living in urban Canada, guns are severely restricted and illegal. I suppose that the coming of this 6-4 20th anniversary prompted me to find them and figure out what exactly they were.
In the Square and after 6-4, the most common weapon I saw in use by People’s Liberation Army soldiers was the AK-47. This gave me somewhat of a clue.
I began, using my vernier calipers, to measure the diameters of the mouth and base, noting the bevel and ring just above the base. I also measured the overall length. Numbers imprinted on the bottom of the casings are “947 72” and “601 74”. What these numbers signify I have not a clue. A Google search told be that these shell casing were rimless and made of brass.
Lateral view of a steel-cased 7.62x39mm FMJ cartridge.
As luck would have it I found a very informative web page on the M43 bullet, more formally called the 7.62x39mm. They even had a section and a photo of the Chinese version. Included in the web page was an engineering diagram of the cartridge dimensions. After checking the dimensions of the shell casings against the engineering diagram I knew I had an exact match.
For completeness I also researched the AK-47, which led me to the Type 56 assault rifle used by the Chinese Army.
To think that the tips of these two shell casings were fired somewhere in the Square on 6-4 and may have killed someone makes me shudder. Mao once quoted “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun'”* These bullets are its messenger boys. How unfortunate is it that Mao is again proven right.
* source: Problems of War and Strategy, Nov 6 1938, Selected Works, vol II, pp 224.
