Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (41 page)

Back in Beijing, we kept in touch, meeting at prearranged spots. Whenever he was late, I feared he had been arrested. When his wife gave birth to a baby girl in the spring of 1994, she warned him to stay away because their home was being watched. Zhang never saw his baby daughter. A few days later, he was arrested at midnight when police raided the safe house he was staying at in Beijing.

I mailed Zhang’s wife a package of baby clothes. I dared not contact Grandfather Zhang in case the family had not told him what happened. After I returned to Toronto, I learned that Zhang Lin had been sentenced to three years of hard labor in a coal mine. At last report, he had gone on a hunger strike. Among his crimes was giving interviews to the
Globe and Mail
.

On April 1, 1994, Wei Jingsheng, too, was rearrested by police as he made his way to a press conference with foreign reporters. Authorities were furious that he had refused to halt his pro-democracy activities. The last straw had been a secret meeting with John Shattuck, the top human rights official in the U.S. State Department.

In 1995, Wei was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Late that year, after nearly twenty months in detention, he was formally charged with attempting to overthrow the Chinese government. Authorities refused to disclose where they were keeping him. On December 13, 1995, as the first snowfall of the season dusted the bleak streets of Beijing, Wei was convicted of conspiracy to subvert the government and sentenced to fourteen more years in prison.

Soon after Wei Jingsheng’s rearrest, I slipped onto the campus of People’s University. Walking right past the plainclothes agents surrounding a modest three-room apartment, I knocked on the door.
“Everyone is afraid,” said Professor Ding Zilin softly, shutting the door behind me.

It was a tense time, just a few weeks before the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The fifty-seven-year-old philosophy professor peered through the lace curtains of her ground-floor apartment. “They’re still there. They can see right in. Are you afraid?” I shook my head. Foreign reporters hadn’t been beaten up in more than a year. Professor Ding was the one in danger. The government tapped her phone, confiscated her mail and tailed her whenever she went out grocery shopping. For the past six months, an anonymous caller had threatened to trash her home. It was clear why authorities were so afraid of her. But why was she not afraid of them?

“What have I got to lose?” she said quietly. She patted the small black briefcase beside her containing some neatly folded receipts and a mailing list. “I’ve made arrangements for someone to continue this work in case I am arrested.” With her gray hair, tailored white silk blouse and charcoal trousers, she hardly seemed like a dangerous subversive. But Ding Zilin was living up to her name, which meant Gentle Rain. With the quiet persistence of a drizzle that never lets up, she was compiling the most comprehensive list in existence of the dead and wounded of Tiananmen Square. When she found them, or their next-of-kin, she passed on financial aid from donors overseas. More important, perhaps, she reassured the families they were not alone. Gentle Rain Ding was the government’s Chinese Water Torture.

The first name on her list was Jiang Jielian, a top student who had turned seventeen the day before he died. He was an ace badminton player, president of his high-school class and an avid supporter of the pro-democracy demonstrations. He was also Professor Ding’s youngest child. His death had devastated her. For weeks, she had lain bedridden, unable to move. She left his desk intact, his athletic and scholarly awards and his favorite books displayed just as he had left them. To hold the ashes, her husband built a camphor cabinet and placed it in a corner of their bedroom. Above it, Professor Ding hung an oil painting based on a precious last photo of him taken during the protests. It depicted him in a headband, smiling and holding aloft a pro-democracy banner.

It took two years for her to evolve from broken-hearted mother to fearless subversive. On April 9, 1991, she was watching a televised press conference with Premier Li Peng when Lena Sun raised her hand and asked: “When will the government release a list of names of those who died at Tiananmen Square?” The premier allowed himself a tight smile. “The family members of the dead are reluctant to have their names disclosed because they view the event as an anti-government riot. We must respect their wishes.”

Professor Ding, a Communist Party member, was stunned. A few weeks later, she gave her first interview to a foreign reporter. Looking straight into the television camera, she declared how proud she was that her son had marched for democracy. She described how she had tried so hard to keep him home that fateful night, and how he had insisted on trying to stop the troops from reaching Tiananmen Square. She recalled with a faint smile how he kissed her, how he mischievously locked himself in the bathroom, and then how he quietly slipped out the window. She wept as she repeated his playful last words: “We are parting forever.”

With a classmate, Jiang Jielian headed for Muxidi. A huge crowd was blocking the path of thousands of heavily armed soldiers. They opened fire. “I think I’ve been hit,” Jiang cried out. He had been shot in the back. His classmate lifted him onto the back of a pedi-cab, then got him into a taxi. Jiang died on the operating table of the nearby Beijing Children’s Hospital, the first of more than fifty deaths there that night. At home, Professor Ding waited anxiously. Her husband kept a vigil by the school gate, the distant roar of tanks and gunfire freezing his heart. At dawn, their son’s hysterical classmate returned to campus, his clothes stained with blood. Professor Ding’s husband went to the hospital to claim their son’s body.

After the interview was broadcast in Canada and the U.S., reprisals were swift. People’s University banned her from teaching and slashed her pay. The Party expelled her. (Technically speaking, Professor Ding had already quit by refusing to pay her monthly dues after her son’s death.) When her husband, head of the Esthetics Institute at People’s University, gave his own interview to Voice of America, he, too, was dismissed.

Professor Ding should have felt fear. Instead she felt liberated.
With time on her hands, and nothing more to lose, she began to write articles about her son for publications abroad. Donations began trickling in. She knew several victims’ families and decided they needed the money more. They in turn passed on other names. Professor Ding began compiling her list. To start with, seven young men and women from People’s University had died. Gradually, she transformed her tiny apartment into a nerve center. She served tea to bereft families in her living room. Her son’s empty bedroom became her office. A donation from Chinese students at Stanford University paid for a computer. And a Chinese man who had attended the same high school as their son nearly a quarter century earlier bought Professor Ding a Canon copier. His name was Wei Jingsheng.

At first, Professor Ding’s neighbors and colleagues were supportive. “But as the government increased the pressure on me, friends I’ve known for decades turned the other way. Now I only speak to people when they speak to me first. But I walk with my head high. I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m doing humanitarian work.”

The more families she met, the less isolated Professor Ding felt. She kept her records in a safe house, promising both donors and recipients confidentiality. If she determined that the family had lost its main breadwinner, she made additional payments. Occasionally the money ran out. Once, a young man, disabled from his wounds, knocked on her door. “All I could do was invite him to dinner,” she said regretfully. Her list included victims who lived as far away as Ningxia in the northwest and Hainan Island in the south. Her dogged detective work unearthed harrowing stories. A medical student one month short of graduation was shot in the throat as she rescued others. A coal miner was forbidden to leave his city in the provinces to retrieve the ashes of his nineteen-year-old son in Beijing.

Only one family betrayed her. Two days after the massacre, their eight-year-old son had taunted the troops. A soldier aimed his AK-47 at him and squeezed off a round. As the boy crawled, bleeding, along the road, the soldier refused to let anyone help him. An agitated bystander pulled out his identity card and said, “I support the suppression, but this is an innocent child. Please let me take him to
the hospital. I will leave my ID here as a guarantee.” The soldier relented. The boy survived, but lost a kidney, a rib and his spleen.

Professor Ding telephoned the boy’s family. But when she learned they lived at Muxidi, where her own son had been killed, she couldn’t bear to go. Instead, a volunteer delivered the money. By then, the father had had a change of heart. “How do I know you’re not the police?” he said, pushing the volunteer out of his home. The shaken woman wrote Professor Ding’s name on the back of a business card and handed it to him. The father grew angrier. “I’m polite to you. At least I didn’t search your bag,” he said. He later turned the business card over to the police.

“The father was trying to prove his loyalty,” said Professor Ding. “What’s happened to his son has already happened. The father was worried about the future. I’m not angry at him. I just pity him, and especially his son.”

Most recipients were deeply moved by her letters and the money she passed along. One of them was Fang Zheng, the student at the Beijing Sports Institute whose legs were crushed by a tank. After his school expelled him, he moved to Hainan Island, where he earned a meager living selling cigarettes by the roadside. Fang began lifting weights in his wheelchair. He discovered he was good at discus, shot put and javelin. Within a couple of years, he became China’s national disabled discus champion. In 1994, Hainan chose him for its team at the Far East and South Pacific Disabled Games. As soon as Fang arrived in Beijing for training, he phoned Professor Ding. “Seeing me will only hurt your career. Just concentrate on winning,” she advised him. He did as she asked.

Some foreign journalists invited to cover the Disabled Games inquired whether China’s teams included anyone injured at Tiananmen Square. Fang suddenly became a public-relations liability. An official from the Sports Commission told him he would have to go. Fang argued that he was the national discus champion. The official said the event was canceled. What about javelin and shot put? Fang asked. “You’re not number one,” he was told. “Go home.”

Deng Pufang, Deng Xiaoping’s handicapped eldest son, tried to intervene. The two young men, both victims of China’s violent
political upheavals, faced one another in their wheelchairs. In his role as chairman of the China Welfare Fund for the Disabled, Deng Pufang offered Fang a deal: he could stay and compete on condition he not tell anyone how he lost his legs. The shot-put champion agreed. But a few days later, Sports Commission officials overruled Deng’s son.

Fang Zheng decided he had to meet Professor Ding before he left. She told him that plainclothes agents still ringed her home. “I’m coming anyway,” he said. He arrived late that afternoon, his wheelchair towed by a friend on a bicycle. Professor Ding cooked dinner for him. Afterward, she pushed his wheelchair to the front gate as eight plainclothes police snapped photographs and barked into walkie talkies. “Five years ago, they cut off his legs,” she said to me. “Now it’s as if they have cut off his arms.”

By mid-1995, Professor Ding was working on new leads. She had already contacted more than 130 families in which someone had been killed at Tiananmen Square. That fall, the New York Academy of Sciences honored her with its Human Rights Award. Perhaps to prevent her from physically receiving the award, authorities temporarily detained Professor Ding and her husband. But just as Wei Jingsheng’s arrest a generation earlier created more heroes, the couple’s detention prompted others to come forward. For the first time since the Tiananmen Massacre, sixteen relatives of those killed or wounded dared to speak out, signing a petition demanding the couple’s release.

In fact, Professor Ding had no intention of going to New York. In an acceptance speech written before her arrest, she thanked the academy but said she dared not leave China for fear of not being allowed back in. “In the past,” she wrote, “the overwhelming majority of those who had been treated with injustice, including those whose family members were slaughtered or persecuted to death, carried their burdens in silence and in humiliation, and waited patiently for the authorities to ‘right the wrongs and restore their reputations’ for them. This amounts to the victims surrendering their dignity and integrity as ransom for the second time. It is high time the Chinese people close the chapter on submitting themselves to humiliation in a slavish manner.

“In the years since [Tiananmen], I have simply done what a mother’s love and an intellectual’s conscience drove me to do. Each and every citizen living in this land not only should have the freedom from fear, adversity and misery but should have the right to choose the kind of society, political system and individual lifestyle that is compatible with human dignity. These were the dreams of those who gave their lives at Tiananmen Square. These are the goals for which we, the living, strive.”