Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (31 page)

H
u Yaobang died on April 15, 1989, at age seventy-three. At first, I shrugged off the news. He was a political has-been, purged two years earlier as Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent after failing to contain the same student demonstrations that had led to Fang Lizhi’s dismissal. His death seemed unlikely to change the political landscape.

So I was surprised when Big Character posters immediately went up on the campus of my alma mater. Why would anybody mourn Hu? He was a buffoonish character who once advocated that Chinese, for sanitary reasons, use knives and forks instead of chopsticks. The joke went that Deng had chosen him because at four feet eight inches, Hu Yaobang was the only person on the ruling Politburo who looked up to Deng. His fall from grace began when he made the fatal mistake of looking enthusiastic when Deng made a bogus offer to retire. To me, Hu was just another Party hack who proved once again that being heir apparent was bad for one’s health.

So why were the students rushing out to lay wreaths? Then I remembered how mourning Premier Zhou Enlai had been the only way to attack the Gang of Four in 1976. Was mourning Hu the only way to criticize Deng, the man who had purged him? For several months now, people had observed how dissidents like
Professor Fang had circulated petitions and held news conferences – all without reprisal. Many felt the government was weak and that it was time to take further action. Rumor had it that former Party chief Hu had suffered a heart attack during an unusually acrimonious Politburo debate on educational policy. Within hours of his death, the students had adopted him as their fallen hero and were calling for a city-wide boycott of classes.

A few days later, a million Beijingers joined in the biggest spontaneous anti-government demonstration in Communist Chinese history. I remembered how gloomy Ren Wanding had been about finding any supporters just a few months earlier. And I remembered how Professor Fang marveled how, only a few years ago, people didn’t even dare speak of human rights. I assumed they were as stunned as I was at how rapidly the protests gathered steam.

That evening, a crowd gathered in front of the Central Committee headquarters, yelling for Empress Dowager Ci Xi to step down. Ci Xi, who had been dead for eighty years, was infamous for controlling politics from behind the scenes. Screaming for her abdication was just another thinly veiled attack on Deng. Thank goodness I had majored in Chinese history.

Tiananmen is gargantuan, the biggest square in the world. It is a hundred sprawling acres in all, flatter and bigger than the biggest parking lot I have ever seen. I used to get tired just walking from one end to the other. Moscow’s Red Square was intimate in comparison. Tiananmen could simultaneously accommodate the entire twenty-eight teams of the National Football League plus 192 other teams, each playing separate games. It could stage an entire Summer Olympics, with all events taking place at the same time. Or if you put a mountain in the middle, you could hold a Winter Olympics there instead.

Tiananmen Square made me feel tiny, insignificant, powerless. That was no accident. As the geographic and political center of Beijing, it was enlarged after the Communist victory to celebrate the grandiosity of Red China. In 1949, the Great Helmsman stood on the rostrum, in front of the Forbidden City, to proclaim: “The Chinese people have
stood up.” He returned during the Cultural Revolution, waving majestically to a crowd of a million hysterical Red Guards that included Scarlet, Future and many of my classmates.

Tiananmen, which means Gate of Heavenly Peace, is also one of the least hospitable squares in the world. There is no bench or place to rest, nowhere to get a drink, no leafy tree to offer respite from the sun. Only the one-hundred-foot high Monument to the People’s Heroes punctuates it, and, after 1977, Mao’s white and gold mausoleum. Tiananmen is also one of the most heavily monitored squares in the world. Its huge lampposts are equipped with giant speakers for crowd control and swiveling videocameras. The commercial photographers, with white pushcarts and colorful shade umbrellas, are actually plainclothes police. For a modest fee, they snap photos of Chinese tourists posing in the square and mail you the pictures a week later. That way, they have your name and address, too.

On April 21, 1989, thousands of students began gathering in Tiananmen Square in anticipation of Hu’s state funeral the next day. By then, the criticism of Deng had burst into the open. “Down with dictatorship,” read one banner. “You’ve fooled the people too long,” said another. A Big Character poster titled “The Nine Crimes of Deng Xiaoping” accused him, among other misdeeds, of refusing to retire and of protecting his eldest son from a corruption inquiry.

Police videotaped the students on the steps of the Great Hall of the People on the western side of the square. As one youth made an impromptu speech about democracy, a dozen PLA soldiers burst through the hall’s massive bronze doors and took karate kicks at the students. The panic-stricken crowd fled. I was angry and upset. It was the first time I witnessed the PLA attacking the people. Had China changed that much in the years I had been gone?

Authorities planned to close the square for Saturday’s funeral, but the students outsmarted them by camping out the night before. In a massive procession that Friday, more than a hundred thousand students marched into Tiananmen Square. As passersby applauded, the students sang the Communist
“Internationale”
and for a moment I felt like I was back at Big Joy Farm. Then the demonstrators
chanted, “Down with dictatorship!” and “Long live freedom!” and I knew things were not the same. Sixty truckloads of soldiers arrived that evening to seal off the square, but it was too late.

Saturday, April 22, 1989, dawned cloudless and warm. The police belatedly sealed off the square. The tens of thousands of students who had spent the night there remained on the inside. Members of the public, excited and curious, gathered on the edge of the square. At seven, a single line of unarmed police formed in front of the Great Hall of the People. Undaunted, the students advanced toward them until they faced them, nose to nose, less than a foot away.

Remembering my own student demonstrations from the sixties, I expected a full-scale riot. Instead, the students chanted an old Maoist flower-power slogan: “The people love the police! The police love the people!” When the funeral started at nine, five thousand soldiers massed behind the single line of police. We could all follow the proceedings through the square’s loudspeakers. When the national anthem began, the students joined in lustily. If I hadn’t lived through the Tiananmen incident in 1976, I would have thought they were a bunch of polite college kids. But I knew they were really demanding Deng’s abdication.

When the funeral ended forty-five minutes later, I watched from the sidelines as China’s aging leaders paused on the broad granite steps of the Great Hall to stare in disbelief at the sea of students. Symbolically, the gulf between them was filled with soldiers. Some students began to shout, “Dialogue! Dialogue! Dialogue!” Three knelt on the steps, holding a petition aloft. Deng slipped out a side entrance.

At first, I couldn’t understand why the government didn’t just accept the petition and defuse the situation. I learned later that the Politburo was badly split. The latest heir apparent, who played golf and had a penchant for Western suits, firmly believed that doctrinaire Marxism was hindering rapid economic development. Only by keeping ahead of people’s material demands, Party Chief Zhao Ziyang contended, could the Communist Party remain in power. No civil libertarian, Zhao (pronounced
Jow
) nonetheless wanted to use the pressure from the students to ram through further reforms — and perhaps force Deng into real retirement. But by even
thinking
of using the anti-Deng protests to advance his own agenda, Zhao had sealed his fate. Heir today, gone tomorrow.

After demonstrations flared in at least six other Chinese cities, a banner headline on a front-page editorial in the
People’s Daily
screamed, “Take a Clear-cut Stance Against the Instigation of Turmoil.” In normal countries, a newspaper editorial is just the opinion of some pointy-headed editor. But in China, it is a directive from the top. This editorial accused the students of conspiracy and sabotage, which left them vulnerable to retaliation and possible prison terms. Deng had spoken. There would be no compromise, no dialogue.

The students – and the populace – understood the significance of the editorial. But its fighting words only gave them a shot of adrenaline. Outraged at the hard-line labels, tens of thousands of students poured into Tiananmen Square once more. For the first time since the demonstrations began, ordinary residents joined in, too. The protesters demanded a retraction and, for good measure, the resignation of hard-line Premier Li Peng. Emboldened by the outpouring of public support, the students came up with three new demands: an open dialogue with the government, an apology for the police beatings, and unbiased media coverage of the student movement. If they didn’t get an immediate response, the students brashly warned, they would retake Tiananmen Square.

Deng was apoplectic. “We are not afraid to shed a little blood since this will not seriously harm China’s image in the world,” he said, according to reports that leaked later. With exquisite bad timing, Ren Wanding, the old Democracy Wall activist, chose this moment to speak out. “If there are people who force us to shed blood, then let our blood flow,” he said.

By early May, it seemed that everyone had joined the demonstrations. Police officers, Foreign Ministry aides, steelworkers, bankers, even
People’s Daily
reporters, in a rebuke to their own editorial writers, waved the banners of their organizations and marched with their work IDs pinned to their shirts. The biggest silent majority in the world was no longer silent. For the first time since my misguided Maoist days, I could relate again to being Chinese. I felt a surge of pride. The Chinese people didn’t accept being downtrodden. They had real backbone.

But as the days passed, and the mercury hit the nineties, the crowds started thinning. Then the protesters got another shot of
adrenaline. A thousand journalists, including CBS’s Dan Rather and CNN’s Bernard Shaw, began descending on Beijing for the Sino-Soviet summit. With so many journalists rattling around in search of a story, the students decided to reignite public opinion by staging a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. It was a brilliant tactic. The move would win them immense sympathy, the leadership would be distracted by the summit, and the world’s media would go ga-ga over a David-and-Goliath story.

Gorbachev was due in Beijing on Monday, May 15. Two days before, several hundred students indulged in a last lunch. After downing beer and sausages on their campuses, they donned white headbands emblazoned with red slogans and marched enthusiastically for two hours down to Tiananmen Square. By midafternoon, the initial crowd of hunger strikers had ballooned to more than one thousand, or about one per visiting journalist. I squeezed my way to the front of the crowd as a slight, slender woman began reading a “hunger-strike declaration.” Chai Ling, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in psychology, looked like a Gap model in her slim tan pants and white polo shirt, a pair of folded sunglasses dangling from the open collar. The television cameras loved her because her curtain of silky hair was always falling in her eyes, and because she tended to weep at the slightest provocation. After the crackdown, the government’s Most Wanted List of Student Leaders would describe her as having “single-fold eyelids, high cheekbones, short hair and rather white skin.”

“Comrades!” Chai Ling began, her breathy voice barely audible through a bullhorn. The crowd sitting cross-legged before her quieted down immediately. “We protest the government’s uncaring attitude! We request a dialogue! Don’t label us as fomenters of disorder!” Everyone cheered. She led the crowd in slogan-shouting, a skill drummed into Chinese kids since nursery school. “Immediate pardon! Immediate dialogue! No delay!” she shouted in her delicate voice, and the crowd screamed back. “I love my homeland more than rice! I love truth more than rice!” she cried. The crowd went wild. Chai Ling then announced it was time to take a collective oath. Raising her delicately clenched right fist, she recited the hunger-strike oath, pausing at every phrase to let the students repeat
after her: “I swear, that to promote democracy, for the prosperity of my country, I willingly go on a hunger strike. I will not give up until I realize our goals!”

I looked at my watch. It was 5:20 p.m. Gorbachev was due to arrive in less than forty-eight hours. The students looked grim and determined, a sense of destiny on their faces. I wandered over to a large knot of people where a bookish young man with olive skin was giving an impromptu press conference. The foreign press wanted to know whether the students would try to approach Gorbachev. Wang Dan, who would become Number One on the government’s Most Wanted list, smiled coolly. “We’re not trying to use foreign influence to pressure the Chinese government,” he replied, speaking through a battery-operated bullhorn. It was, of course, a transparent lie, but everybody went along with the fiction, applauding as he spoke. He continued, “I think China’s leaders can learn a lot of good things from the Soviet Union.” Someone asked if he was afraid of going to jail. Wang Dan smiled inscrutably. The press conference was over.

Overnight, the square was transformed into an urban Woodstock, without the mud and psychedelic drugs. Red silk banners fluttered from flagpoles. Shabby tents of plastic sheeting sprouted from the pavement. Lovers snuggled. Students strummed guitars and sang terrible Hong Kong pop songs. Some debated politics. And they smoked like fiends. I choked even though we were outdoors. “I can give up food and drink,” said a twenty-three-year-old engineering student in stonewashed jeans, puffing away. “But not cigarettes.”

The hunger strike resonated deeply in China, where the standard rural greeting was still “Have you eaten?” People fretted that the students, esteemed in Chinese society because the chance at a university degree was so rare, would ruin their health. Many Chinese, who defined hardship as anything less than three hot meals with rice a day, were moved to tears. And in an agrarian nation where everyone wanted to get as far away from nature as possible, camping out, even in the middle of a city of ten million, was also viewed as a terrible privation.