by Linda Jaivin
‘What’s he singing?’ Billy shouted into my ear.
It sounded to me like ‘Take off your clothes and come with me.’ That couldn’t be right. ‘Ziyin,’ I turned and shouted into her ear. ‘What’s he singing?’
She was bent over laughing. ‘Take off your clothes and come with me.’
I lost a boomerang earring. Billy dived to the ground. Scrambling fearlessly through the legs of the pogo-ing crowd, he came up with a handful of beer bottle caps.
And He Yong sang, in another song called ‘Garbage Dump’:
The place where we live
Is a garbage dump
We’re all insects
Fighting and squabbling
We eat our conscience
And shit out our thoughts
What can we do?
Nothing
Tear it down! Tear it down!
It was anarchy in the PRC.
‘If I do any concerts in China,’ Billy said, ‘I want him to support me.’
As He Yong made his way to the bar, I approached him. ‘Uh, that was great,’ I began, awkwardly. ‘There’s this English singer here, a rock star, who wants to buy you a drink. He says if he plays any concerts in China, he’d like you to support him. He’d love to talk to you.’
He Yong snarled. ‘Rock star? What’s his name?’
‘Billy Bragg.’
‘Never heard of him.’ He looked away, fully attitudinal.
‘Can we buy you a drink anyway?’
‘Yeah, whatever.’
He Yong led us to a back room where we sat around a small table with our beers. An English girl in punk gear, a Chinese language student, burst through the door and wrapped herself around He Yong, who had an air of just tolerating her affection. She glared at us with the classic hostility of the foreigner who has suddenly found her Chinese with other round-eyes. I remembered that feeling well and smiled.
Suddenly, her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. She sat up straight. ‘Billy Bragg?’ she shouted. ‘I don’t believe it! You’re Billy Bragg!’
Billy confirmed that he was, indeed, Billy Bragg.
‘Ta hen you ming!’ she shrieked at He Yong. ‘He’s so famous!’ is what she meant to say but she mixed up her tones in her excitement and actually said, ‘He’s got a superior fate!’ He Yong understood anyway and looked at Billy with fresh interest.
As we raved on into the night, we pretty well forgot the news about Hu Yaobang’s death. Who cared, anyway? One less ageing Communist leader, ex-leader, whatever. He Yong was much more interesting.
Two days later, on 17 April, Billy and I climbed up to the rostrum at Tiananmen where Chairman Mao had stood to declare the founding of the government of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The ancient gate to the Forbidden City overlooks Tiananmen Square, the biggest plaza in the world. Once one of Communism’s sacred sites, the rostrum was, by 1989, open to any worker, peasant or soldier with a few spare quid for the entry fee. Billy and I struck silly poses, taking photos and waving to the imaginary masses below, when we noticed that, uh, there actually were some masses down there.
‘What’s that all about?’ Billy asked, pointing to the knot of people clustered around the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the centre of the square.
‘No idea,’ shrugged I, the China specialist, and posed for another happy snap.
BILLY Bragg left China the following day. Before he left, we hatched a scheme with Ziyin for a rockumentary which she would direct and Billy would present with me as his translator and sidekick. Some days after this, Ziyin and I came upon He Yong again, this time performing at the ancient Observatory Tower. We invited him out to a meal. He seemed a lot younger off the stage, more like his nineteen years and, for all his attitude, sweet and likeable.
Though I was working full-time on The Avenue of Eternal Peace, having finally figured out what was happening on Tiananmen Square, I checked out the action there whenever I could. Every day, students and others gathered to mourn Hu Yaobang’s death. Some declaimed from the Monument to the People’s Heroes what a great man Hu Yaobang had been, the ‘soul of China’ in fact. It was weird. I’d never heard any Chinese person speak like that about Hu when he was alive. He’d certainly been one of the more colourful leaders of the Deng era. He was the first to wear a western suit, even if his long underwear usually stuck out from the bottom of his trousers. He’d done more than most Chinese leaders to rehabilitate the victims of past political campaigns, and demonstrated a relatively benign attitude towards writers and artists. He’d even proposed leading a ‘tiger hunt’ to ferret out corruption among the top levels of the military and government. Still. It was clear that Hu’s death wasn’t the only thing on the minds of his mourners.
Sure enough, the speeches soon broadened to cover the problems of corruption and inflation, and demands for freedom of the press and democracy. Some of the tributes to Hu were scarcely disguised attacks on Deng and other leaders. ‘He who died should not have died; those who ought to have died are still alive’ read one famous couplet. The crowds swelled daily in that first week, on some days to tens of thousands. Some speakers called for the leaders to make public their bank accounts—and the bank accounts of their sons and daughters and, provocatively, their mistresses. On Wednesday night, 19 April, students rushed the gate of the heavily guarded leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, on the edge of the square, calling for Premier Li Peng to come out and meet them. Hundreds of police forced them back. By now, plainclothes police swarmed the square day and night and infiltrated the campuses, taking photographs and notes; the security forces sent regular reports on the unrest back to the Communist leaders.
Hu Yaobang’s funeral was scheduled for Saturday 22 April at the Great Hall of the People on the edge of Tiananmen Square. The government, fearing mass protests, announced that Tiananmen would be off-limits to the public on the day of the funeral. The night before the funeral, I visited the writer Sang Ye and his Australian girlfriend Sue Trevaskes. They lived at one of the universities. Just before 10.30 p.m., they walked me to the campus gates to see me off. It was very quiet— unnaturally quiet—on the campus. Suddenly, thousands of students poured out of the dormitories and streamed past us to converge at the gate. Many of them wore white paper flowers, symbols of mourning. Most were on foot, some were on pushbikes. We looked at each other, agog. Then it dawned on us: the students planned to get to Tiananmen Square before the police could seal it off.
With clockwork timing, a huge procession of students from other universities came parading down the street. We watched in amazement as the students swung into line. They marched behind banners identifying themselves by university and department. They held high other placards calling for human rights, democracy and an end to corruption. They were well organised and disciplined. They were singing the ‘Internationale’.
Following them were men in overcoats with cameras, clicking away. Seeing this, Sue took my hand and squeezed it. Despite the balmy evening, we both felt a chill.
The next morning, I rode my bike to the square from Nick’s place in the eastern part of the city, one of thousands of people converging on Tiananmen from all directions, curious to see what was happening. Rows of policemen blocked our path.
Deng Xiaoping, who’d refused Hu Yaobang the posthumous title of Great Marxist, later explaining that ‘he didn’t make the grade’, and the other top leaders avoided confronting the protesters on Tiananmen by entering the Great Hall via an underground tunnel. After the official ceremony, at which Zhao Ziyang delivered the eulogy, Deng approached Hu’s widow, Li Zhao, to offer his condolences. She waved him away. When Marshal Nie Rongzhen, a wheelchair-bound member of the very old guard, asked her if he could do anything to help, she replied, ‘Clear my husband’s name.’
Throughout, the students kept up their protests outside the hall, shouting for Premier Li Peng to come out and talk to them. When, two hours after the ceremony ended, he still hadn’t appeared, they returned to their campuses, b
ut not before making one final dramatic gesture. Three students knelt on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, raising aloft a petition calling for Li Peng to conduct a dialogue with them. No one came out to take the petition.
Several days later, on 26 April, the government published an editorial in the People’s Daily accusing a ‘small handful’ of bad elements of a ‘planned conspiracy’ to overthrow socialism and the Communist Party itself; it accused them of ‘counter-revolution’. The editorial was broadcast on radio and television as well. ‘Counter-revolution’ was a strong phrase. It was an open secret that the editorial was based on a speech by Deng Xiaoping, who at eighty-five was still China’s top leader in spite of his nominal retirement. That night, security agents stripped the Monument to the People’s Heroes of the wreaths, banners and posters left there during eleven days of protest. The students, outraged and insulted, decided to march on Tiananmen in even more massive numbers the following day. Fearing the worst, many of them wrote last wills and testaments.
Thursday morning, 27 April, I had an appointment at the Beijing Film Studio. To get there I had to pass through the university district. From my taxi, I saw students massing behind every campus gate, outside of which stood lines of police. The students had planned to march out at 8 a.m.; I must have passed around 8.40, so the tension had been building for nearly an hour.
About an hour after that, an explosive, collective roar could be heard all the way inside the film studio. The students had broken out of their campuses. By early afternoon they reached an intersection a couple of blocks from Tiananmen Square, just outside a Sichuan restaurant where I was lunching with Ziyin and some people from the studio.
The drama outside was too compelling. We abandoned our meal and joined a crowd that now numbered in the hundreds of thousands, most of them cheering on the students, who were yelling slogans and berating the policemen who had formed a human blockade across the road. The crowd shouted their support for the students.
A loudspeaker at the intersection broadcast the People’s Daily editorial of the previous day. It warned that all unauthorised demonstrations were illegal. An elderly lady looked up at the speaker and snapped, ‘The only one shouting counter-revolutionary slogans around here is that loudspeaker.’ Everyone laughed.
The students surged forward and the police gave way. A great cheer went up along the street. People applauded, whistled, bellowed their approval as the students marched by, flying the banners of their schools. One protester held a sign that read ‘a small handful’, a reference to the editorial. It bobbed up in the middle of a great sea of people by now half a million strong.
Despite the size of the demonstration, the marchers maintained a degree of discipline that testified to a solid Communist education in collective activity. The students had unified their slogans and sang the same songs, including the Party’s own ‘Internationale’. The only unruly elements were from the arts academies.
‘Thank god for arts students.’ I nudged Ziyin.
‘There goes my school,’ she laughed, pointing out the banner from the film school.
Holding hands so that we wouldn’t be pulled apart in the surging crowd, Ziyin and I followed the marchers down the street. Workers perched on scaffolding waved their hardhats and shouted, ‘Long live the students.’ The students shouted back, ‘Long live the workers.’ Soft-drink peddlers donated their wares to the marchers. Even some of the policemen applauded, and I saw several wipe tears from their eyes as the students passed. Some onlookers were weeping openly. An elderly man navigated a course through the crowd towards me and proclaimed, in perfect English, ‘This is a great moment.’ Ziyin and I experienced an incredible rush of emotion; we too had tears in our eyes.
As we reached Tiananmen, we strained to see into the square. As we’re both short, by northern Chinese standards, we weren’t having a lot of success. A couple of guys who’d clambered onto one of the old carved stone lions that guard the entrance to the Forbidden City called down for us to give them our hands, and they hauled us up onto the lions as well, where we shared their excellent view.
The marchers continued past Tiananmen to a road which rings the city and leads eventually back to the universities. Ziyin and I jumped down off the lion and followed them into the east part of the city. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it, and Ziyin had grown up in Beijing.
That morning, Hou Dejian and Cheng Lin had gone for a spin in the Benz. Although neither of them were in the habit of reading the People’s Daily, even they had seen the previous day’s editorial. About a block from home, they were enveloped by the demonstration, trapped for over an hour, their Benz an incongruous island of burgundy-enamelled privilege in a surging sea of protest.
Cheng Lin fretted. Would the crowd try to damage or even roll the car? After all, the fact that Communist officials were buying Benzes while people still went hungry was one of the targets of student anger. When it became apparent that no one was going to turn nasty towards them, Cheng Lin focused her concern on the possibility that the demonstrators’ bicycles, scraping past, might scratch the duco.
Hou didn’t give a stuff about the car. He was utterly fascinated. When the last of the parade had passed, they drove the car home. Cheng Lin, breathing a sigh of relief, locked it in the garage and fled into the safety of their apartment. Hou hopped on a bicycle and raced off to catch up with the marchers, whom he followed, enthralled, for hours.
That evening, he called his manager, Xie Yunpeng. ‘It was so much fun, Xiao Xie!’ he raved. ‘So liberating!’
Xie was eternally wary of Hou’s little enthusiasms, whether for politics or young women. Though he had a deep sense of foreboding, he kept his counsel and indulged Hou as he babbled on about the day’s excitements.
When the protests began, Liu Xiaobo was a visiting scholar at New York’s Columbia University. Responding to the news from home, he published a series of articles in the American Chinese-language paper World News pouring scorn on China’s so-called ‘independent intellectuals’ for their outpouring of grief for Hu Yaobang, who was, he said, just a Communist Party boss. He noted that the tragedy of the 1979 Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng’s sentence had evoked a far more muted reaction from people, himself included. Now, he wrote, ‘what is most required of Chinese intellectuals…is neither to mourn Hu Yaobang nor eulogise him, but rather to face up to the figures of the imprisoned Wei Jingsheng and [fellow Democracy Wall activist] Xu Wenli and to engage in a collective act of repentance.’ He called the petition movement begun by Professor Fang Lizhi ‘the first step towards such repentance’.
As the protests escalated, Liu Xiaobo couldn’t bear to be away a minute longer. He flew back to Beijing, arriving on 27 April. He immediately phoned Hou. Cheng Lin’s mother answered the phone. Like her daughter, she’d never liked Xiaobo. So she told him that Hou was in Guangzhou.
The following night, Hou Dejian, Cheng Lin, the Yangs and I were all invited to dinner at the house of the Australian diplomat Richard Rigby and his wife Tai Fang. No one could stop talking about the demonstrations. Gladys told us that Yang Xianyi had donated 500 yuan to the students. That was the equivalent of several months wages for an average worker. ‘And he didn’t even consult me first,’ she groused, hastening to add, ‘Of course, I’d have approved anyway.’
Another elderly woman, a member of the Communist Party, broke down and cried. Appalled by the corruption which made a mockery of communism’s egalitarian ideals, and the Party’s failure of will to do anything about it, she declared herself on the side of the students. Even if the students’ aims were vague, we all professed ourselves profoundly inspired by them.
Cheng Lin, for her part, told anyone who would listen that, like the students, she too was struggling against dictatorship. Hou Dejian, she fumed, was the Deng Xiaoping of their home, expecting to be waited on hand and foot and never lifting a finger to help her or her mother with the household chores.
After dinner, Richard pulled out his guit
ar. Hou sang ‘Get off the Stage!’ and then Richard launched into a raucous and wonderful version of ‘La Bamba’.
I left China on the last day of April. I needed to return to Australia to meet with the producers of the mini-series and tie up a few loose ends in Canberra, after which I planned to return to Beijing.
The students continued to demand a dialogue with the government. The authorities replied that they’d have to end their boycott of classes first. Forming the Autonomous Union of Beijing Students, the students elected the flamboyant Wuer Kaixi as their chairman, and voted to keep striking.
Wuer Kaixi (aka Uerkesh Daolet) was a twenty-one-year-old student at Beijing Normal University, a centre of student activism, and a member of the ethnic Uighur minority. He’d been one of the three students who’d kneeled on the steps of the Great Hall of the People after Hu’s funeral, petitioning for dialogue with the leadership. His exotic looks, rhetorical flair and breathtaking egocentricity contributed to a charismatic appeal. Asked by a foreign reporter what was the difference between this student movement and that of 1986, he gave the astonishing answer, ‘Me.’
The students planned another massive protest for Thursday, 4 May. The student demonstrations that had taken place seventy years earlier on that date were a precursor to the founding of the Communist Party in China. The students’ choice of 4 May was doubly provocative for, on that day, Beijing would be hosting the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank. The meeting would be attended by the first Taiwan officials to step foot on the mainland since 1949. Two weeks later, on 15 May, Mikhail Gorbachev was scheduled to make the first visit to China by a Soviet leader in thirty years, an event so important that Deng Xiaoping had called it the last great milestone of his career, and the most significant diplomatic victory since the restoration of relations with the US in 1979.
