Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (25 page)

29 MAY 2009

20 years on from the Tiananmen massacre, the former Communist party official is still under house arrest

By Jamil Anderlini

When China’s ubiquitous state security agents want to intimidate a dissident or political activist for the first time, they usually come knocking in the middle of the night with an invitation for ‘a cup of tea’. Once the tea is served in some secret location, the agents explain that if their guest continues publicly to criticize Communist party rule, the likely consequences range from unemployment to long prison sentences or even ‘disappearance’ for them, their family and friends.

So it seems somehow fitting that Bao Tong, the most senior Communist party official to be jailed as a consequence of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, should have invited me to tea at his apartment in the west of Beijing.

It was 20 years ago next week, on 3 and 4 June 1989, that the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peaceful student protesters and bystanders. As the anniversary of the bloody crackdown approaches, Bao, now 77, remains under house arrest, his apartment watched around the clock and his movements tightly restricted by state security officers. I’d originally invited him for lunch at a restaurant but, as he patiently explained, under the terms of his house arrest it would be more convenient to meet in his home.

He greets me at the door with a wry smile, jet-black hair and a lithe frame wrapped in a Princeton University sweatshirt. It is hard to believe that he spent six years of his life doing hard labour during the Cultural Revolution and then, from 1989, another seven years in solitary confinement in the notorious Qincheng political prison. When I mention the sinister-looking men at the entrance to his apartment block who asked me to explain why I’ve come to see him, his face cracks into a sly grin.

‘I’m contributing to the country by stimulating domestic demand, increasing employment and helping solve the financial crisis,’ he says. He speaks Mandarin with the soft consonants of a southerner and the confidence characteristic of a senior party cadre. ‘You only saw three people down there but if I want to go out I’m followed by three groups – one on foot, one in cars and one on motorbikes. Just think – it takes more than 30 people to keep an eye on me so if the government decided to monitor all 1.3bn people in China we could solve the unemployment problem for the whole world!’

While this kind of gallows humour and the satirical use of communist propaganda slogans is common on the anonymous internet, I have never heard a senior Chinese official, even a retired one, talk like this in public.

Bao Tong was born in 1932 in Shanghai, where his father was a clerk in an enamel factory. The young Bao was influenced by two uncles, prominent left-wing intellectuals: one became a professor at Oxford University; the other became famous for a hunger strike aimed at convincing the government of the day to fight the Japanese.

At high school in Shanghai, Bao met his future wife, Jiang Zongcao, an active member of the communist underground who was kicked out of a string of schools for organizing demonstrations. She convinced him to join the Communist party in 1949, the year it came to power following a bloody civil war. Comrade Bao quickly worked his way up through the communist bureaucracy, but then in 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, he was denounced and sent to do hard labour at a re-education farm in Manchuria.

After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, many previously persecuted officials were politically rehabilitated and Bao was assigned to senior government positions. During the 1980s, he worked as a top aide to premier Zhao Ziyang, a liberal reformer who helped usher in a period
of political and economic openness in the 1980s, and in 1987 was appointed to the Communist party’s central committee. He served as the minister in charge of political reform and as political secretary to the standing committee of the Politburo, the five-man group that ran the country at that time.

One of the first things I notice in his spartan, dimly lit apartment is a large photograph on his bookshelf of Zhao. Only two weeks ago, Zhao’s secret memoir,
Prisoner of the State
, was published in Hong Kong – a rare first-hand account of Chinese elite politics. Over the next hour, Bao gives me his own blow-by-blow account of the secret and increasingly intense power struggle that raged during the seven weeks of upheaval that ended with tanks rolling down the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing.

He begins with his verdict: the man who bears full and sole responsibility for ordering the People’s Liberation Army to turn their guns on the people is Deng Xiaoping, the Communist party elder who controlled the leadership from behind the scenes until his death in 1997. Most historians regard Deng as the father of modern China: the architect of its economic reform and opening to the world. But in 1989 his only official title was chairman of the Central Military Commission.

‘Most of the students weren’t trying to depose Deng Xiaoping; they were hoping he would carry out reforms,’ Bao says. ‘The problem was Deng felt threatened and he called in the troops. This is how the tragedy happened, a true tragedy in Chinese history.’ Zhao, explains Bao, felt the students’ demands for democracy and an end to corruption were exactly what the Communist party itself claimed to stand for, and that a conciliatory approach would be the best way to end the protests.

This difference of approach ultimately proved critical. But Zhao’s struggle to avoid sending in the troops ended on 17 May 1989 when, after a state visit to China by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhao’s colleagues in the Politburo forced him to resign. In the middle of the night on 18 May, Zhao made his final, tearful, public appearance in Tiananmen Square, urging students to give up their struggle and return to class.

In a famous photograph from that night, Wen Jiabao, now premier of China, can be seen standing next to Zhao as he addresses the demonstrators. Bao won’t be drawn on whether Wen was a Zhao sympathizer,
as some historians suggest. ‘Who knows if he supported Zhao? Only he knows.’

His caution reminds me that every word we’re speaking is being recorded and I glance around the room involuntarily, as if I might be able to spot one of the bugs. This line of questioning is not going to do me or my host any good, so I return to 1989 and the days after Zhao’s resignation.

‘Many people thought Zhao Ziyang was conspiring to launch a coup against Deng Xiaoping,’ Bao says. ‘In fact, he and I did hatch a “conspiracy” [on the day Zhao was forced to resign], which was to sing the praises of Deng Xiaoping.’ Zhao believed he could avert a massacre by appealing for calm, explaining to the masses why Deng was in charge, despite holding no formal government or Communist party positions.

Bao was implicated – and later punished – for his alliance with the discredited Zhao. I ask if he regrets not having tried to plot a real coup with Zhao at that point. ‘Some people said Zhao Ziyang could copy Yeltsin and climb up on to a tank, but that,’ says Bao, ‘was impossible: no single soldier would listen to Zhao, they didn’t know him at all. They listened to their officers, the officers listened to the generals and the generals listened to Deng Xiaoping.’ As Mao Zedong famously said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Bao describes the night the old men, women and children of Beijing took Thermos flasks to the soldiers and begged them not to enter the city; how ordinary citizens built barricades in the streets to protect the students and how the tanks and troops stormed the city. ‘The tanks were roaring and the bullets were flying into people’s homes. In my building, the son-in-law of a government minister was killed as he was pouring a cup of tea in his living room.’

I look down at the untouched porcelain teacup on the table in front of me. I’ve been so engrossed I haven’t taken one sip and now I’m not sure if it’s my cup or his. Bao’s vivid description belies the fact he was not in Beijing that night and was not able to piece together the whole story until years later, with the help of smuggled western media cuttings.

On 28 May 1989, Bao himself was arrested and taken to Qincheng, China’s main political prison since the 1950s. There he became number 8901 – the first prisoner to enter Qincheng in the year 1989 – and was
put in a 6m by 6m cement cell with only a stiff wooden board propped on two sawhorses for a bed. ‘I lay down on the board and went to sleep. People ask me why I wasn’t terrified. Before that moment I didn’t know when they would come for me, but now I didn’t need to worry any more.’

There was no door to his cell but a guard sat at a table propped across the entrance; two soldiers stood to attention behind him. The seated guard’s job was to record the prisoner’s every action in a notebook 24 hours a day, one entry a minute, for seven years. Bao chuckles at the frustrating boredom of the job assigned to his captors – ‘20.00 hours – prisoner 8901 sleeping; 20.01 hours – prisoner 8901 sleeping; 20.02 hours – prisoner 8901 sleeping, and so on.’

In 1996 Bao was finally released from prison and placed under house arrest. His jaw tightens slightly as he describes the hardships his family has endured as a result of their relationship. His Princeton-educated son Bao Pu, 42, is a US citizen and the publisher of Zhao’s memoirs in Hong Kong. He is barred from entering China to visit his elderly parents.

But it is Bao Tong’s wife who has suffered the most. He describes the day Zhao Ziyang died in 2005. He and his wife wanted to pay their respects, but were blocked by people guarding the door of the lift in their apartment block, threatening them not to go out. ‘I explained that it was illegal for them to stop me from going.’ The men instead shoved his elderly wife to the ground, breaking her hip. She spent more than two months in hospital. ‘The Chinese Communist party is just like the Mafia,’ says Bao. ‘If the Mafia boss thinks you might betray him, he will just kill you or throw you into prison for as long as he likes. This is not how a political party or a government should behave.’

For all he and his family have endured, Bao considers himself lucky, compared to those even now imprisoned for supposed crimes related to the 1989 demonstrations, or to those who died in the crackdown or in the brutal witch-hunt that followed.

According to Bao, his tormentors’ niggling fear is that one day this old revolutionary insider might either be rehabilitated and return as a top Communist official or become a figurehead for a new wave of activism. Bao says he still receives a measure of protection from old friends in senior government positions. ‘I should count myself lucky and express my thanks with the popular slogan: “My eternal gratitude to the Communist party and to Chairman Mao!” ’

It is in this ironic humour that one senses the real threat to the current leaders in China, even two decades after the Tiananmen massacre and 12 years after the death of Deng Xiaoping. Bao mocks their slogans and denigrates their demigods, but he is, after all, one of them. If he were to be allowed to air his views, they fear the whole authoritarian edifice could start to crumble.

‘China has almost erased the memory of Tiananmen by making it illegal to talk about what happened. But there are miniature Tiananmens in China every day, in counties and villages where people try to show their discontent and the government sends 500 policemen to put them down. This is democracy and law with Chinese characteristics.

‘The first sentence of the Chinese national anthem goes like this: “Arise! All those who refuse to be slaves.” I believe there will be real democracy in China sooner or later, as long as there are people who want to be treated equally and have their rights respected.

‘It will rely on our own efforts, it will depend on when we, the Chinese people, are willing to stand up and protect our own rights.’

The tea is now cold and the table has been set for lunch. Bao’s family is waiting in the other room for me to leave. Even shaking the hand of a foreign journalist could expose them to criticism from the authorities and, after all they’ve been through, I don’t want to be another source of inconvenience. As I leave the lift, I turn my video camera on the security agent sitting at the desk in the lobby. He yells at me to turn it off and I leave the compound in a hurry, 30 pairs of eyes boring a hole in my back.

A few days after this interview, Bao Tong was invited on a tour of a scenic reserve in southern China by the Public Security Ministry. According to his son, he left of his own volition in the company of his security agent entourage last Monday and will not return until 7 June, when the sensitive anniversary has passed.

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