Wang felt a dull sadness. Until the censors started calling, he had not thought about Zhao in years. For most of the past decade and a half, Wang had been immersing himself in books about memory chips and programming languages, and building a comfortable life for himself and his wife, complete with a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs. But Zhao’s death brought back memories from another life, one in which he dared to fight for principles like freedom of speech. It stirred up feelings that had been gnawing at his conscience and doubts about the choices he had made. It made him wonder what had become of the young idealist he once was.
It felt as if a lifetime had passed since he participated in the protests in Tiananmen Square, but now he remembered the exhilaration of marching through the city as part of a crowd of hundreds of thousands; the cry of students chanting slogans for freedom and democracy; the conviction that he could make a difference and help steer his nation toward a better future. He was a junior at the China University of Politics and Law then, a shy kid from the countryside who gained self-confidence in the student movement. As the demonstrations grew and spread across the country that spring, Wang set up a loudspeaker station on his campus so classmates could broadcast news and speeches. He often spent his days in the square and his nights at the loudspeaker station, sleeping only a few hours at a time and living off the adrenalin rush of idealism. He was at the station on the night the army opened fire, reading out the reports of violence as they came in, but he kept thinking that there must be a mistake, that the military couldn’t have done this, that people weren’t really dying. When the bodies of four students killed in the shooting were brought back to the university, he put down the microphone and wept.
Later that morning, teachers and classmates urged Wang to flee the capital: he had attracted attention to himself, and they feared the authorities would be looking to arrest him. Rushing to the rail station, Wang saw the smoking wrecks of cars and buses that residents had tried to use to block the army’s attack. He caught the first train out, and eventually made his way to his hometown in rural Shanxi Province, where he listened to the reports of student arrests and waited for word of his own fate. Several tense weeks later, the university summoned him back to campus—he would be allowed to return to school and graduate if he confessed. Wang felt he had no choice. The teachers assigned to his case let him get away with describing only his own actions and never pressed him to name others who took part in the demonstrations. But like many students in his situation, Wang had to endorse the military crackdown and write that he had been “tricked” into supporting the democracy movement. It was a lie, but at the time he was just relieved to be getting off easy.
After earning his law degree, Wang returned to his hometown and struggled to find work because no one wanted to hire someone tainted by participation in the Tiananmen protests. As the government pushed ahead with market reforms, though, the emerging private sector began to overtake the state economy, creating opportunities even for political outcasts. A fellow law student and Tiananmen protester named Pu Zhiqiang helped Wang get a job at an advertising firm in Beijing. The company was hired to produce a regular feature page about computers for a state newspaper, and Wang was assigned to edit it. He threw himself into work, learning as much as he could about the computer industry. One job led to another, and within a few years he had gained enough experience and expertise to start a tech consulting firm with a friend. Suddenly he was a member of Beijing’s growing middle class.
Each year, Wang let go of the past a little more. It hurt to dwell on the tragedy, to think of the lives lost and the fact that no one would ever be held accountable, to wonder how China might be different if the party had set the nation on a path of gradual political reform. The Communist Party maintained a tight grip on power, and as far as Wang could tell, there was nothing he could do about it. So, like almost everyone else, he moved on. He focused on his own problems instead of the country’s, on work instead of politics, on money instead of justice.
Wang worked so hard that his health suffered. In 2000, he was forced to take a medical leave and while recuperating at home, he found himself exploring the World Wide Web. The Internet was still relatively new to China, and the government had not yet started blocking access to politically objectionable Web sites. Bored and restless, Wang came across the vast array of material available online about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations—essays, memoirs, reports, even videos. He was quickly drawn in, spending entire days in front of his computer, scrolling through one compelling document after another. A novel he found online left a particularly deep impression. It was based on the experiences of a group of friends who agonized over whether to help a democracy activist wanted by police after the massacre; in the end, they tried to smuggle him out of the country but were betrayed by one of their own, and they all ended up in prison. It was during this break from his hectic career that Wang began to think about the potential of the Internet; he would help start Bokee.com three years later. It was also during the medical leave that Wang first read at length about Zhao Ziyang. In the final days of the democracy movement, he had seen a poster on campus calling on students to “protect” Zhao, and he recalled reading a number of reports about political reform written by think tanks under Zhao’s control. But the party’s efforts to erase Zhao from history had been so effective that Wang never appreciated who Zhao was and what he had done until he read about him on the Web. It was only then that he learned Zhao was still alive and being held under house arrest.
After Zhao’s death, Wang felt compelled to examine his own life, to ask himself if he had strayed too far from his principles in the years since Tiananmen. Yes, he marked the anniversary of the movement every year by visiting the square with a few old friends. Yes, he once signed an open letter urging the government to apologize for the massacre. But could he have done more? His company had challenged the state’s monopoly of the media by giving millions of Chinese a place to publish on the Web. But given his compliance with the party’s Internet censors, was that enough?
The more Wang thought, the more he knew he had to pay tribute to Zhao. At home that evening, he sat in front of his computer and composed a eulogy:
Your death will be in our hearts forever, never to be forgotten. We will always remember that you once used your body to block the bullets that gunned down our nation’s glorious future. You calmly endured 16 years of life without freedom. You never bowed your head. You stood up for justice. You displayed the utmost in political courage. Because of you, there was a rare bit of color in the gloom of politics. And yet the cowardly souls you tried to redeem repaid you with cruel confinement. For 16 years, you as a common citizen frightened those destroying our nation, shamed those who are fainthearted, and inspired people of integrity and ideals. All patriotic people who cherish justice, whether they are old or young, from north or south, followed you closely, praying for you and hoping that one day they might fight for the nation’s future with you. We shared the same willingness to act regardless of what might happen to us, the same love of our country, the same desire to pursue justice and freedom. But now, before we could realize our dreams, the heavens have taken you from us. How could we not grieve deeply?
Wang signed the essay “The 1989 Generation,” and sent copies to some friends.
The next day, he read online that people were visiting Zhao’s home to pay their respects to his family, and he decided that he would also go. He skipped work a few days later. Together with a few friends, he bought some flowers and located Zhao’s house using an address he found on the Internet. No one tried to stop them as they walked down a narrow alley to the house, but inside past the large red doors, Wang noticed several men who appeared to be state security agents. Some had cameras and snapped photos, but he was no longer frightened. He signed his name in a guest book on a table near the entrance and left his phone number, too.
The house was of a traditional design, with rooms positioned around two small courtyards. The family
had set up a memorial shrine in a small study located to the left, and it was full of wreaths of white and yellow chrysanthemums graced with black and white ribbons carrying messages of condolence. A portrait of Zhao wearing a light blue shirt hung on the center of the main wall. Nearby was a funeral scroll: “To be your children is the honor of our lives. To support your decision is our unchanging choice.”
What Wang found most striking about Zhao’s house was how ordinary and run-down it was. The walls were dirty, the ceilings were low, and the study was furnished only with a shabby sofa, an old desk, and a small collection of books, among them the translated memoirs of a few U.S. and Soviet leaders and a recent exposé of rural corruption, An Investigation of China’s Peasantry. It occurred to Wang that the house was not much bigger or better than his parents’ simple home in the countryside. So this was where a great man had been confined in old age, left to die all but forgotten by the world.
Wang expressed his sympathies to Zhao’s relatives, who were dressed in dark blue cotton coats, and he gave them copies of the eulogy he’d written. One of Zhao’s grandchildren, a teenage girl, started to cry as she read the tribute, and as he watched her, Wang found himself wiping away tears, too.
FUNERALS FOR POPULAR Chinese leaders can be politically sensitive affairs. In 1976, Mao tried to restrict public mourning for his longtime deputy, Premier Zhou Enlai, the man who engineered the rapprochement with the United States and was viewed as a voice of restraint during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. But a million people lined his funeral route, and tens of thousands later staged protests in Tiananmen Square and clashed with police. The 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen were also triggered by the death of a popular leader, the reformist party chief Hu Yaobang, who had been ousted by hard-liners two years earlier. So in 2005, the leadership approached Zhao’s funeral with particular caution. It wanted a memorial service that would help the nation forget Zhao’s life, not celebrate it.
The task seemed easy enough, for it had never been very difficult to persuade people to forget Zhao. Western governments stopped asking about him almost as soon as he fell from power, and kept his name off the lists of political prisoners they inquired about. Many analysts at the time considered Zhao an authoritarian leader who sided with the students as part of a power struggle, not a genuine democrat. His critics argued that he never showed much interest in democratic reform before the Tiananmen movement, and accused him of helping the party’s hard-liners topple his liberal predecessor. Zhao backed the prodemocracy demonstrations, they said, only because he was an opportunist making a power play against the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. This was the cynic’s interpretation of Zhao’s decision to oppose the military assault in 1989, and Deng and the men he picked to replace Zhao were more than happy to let it stand. The last thing they wanted people to believe was the alternative, that Zhao was that rare exception in the history of Chinese Communist Party leaders: a man who could no longer go along with evil.
But in time, that’s what the evidence showed he was. In internal documents smuggled out of China and memoirs written by people who worked with him, a picture emerged of Zhao that challenged the party’s caricature. Not only was he a bold advocate of capitalist-style economic reforms at a time when party conservatives were fighting such policies as ideological heresy, he also was a proponent of political reform who favored a democratic transition in China, albeit a gradual one. During his three years in power, Zhao promoted discussion of changes in the party’s ossified political structure to reduce corruption, including the introduction of competitive elections and increased autonomy for local and national parliaments. He told one aide he hoped provincial-level elections could be held within a decade. Another recalled that during Zhao’s tenure, neither the Politburo nor its powerful Standing Committee ever discussed a single case involving a “political crime.” And when officials sought his instructions about a new film about the Cultural Revolution, Zhao suggested the party stop interfering in the arts. “I don’t investigate movies, I watch them,” he said. “If I have to issue instructions for every movie I see, I think I’ll stop watching movies.”
When the students filled Tiananmen Square, Zhao encouraged dialogue and calm, cautioned his colleagues against heavy-handed measures, and appeared to sympathize with the protesters’ demands. “Democracy is a worldwide trend,” he told the Politburo on May 1, two weeks after the demonstrations began and months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. “If the party does not hold up the banner of democracy in our country, someone else will, and we will lose out. I think we should grab the lead on this and not be pushed along grudgingly.” A few weeks later, Zhao discussed the subject with the Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to Beijing at the height of the student protests for a previously scheduled summit meeting. “Can a one-party system ensure the development of democracy?” Zhao asked his Soviet counterpart. “Can it implement effective control over negative phenomena and fight the corruption in party and government institutions?” Gorbachev recalled the conversation in his memoirs:
From Zhao’s arguments, it followed that the Chinese leadership was prepared to follow the path of political reform by giving the masses a chance to enjoy broad democratic rights under one-party rule. He concluded that if this did not work out, the issue of a multi-party system would inevitably arise. In addition, he emphasized the need to strengthen citizens’ constitutional rights and create an optimal correlation between democracy and law. Law must be based on democracy, and democracy must be based on law…. To be frank, the openness demonstrated at my meeting with [Zhao] amazed me…. Here he was, faced with a democratic challenge from the student masses. Zhao Ziyang had to know that many were demanding the imposition of order, since the student demonstrations had taken on the character of civil disobedience. But most of these demonstrators were people who had followed him, after all, or at least who had been inspired by ideas he himself shared. Herein lay his drama.
The drama reached its climax the day after Zhao’s meeting with Gorbachev. In an expanded session of the Politburo Standing Committee, Deng proposed the imposition of martial law to clear the square and end the protests. Zhao objected, and when he was overruled, he tendered his resignation.
After the bloodshed, Zhao submitted to life under house arrest. From his home at No. 6 Fuqiang Hutong, he watched in frustration as the party blamed him for the student “turmoil” and then set out to make sure the country forgot him. He tried to resist. In the late 1990s, two letters he wrote demanding a reassessment of the Tiananmen protests were leaked to the public. And later, in interviews secretly conducted by various friends in the years before his death, he managed to present his views for the historical record. He explained his plans for gradual democratic reform, answering critics who accused him of moving too slowly as well as those who said he had moved too fast, and he faulted Deng for failing to grasp the need to adapt the political system to the new economy he was building. He denied trying to push out his predecessor, and criticized his successors—China’s current leaders—for lacking vision and forbidding even talk of political reform. He worried about rampant corruption and rising discontent with the party’s rule, and wondered whether those who benefited most from China’s one-party market economy—party hacks and their cronies—were already too powerful and entrenched for any leader to introduce democracy. But most of all, he denounced the Tiananmen Square massacre. “There was an argument that the suppression was the last resort, as there was no alternative. This argument is wrong,” he said. “We had many chances that would have made a solution without bloodshed possible.”
Zhao lived under constant surveillance, and security remained tight even as he lay on his deathbed in the hospital. Some party officials resorted to putting on white lab coats and pretending to be doctors so they could keep a closer eye on him. When Li Rui, the eighty-eight-year-old former government minister who once served as an aide to Mao, attempted to visit Zhao in late December, security agents blocked his w
ay for nearly an hour before a supervisor intervened. Days before Zhao’s death, the seventy-five-year-old former Politburo member Tian Jiyun was permitted to see his former colleague for the first time in more than fifteen years, but security agents insisted on staying in the room to monitor their brief conversation. After Zhao died of lung failure, Tian returned to the hospital. “Now that he has gone,” he told Zhao’s children, “we don’t have to be afraid any more of people saying we are plotting some so-called hidden scheme!” Zhao’s only daughter, Wang Yannan, announced her father’s death in a text message to friends with her cell phone: “He left quietly this morning. He is free at last!”
But even after Zhao’s death, the security apparatus didn’t back off. His children began having trouble making and receiving calls with their cell phones, and the calls that did go through were often cut off. Police set up checkpoints around his house, blocking friends trying to visit to express their sympathies. They also detained a large group of petitioners, ordinary citizens from around the country who had traveled to Beijing with grievances against the abuse of power by local officials, and who unfurled a banner “in memory of our good leader.” When Bao Tong, the seventy-two-year-old former aide to Zhao who was the highest-ranking official arrested in the Tiananmen crackdown, attempted to leave his apartment building to pay his respects, a team of plainclothes security agents shoved him back inside and into an elevator. His seventy-three-year-old wife was knocked to the ground in the scuffle and hospitalized for weeks with a fractured vertebra. Bao sprained his wrist and a finger, but the agents wouldn’t let him see a doctor unless he removed a white flower pinned to his shirt and a black armband he was wearing, traditional symbols of mourning. He refused and endured the pain instead.
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 2
