Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (34 page)

Mutilated body of Liu Guogeng, a platoon leader. After he shot four people, Liu was beaten to death, set on fire and disemboweled by enraged crowds as the Chinese army shot its way into the capital on the night of June 3–4, 1989. Chinese authorities released this photo
—
and showed footage of the corpse on the evening news — to demonstrate that the soldiers were the victims
.

A rare shot of soldiers after they regained the square around dawn on June 4, 1989. The tents and bicycles belonged to the student demonstrators. The photo was also released by the Chinese government in a propaganda brochure
.

O
n Friday night, June 2, I stayed up all night to chronicle a ridiculous invasion of six thousand unarmed foot soldiers. Some thought the government was trying to position troops near the square. Others believed it was a last attempt to retake the square without violence. Still others thought the soldiers were under orders to topple the Goddess of Democracy. In any case, the mission failed miserably. I watched as irate citizens upbraided the soldiers, who cowered in bushes across from the Beijing Hotel while radioing frantically for instructions.

After sleeping three hours, I gulped down some yogurt and ran out to see what was happening on Saturday. At noon, soldiers fired tear gas on demonstrators who had waylaid an ammunition truck. That afternoon five thousand troops confronted even more demonstrators outside the Great Hall of the People. But except for a beating or two, the showdown was uneventful. At one point, the two sides – soldiers and protesters – even competed to see who best sang “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China.”

The government had lost all credibility. It had buzzed the square with military helicopters — and people laughed. It had tried to send in armored personnel carriers – and old ladies lay down in their path. The night before, it had dispatched foot soldiers — and civilians
trapped them in the bushes. Many thought the battle of Beijing was over and the people had won. Most expected the army to go home and stop bothering them. Everyone, myself included, forgot one of Mao’s most famous quotations: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

That night around six, on the northeast edge of the city, I spied another military convoy stopped on a road littered with broken glass. The
Globe
didn’t publish on Sunday, but by force of habit, I got out of my car and counted eighteen truckloads of soldiers toting AK-47 assault rifles. I noticed their faces. They weren’t green recruits but grim-faced, seasoned troops. I also noticed they were no longer wearing canvas running shoes.

“They’re wearing boots,” I told Jim Abrams, the AP bureau chief, when I called to swap information.

“I know,” he said. “The army is coming in from every direction.”

It was clear something would happen tonight. Had the government any finesse, it would have aired a trio of James Bond movies, and everyone would have stayed glued to their television sets. Instead, it broadcast this warning: “Do not come into the streets. Do not go to Tiananmen Square. Stay at home to safeguard your lives.” The government might as well have issued engraved invitations.

“History will be made tonight,” I said melodramatically to Norman. He was tired of all-nighters.

“That’s what you said last time,” he reminded me. I had said the same thing a week earlier when the AP’s John Pomfret put out an urgent bulletin, which turned out to be false, that troops were marching down the Avenue of Eternal Peace clubbing anyone in their path. But Norman grudgingly came along for the second time. On the way, we stopped by the Reuters office, where they were frantically trying to confirm the first death, reportedly at Muxidi, a neighborhood on the far west side of the city. I volunteered to call the Fuxing Hospital in the area. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered, an ominous sign.

I did not know that the massacre had already begun. That Saturday evening, Deng Xiaoping had ordered the army to take the square by using “all necessary measures.” At Muxidi, the troops found their way completely blocked by enormous crowds. As they
tried to press forward, some in the crowd began stoning the soldiers in the front lines, People’s Armed Police troops armed only with truncheons. The People’s Armed Police, a huge paramilitary force that Deng had split off from the PLA in the 1980s, specialized in quelling domestic dissent. Yet their fiberglass helmets cracked under the torrent of stones. Some soldiers were injured. Behind them, their officers, armed with pistols, panicked and began shooting. Behind the People’s Armed Police was the 38th Army, toting AK-47s. As all hell broke loose, they also began firing into the dense crowds. Soon soldiers were chasing civilians down alleyways and killing them in cold blood.

Residents screamed curses and hurled dishes and tea cups from their windows. The army units, from the provinces, probably had no idea those buildings housed the Communist Party elite, and raked the apartments with gunfire. Several people died in their homes that night. The nephew of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of China was shot in his own kitchen.

In the confusion, the army even shot some of its own soldiers. Behind the 38th Army was an armored personnel carrier unit belonging to the 27th Army. Driving in the darkness with their hatches down in an unfamiliar city, they inadvertently crushed to death soldiers from the 38th Army.

Norman and I got to the Beijing Hotel around 11 p.m., just as several armored personnel carriers whizzed by. So as not to advertise my presence, I parked the
Globe’s
car on Wangfujing, a busy shopping street adjacent to the hotel. Catherine Sampson, a reporter for the
Times
of London, offered to share her fourteenth-floor room. Simon Long, a BBC reporter, was also there filing a story. I needed quotes, and persuaded Norman to go with me to the square. Before I went out, I ditched my notebook so I wouldn’t attract the attention of plainclothes police and, as a precaution against tear gas, stuffed a hankie in my pocket.

The square felt like a cross between a New York street festival and a British soccer riot. All the floodlights had been switched on, presumably for the benefit of the videocameras. Several hundred thousand people milled around, students in T-shirts, women in flowered dresses, roughly dressed peasants with unkempt hair. Parents snapped
photos for the memory book of their children posing in front of the Goddess of Democracy. Western tourists in pedicabs filmed the raucous scene with videocameras. Since mid-April, Tiananmen Square had been a bigger tourist draw than the Great Wall.

The night before, the invasion of the foot soldiers had been harmless fun. With the radio and television warnings on Saturday evening, people were quivering like excited rabbits waiting to see what would happen next. Every ten minutes or so, a panic rippled through the crowd, sparking a mass stampede. After regrouping, another wave of hysteria hit the crowd, and they fled in a different direction. You had to run with them or risk being trampled to death. Once, I tried to take refuge behind a skinny lamppost, but a dozen others had the same idea.

No one had any idea how bad the situation was. Some had heard that the troops had begun to shoot, but the true magnitude of casualties wasn’t yet known. People were indignant, not afraid. “It’s unspeakable,” said one young woman, her hands on her hips. “Worse than fascists.” A young man stood on a traffic kiosk with a bullhorn, a small supply of bricks at his feet, shouting, “Down with fascists!” Others like me clutched their hankies. A couple of young men readied Molotov cocktails.

Norman and I walked toward the north end of the square, where an armored personnel carrier was burning. “Are there any soldiers inside?” I asked a student in a red headband. “We pulled them out first,” he said. In the distance, I saw another armored personnel carrier in flames just in front of the Communist Party headquarters at Zhongnanhai. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I looked at my watch. It was just past midnight on Sunday, June 4, 1989.

Some people claimed to hear gunfire. I strained to listen, but the din of stampeding humans was too loud. Someone whispered that the soldiers were holed up inside the Great Hall of the People. An Italian journalist grabbed my arm and told me the troops were inside the Forbidden City and would come pouring out any minute. By 12:50 a.m., I was frightened and tired. I had my quotes. “I’m not a cameraman,” I said to Norman. “I’ve got what I need. Let’s go.”

We made our way back to the Beijing Hotel. Someone had fastened
the wrought-iron gates shut with steel wire. We clambered over them and scurried across the parking lot. Plainclothes agents were frisking foreign reporters on the main steps. I walked around them and into the lobby, where a reporter for
USA Today
was filing a story on a pay phone. An agent armed with a pair of heavy shears cut the cord in mid-sentence. The reporter was so astonished his jaw dropped. Without a word, the policeman methodically chopped the wires on the rest of the lobby phones. Norman and I took the elevator up, still unnoticed.

That night, many reporters like myself used the Beijing Hotel as a base of operations. This was not the proverbial wartime-reporting-from-the-hotel-bar-stool-by-jaded-hacks syndrome. The Beijing Hotel had direct-dial telephones, bathrooms and an unparalleled view of the north end of Tiananmen Square. It was so close, in fact, that we were within range of the guns. A small number of reporters, like Andrew Higgins of the
Independent
, stayed among the crowds on the street. And an even smaller number, including UPI’s Dave Schweisberg, remained in the center of the square all night with the students. Still other reporters never left their offices in the diplomatic compounds, relying on reports from their news assistants and wire service copy to write their first stories.

Back in Cathy Sampson’s fourteenth-floor room, I moved a chair onto the balcony and began taking notes. Norman and I had left the square in the nick of time. Ten minutes later, the troops rolled in from the west side, the armored personnel carriers roaring easily over makeshift barricades. Protesters hurled stones. A cyclist gave impotent chase. I could hear the crackle of gunfire clearly now. I watched in horror as the army shot directly into the crowds, who stampeded screaming and cursing down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. At first, some protesters held blankets and jackets in front of them, apparently believing the army was using rubber bullets. Only after the first people fell, with gaping wounds, did people comprehend that the soldiers were using live ammunition.

I could not believe what was happening. I swore and cursed in Chinese and English, every epithet I knew. Then I realized I was ruining Simon’s tape of the gunfire for his BBC broadcasts. I decided the only useful thing I could do was to stay calm and take the best
notes of my life. A crowd below frantically tried to rip down a metal fence to erect another barricade. When it wouldn’t budge, they smashed a window of a parked bus, put the gears in neutral and rolled it onto the street. They did that with a second and then a third bus. The rest of the crowd shouted,
“Hao!”
(“Good!”).

The troops and tanks began closing in from all directions. At 1:20, I heard bursts of gunfire from the south, then another burst five minutes later. At 2:10, several thousand troops marched across the north side of the square. At 2:15, they raised their guns and fired into the dense crowd. I timed the murderous volley on my watch. It lasted more than a minute. Although the square was brightly lit, the streets surrounding it were dark. I couldn’t see clearly if anyone had been hit. I assumed they must have been because of the angle of the guns, the length of the volley and the density of the crowds. A few minutes later I knew I was right as five ambulances raced by the hotel through the crowds. Cyclists and pedicab drivers helped evacuate the wounded and dying. I hadn’t even noticed that a man had been shot in the back below my balcony until an ambulance stopped to pick him up.

At 2:23, tanks from the east fired their mounted machine guns at the crowds. At 2:28, I counted five more ambulances racing back to the square as people frantically cheered them on. In the distance, I saw red dots trace perfect arcs through the sky. “Fireworks?” I asked, turning to Cathy. Neither of us knew they were tracer bullets, and even if I did, I had no idea they were real bullets, coated with phosphorus to glow in the dark. In my first story, I called them “flares.”

Cathy heard a bullet hit our balcony and pointed it out to me at the time. I have no memory of it. I should have realized the lead was flying, but I was so completely absorbed in taking notes. Nor did it occur to me that, as soldiers advanced across the north side of the square, pushing back protesters toward the hotel and beyond, our balcony was in the line of fire. The next day, when I examined the bullet hole, I felt nothing. It was insignificant compared to all the death and destruction going on around me. Besides, the hotel felt so normal, with its twin beds, blond-wood furniture and lace curtains.
I learned only later that a tourist in the hotel had been grazed in the neck and the neon sign on the roof had been blasted to smithereens.