Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (36 page)

At 9:46, the crowd suddenly began stampeding away from the square. I couldn’t figure out why. Then I saw that the soldiers had knelt into a shooting position and were taking aim. As the people ran, the soldiers fired into their backs. More than a dozen bodies lay on the ground. When the shooting stopped, there was absolute silence. Some of the wounded began to crawl to the edge of the road. To my amazement, the crowd began to creep
back
toward the square. At 10:09, another murderous barrage sent them racing down the street toward the hotel. They crept back toward the square
again
. At 10:22, there was another volley, lasting three minutes. I watched in horror as the soldiers advanced, shooting into the backs of fleeing civilians. The wounded lay, beyond reach of rescuers, as the
soldiers kept up their heavy fire. The French tourist began shrieking hysterically, “They are crazy! Simply crazy!”

A Chinese friend had invited Norman to Sunday lunch. Just as I oddly had wanted to go for breakfast, he wanted to keep his date. I told him it would be insane to bicycle across town during a massacre. When he wouldn’t listen to me, I suggested he phone his friend.

“A nine-year-old girl was killed and they’ve just brought her body back,” his friend said in a flat, emotionless tone. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to make the trip out here.”

After the third barrage, I counted more than twenty bodies. One cyclist was shot in the back right below our balcony. There were two big puddles of blood on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. People carried the body of a little girl toward the back of the hotel. After twenty-three more minutes, a few people gathered up enough courage to approach the wounded. The soldiers let loose another blast, sending the would-be rescuers scurrying for cover. The crowd was enraged. I grimly kept track of the time. An hour later, the wounded were still on the ground, bleeding to death.

For the rest of the morning, and throughout the afternoon, this scene repeated itself again and again. In all, I recorded eight long murderous volleys. Dozens died before my eyes. By midafternoon, the crowd was down to about five hundred maniacs who stood on the corner screaming, “Kill Li Peng! Kill Li Peng!” Only when a steady rain began to fall at 4:15 did they finally drift away. The rain cleansed the street of the blood. When it stopped, the crowds returned, and the soldiers fired again, and again, and many more people died.

I thought how strange it was that Beijingers didn’t want to get wet, but they weren’t afraid of getting killed.

A lone man stops a column of tanks from Tiananmen Square. He was variously reported to have later been arrested and even executed, but this was never confirmed. In fact, it seems that authorities had no idea who he was. He presumably remains anonymous — and free
.
Photo: AP/Jeff Widener

Deng Xiaoping congratulating military officers for a job well done after the Tiananmen Massacre. This photo was published in a Chinese propaganda brochure
.

“Y
ou’d better get out here,” Norman said. It was noon on I Monday, June 5, 1989. I dashed onto the balcony. A young man had leaped in front of a convoy of tanks. “Oh, no!” I cried. I held my breath. I was convinced he was going to die. My eyes filled with tears. Miraculously, the lead tank stopped. Standing underneath its giant muzzle, the young man looked like a kitten under a car fender. Annoyed at myself for crying so easily, I brushed away my tears so I could see clearly.

The tank twisted left, then right. Each time, the man stepped lightly in front. After a few feints, the tank switched off its engine. The whole street fell silent. The young man seemed to know his way around a tank. He scrambled onto its caterpillar treads and up its sloping sides. A shot cracked. He didn’t flinch. He clambered onto the gun turret. Was he trying to reason with them? Another heart-stopping moment later, he climbed back down.
Now run!
I urged silently. But he didn’t. The tank cranked up its motor and edged forward. Again, the man stepped in front and blocked it. By then a few people on the sidelines had regained their wits and they hustled him to safety. The convoy continued rumbling down the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

Who was he? Some overseas reports claimed he was a nineteen
year-old student named Wang Weilin and that he was later executed. Another report said he had been sentenced to ten years. Neither story was ever verified. My own theory was that authorities had no idea who he was, either. In 1994, a Chinese journalist confirmed my hunch. She told me that her bosses at the Xinhua News Agency had tried in vain to find the mystery tank man. “They wanted to show him to the world to prove that China doesn’t kill people,” she said.

In the excitement, everyone forgot the other hero. The driver of the lead tank had exercised extraordinary restraint. And although the Chinese government belatedly made propaganda hay out of this, my bet is the tank driver was secretly punished for losing the government so much face.

After the television footage of that dramatic confrontation made it clear that foreign journalists were holed up in the Beijing Hotel, the police came searching for us. Unfortunately, the documents we needed to obtain a room identified us as journalists. The police kicked out anyone they could find and confiscated notebooks and film. Before they got to Cathy’s room, I asked Norman, who had a businessman’s visa because he was working for Sun Microsystems, to rent one in his name. By simply hanging a Do Not Disturb sign on the door, I kept out the hotel staff for days. Each time I left the room, I hid my notes under the minibar fridge and inside the bathroom light fixture.

That Monday, tanks assumed a defensive position at the Jianguomen intersection, sparking rumors of civil war. The airport was pandemonium as most foreigners tried to flee. All the gas stations shut down. I stopped driving the old Toyota to save my half tank of fuel for an emergency. Taxi drivers began charging $500 or more for a ride to the airport. Chinese soldiers stopped one vanload of Americans, relieving them of their money, plane tickets, luggage
and
vehicle. When the Canadian Embassy rescued its students trapped on campuses, its convoy was stopped at gunpoint and forced to detour through the back roads of the countryside to avoid roadblocks on the main highways.

The now-deserted Beijing Hotel felt creepy. It closed its dining rooms, doused the lobby lights and issued special passes to the handful of remaining guests. For a few nights, even the streetlights in front
were out. Crouching on my darkened balcony, I peeked at gun-toting soldiers scouring the shrubbery for civilians as if they were on a jungle reconnaissance mission. When the tanks rumbled by, I was so angry I wanted to hurl down a hotel chair, or at least a tea cup, like the residents at Muxidi the night of the massacre. Norman restrained me, a good thing, too, because one afternoon a trigger-happy soldier fired his AK-47 through the hotel’s plate-glass doors.

The capital of China looked like a war zone. Bullet holes pockmarked lampposts and subway entrances. Charred buses littered the streets. Torn fences, concrete lane dividers, smashed dumpsters and overturned tractors — futile barricades against the army’s onslaught — clogged roads all over the city. On the road leading north to the Great Wall, the carbonized hulks of tanks were still warm to the touch, like a backyard barbecue after the guests have left. Tank treads had chewed up the asphalt. Five years after the government repaved the roads, I could still feel the ridges as I drove along the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

Absurdly, Norman wanted to go to work that Monday and tried tempting me with the promise of eyewitness reports from the other side of the city. “It’s too dangerous,” I said flatly, refusing to let him go. “The army is shooting at anything that moves.” I didn’t take my own advice. With another reporter, I drove to Beijing University, where someone was reading out the names of slain students over the loudspeakers. Every person I saw was wearing a black armband. Many were weeping. As I walked around the familiar campus, I cried, too. I had spent so many years here, and now it had come to this: I was counting the dead at my alma mater.

At the National Minorities Institute, the front entrance was draped with crepe. The gate’s walls were pasted with photos of slain students. Funeral music swelled from campus loudspeakers. At the University of Politics and Law, students had just finished holding a memorial service. Black and white banners said, “An eternal injustice” and “Tragic beyond compare in this world.” A half hour earlier, a dead youth, crushed by a tank, had lain on a block of ice. The floor was still wet where the ice had melted. His face had been unrecognizable, someone said, like raw hamburger. His blood-soaked corpse, one of four unidentified victims, was being transported to
Qinghua University as a stand-in at another funeral. “We can’t find our own classmates’ bodies so we’re using these,” explained one exhausted female student, her eyes red and swollen.

At People’s University, where Mao’s grandson was enrolled, seven had died – five students and two children of faculty members. The pine trees at the front entrance were covered with white tissue chrysanthemums. On a branch, someone had hung a bloodstained khaki coat, the kind the students wrapped themselves in to keep warm at night. At one dorm, weeping students were conducting a memorial service for a slain classmate. Her ID card lay on top of a clean bedsheet. Two candles were burning. A tape recorder played a scratchy version of the now ubiquitous funeral music. I felt wrung out, utterly exhausted. I went back to the hotel and had a long cry. Then I wrote my stories.

The next day, two army units faced off near the Military Museum, intensifying rumors of civil war. Feelings were running high after the 27th Army’s armored division had accidentally crushed some soldiers from the 38th. That Tuesday morning, I dropped by Wangfujing Street for my daily bullet-hole check of the
Globe’s
Toyota. It was gone. It was just a car, an old one at that, and not even mine, but I was disconsolate. My getaway car, my security blanket, had disappeared. I felt utterly depressed, out of all proportion to the loss.

For seven weeks, I had been working nineteen-hour days. Radio and television stations in Canada and the U.S. had been calling at all hours of the night (their day) for quick updates. Norman had learned to pick up the phone in his sleep and pass it to me without a word. I didn’t even bother sitting up or switching on the light. In the morning, I couldn’t remember who called or what I said. Once, while filing a pre-dawn story to the
Globe
, I fell asleep at my desk. I awoke to find my modem on and the phone line still open to Toronto — at $250 an hour.

Many reporters were at their breaking point. Even before the massacre, Kathy Wilhelm, of the Associated Press, got so run-down covering the protests she was evacuated to Hong Kong and hospitalized. A BBC reporter collapsed. Several journalists dissolved into hysterical tears and couldn’t function. Andrew Higgins of the
Independent
was still shell-shocked after crawling on his belly through the bushes back to the Beijing Hotel the night of the massacre. A couple of days later, he remained convinced that he would be hit by a stray bullet and refused to stand upright in my hotel room, actually crawling along the carpet while he talked to me.

For years, I had weighed a constant 124 pounds, but as a result of the Tiananmen diet – lots of missed meals and little sleep – I lost 14 pounds. After the theft of the
Globe’s
car, I decided to cheer myself up with my first real meal in three days. Norman and I chose the nearby swank Palace Hotel, which, despite roadblocks, massacres and martial law, managed to offer a lavish daily buffet because it was partly owned by the People’s Liberation Army.

Norman and I had just stepped out of our hotel at noon when we heard the telltale roar of an approaching convoy. I ducked behind some cedar shrubs in the parking lot to count tanks. Perhaps they didn’t like me taking inventory: the soldiers opened fire. We hit the ground, just like in the movies. We were so close the bullets didn’t whistle. Only six yards, the skimpy shrubs and a wrought-iron fence separated us from them. I noticed Norman’s head was up and realized with a jolt that he was still counting tanks.