Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (38 page)

The Tiananmen Massacre was part of an old-fashioned power struggle. After the massive demonstrations that spring, which must have reminded Deng Xiaoping of the worst days of the Cultural Revolution, he became convinced that further liberalization would weaken the Communist Party — and his own grip on power. But his dapper, golf-playing heir apparent, Zhao Ziyang, still endorsed Deng’s original thesis that Marxist dogma handcuffed the profit motive and that without reform, the Party was doomed.

Yet China’s paramount leader wanted a yes-man, not someone who thought for himself. When Deng decided to use the army to suppress the demonstrations, Zhao alone among the Politburo members objected, his final act of disobedience. The bloody massacre that followed Zhao’s purge had a two-fold objective: to force his many supporters in the government and Party into total surrender, and to crush the fledgling democracy movement.

In forty years of Communist rule, no one, not even Mao, had ever dared bring tanks into the capital. So that there would be no finger-pointing afterward, Deng decided everyone had to have blood on their hands. He ordered every single military region to
biao tai
, or demonstrate their attitude, with a tangible show of loyalty. Many commanders dragged their feet, but Deng waited, and lobbied. Those who didn’t go along were arrested and eventually court-martialed. It took fifteen tense days, from the declaration of martial law to the start of the massacre, for him to bring every general on side.

Because I had once admired my soldier classmates so much, I became obsessed with trying to understand how and why China’s 3.5-million-member army had changed. When the Museum of Military History opened a post-massacre exhibit extolling the army
for its “glorious” performance, I looked there for a rank-and-file soldier to interview on Chinese Army Day, August 1, 1989.

The museum’s parking lot displayed a dozen burned-out tanks. Inside, fourteen plaster busts of “martyred” soldiers, including the two who had been immolated, dominated the main exhibition room. I approached a young man in civilian clothes whose brush cut indicated he was a soldier. He turned out to be a junior officer in the People’s Armed Police. When I whispered that I was a reporter, he didn’t recoil, and even offered to show me around.

I’ll call him Yang. As we looked at some bloodstained uniforms and tattered banners, I told him I’d heard that Beijingers were treating the People’s Armed Police and the People’s Liberation Army like occupying armies. Two soldiers had been garroted near where I lived, I said. Another was stabbed to death. The military had issued commemorative watches to soldiers who had participated in the massacre, but few dared wear them. Instead, the watches almost immediately appeared in Beijing’s flea markets, where foreigners snapped them up as souvenirs. I remembered how my soldier classmates had once proudly worn their uniforms, even when off-duty. I asked Yang, who was wearing a blue T-shirt, sandals and white dungarees, if I was imagining that off-duty soldiers avoided wearing their uniforms these days.

“Now it is a badge of shame,” he said. When martial law was declared, he said, waitresses sometimes refused to serve soldiers. But since the massacre, civilians had been elaborately polite. “It’s their way of telling you how much they hate you,” he said.

Based in a city a thousand miles away, Yang, twenty-six, had arrived in Beijing on an unrelated mission the day after martial law was declared. He had often gone to Tiananmen Square to listen to speeches. On the night of the massacre, he had lain awake in his army hostel, listening to the crackle of gunfire. The shooting had been so close he could smell the gunpowder.

“They shot a lot of people, didn’t they?” he said hesitantly. With a nervous smile, he added a horrifying detail. “Some soldiers sang as they shot people.”

“What song?” I asked, morbidly curious.

“ ‘Our Army Is Marching toward the Sun,” ’ Yang said.

I was sorry I had asked. It was the pep song I remembered my soldier classmates singing back in my Maoist days.

At People’s Armed Police headquarters, he had picked up some gossip. Deng Xiaoping himself had given the order to shoot, delicately phrased as “use all necessary measures,” in his role as chairman of the Central Military Commission. Few soldiers dared talk about what happened, Yang said. Some felt they had been used in a power struggle. Many felt intense guilt. “But what we feel in our hearts and carrying out orders are two different things.”

Yang suddenly pulled two tickets out of his pocket. “It’s for an Army Day dance at the Beijing Officers Club,” he said. “Would you like to go with me?” We strolled over to the club, right next to the museum, flashed our tickets at the armed guard and walked into a cool oasis of privilege. In the ballroom, festooned with Christmas lights, we took a spin on the parquet floor. White-haired, heavy-set officers in shirts and ties danced with lithe young women in dresses and high-heels. “Look,” said Yang. “No one is wearing an army uniform.”

If morale was bad among the rank and file, what did senior officers think? Did they support Deng? A few months later, I arranged through a friend to interview a top general in one of China’s seven military regions. The general, whom I’ll call Fu, had joined the Communists in the 1930s to fight the Japanese invaders. The son of poor peasants, he had been intensely loyal his whole career — until June 4, 1989. “He can’t accept that the army fired on people,” his daughter told me.

For the first time in his fifty-year career, General Fu had lost the faith. Even during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the provinces, his belief in communism had never wavered. But now he, too, had joined the ranks of the disillusioned. “Of course there was a problem with the government,” said General Fu, who had neatly cropped gray hair and an erect military bearing. “Otherwise, why all of a sudden did so many people come out on the streets?”

We were sitting in his austere living room, sipping jasmine tea. Later he hosted me at a simple dinner. Because of his rank, he had a chauffeured car, traveled by “soft berth” on trains and lived in a magnificent
home by Chinese standards – eleven bright, airy rooms. A soldier had been assigned full time to cook, clean, wash the laundry and fetch boiling water for the general’s tea habit. Otherwise, he lived simply, as army officers had been exhorted to do in Maoist times. His floors were bare, the walls whitewashed. His furniture was army issue – a heavy, scarred desk, steel beds and inexpensive rattan chairs. His only luxury was a large Chinese-made color television. He stuck to his old-fashioned baggy clothing, and looked askance at his fashion-conscious daughter in her black leather miniskirt and bomber jacket.

Despite his high rank, General Fu wasn’t politically invulnerable. He chose his words with care, his voice lowered. When the soldier-servant came in the room, the general fell silent. He agreed to talk to me in part because he was anxious to hear first-hand what had happened in Beijing. He confessed that he no longer believed his own government. During the pro-democracy protests, the army had issued a specific order banning soldiers from listening to Voice of America broadcasts. He had tuned in every day. As he pumped me for details of Tiananmen, I realized that even senior army officers had been kept in the dark. He listened gravely as I described the soldiers shooting again and again into the backs of fleeing demonstrators.

“Deng Xiaoping didn’t handle it properly,” said General Fu. “It didn’t have to be handled that way. It was a mistake.” He looked steadily at me. “How many died in all?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m still not sure.”

How many died was a question that particularly obsessed me. Even if I wanted to forget, I couldn’t. Everywhere I went as a reporter in China, when people learned I had been there, they asked: How many died? At first, Beijing asserted that no one died in Tiananmen Square. In the face of universal disbelief, it then announced a death toll of 323, but contended that many of the victims were soldiers. It didn’t specify how they had died, but considering the protesters were unarmed, it’s likely many were killed by friendly fire.

Foreign media estimates of the death toll ranged from several hundred to several thousand. Like other reporters, I visited hospitals in the days after the massacre, but their numbers counted only those
who died there. Many victims who were patched up and sent home might not have survived. And many others who died in the streets were never taken to hospital. I know of several cases where bodies were turned directly over to their families.

As the government began cracking down, keeping records, or even acknowledging their existence, became a dangerous political act. One couple had to search for two harrowing weeks through forty-six hospitals before they found the body of their son. While some Beijing residents had taken the precaution of slipping a note with their names and addresses in their pockets before going out that night, many demonstrators were illiterate migrant workers who may have died in anonymity. Their families back in the village would know only that some time after mid-1989, they were never heard from again. Few relatives were foolhardy enough to come to the capital asking troubling questions.

After much research, I believe the death toll was about three thousand, based partly on a Chinese Red Cross report, issued a day after the massacre, of 2,600 dead. Under intense government pressure, the Chinese Red Cross almost immediately retracted the figure, but the Swiss ambassador, acting in the name of the International Red Cross, quietly confirmed that initial number and passed it on to other ambassadors in Beijing. What’s more, if several hundred soldiers died in friendly fire, then many, many more civilians must have died trying to block the army’s approach. Several Western military attachés who witnessed the massacre also concur with the estimate of three thousand dead, based on crowd density, troop size, volume of firing and the use of combat-type ammunition.

Will we ever know the true number? Many think not. I disagree. Like all preceding Chinese governments, Beijing’s mania for recordkeeping is obvious. If the government can tell us that “before the rains on May 18, 1989, the Municipal Public Transport Company drove seventy-eight buses and the Bureau of Goods and Materials sent four hundred thick wooden sheets to the square to protect students from the downpour,” then they also know how many died. They are the ones with access to cemetery and crematorium records.

One day, a new government may launch an investigation of the Tiananmen Massacre. Then, perhaps, the truth will finally be told. Still, it is sobering to remember that, twenty years after the first Tiananmen crackdown in 1976, few details have emerged. That earlier death toll remains shrouded in mystery. How long will it take – fifty years? a hundred? – before we will finally know how many people died that June at Tiananmen Square.

Professor Ding with her husband. They are standing beside a cabinet holding the ashes of their teenaged son, one of the first people killed during the Tiananmen Massacre.
Photo: Jan Wong

Wei Jingsheng, during a brief period of freedom in September, 1993, after serving nearly fifteen years in prison. He was subsequently accused of trying to overthrow the government, and sentenced to fourteen more years in December, 1995.
Photo: AP/Greg Baker