by Linda Jaivin
We were all exhausted, so it wasn’t that late when we decided to bunk down. Hou lay on the sofa. He seemed frail and exhausted. I tried to make myself comfortable on the floor with the others.
At about 10.30 p.m., a call came through on the embassy switchboard for me. It was too weird. Who would call me there at such a time? My hair stood up on the back of my neck as I picked up the receiver. It was Xiaobo’s young friend. In a voice choked with sobbing, she said that Xiaobo and she had been riding a bicycle towards her home in the city when an unmarked van pulled up, and plainclothes policemen or army men—she wasn’t sure which—jumped out, knocked him off the bike and dragged him into the van, which then sped off again.
HOU’S face went white when, tears streaming, I reported the news. We’d already heard tales of people being beaten and shot on arrest. Was Xiaobo even alive? Hou shook like a leaf, shattered in a way I’d never seen. We held each other tight. For once, he had no joke, or little story, or homespun philosophy, metaphor or change of subject to deflect the mood.
There was no question of Hou going to the airport now. If Liu had been taken, they’d be looking for Hou as well. Nick spoke to Richard. They agreed that he should remain in the embassy until it was safe to come out. They’d inform the ambassador of the situation as soon as they could. In the meantime, Hou’s presence had to remain a secret even from the embassy security guards. When on 7 June the rest of us headed off to the airport in a motley range of vehicles all flying the Australian flag, we left Hou in Nick’s office with some chocolate, the short-wave radio and a small metal bin to pee in. He wasn’t to leave the cultural offices until told it was safe to do so.
On the same day, the US embassy gave sanctuary to Professor Fang Lizhi and his wife, the university lecturer Li Shuxian, for whom arrest warrants had been publicly issued. The Chinese government, who blamed the pair for inciting the unrest, was furious, and there were rumours that they were considering breaking international law and sending the army into the embassy grounds to arrest them.
As the Qantas jet took off from the by-then chaotic Beijing airport, some people cheered. I wept all the way back to Australia.
Later that day, claiming there’d been a sniper, troops laid a heavy barrage on several buildings in the Jianguomenwai foreigners’ compound. More than a dozen armour-piercing shells were recovered from several Australian flats alone and the bullets reportedly missed a Bangladeshi infant by mere centimetres.
As one of the first off the plane in Sydney, I was pounced on by television crews. Later, when I saw myself on TV, I was shocked at how haggard I looked. I’d lost three kilos in those few days (the post-massacre diet—not coming to a woman’s magazine near you). I suffered from nightmares which stayed with me for months, and from which I occasionally awoke screaming. In the midst of the monsters, the blood, and the big killing machines, Liu Xiaobo sometimes would appear and we’d make love, and it was unbearably, weirdly erotic. I’d wake up and be too upset or afraid to go back to sleep.
I obsessed about Xiaobo. I felt intensely guilty, responsible somehow for his arrest. Why hadn’t I insisted that Xiaobo come to the embassy with Hou and me? I felt that I hadn’t cared enough about him at the time, and that perhaps this had contributed in some way to the insouciance with which he seemed prepared to face his own flight into the unknown. Funnily enough, I was unaware that Nick Jose was tortured by a similar emotion until years later I read his book Chinese Whispers. ‘Should I have forced [Xiaobo] inside the safety of the diplomatic compound for his own good?’ Nick wrote. ‘Beyond a certain point I had not joined cause with him. I had not taken his life into my own hands…His reckless caprice proved costly, and it continued to cause me pain and regret as well, whenever I thought of him.’
In Canberra, I jumped every time a car backfired; the sound of heavy trucks made my heart palpitate and I had visions of armoured personnel carriers. I rarely slept more than a few hours a night and was getting nuttier and nuttier. In the middle of handing in a petition at the Chinese embassy, I screamed abuse at the officials, utterly out of control. One day, on my way to get some groceries, I pulled into the parking lot at a local shopping centre and broke down completely. I slumped over the steering wheel of the car and howled. When I finally looked up I saw I was parked in front of a medical centre. They ushered me straight in to see one of the general practitioners, a wonderful doctor who counselled me for months afterwards.
I felt so alienated from my freelance work that it made me almost physically nauseous to contemplate, but Geremie and I were financially stretched and I had no choice. How could I write reviews of travel books or subtitle Chinese films when people I knew were on the run, in prison, maybe being tortured? I penned long submissions to the UN Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International, providing the latter with as many details as I could, not just about Xiaobo and his arrest, but other friends as well, including the imprisoned playwright Wang Peigong.
Nick Jose and I would sit at the kitchen table of our house in Canberra for hours, rehashing events in such excruciating, Rainmanlike detail (‘I think it was a red bike he was riding.’ ‘No, I’m sure it was more like maroon.’ ‘Was that 2.30 p.m.?’ ‘More like 2.40.’) that Geremie worried about our sanity.
Word leaked out that the Australian embassy was harbouring a dissident. Speculation focused on Chai Ling, missing since the clearing of the square. According to the Melbourne Herald’s front page story, ‘A chilly stand-off between the Australian Embassy in Beijing and the Chinese Government is threatening relations between the two countries.’ Those of us who knew said nothing.
The embassy asked Nick to arrange a cultural invitation that would allow Hou to be able to come to Australia and work on his music—a face-saving way of getting him out of China.
On the streets and in the workplaces of the capital, the government unleashed a red terror the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Cultural Revolution. Beijing remained under martial law. For weeks after 4 June, shots still rang out in the night. As frightening was the knock on the door. The ‘wanted’ list of twenty-one student leaders even gave details of the fillings in their teeth. The authorities established hot lines and rewards for informers and urged people to report on any neighbours, friends or colleagues who’d taken part in the protests or even just passed on rumours. Chinese citizens were forbidden to speak to foreigners without authorisation. Border police were told to shoot anyone who tried to evade arrest.
The Party vowed it would ‘thoroughly mop up counterrevolutionary rebels’ and ‘isolate and smash our most stubborn enemies’. The crackdown wasn’t confined to Beijing. Hundreds of cities around the country had erupted in related demonstrations. By the end of July, a nationwide dragnet had swept some six thousand people into prisons, detention centres and labour camps. Daily, Chinese television broadcast images of handcuffed detainees, bowed and visibly bruised from beatings. More than thirty people were executed, some merely for setting fire to army vehicles.
After Liu Xiaobo’s arrest, a friend made postcards with this image, of him behind the Chinese character for ‘gate’, on the front and a plea for his release on the back, for people all over the world to send to the Chinese government.
On 23 June 1989, Central Television broadcast the news that Liu Xiaobo was among the arrested. The following day, the Beijing Daily, in an article later reprinted in the People’s Daily, accused Xiaobo of having been the ‘black hand’ behind the ‘turmoil’. Dismissing the hunger strike as a ‘farce’, it alleged that Xiaobo had returned to China from abroad specifically to ‘instigate and participate in rioting’ and declared him guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’. However grim the implications of this, I was indescribably relieved to know he was alive.
The last of the bloodstains had yet to be scrubbed off, or the streets smoothed of tank tracks when the propaganda machinery switched into high gear. Books, videotapes, newspaper articles, exhibitions and ‘study materials’ presented what the Communist Pa
rty called the ‘true face’ of the ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’. They alleged that the ‘turmoil’ had been supported by ‘overseas reactionary forces’ with the aim of overthrowing the government and setting up a ‘western-style bourgeois republic’. The media provided saturation coverage of the casualties suffered by the army—in the official version of events, it was mainly soldiers who’d died at the hands of ‘thugs and rioters’.
The official Chinese media was full of reports illustrating the warm support proffered by the citizens of Beijing to the martial law troops. There were heartwarming stories of how people took drinks to the troops patrolling in the sweltering heat. This sort of gesture was in fact so rare that when one citizen actually did deliver up a pail of water to some perspiring soldiers, the soldiers checked it for poison—and the tests came back positive.
At schools and workplaces, people were expected to attend daily political study sessions, fed a Party line many could only gag on.
The Party cracked down on those eternal troublemakers—the writers, artists and intellectuals—as well as the new entrepreneurial class, who’d so conspicuously supported the protests.
Just to show that it wasn’t entirely insensitive to public opinion, the government arrested a handful of Communist Party cadres, charged them with corruption and executed them.
From New Delhi to Washington, Manila to London, individuals and governments loudly condemned the brutality in Beijing. France put relations with China on hold and offered a haven to escaped leaders of the movement. American President George Bush suspended high level contacts and military sales to China.
At Parliament House in Canberra, Prime Minister Bob Hawke broke down in tears as he addressed a memorial service for the massacre’s victims attended by 2000 people. Geremie also spoke at the service. I sat on the podium, dressed in black, tears streaming from my eyes as they played a taped interview from the BBC with Yang Xianyi who deplored the massacre as something not even the warlords, the Japanese or the Nationalists would have dared to carry out. A partial translation of the declaration that Hou, Xiaobo and Gao Xin had drafted at Nick’s was read aloud as a message from some ‘citizens of Beijing’. Hawke made the decision to let thousands of Chinese in Australia on short-term visas stay on if they wished.
Nowhere perhaps was the reaction stronger than in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Hong Kong, tearful demonstrators again packed the Happy Valley racecourse, this time to mourn and to condemn the Communist regime. Buses, taxis and private cars flew scraps of black cloth and buildings were festooned with posters calling for the overthrow of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng. The traditional barometer of confidence in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng stock index, lost nearly a quarter of its value in trading, the real estate market crashed and nervous residents queued outside the Australian and other embassies for immigration applications.
In Taiwan general indifference to events on the mainland meant that before the massacre the biggest demonstration in support of the students had numbered only about 8000 people (compared with more than a million in Hong Kong). Afterwards, however, the mood of regret and horror was summed up by a poster written by students at Hou’s alma mater, Cheng-chih University: ‘We apologise, compatriots!’ The Nationalist government put its military on high alert.
Yet within days of the massacre, the Nationalists also proposed, for the first time in forty years, opening direct mail and other links to the mainland. They claimed this would ‘break the wall of silence’ the Communists were trying to erect around their citizens. The move had a whiff of desperation about it—the massacre hadn’t been the greatest advertisement for creating a unified China. In fact it made Taiwan independence look like a damn good idea.
The Communist Party reacted angrily to the outside world’s condemnations, blaming Taiwan and the west for causing the trouble in the first place. Brazenly, it denied that there’d been a massacre at all. Answering American television journalist Tom Brokaw’s assertion that there were ‘miles of videotape’ to prove it had happened, a Chinese government spokesman retorted that anything could be faked with modern technology.
Errors of fact, hyperbole and journalistic simplifications in the western and Hong Kong media reports were a godsend to China’s propagandists. They poured scorn on early claims of tens of thousands killed in Beijing. Pouncing on the common journalistic shorthand ‘Tiananmen Massacre’, they claimed that since there had in fact been no massacre on Tiananmen Square, there had been no Tiananmen Massacre, and therefore no massacre at all. The Chinese media made much of the story of how Hou, Xiaobo and the others had organised the ‘peaceful evacuation’ of the square.
They weren’t so pleased when in July, taking up the theme, a group of academics, authors and writers in Norway nominated Xiaobo for the year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Though the Chinese leadership reaffirmed its commitment to economic reform and the open door, foreign tourists, businessmen and students deserted the capital. Hotels that had boasted full occupancy were near empty. In a bizarre gesture intended to counter Beijing’s new image as a dangerous city, the municipal Tourism Bureau offered US$100,000 compensation for any tourist killed or injured in the capital on account of martial law.
There was no end to rumours as to Hou Dejian’s fate. Newspaper reports in Taiwan and Hong Kong had him hiding in South China, in secret exile abroad, under house arrest in Beijing. He’d been so weakened by the fast that he couldn’t walk unsupported. He’d been named a ‘counter-revolutionary agitator’ and put on a most wanted list. He’d been arrested as a Taiwan spy. He’d been taken at Beijing airport, following a cruel betrayal by a customs officer who’d promised to help him across the border. He’d been shot in the head. He was dead.
The Taiwan media, now gone all soft on Hou, who had been, after all, Taiwan’s most prominent representative on the square, claimed he’d only gone to China ‘under pressure’ in the first place. He was a hero. In one story, when Chinese officials visited him in the hospital where he lay wounded to urge him to write a ‘statement of regret’, Hou had remained firm, insisting even in his weakened condition that he’d been right to fight for freedom and democracy.
When, several days after the massacre, a well-dressed woman in her thirties made the rounds of Hou’s neighbours and music industry colleagues in Beijing to collect money for the operation he needed to save his life, they readily handed over what cash they could. She bagged some 2000 yuan before anyone twigged that it was a scam.
It wasn’t long before the Beijing grapevine got it right about where Hou was and what had happened to Xiaobo—way ahead of the foreign, Hong Kong and Taiwan media or any official announcements.
Back in Taiwan, Hou’s mother petitioned the Nationalists to allow Hou to return legally to Taiwan, should he find a way of leaving the mainland. The authorities there informed her that this would be difficult. Now that he travelled on a PRC passport he was subject to the rule that any mainlander who wanted to settle in Taiwan had to spend at least five years in a ‘free territory’ first. On the other hand, the government was drafting new regulations that would make exceptions for mainland democracy activists. Taiwan’s minister for internal affairs suggested that Hou might apply under those. The government’s offer of a haven to mainland dissidents prompted howls of protest from local oppositionists demanding a similar welcome be extended to pro-Taiwan independence dissidents in exile abroad as well.
In mid-June, a petite Chinese woman of mysterious identity arrived in Hong Kong, met with democracy supporters there and boarded a plane for Australia. The Hong Kong and Taiwan press went crazy— Chai Ling had escaped!
Not quite. The woman was Cheng Lin, though you’d think Cheng Lin was Chai Ling from some of the stories that came out after she’d reached Australia. To wit: the Communists had sent agents abroad to arrest her! She was in great danger, forced to move to a different place every day to avoid capture! She was in dire financial distress!
None of this was true. She’d breezed through immigration
at Beijing, helped by a famous comedian who went with her to distract the officials, clowning around and signing autographs for them. As for money, she told me herself that when she passed through Hong Kong, the activists there gave her US$10,000 in funds that had been donated to the movement and Hou Dejian’s brother Dewei sent her remittances from his personal savings in Taiwan as well.
In those first weeks in Australia, when she was staying with Geremie and me, Cheng Lin pined frequently for her Benz and a full-length mirror. She wanted to buy a fur coat with the donated funds, but we advised her that would be highly inappropriate. Forbidding her to buy the fur coat she desperately needed was one of the many ‘crimes’ of which she later accused us, both in conversations with friends and in the Chinese-language media. She said I abused her, which was true— on several occasions when she slagged off Liu Xiaobo, I furiously told her to shut up. She was angry with me for getting Hou into the Australian embassy, convinced that the comedian could have covered for both of them at the airport; if it hadn’t been for my interference, she maintained, both she and Hou would have been in Australia by then, together, reunited. My biggest offence of all, of course, was that, in her version of events, I had kept her and Hou apart when they so desperately wanted to see each other on that fateful day in Beijing.
Hou wrote to tell me he’d had a letter from Cheng Lin in Australia. ‘She’s said some bad things about you. I really hope that the two of you can be a bit more charitable towards her. She is alone in a foreign country and needs friends.’
By the time we received the letter, she had moved out and was no longer speaking to us.
In the embassy, Hou Dejian settled into a routine of waking up late, listening to the news on the short-wave radio, reading Chinese-language books from the libraries of the Australian diplomats and devouring their Hong Kong magazines, from which he too learned of his wounding, arrest and death. He looked through their English-language publications as well, improving his vocabulary, and swam at night in the embassy pool. He watched videotapes of Australian films, travelogues, and documentaries until, as he later told the South China Morning Post, ‘I could tell you how many kilograms of milk can be squeezed out of an improved Australian cow.’ The same confident, easygoing personality that led him to squat by the side of the road schmoozing with traffic police now had him jabbering away in his fast-improving English and making friends with everyone from the security guards to the ambassador.
