by Linda Jaivin
… Chinese intellectuals must bring an end to their millennia-old and weak-kneed tradition of only talking and never acting. We must engage in direct action to oppose martial law; through our actions we appeal for the birth of a new political culture; through our actions we repent the mistakes resulting from our long years of decrepitude. Every Chinese must share in the responsibility for the backwardness of the Chinese nation.
… although [the students’] aims are democratic, and they espouse the theory of democracy, in dealing with concrete problems they have acted undemocratically … we appeal to the Chinese to abandon their vacuous, traditional, simplistic, ideological, sloganising and end-oriented approach to democracy and engage in the democratisation of the political process itself, starting with small practical matters. We appeal to the students to examine their own actions and make their priority the democratic reorganisation of the student body on Tiananmen Square itself.
They didn’t know that, on that very same morning, Deng Xiaoping and other Party elders were meeting with Li Peng and the rest of the Politburo Standing Committee to formalise their decision to clear the square by force. One of the old Party leaders, Wang Zhen, is supposed to have declared at that meeting, ‘Anybody who tries to overthrow the Communist Party deserves death and no burial.’
The students set up a tent for the four hunger strikers on the platform of the Monument to the People’s Heroes. For days, the students had been debating whether to leave the square and declare victory. Leaving might be the only way to avert a violent crackdown by the army pressing in on the city. Many of the Beijing students had already returned to their homes or dorms. Most of the students still camping out on the square came from the provinces. They tended to oppose a tactical withdrawal—they had nowhere else to stay in the capital. Although the people of the city continued to maintain the barricades, the square had been losing its magnetic pull.
At the same time, it was becoming less of a hellhole, thanks to garbage bags, pup tents and other vital supplies bought by Hong Kong supporters with the money from the concert. The ‘Goddess of Democracy’, a rough-hewn polystyrene Statue of Liberty created by art students, like a fab new side show at an old carnival, had drawn crowds back into the square once more on 30 May. When news got out that Hou Dejian was going on hunger strike the number of people on the square rose, by some accounts, over ten-fold.
They began the strike at 4 p.m. on 2 June. Over their new green tent a banner advertised their manifesto and repeated its opening lines. ‘We are on a hunger strike! We protest! We appeal! We repent!’ As the four—Hou Dejian, Liu Xiaobo, Gao Xin and Zhou Duo—approached the monument, the crowd stirred and crushed forward. Student pickets linked arms to keep them from surging up the steps. Hou addressed the throng. Every sentence he uttered received resounding applause. Drawing attention to the Concert for Democracy in China t-shirt he was wearing, he told them about the concert, and how orderly the Hong Kong audience had been. ‘Compatriots, look at Tiananmen Square today! Is it what you would call hygienic? I hope that every compatriot can devote just a little bit of effort towards cleaning up the square.’
They read out their manifesto and proposed new slogans, including ‘We have no enemies! Let’s not allow hatred and violence to poison our minds and the progress of democracy in China!’ and ‘We seek not death, but true life!’
Jimmy Ngai, a friend of mine from Hong Kong who was covering the movement for the Hong Kong edition of Esquire, was among the hundreds of thousands of people who thronged into the square when Hou and the others began their strike. Jimmy described how Hou Dejian showed the crowd his t-shirt, saying that while the other performers, including Teresa Teng, couldn’t be there that day, they were there in spirit. Then Hou led the crowd in singing ‘Heirs of the Dragon’.
‘I’ve sung “Heirs of the Dragon” countless times,’ Jimmy wrote. ‘In [Hong Kong’s] Chater Garden, in Victoria Park, on King’s Road, at the racecourse, outside the gates of the Xinhua News Agency, but I still wasn’t prepared for how deeply moved I would be hearing this song sung here in the capital of the land of the “dragon”, in the “far off east” itself.’
Friends of the four, prominent writers, musicians and academics all made their way to the tent to express support. An endless stream of people came by to verify Hou’s presence for themselves. He was constantly having to pop out of the tent to wave, shake hands and sign autographs. Xie, squatting at the tent’s entrance, was reminded of Mao reviewing the Red Guards. A Taiwan reporter imagined it was like the kind of scene created by an international rock megastar.
The same reporter noted approvingly of the content of their manifesto and its ‘very high standard of democratic thought and ideals’. His article, titled ‘The Heir of the Dragon Composes a Democracy Movement’, also praised Hou for encouraging the students to clean up the square. The squalor had generally disgusted Taiwan and Hong Kong supporters of the movement.
A nurse attempted to convince the four, chain-smokers all, not to smoke inside the tent, to no avail. Within hours the air was foul with smoke and the donated carpet and pillows they lay on were soaked in nicotine fumes.
A young fan of Hou brought him a bouquet of flowers. Weeping, she told him she knew every song he’d ever written. While young female students of Xiaobo’s as well as Hou’s fans managed to get past the pickets and into the tent, Wuer Kaixi didn’t, to the amusement of doctors and nurses in attendance. One member of the medical staff told a newspaper reporter from Taiwan, ‘When you’re not hot, you’re not.’
Hou fantasised aloud about organising a rock concert in which the emcee and bands could descend on the square from a helicopter, setting off fireworks as they landed. ‘This is too much fun,’ he said to Xiaobo. ‘Maybe I won’t go to Hong Kong after all.’
Zhou Duo and Gao Xin felt things were getting out of hand. It was supposed to be a hunger strike, they griped, not a three-ring circus.
The Beijing Municipal Party Committee called their action a ‘two-bit so-called hunger strike’. Even the United Front’s Yan Mingfu, who was relatively sympathetic to the protesters, thought it bordered on the farcical. He reportedly remarked that Hou Dejian ‘had just managed to catch the last pirate boat out of port’.
They got little sleep that first night. Late on the evening of 2 June, a jeep overturned on the Avenue of Eternal Peace some three kilometres west of the square, killing three people and injuring another. Students believed that this incident heralded an impending crackdown by the army.
In the wee hours of 3 June, about five thousand unarmed soldiers arrived in the square. Exhausted by their more than nineteen-kilometre run from their base in the eastern part of the city, they were easily stopped by the crowds. So was a second column. To the west, on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the people surrounded and brought to a halt a convoy carrying ammunition and weapons.
Some people concluded that the army lacked the will to take control. Others suspected that, by giving up weapons to the people, the government was trying to instigate violence—and give themselves an excuse to open fire.
Xie sat on the monument’s steps all night, compulsively eating chocolate and keeping an eye on the tent. He told himself that at the first sign of trouble he’d sling Hou’s slight frame over his own sturdy back and hightail it out of there.
Later that Saturday, the crowds stopped another convoy, this time several lorries carrying workers armed with clubs. Some of the workers confessed they’d been paid to stir up trouble. At 2 p.m., riot police charged the place where the people had stopped the first convoy, beating the crowd back with truncheons and firing tear-gas canisters. Some of the people confiscated weapons from the trapped and seemingly helpless soldiers.
As the news of these incidents filtered back to the tent, Xie tried to convince Hou to pull out while it was still safe to do so. Liu Xiaobo’s wife sent a similar message. But they had committed themselves, and they’d see this through to the end.
Xie ducked out to the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet
on the edge of the square for a bite. When he returned, Hou said to him, ‘I’ve just written a song. Get a pen and transcribe the melody for me, will you?’
The Taiwan author Bo Yang once wrote a controversial essay called ‘The Ugly Chinaman’ which condemned the selfishness and lack of civic consciousness that he claimed were characteristic of the Chinese people. Hou, who admired Bo Yang, felt moved on this day to compose a reply, which he called ‘The Beautiful Chinese’.
Freedom-loving friends, spread your wings
Friends of conscience, open your hearts
Friends of democracy, let’s take each other’s hands
Ugly Chinamen, today we are so beautiful…
Everything can be changed
Everything is within our grasp
Listen no more to lies
The truth is there for all to see.
Millions of people joined the protests in Beijing in May. ‘Just don’t go making speeches yourself,’ Xie grumbled. ‘If you do, I’ll be the one to get in trouble.’
In spite of the chaos, word got round that Hou had composed a new song. Reporters from a Taiwan television station filmed him singing it.
At 6.30 p.m., Martial Law Headquarters broadcast an ‘emergency announcement’. The army had, it said, ‘a sacred mission’ to put an end to the ‘turmoil’. They would no longer tolerate ‘lawless acts’ like the interception of military vehicles. ‘If there are people who refuse to heed these warnings and insist on acting independently, testing the limits of the law, the martial law troops, the security forces and the People’s Armed Police have the right to use whatever means at their disposal, including the use of force, to deal with them.’
Ordered to stay off the streets, the people of Beijing poured out of their homes in the hundreds of thousands.
Chai Ling, the twenty-three-year-old commander-in-chief of the ‘Protect Tiananmen Headquarters’, asked the thousands of students on the square to recite an oath, which went in part:
I swear that I will devote my young life to protect Tiananmen and the republic. I may be beheaded, my blood may flow, but the people’s square will not be lost. We are willing to use our young lives to fight to the very last person.
Swept up in the roiling tide of emotion, Hou leaped to his feet and joined in the swearing of the oath.
‘Down with Li Peng!’ someone cried.
‘Down with Li Peng!’ Hou responded with the rest, forgetting that he opposed such slogans.
‘Mr Hou,’ a student said, handing him a plastic helmet and army greatcoat, ‘take these. They’ll protect you from rubber bullets.’
In Hangzhou for several days with Wayne and Murray, I hadn’t been able to get much information about what was happening in Beijing. All I knew of Hou’s hunger strike was what Geremie, now back in Canberra, was able to tell me over the phone. I was desperate for news. On the afternoon of 3 June, we arrived in Shanghai and checked into the Huating Sheraton. We were supposed to fly to the city of Qingdao the following day, and had plans to meet Nick Jose, who was also in Shanghai, for dinner. The hotel had cable. I stayed glued to CNN until it was time to meet Nick. After a fretful dinner we all returned to Nick’s room in the Hilton and got back onto CNN. When the Chinese authorities pulled the plug on the satellite transmission of images, we could only watch, numb with shock and horror, pictures of maps and listen to the reporter’s description of what was happening in a city that Nick and I both loved, to a population that included some of our closest friends in the world.
Several kilometres west of the square, the troops opened fire on unarmed crowds with automatic weapons and live ammunition, including dumdum bullets. People, including young students and even children, were dying by the hundreds.
Witnesses raced into the square to report on the slaughter, some bearing spent cartridges or the bloodstained clothing of victims. The team of student pickets guarding the hunger strikers’ tent vowed they’d protect the four of them to the death. Liu Xiaobo replied by swearing that they would survive or perish together with the pickets. Not having been raised on the educational diet of revolutionary self-sacrifice with which both the students and Xiaobo had grown up, Hou was alarmed. Suddenly clear-headed, he wondered at his own swearing of the blood oath hours earlier.
Foreign correspondents in the square came by and said goodbye to the four as though they’d never see them alive again.
The sound of gunfire grew closer.
Someone played a recording of ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ over the loudspeaker on the monument.
Wuer Kaixi made a stirring speech pledging to give his life to the movement, collapsed and was carried off on a stretcher.
Hou and Xiaobo looked at each other. Xiaobo raised an eyebrow.
An hour later, around 1.30 a.m., the government’s loudspeakers crackled into action.
‘All students and citizens on Tiananmen Square must leave immediately so that the martial law troops can carry out their mission. We cannot guarantee the safety of anyone who refuses; they must take full responsibility for the consequences of their actions.’
Shortly afterwards, a doctor came to visit the four hunger strikers. He described the horrific casualties piling up in hospitals throughout the city. The army had surrounded the square. They were massing on the north side, in front of Tiananmen Gate. Their guns pointed southward, towards the rows of tents on the square.
A tear gas canister exploded not fifty metres from the monument. It was a quarter to three in the morning.
Not long after, the tremulous, hoarse whisper of the student leader Chai Ling crackled through the students’ p.a.: ‘Anyone who wishes to leave the square can go; the rest will remain and defend the square to the death.’
‘Fuck!’ cried Xiaobo. Even if many of the several thousand students on the square wanted to leave, they were unlikely to desert those who’d responded to Chai Ling’s call to defend the square. The only way to save the lives of the students would be for them all to leave together. There was another problem. Some of the people who’d taken guns from the soldiers were threatening to fight back.
When Chai Ling finished her announcement, Hou approached her. He asked her to try and negotiate with the troops for a peaceful evacuation of the square.
She refused. Hou and the others decided it was time to take matters into their own hands.
XIAOBO took hold of the p.a. system. It was just past 3 a.m. on 4 June. He asked anyone who had a weapon to hand it in. The success of the movement depended on it retaining its non-violent stance to the end. If even one student or worker was caught with a gun, the Party would claim that the whole movement hadn’t been a peaceful protest at all but an armed rebellion.
As he spoke, a reporter from Taiwan’s United Daily News rushed up to Hou and introduced himself. ‘You had a good future ahead of you in Taiwan, yet your ideals and hopes led you to come to the mainland. The tanks of the PLA are moving in on the orders of the Communist Party to deal with the students, and yourself. Tell me, how do you feel?’
Hou gawped at the reporter. ‘Sorry, I don’t have the time to stand here and talk about my feelings right now,’ he said. Then the media star in him rallied to the occasion and he gave the journo his quote: ‘Faced with this inhumane, irrational and rabid “reactionary government”, we must not allow any more blood to be shed.’
A commotion arose on another corner of the monument. The workers, who’d joined the movement under their own leaders, and had their own encampment on the square, were less convinced by Xiaobo’s words than the students. They were so unconvinced, in fact, that they had mounted a heavy machine-gun on the top tier of the monument. They’d got the gun from an armoured personnel carrier that had been stopped by the crowd. It was loaded and pointed in the direction of the Great Hall of the People. They also had a handful of other guns and a crate of molotov cocktails. They waved iron bars threateningly at students who’d come to reason with them.
The students dashed back to Hou Dejian, interrupting his conversati
on with the reporter. ‘They won’t listen to us, Mr Hou!’ one said.
Hou Dejian made his way into the middle of the fracas, took a deep breath and put his hand on the arm of a young man barely out of his teens who was one of the defenders of the big gun.
Calling the singer ‘elder brother’, the worker broke down in tears. ‘I’ve supported them, the students, from the start,’ he said through sobs. ‘Several of my best mates, they’re dead. They died trying to keep the army from getting here.’
Hou put his arms around the boy’s shoulders. He cried too. Big, rasping sobs.
Hou led the worker and two of his friends back to the fasting tent. There, Xiaobo, Gao and Zhou convinced them to turn in their weapons and evacuate. ‘You won’t be remembered as a martyrs, you know that?’ Xiaobo argued. ‘They’ll call you violent thugs and rioters. Your names will never be cleared.’
Solemnly, the workers collected the weapons and handed them in. Putting their arms around each other and Hou again, they wept bitterly.
Xiaobo suggested they return the weapons to the army.
‘No way!’ Xie blurted. ‘What a great fucking way to get yourselves killed. Approach the soldiers while carrying an arsenal of weapons.’ Xie had a better idea. ‘Destroy the weapons, in front of foreign reporters.’
‘Good thinking,’ Xiaobo said. As the cameras flashed, Xiaobo and Hou smashed the weapons against the stones of the monuments.
It was hard work. They hadn’t eaten or slept for nearly two days, and besides, as Xie later commented, ‘Hou Dejian was unused to doing any physical work whatsoever’, so it wasn’t surprising that they nearly collapsed with exhaustion. They found some apples and hungrily set into them.
Zhou Duo and some of the Red Cross doctors came up with an idea. It was very risky, but it could save all their lives. They would delegate a small group to the front line to ask the army for enough time to organise an evacuation, and a promise of safe passage for the students. They reasoned that whatever carnage had already occurred on the streets leading into the square, the Party would prefer not to have the blood of thousands of students on its hands—or on Tiananmen Square.
