Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (33 page)

But the soldiers were no match for the people. Elderly women lay down in front of tanks. Schoolchildren swarmed around convoys, stopping them in their tracks. After the first tense night, the soldiers began to retreat as the crowds cheered and applauded. Some bystanders flashed the V sign. Others wept, and so did some of the soldiers. One commander shouted, “We are the people’s soldiers. We will never suppress the people.”

The next night, in a southwest corner of Beijing called Liu Li Bridge, I came across a dozen military trucks engulfed by five thousand emotional civilians. Three hundred rifle-toting soldiers sat in the immobilized trucks, their fuel lines cut, frozen like bugs in amber. Mindful of the martial-law ban on interviewing, I approached a middle-aged Chinese woman and identified myself as a reporter for Canada’s
Globe and Mail
. I took out my notebook and pen and said, “According to the martial-law rules, I’m not allowed to ask you any questions.” She understood.

“The government underestimated us,” she said, with a sad, proud smile. She gestured at the crowd. “Look at all the people who have
come out to protect the students. The government is wrong.” I scribbled in my notebook and thanked her. It was two in the morning and the moon was full. A young man hoisted himself onto one of the truck’s wheels. “Have a cigarette,” he said, politely trying to break the ice in the classic Chinese way. The crowd good-naturedly urged the soldiers to smoke. Finally, two soldiers lit up. People cheered.

This
was martial law? The soldiers, many of whom looked too young to shave, seemed bewildered. The slogan “The army loves the people! The people love the army!” had been drummed into them in basic training, which hadn’t included how to deal with smiling civilians who cut your fuel lines. Kept incommunicado, the soldiers had not seen the brief, but extraordinary, Chinese media coverage of the demonstrations. They had been told only that they were going on military maneuvers.

Someone lifted a case of soft drinks onto the truck. An old woman in an apron came out to collect some empty bowls. “You see,” a woman in the crowd said to no one in particular, “we give them food and drink. They’ve been sitting here all day. The government hasn’t given them anything.” People tossed the soldiers old protest leaflets to read. Housewives told them about the week-long hunger strike. “The students were very well behaved,” said one old worker. “All they want from the government is an official apology.” Several people distributed Popsicles to the soldiers, who finally climbed down from their trucks and began fraternizing with the enemy. It was hard to feel threatened by a soldier sucking on a Popsicle. This was the PLA I knew and liked. The fresh-faced troops reminded me of Horsepower and my other soldier classmates. When people swarmed over the trucks, proclaiming they loved the army, I felt I was back in Maoist times.

The first twenty-four hours of martial law was a huge defeat for the authorities. For the next ten days, hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens manned the barricades. People brought their children to Tiananmen Square for shish kebabs, ice cream and a little dissent. The swashbuckling Flying Tigers acted as messengers and scouts, and zoomed around on their motorcycles gathering intelligence on troop movements. One student leader celebrated the “people’s victory” by getting “married” in the square. Chai Ling was bridesmaid.

The massive display of civil disobedience fed on itself Seven top generals, including a former minister of defense and another who was a hero of the epic Long March, signed a petition opposing martial law Protesters marched up and down the streets laughing and chanting: “Li Peng, step down, or we’ll be back every day!” One afternoon, a crowd of several thousand gathered in front of Zhongnanhai to watch a sit-in of several dozen students. A minstrel settled into the crook of a tree branch and, strumming his banjo, began singing satirical folk songs about Deng and Premier Li Peng. Then a drummer led a parade by, singing this ditty in Chinese to the tune of “Frère Jacques”:

The people had called the government’s bluff. Martial law was marshmallow law. Each day I roamed the city in the Globe’s old Toyota, which I had finally learned to stop without stalling. During the two-hour traffic-clogged drive out to the university area, I often picked up hitchhiking student protesters to interview so I wouldn’t waste time. At one barricaded intersection, I inched along while student marshals in red armbands waved through cars on each side. Finally, it was my turn. Then someone noticed my foreigner’s black license plates. A marshal put up his hand to stop me and motioned the jeep on the other side to go through first.

“Chinese before foreigners,” he declared. I hated the old days when China let foreigners go before Chinese. Now I was damned if the next generation was going to let Chinese go before foreigners. Anyway, it was
my
turn. I eased forward until my Toyota was nose to nose with the jeep. “Back up!” people screamed at me. Then I did something really stupid. Which was nothing. Before I knew it, the mob was trying to flip our car. One of my hitchhikers stuck her head out the window and yelled, “We’re students. She’s a good person. She’s a foreign reporter. She’s giving us a lift
home.” Then she screamed at me to back up. The crowd hesitated just long enough for me to reverse. The jeep went through first, its driver grinning at me.

I was becoming more than a bit cranky. The outside world thought the demonstrators were disciplined, and marveled. But having lived through the Cultural Revolution myself, talents like slogan shouting and mass marching didn’t impress me. Maybe it was sleep deprivation — I was working nineteen hours a day — but to my jaundiced eye it seemed that the students were merely aping their oppressors. They established a Lilliputian kingdom in Tiananmen Square, complete with a mini-bureaucracy with committees for sanitation, finance and “propaganda.” They even adopted grandiose titles. Chai Ling was elected Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Tiananmen Square Unified Action Headquarters.

Like the government, the students’ broadcast station sometimes deliberately disseminated misinformation, such as the resignation of key government officials, which wasn’t true. They even, indignity of indignities, issued us press passes. Using transparent fishing line held in place by volunteers who simply stood there all day, they carved the huge square into gigantic concentric circles of ascending importance. Depending on how our press passes were stamped determined how deeply we could penetrate those silly circles. We reporters had to show our passes to half a dozen officious monitors before we could interview the student leaders, who, naturally, hung out at the very center, at the Monument to the People’s Heroes.

One night, a rumor swept the square that the students had captured some assault rifles. If true, it meant they possessed weapons for the first time. I tracked down the tent where the guns were supposedly stored and asked the wild-eyed student guard if I could take a peek. He refused, but assured me the guns were inside. For an allegation that serious, I had to see the guns for myself. But he wouldn’t budge, and I finally stomped off in frustration, never reporting it. Later, I found out it was true, and was perhaps a reason the government decided to shoot to kill on the fateful night.

Others had more serious run-ins with the baby bureaucrats. On May 23, three protesters lobbed bags of ink at the giant portrait of Mao hanging from the rostrum. Student marshals hustled the trio
to the command center, where a slender young woman named Huang Qinglin took charge. She was the unlikely leader of the Dare-to-Die Squad, the one thousand fanatics who had sworn to protect student leaders like Chai Ling and Wu’er Kaixi with their lives. She ordered the ink throwers interrogated. They turned out to be democracy activists from Hunan, Mao’s home province. To my shock, she then turned them over to the police. It was something I might have done in my stupid Maoist years. But the Cultural Revolution was long over, and Beijing was under martial law. I happened to be interviewing Commander Huang when this happened.

“Why turn them in?” I asked, as evenly as I could, remembering that I had no right to moral superiority.

“We don’t want the government to have an excuse to attack us,” she said. “They might be government agents, provocateurs. They had no identification papers on them.”

I thought to myself:
Would you carry ID if you were going to vandalize the biggest Mao portrait in the country?

Perhaps Commander Huang, a student in public relations at China Social University, took her major too seriously. She told me she feared the incident might turn public opinion against the students. Even though Mao had been dead for thirteen years and his policies had been completely dismantled, he remained an icon. When a heavy rainstorm began moments later, some of the more superstitious students thought the heavens were signaling their displeasure over the ink-tossing incident. Someone quickly threw a khaki tarpaulin over the vandalized painting and within a day, authorities had hung a fresh Mao portrait in its place.

Commander Huang was beautiful, with flashing almond eyes and soft dark hair. She wore a double strand of pearls at her neck and a plain wedding band on her finger. A wide-brimmed straw hat was her only protection from the downpour. Her running shoes and bulky green corduroy jacket were soon soaked through. Two volunteer nurses tried to throw a sweater over her, but she shrugged it off, telling them to give it to someone who needed it more. Her hands were like ice, and she seemed to be running on pure adrenaline. She said she had been up for five days and five nights, ever
since the premier had declared martial law. She stole catnaps in corners but otherwise was constantly on duty. That day, all she had eaten was a cucumber and two boiled eggs. She couldn’t keep her food down anyway. She was two months pregnant.

“I didn’t want to be the head of the Dare-to-Die Squad,” she said, “but somebody has to take the responsibility.” Her husband was out of town on a work trip, she said, and didn’t know that she was squad commander — or that she was pregnant. Commander Huang spoke rapidly, her delicate hands fluttering. She personally thought the students should leave the square, but said she was bound by an “iron” discipline. “If the majority votes to stay, then the minority must obey them,” she said. She seemed to be achingly earnest about her first try at democracy. Then I remembered she had just turned in three protesters.

The ink throwers — a factory worker, a small-town newspaper editor and a rural schoolteacher — had been inspired by the hunger strike in Beijing, according to an account later published in the
Legal Daily
. Before hopping a train to Beijing from Hunan, they had plastered the railway station with democracy slogans. During the eighteen-hour journey, they composed a manifesto calling for the end of the Communist Party and the adoption of Western-style democracy. In Beijing, they made a bee-line for the huge portrait at Tiananmen Square, scoring direct hits just above Mao’s left eyebrow, his right temple and his neck. From a distance, it looked like the Great Helmsman was weeping. A Chinese court later sentenced the worker to sixteen years, the editor to twenty years and the schoolteacher to life, three of the harshest terms meted out to the Tiananmen protesters.

(On the night of the massacre, I couldn’t stop worrying about Commander Huang. At first I was afraid she had been killed. Later I feared she had been arrested and executed. The first chance I had, I searched out China Social University, which I had never heard of before. It turned out to be a small, privately run school down a dusty alleyway in the east part of the city. I sneaked past the guard at the front gate and approached a friendly-looking young woman. “Do you know Huang Qinglin?” She looked blank. I tried several
other students. Finally, I asked a young man if he could point me to anyone majoring in public relations. “This school doesn’t teach public relations,” he said.

I went back and double-checked my notes. There was no mistake. That’s what she had said. Had she given me a false identity to protect herself? Or was she a government agent? Was that why she betrayed the ink tossers? I had no idea.)

By the end of May, the square had become a smelly squatters’ camp. Heaps of garbage baked in the hot sun. Makeshift latrines — municipal buses with their seats removed – stank terribly. Many Beijing students had already drifted back to campus. The only new faces were students arriving from the provinces. For a week, the student leaders debated whether to stay or go. Chai Ling, the most radical leader, was against retreating, but even she finally agreed.

For a farewell rally, the students commissioned a thirty-foot-tall plaster statue from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. On May 30, tens of thousands watched a midnight procession of four pedicabs, each loaded with a few segments. In Tiananmen Square, using a bamboo scaffold, the protesters assembled the pieces into a statue they dubbed the Goddess of Democracy. She held a torch aloft and wore a flowing robe, and looked like a Chinese Statue of Liberty. No one could miss the symbolism as she stared north at the huge new portrait hanging from the rostrum. She was facing down Chairman Mao.