by Linda Jaivin
Once Time got the ball rolling, Hou fielded at least one interview a day, sometimes more. Among the media organisations that would beat a path to Hou’s door over the next several months were Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the London Independent, The Times, the Melbourne Age, the South China Morning Post, Helsinki Post, Der Spiegel, Indian, French and German newspapers, the Agence France Presse, United Press International, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, the Voice of America, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, German television and the BBC.
Jimi was surprised by the zeal with which Hou took to his new vocation. ‘He liked the attention. But he also believed that he was doing the movement, the revolution, whatever you want to call it, a favour.’
The Wall Street Journal called Hou ‘China’s No. 1 dissenter—the only person in this vast nation of 1.1 billion who regularly utters in public the criticisms of the state that many Chinese share but dare not speak.’ Hou himself considered his ‘prime audience’ to be the Chinese people themselves, whom he could reach either directly through Chinese-language BBC or Voice of America broadcasts, or indirectly through translations of his interviews in the ‘internal reference’ press, publications produced for government and Party cadres to provide them with information deemed unsuitable for mass dissemination. His words also reached the Chinese people via Taiwan radio, which translated them into Chinese and broadcast them into the mainland.
On 11 January 1990, the State Council ended martial law in Beijing. Li Peng declared that ‘the situation in the capital and the country as a whole has become stable, social order has returned to normal and a great victory has been won in checking the turmoil and quelling the counter-revolutionary rebellion’. On the other hand, he warned, ‘Some unstable factors still exist in our society. The hostile forces in and outside the country will not give up their attempt to subvert the socialist system.’ It was clear that the end of martial law didn’t signal any softening on dissent.
‘Like a thick carpet of snow, silence has settled over China,’ wrote Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. ‘In muffled voices, among friends, some people still mock their leaders and dream of change, but despite the lifting of martial law last week they are quiet in public, or they are in jail. Everyone except Hou Dejian.’
Nick Kristof, who would win a Pulitzer Prize with his partner Cheryl WuDunn for their China reporting, recalls asking Hou to lunch one day at the Palace Hotel. As they walked into the hotel, they ran into Wall Street Journal correspondent Adi Ignatius, waiting for Hou with his foreign editor, who’d just flown in from New York. Hou had accidentally double-booked. ‘We fought over him a bit,’ Nick told me. ‘But in the end we surrendered him to the Wall Street Journal. Adi’s editor was only in town for a few days.’
Nick explained why Hou was in so much demand: ‘We were all getting sick of saying “an artist said this”, “a worker said that”. After Hou emerged in that article in Time, we leapt to interview him. First we wrote features about him. Then we realised that he had very useful quotes that could be used on almost any topic. So you could either use anonymous sources or you could use Hou Dejian. Also, he had a telephone, and was willing to be interviewed over the phone, the only person in Beijing willing to do so. And he wasn’t only articulate, but quite thoughtful.’ And thanks in part to his sojourn in the Australian embassy, ‘he spoke enough English that non-Chinese speakers could use him’.
Nick Kristof told me his favourite Hou quote. ‘He said, “In some countries in Eastern Europe, they sacrificed a few leaders to save the Party. In China, they sacrificed the Party to save a few leaders.” It’s not entirely true, of course, but it’s eminently quotable.’
Hou’s political commentary displayed the same symmetry and facility with metaphor and image that made so many of his song lyrics memorable. ‘This government is the worst possible system—because there is no system.’ ‘China is like a road that’s equipped with traffic lights but where the police ignore the signals and arrest people at random.’ Once, he called me up for help polishing a line he wished to drop in an upcoming interview. It was about the government’s fear of foreign-backed ‘peaceful evolution’ pushing the people towards ‘violent revolution’. The phrases balanced nicely in Chinese and he wanted reassurance that they worked equally well in English.
Hou didn’t only give good quote, but good colour as well. He hardly fitted the stereotype of the dissident, what Adi Ignatius characterised as the ‘rumpled intellectual surrounded by books and absorbed in thought’. Hou’s interviews often took place in his studio, a converted garage full of instruments, sound equipment and quirky toys like a sound-activated dancing plastic flower. He liked to wrap up by serenading the journalists with ‘The Beautiful Chinese’ or ‘Get off the Stage’.
Xie, who worried that Hou was looking for trouble, had to admit that his friend’s mood had improved tremendously.
Hou’s favourite themes were non-violence, rationality and democracy— the themes of the hunger strike manifesto. ‘All I seek,’ he told one reporter, ‘is fairness and justice for all—including the Party’s leaders.’ Democracy, he asserted, couldn’t be achieved by violent revolution. As for the problem of the ‘Tiananmen massacre’, he told Australian journalist Peter Ellingsen, ‘There’s only one truth and that’s that many died. Where they died is not important.’ Jan Wong of Toronto’s Globe and Mail stated the view of most of the foreign press corps was that ‘Mr Hou’s story is credible’.
Hou took to describing himself as a professional musician struggling to become a ‘passable dissident’, though he told reporters he was probably the ‘dumbest, most amateur dissident in the world’. Comparing himself to a substitute player thrown into the game without much preparation, he joked that as soon as Fang Lizhi came out of the American embassy he could have his job of chief dissident back. He admitted that he was afraid of going to jail, but if he had to choose between submission and imprisonment, he’d take the latter.
Some Hong Kong media spoke to Hou around this time, but the Taiwan press, having so righteously condemned Hou for his supposed lie about the massacre, were with few exceptions conspicuously absent from the queue of media wanting to interview Hou. He asked sardonically, ‘Where have all the Taiwan compatriots gone?’
Soon after Hou’s first interviews began appearing in the press, the Public Security Bureau sent some men to speak with him. ‘Mr Hou,’ one said, shuffling his feet awkwardly. ‘It is possible that you don’t realise the extent to which your words are being used by enemies of the Chinese state. I’d advise you to keep in mind the national interest.’
‘If you want to arrest me,’ Hou replied, ‘go ahead.’
‘Oh no, no, no,’ the policeman denied, waving his hands in a panic. ‘We don’t want to do that!’
‘Er, Mr Hou,’ the other began. ‘Perhaps the international media has distorted your views?’
‘Absolutely not.’ Hou repeated some of his sharpest criticisms for their benefit, signed a written transcript of the conversation for them and requested that they show it to the leaders of the Communist Party.
The authorities made one last-ditch attempt to use Hou for propaganda, inviting him to a Chinese New Year’s banquet hosted by the United Front Department in late January for some one hundred and fifty resident ‘Taiwan compatriots’. Asked to perform, Hou sang ‘The Beautiful Chinese’, telling the gobsmacked assembly that he’d written the song in honour of the ‘heroic and patriotic participants in the pro-democracy movement’. When he finished, one or two people started to clap, then stopped, and there was silence. ‘They didn’t invite me to any other parties after that,’ Hou boasted to Adi Ignatius.
While Hou maintained a façade of saucy insolence towards the authorities, he knew he was walking a fine line. He wrote a letter to the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and sent me a copy, with instructions to make the contents public s
hould he be arrested.
The letter, which began by wishing the Public Security Bureau a happy spring festival, acknowledged the courtesy with which its agents had so far treated him.
You never forced me to confess to things I haven’t done or words I haven’t spoken, and you permit me to maintain my own views, even if they differ in every respect from the official propaganda. From the bottom of my heart, I appreciate your enlightened attitude. At the same time, I would love to see this attitude applied to every corner of the Chinese mainland and to every Chinese person.
You’ve made it clear that you sincerely hope that I will protect myself and avoid trouble…I cannot do this, despite your well-intentioned advice. I must refuse the opportunity you’ve given me to live my life in peace and happiness…
I don’t believe that I’m braver or more insightful than anyone else. But because I’m not in prison I still have the opportunity to choose between silence and imprisonment. So please don’t advise me to look after myself anymore. I believe that all worry and unease will vanish once I am tried and sentenced.
Don’t blame yourselves if this happens. It’s part of your job. I can’t hate you for carrying out your duties. If there is such a day when I’ve served out my sentence, or been rehabilitated, I will be at your service, and would love to see any of you should you visit me simply as a fellow Chinese. I’m sure that any conversation we would have then would be much happier than those we are having at present.
Respectfully wishing you peace,
A Chinese who speaks his mind,
Hou Dejian
6 February 1990.
He showed the letter to Xie, who fretted, ‘That letter is an invitation to arrest.’
Hou shrugged. He packed a bag with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, some medicines and a few other things he’d need in detention and placed it by his bed. Just in case.
Informed that he could travel if he wanted to Hou visited Guangzhou briefly in March. Returning to Beijing, he showed no inclination to budge from there again.
‘You know,’ one official suggested, ‘it might be a good time to go to Australia to visit your wife.’
‘You should have thought of that when I still had a wife,’ he retorted.
Cheng Lin had run off with Wuer Kaixi. They met in Canberra, while he was there raising support for the democracy movement. They’d kept the affair secret at first, but it wasn’t long before the world’s Chinese-language press was full of gossip about the pair. Despite their estrangement, Hou was deeply stung by the news. Years later, he found it too painful to discuss. Jimi told me that Hou had been heartbroken. He was stunned that she’d given him so much grief over how his activism hurt her family—and then paired up with the biggest activist of them all. ‘She’d laid so much guilt on him,’ Jimi said. ‘They’d been in communication all those months and yet she never told him. He heard it from someone else. That was the ultimate insult.’
But Hou had also been seeing other women. His favourite was Sun Yanmei, whom he met through Cheng Lin’s younger brother Cheng Yu. He called her by the nickname ‘guinü’, ‘daughter’. He’d called Cheng Lin mimi, which was a common name for kittens (as well as the baby panda in the song), and Yuanzhen had been yatou, the term for a young serving maid.
Sun Yanmei. ‘I just really liked being with him.’
‘I have what you might call a Lolita complex,’ he admitted to me.
Sun Yanmei was petite like Cheng Lin, with a smooth, round face, a tiny cherry-like mouth and large black eyes fixed in an adoring gaze on the legendary figure who’d accepted her into his world. A technician in a medical pathology lab, she was only twenty and not very political. ‘I just really liked being with him,’ she told me. They started out as friends, but by February she realised that she was falling in love. He was her first boyfriend.
Australian diplomats, who continued to socialise with Hou after he left the embassy, recall that Yanmei often sat quietly by his side at social gatherings. As he spoke with the others, he played little games with her hands, one diplomat recalls, ‘like you might do with a child’.
Hou continued to speak to the press, but privately he worried that the Communist Party, unable to shut him up and unwilling to arrest him, might come up with other ways of silencing him.
‘If I die in a car accident,’ Hou Dejian told me over the phone, ‘it’ll be no accident.’ I could hear him sucking back cigarette smoke. It was March 1990. ‘Really?’ I replied without surprise, for we’d had this same dialogue every week or so for the past couple of months. ‘Why’s that?’
‘There are people who’d like to see me out of the way,’ he answered.
‘If anything happens to you,’ I pledged, ‘I’ll go straight to the international press. They’ll believe me when I say you were murdered. There’ll be a huge outcry. The Chinese government will never get away with it. The repercussions will be enormous.’
‘Good.’
The ritual was for the benefit of the Chinese security forces who listened in on Hou’s phone calls.
The Party, dominated now by its most politically hardline faction, was not in a tolerant mood. Just ahead was a series of highly sensitive dates, beginning with the Qing Ming Festival on 5 April, the traditional day for remembering the dead, and continuing through 15 April, the first anniversary of Hu Yaobang’s death, 22 April, his funeral, and so on all the way through 4 June. Activists abroad called for people to ‘take a walk’ on Tiananmen on those days to show the authorities nothing was forgotten, nothing was forgiven. Hou declared he’d stroll on the square, then had second thoughts. ‘If you don’t have a big stick,’ he told reporters, ‘it’s better to stay away from mad dogs.’
At the end of March, a representative from the United Front Department came to see Hou and offered to arrange a little holiday outside Beijing for him and a few friends over Qing Ming. Hou thanked them but said he was staying in Beijing. The security forces stepped up surveillance of his activities.
By 1 April 1990, the streets were swarming with police armed with machine-guns and electric truncheons. Teachers were ordered to keep an eye on their students. The party secretaries in factories threatened to sack any workers caught commemorating the approaching anniversaries in any way, including the wearing of either white or black (the traditional and contemporary colours of mourning) on those days. Armed police patrolled the university district while soldiers practised their martial arts skills in public locations around the city.
On Qing Ming, the universities shipped their students out on excursions to the Great Wall, while primary school children were bussed in to sing and dance the praises of socialism on the square itself. Plainclothes policemen hung about the square’s edges photographing onlookers, and platoons of soldiers goose-stepped by chorusing ‘Socialism is good! Unity is strength!’ The day passed without incident. On 15 April, someone managed to lay a wreath for Hu Yaobang and ‘the brave fighters who died for the restoration of the Chinese nation’ at the monument in the centre of the square, but police quickly removed both him and his wreath.
Human rights activists in the US, meanwhile, lobbied for China not to be granted Most Favoured Nation trading status unless Beijing improved its human rights record. President George Bush had to make a decision by 3 June. On 10 May, in possibly a conciliatory gesture, but also responding to pressure from more moderate factions within China as well, the Chinese government announced that they were releasing several ‘law-breakers involved in the turmoil and counterrevolutionary rebellion’. Among them was Zhou Duo.
Zhou appeared in better shape than Gao had been. Held not in prison but in a guesthouse outside Beijing, he’d been allowed to read books and newspapers and even keep a diary. They’d been about to release him in December but panicked in the face of the events in Romania.
Hou was delighted to have him back. Gao Xin and Zhou Duo decided they’d join Hou in speaking out. Hou, for his part, felt he’d said just about everything he had to say, and volunteered to
act as their publicist.
When the trio got together, the conversation often turned to Xiaobo. He’d been in prison now for nearly an entire year without formal charge or trial. They missed him and worried how he was surviving. It was difficult to conceive of him adopting what the authorities called a ‘good attitude’; they couldn’t imagine he’d be less stubborn and argumentative in prison than he was in ordinary life.
As the biggest anniversary of them all, 4 June, approached, the government was taking no chances. Tiananmen Square would be sealed off from 1 June for official programs ranging from a commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Opium Wars to a traffic safety campaign for which the square would be filled with 2000 cars on 4 June itself. If anyone needed reminding about the consequences of protest, the Chinese media conspicuously reported the execution of twenty more people involved in the events of the previous year, including one man in Sichuan province whose crime had been trashing a military jeep.
The Public Security Bureau offered to lend Hou a car so he and his friends could take a ‘little holiday’ anywhere they pleased, so long as they left Beijing. ‘I’ve already got a car,’ he told them. ‘And I’m not going anywhere.’
As it turned out, Hou would go all right and not just for a ‘little holiday’ either. But he’d go in style—following what Reuters was to call ‘one of the boldest public expressions of dissent since last June’s bloody military crackdown’.
AT the end of May 1990, Hou Dejian, Zhou Duo and Gao Xin drafted an open letter to China’s leaders. Reaffirming their commitment to the principles of rationality, tolerance and non-violence, they reminded the leaders of their role in organising the peaceful evacuation of the square. They called the twelve months since 4 June ‘the most silent and repressive year since the beginning of Reform and the Open Door a decade ago’. They urged the government to release Liu Xiaobo and all other political prisoners.
