Meanwhile, Zhao’s children began negotiating their father’s memorial arrangements with senior party officials assigned to handle the funeral. The family wanted to host the service and open it to the public, but the party insisted that it be allowed to take control and restrict attendance. Another point of dispute was the content of an official obituary evaluating Zhao’s life. Such obituaries are standard protocol for senior officials, but Zhao’s family objected because the party’s draft accused him of making a “serious mistake” in 1989 and played down his role in promoting the market reforms that transformed the economy. They argued that if any “mistake” was mentioned, the party should be specific about what their father had done wrong, and note that he spent the last years of his life under house arrest for it. There was also disagreement over what would happen to Zhao’s ashes. The party agreed to place them in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the nation’s main resting place for revolutionary heroes and high government officials, but selected a small memorial hall that the family complained held only the ashes of lower-level officials. Later, the family inquired about purchasing a plot in the section of the cemetery open to the public. Party officials lied and told them it was sold out, apparently because they worried the tomb might become a gathering place for the party’s opponents in the future.
After sixteen rounds of negotiations in little more than a week, the party finally told the family it intended to organize a modest, invitation-only funeral and refrain from publishing an official evaluation of Zhao’s life. The family would be allowed to submit a list of guests and take his ashes home. Zhao’s children reluctantly agreed, but outlined their concerns in a letter to party authorities. They noted that their father had been held under illegal house arrest for nearly sixteen years, and urged the party to give people who had been prevented from seeing him for so long a chance to attend the funeral and say good-bye. They said their father never changed his position on the Tiananmen Square movement, and neither would they. The party was just wrong, they wrote, and no matter what it said about him now, “history would draw the correct conclusion.”
ABOUT A WEEK after Wang Junxiu visited Zhao’s house, the family arranged for him to get an invitation to the funeral. Wang knew that attending the service would be a political statement, and that there could be consequences. Perhaps the secret police would put his name on some blacklist, or scrutinize his company’s finances, or put pressure on his business partners. Anything could happen, or nothing could happen. The uncertainty had the effect of magnifying fear, and the party used fear to discourage people from concerning themselves with politics or public affairs. It preferred that they focus on their narrow self-interests, because that made it easier to keep them divided and prevent them from coming together to challenge its rule. It preferred that people skip Zhao’s funeral. Wang recognized that there was no benefit to attending the service, only risks and costs. But he decided almost immediately that he would go. His conscience demanded it. As a member of the Tiananmen generation and one of the many students that Zhao had tried to defend, he felt it was the least he could do.
Wang woke before dawn on the morning of the memorial service. The Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery was on the other side of the city, and he had arranged to meet a few friends and share a ride. It was a frigid winter day, and brisk winds had cleared away the pollution that usually choked Beijing, revealing a cloudless blue sky. Despite the cold, Wang dressed lightly, just a sweater and a leather jacket. He took a cab to a nearby light rail station, passing the headquarters of the army’s 2nd Artillery Division, the offices of the computer manufacturer Lenovo, and a vast construction site where yet another luxury apartment complex was going up. The train took him from the suburbs to a subway station in the city, where his friends picked him up in a jeep. There were three others in the car with him: Xue Ye, an environmental activist; Mo Zhaohui, a book publisher; and a driver employed by Mo’s publishing house. Both Xue and Mo had participated in the 1989 demonstrations, and the three of them had been friends for years.
Sitting in the back with Xue, Wang noticed three large bundles of white cloth on the floor of the jeep. In the days before, he and his friends had decided to carry banners in honor of Zhao to the service, and Mo had paid a company to make them. “You are free at last!” read one. “Our memories will not fade, your ideals will never die!” read another. The third said, “You inspired awe by maintaining justice, and that will not diminish with time!” Each was signed “The 1989 Generation.” Wang had felt strongly about bringing the banners. He knew that most of the leaders of the Tiananmen movement had been exiled, and that others who participated had been detained in recent days to prevent them from attending the funeral. He thought the banners would speak on their behalf. He also wanted other people, especially those younger than them, to know that his generation had not been silenced and had not forgotten what happened. But as he examined the bundles of cloth in the car, Wang realized there was a problem. They were too big and too heavy. At least two people would be required to carry each one, even if they were not unfurled. After some discussion, Mo and Xue said they would carry one in first, and if no one stopped them, Wang would recruit friends to help him bring in the other two.
As they drove toward the cemetery, Wang noticed more and more police taking up positions on the streets, men in dark blue uniforms with motorcycles, cruisers, and vans. The vast deployment seemed intended to crush any attempt to stage demonstrations in the city. Some of the officers were setting up checkpoints and roadblocks, and Wang began to worry they might be stopped and prevented from going to the funeral. Xue wondered aloud if the police might try to seize the banners and get rough with them. He scribbled a few names and numbers on a scrap of paper, then handed it to Wang along with his house keys. “If anything happens,” he said, “call these people and give them my keys.” Wang looked at his friend, and it suddenly occurred to him that they were not young anymore. The 1989 generation had grown up. As they approached the cemetery, it was almost 9 A.M.
The memorial activities had begun four hours earlier, in the hospital where Zhao died. The authorities had prohibited Bao Tong, his chief political aide, from attending the funeral, but at the family’s insistence, the party agreed to let him pay his respects in a private ceremony at the hospital. He arrived in a police motorcade under armed guard at 5 A.M. and walked into the room with his hand still bandaged from the scuffle two weeks earlier. Bao looked thin and frail, the white flower still pinned on his shirt, and as a funeral dirge played, he bowed his head before Zhao’s body. It was the first time since Bao’s arrest in May 1989 that he had been permitted to see his old colleague. “You are the only person now with a clear understanding of some things,” one of Zhao’s sons said to him, referring to the party’s secret deliberations before the crackdown. “It’s clear to everyone now,” Bao replied. “Everyone knows what happened. The people all know.” After the ceremony, he posed for a photograph with Zhao’s extended family. But as soon as Zhao’s daughter took out her camera, party officials objected and tried to take it from her. Her brothers came to her defense, and there was yelling and chaos. “If you are human, leave us alone!” Bao shouted. It was only after the family threatened to cancel the funeral that the officials finally backed off and let them take the picture.
The funeral motorcade departed the hospital soon afterward. It was still dark out, and police stopped traffic at every intersection on the route to the cemetery. The motorcade sped through the sleeping city, almost racing, as if the authorities were worried someone might wake and catch a glimpse of it going by. Zhao’s family urged the police to show some respect and slow down, but they were ignored.
At the cemetery, there was a dispute over a funeral scroll the family had prepared. “You advocated democracy and stood by your conscience. Your children are proud of you,” it said. “In the Western heavens, you finally won your freedom. Your grace remains with us forever.” A party official objected. “Democracy, hmph! Freedom, hmph!
You can’t put these up during a funeral hosted by the organization.” Zhao’s family refused to back down and threatened to walk out if the scroll were not put up. But at 8:10 A.M., twenty minutes before the funeral was scheduled to begin, the family was asked to take their positions for a practice run of the ceremony. Instead of a rehearsal, though, the party started the actual service. Without a warning to the family and without the funeral scroll going up, an orchestral dirge started playing, and the first guests, members of the party’s senior leadership, walked into the hall.
Zhao’s successors—the retired party chief, Jiang Zemin, and the new president, Hu Jintao—didn’t bother to show up. Neither did Premier Wen Jiabao, who once served as an aide to Zhao and accompanied him on his last desperate visit with the students in Tiananmen Square. Instead, the government was represented by Jia Qinglin, a man many considered one of the Politburo’s most corrupt members, precisely the kind of figure Zhao had hoped his political reforms would prevent from rising to power. Jia and the few other party bigwigs who came were whisked away before other guests were allowed to enter.
Neither the time nor the location of the memorial service had been announced to the public. But outside, thousands of people from across the country were converging on the cemetery. Hundreds were already waiting at the gate. The family had submitted a list of nearly three thousand guests to the party, including almost everyone who had visited their home or contacted them after Zhao’s death. But it was clear that many more had come hoping to pay their respects to Zhao. Uniformed and plainclothes police were everywhere, trying to stop those without invitations while letting the others through. One group of mourners hoisted a banner that said “Zhao Ziyang’s spirit lives forever,” and then police tackled them. Others tried to break through the police cordon and were dragged away.
Wang’s companions dropped him off in the crowd, then took the jeep to the parking lot, where they were going to try to bring their banners in through a different gate. He got in line, and began making his way toward the cemetery through the police checkpoints. Along the way, he ran into one old friend after another, and marveled at the number of people who had decided to come. At one gate, a small crowd had gathered around officers who had stopped an elderly woman because she didn’t have an invitation. She was in her eighties and could walk only with the help of her granddaughter, who did have an invitation. Several of the guests were arguing with the officers, urging them to show compassion and let the old woman in. Later, inside the cemetery, Wang saw another small crowd gathered around the police, and then realized that his friends Mo and Xue were at the center of the group. The police had taken the banner from them. After a brief delay, they let them continue inside without it.
Wang and his friends fell in behind the crowd of mourners waiting to enter the memorial hall. They stood in a row of four, talking quietly as they stepped inside. Fifty funeral wreaths were placed along the walls, and the photo of Zhao in the blue denim shirt was displayed at the front of the small room. Zhao’s pale and gaunt body lay on a dais, dressed in a traditional, high-collared jacket and covered by the red-and-white Communist Party flag. As loudspeakers played the dirge, Wang and his friends bowed three times before Zhao’s body. Then they each shook hands with Zhao’s relatives, who stood along a wall to the left. But no one was allowed to linger. Plainclothes officers briskly ushered Wang and his companions out as others behind them repeated the ceremony.
As he left the building, Wang felt an intense anger welling up inside him, and he wept in frustration. It was not just the scaled-down memorial service, which he considered an unacceptable substitute for the full state funeral Zhao deserved. Nor was it only the disrespectful behavior of the police and the huge security presence, which he found insulting to Zhao’s memory and his legacy. (How could the authorities send an armored antiriot vehicle to the funeral of the man who refused to order troops into Tiananmen Square?) Rather, he felt a deep despair over what had become of his nation since Zhao’s death. Leaning on a wall outside the memorial hall with tears in his eyes and a police officer barking at him to keep moving, Wang was overcome by the magnitude of the country’s problems—the rampant corruption and abuse of power, the rising inequality and injustice, the moral decay of society.
And then he noticed the people around him. The mourners represented a remarkable cross section of China’s emerging civil society. Wang had met some of them before. Others he knew only by reputation. There were environmentalists and journalists, businessmen and bloggers, and a generation of students too young to remember the prodemocracy movement of 1989 yet still inspired by its ideals. Wealthy entrepreneurs and well-known scholars stood shoulder to shoulder with humble farmers and laid-off factory workers. There was the labor activist Lu Kun, whose husband was in prison for starting a study group to discuss democratic reform, and the young AIDS activist Li Dan, who had clashed with the authorities to expose a hidden epidemic caused by local blood banks. There was Li Heping, one of several self-taught lawyers at the forefront of a campaign to protect the rights of ordinary citizens and force the party to obey its own laws. Wang remembered the missing faces, too, people whom the police had detained in recent days to prevent them from attending the funeral, including his old classmate Pu Zhiqiang, now a prominent freedom-of-speech lawyer, and the historian Ding Zilin, who lost a son in the massacre and was working with a group of mothers to compile a list of all those killed in Tiananmen.
Zhao’s death marked the end of an era in China. If the nation were ever to undergo the democratic transition he envisioned, it wouldn’t be because of one of Zhao’s timid successors in the Communist Party leadership. It would be because of these people who had come to his funeral—people who refused to forget the past and dared to work for a different future. Despite the pain of decades of violent political turmoil and the temptations of a flourishing and freewheeling economy—or perhaps precisely because of both—these people had not given up on Zhao’s vision of a more democratic China. On a day of mourning, Wang saw in them a glimmer of hope.
2
SEARCHING FOR LIN ZHAO’S SOUL
On the afternoon he lost his last steady job, Hu Jie bicycled aimlessly through the smog and traffic of Nanjing, brooding over the mystery of his abrupt dismissal. It was a sweltering Tuesday in the summer of 1999, and his shirt clung to his back with sweat as he navigated the alleyways of a bustling district not far from the Yangtze River. In the sky above, dark clouds threatened a downpour. But Hu kept pedaling, unsure where he was going or what he should do. His mind was racing, disturbed by the past, troubled by the future, returning again and again to the same question: Had the authorities discovered his obsession with the dead woman?
He was a lean, imposing man, with broad shoulders and intense eyes, and he looked younger than his forty-one years. For much of his life, Hu had been a soldier. He served in the air force as a fighter jet mechanic, then as an officer and a political instructor, and there was still something of the soldier in the way he walked and talked, even in the way he sat: watchful, on edge, ready to snap to attention. But there was a bohemian quality about him, too. The plain dark t-shirts he favored and the beard covering his square jaw hinted at his life after the military, when he moved into an artists’ ghetto and tried to reinvent himself as an oil painter, then as a documentary filmmaker. It was only years later, as he surrendered to middle age, that Hu took his latest, most conventional job, as cameraman and producer for Xinhua, the government’s official news agency. There he put together video reports for private screening by party officials across the country. It was a comfortable post, with all the benefits and privileges associated with a position near the top of the state’s propaganda apparatus, and it allowed him to provide a stable home for his wife and son.
Hu Jie
Yet Hu knew he didn’t really fit in at the agency. Xinhua paid the bills, opened doors, and gave him access to equipment and resources, but Hu always saw himself as an independent filmmaker first and an employee of
the state second. Between assignments, he continued working on his documentaries, examining poverty in the countryside, the status of rural women, and other subjects the news agency routinely ignored. His films were not truly subversive, but they cast a critical eye on Chinese society, and that was usually enough to alarm the high priests of the propaganda ministry, who labored to project a sunny image of the party’s rule and quash anything that might cast doubt on that ideal. Hu knew the censors would never approve his documentaries for release in theaters or dissemination through other official channels, so he distributed them himself on videodiscs. He also knew it was only a matter of time before someone at Xinhua noticed what he was doing and decided a fellow like him didn’t belong there.
Now, after two years on the job, it seemed that day had finally come. Earlier that humid afternoon, Hu’s boss had called him into his office and fired him. The man didn’t say much. He just mumbled a weak apology that he “couldn’t resist the pressure from above.” Hu was furious, but he went quietly. He didn’t press for an explanation; he knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer. He signed a resignation letter, cleaned out his desk, and collected the last of his wages.
As he bicycled through the traffic of Nanjing, along boulevards lined with poplar trees, past office towers gleaming with mirrored glass and apartment blocks adorned with damp laundry, Hu considered his sudden unemployment. He felt uneasy, almost nauseous, certainly worse than he had expected. Searching for the source of his anxiety, he recalled his latest project, a subject he had come across only a month earlier, while doing a favor for a friend. He had been helping her move furniture for an old classmate of her parents, and during a break from the heavy lifting, she had mentioned that her parents also went to school with someone named Lin Zhao.
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 3
