by Ian Buruma
Wang Dan, bookish, bespectacled, the most reflective figure among his peers, led the Autonomous Federation of Students in 1989. He arrived in America in 1998, after several years in jail, to study history at Harvard. Chai Ling, the so-called chief commander on the Square, is the CEO of a computer software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or at least she was when I last saw her in 1999. Feng Congde, Chai Ling’s ex-husband, lived in Paris and was rumored to have gone through various religious phases: Taoism, Christianity, Buddhism. Li Lu, Chai’s “deputy” on the Square, manages a hedge fund in Manhattan. Wang Chaohua, one of the oldest and more politically astute Federation of Students leaders in 1989, was studying Chinese literature at UCLA. Zhang Boli, founder, on the eve of the massacre, of the so-called Democracy University on the Square, was studying to be a Protestant minister in California. Wu’er Kaixi, the student leader with rock-star charisma, was a radio-talk-show host in Taiwan.
Chai Ling was seen on television all over the world every day for almost a month: a small, frail girl in a grubby white T-shirt and baggy jeans, admonishing, entertaining, and hectoring the crowds through a megaphone that seemed to hide her whole face. Her image—the megaphone in jeans—was as emblematic of that year of revolutions as the short film clip of the young man trying to defy a tank on Chang’an Avenue. She was on the cover of magazines. Her statements were distributed on audiotapes. There were Chai Ling T-shirts on sale in Hong Kong. Only twenty-three years old at the time, Chai, then a graduate student of psychology at Beijing Normal University, seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Feng Congde was the political one. She followed her husband. That, at any rate, is how she remembers it. But Chai displayed a remarkable capacity for making men follow her. It was one of the main reasons other student leaders set her up as a figure to rally around on the Square. Her oddly affecting physical presence—the ready smile, the quick tears, the appealing eyes—and her gift for oratory held together a disparate, fractious movement, especially when morale was flagging.
Chai’s speech on May 12 moved hundreds of people to go on a hunger strike when the government ignored the students’ demands for a public “dialogue,” and she galvanized the support of many thousands of others. “We, the children,” she said, her reedy voice breaking with emotion, “are ready to die. We, the children, are ready to use our lives to pursue the truth. We, the children, are willing to sacrifice ourselves.” Who could resist such innocence, such purity? Chai’s tearful rhetoric of blood sacrifice owed something to universal student romanticism, exploited by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, but there were echoes too of an older Chinese tradition shaped less by romance than by force of circumstance: It was not rare for critics of the emperor to sacrifice their lives as the ultimate price for telling the truth. Days after the crackdown, while Chai was on the run, a tape of her recalling the last hours on the Square was smuggled out of China. The students, she said, sang “Descendants of the Dragon” with tears in their eyes2. And then: “We embraced each other and held hands, for we knew that the end had come. It was time to die for the nation.”
This message was broadcast in Hong Kong. But she had made another statement a week before, not meant for public consumption. It was recorded in a Beijing hotel room by an American reporter named Philip Cunningham. The interview became the centerpiece of a 1995 documentary film about Tiananmen, The Gate of Heavenly Peace. In it, Chai is sitting on a bed, small, thin, and jittery with nervous exhaustion. Government troops have moved into Beijing. Factions within the student movement are quarreling about tactics, aims, pecking orders, and money. Chai is sobbing as she speaks: “My students keep asking me, ‘What should we do next? What can we accomplish?’ I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to butcher the people brazenly? Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?”
I first met Chai in 1996, when we were both visiting Taiwan for the first free presidential elections in Chinese history. I was there to write a magazine article. She was a political celebrity making the rounds of talk shows and official dinners. It was hard to imagine the Chai I met in Taipei being the same person as that hysterical, sobbing girl in the Beijing hotel room in 1989. Her small body had thickened, her narrow eyes had widened, and she was dressed smartly in the style of an American businesswoman: white skirt, maroon blazer, gold buttons. Divorced from her Chinese husband, she now spoke softly in almost flawless American sentences. Only her sweet, dimpled smile reminded me of earlier images I had seen.
We were sitting around the breakfast table one morning in our hotel, and were joined by two Chinese-Americans, David and Gloria, from St. Petersburg, Florida. David, a dapper man in pale cream trousers, and Gloria, a small woman wearing thick white makeup, had strong opinions about Taiwanese politics. The Taiwanese people, they said, were clearly not ready for democracy. Just look at the corruption and the crime rate. And that President Lee Teng-hui, why, he spoke better Japanese than Chinese. Was he even Chinese at all? He was clearly being manipulated by Japan into provoking China with all his talk of Taiwan going its own way. Gloria then turned to me to explain why Chinese people everywhere needed to be united. I was only half listening, for I was watching Chai in fascination. She was speaking soothingly to David, in English, about “the dignity of free choice” and the need for “constitutional limits of power.” David was clearly irritated. He said the most important thing was to stick to the goal of a united China. Then, while he was still in full flow, Chai glanced at her chunky gold watch, smoothed her blazer, and said with a smile: “Pardon me, but I’ve got to go. David, Gloria, I want you to know I really respect your opinions and thank you for a real fruitful communication. Have a nice day.”
From blood sacrifice to constitutionalism and “Have a nice day”: The shift in rhetoric and the slickness of its presentation were remarkable. Three years later, I saw Chai again. We met for a cappuccino in a nice outdoor café in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had been living since she enrolled at Harvard Business School in 1996. Once again, I was struck by her eagerness to charm, her coquettishness, and the steeliness within the cuddly frame. Occasionally, there would be a sudden hint of suspicion—“Who told you that?” “Why do you want to know that?”—but such outbursts were followed by a cocked head, the dimpled smile, and a disarming assurance that “of course, I trust you. You are my friend.”
We talked about her Internet company, backed by executives from Reebok and Microsoft. The clichés of American political science had made way now for those of the corporate world. America, she said, was “a wonderful land of opportunity for anyone prepared to work his butt off.” Her aim, by selling communication technology to American colleges, was to “create an environment where people can interact creatively.” Her partner was the Republican former state treasurer of Massachusetts and her main adviser was her former boss in a “global strategy consultancy firm.”
Chai handed me a folder with promotional material. It contained references to her career at the Harvard Business School and her “leadership skills” on Tiananmen Square. She spoke to me about her plans to liberate China via the Internet. She joked that she wanted to be rich enough to buy China, so she could “fix it.” But although she was not shy to use her celebrity to promote her business, she was oddly reluctant to discuss the past. When I asked her to go over some of the events in 1989, she asked why I wanted to know “about all that old stuff, all that garbage.” What was needed was to “find some space and build a beautiful new life.” What was wanted was “closure” for Tiananmen. I felt the chilly presence of Henry Ford’s ghost hovering over our cappuccinos in that nice outdoor café. From being an icon of history, Chai had moved into a world where all history is bunk.
Li Lu was Chai’s most strident deputy in 1989. He had refused to leave the Square just days before the crackdown, after other
student leaders, including Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, and Chai, had decided by vote to urge the crowds to do so. Chai changed her mind, tearfully, because of Li Lu. When some well-known Beijing intellectuals advised the students to avoid a bloody confrontation, Li Lu denounced them as “government agents.” Like Chai’s, Li’s appearance on the scene in 1989 was sudden. But within days of arriving in the capital, this provincial student from Nanjing had managed to meet all the main student leaders. A partnership with Chai suited them both: She would be his metropolitan patron, and he her trusted adviser.
Li Lu’s office was on the twenty-sixth floor of a building on Madison Avenue. I waited outside his door while he concluded a phone call. I could hear a bluff voice calling out: “Hey, Bill, cancel my lunch with Dick on Tuesday.” There was a slight burr, a tone more than an accent, that hinted at the speaker’s non-American origin. I glanced at the books on the shelves: tax guides, Wei Jingsheng’s prison letters, business journals. I flipped through some newspaper clippings I had brought with me. There was a profile in The New York Times Magazine. There were articles in The Washington Post. There was a piece quoting Li Lu’s remark that the U.S. stock market boom was like a woman’s multiple orgasm. I knew that he had received an M.B.A. as well as a law degree from Columbia University, and that he had been the honored guest of presidents, senators, and television-talk-show hosts only months after being smuggled out of China by boat. Then, suddenly, there he was, emerging from his office with a smile and an outstretched hand, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a dark flannel suit: “What’ya want: Coke, Evian, coffee . . . ?” Evian, I said. “Hot or cold? Hey, you’re European. You guys always have it warm, right?” And this was a man who hardly spoke English in 1989.
The first thing you notice about Chai Ling, Li Lu, and many others of their generation, is their smooth way with words, a sign, perhaps, of their intelligence, or at least of an extraordinary talent to adapt. Maybe it has something to do with their background, too. They grew up in a society where jargon is the only currency of public political life. The wooden language of the Party has replaced the ancient Confucian clichés with disastrous results. Language is deprived of meaning. “Correct thinking” is learned by rote. People use words whether or not anyone believes them. But orthodoxy changes suddenly, depending on who is up or down in the political hierarchy. What was black yesterday could very well be white today, and you had better be sure which is which. This can result in a facility for rhetoric or a talent for lying to survive. It breeds a cynicism, so that no one is assumed to hold an opinion without ulterior—usually sinister—motives. And because politics, among government officials as well as their opponents, is often confused with morality, unorthodox views, or simply opinions other than one’s own, are seen as a sign of bad character.
This may be one reason why Chai Ling and Li Lu are hated in the Chinese diaspora. Their transformation from idealistic young patriots to go-getting Americans looks too transparent, too self-serving. Foreign adulation also invites jealousy, which is another reason for hatred. A Chinese friend of mine, who is by no means sympathetic to the Communist regime, called Chai Ling and Li Lu “scum.” A well-known Chinese writer referred to them as “extremists” and “Mao Zedong’s best students,” implying that they shared the violent attitudes of Red Guards. Several people told me the former student leaders had “built their careers on the blood of the Tiananmen victims.”
Rhetoric was at the heart of the most bitter Tiananmen controversy after 1989. The filmmakers Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon made their 1995 documentary, Gate of Heavenly Peace, as a polemic against the “radical” student leaders, specifically Chai Ling. Through the deft use of archive material and narration, they argued that the most extreme students had hijacked the leadership of the demonstrations: It was the radical behavior of Chai Ling and her cohorts, behavior that reflected the extremism of the Communist Party itself, that had provoked the hardliners in the government to crack down with such brutality. The main evidence for this was the infamous interview with Chai in the Beijing hotel room a few days before the killings began. And the most contentious sentence was: “. . . what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed.” Chai claims that the word for “hoping for” can also mean “to expect” in Chinese, depending on the context. Her defenders say she is right. Her critics said she was lying. Chai accused the filmmakers3 of “pleasing the [Chinese] government for their personal gain” and “hawking” their film “for crude commercial profit.” To look for the truth, then, was no longer the point: Debate was stifled by mutual denunciation.
Denunciation is the common poison within any dictatorship based on dogma. And paranoia is not a uniquely Chinese vice. Political exiles fight among themselves wherever they come from: Cut off from a common enemy, they tear into each other. In the course of talking to Chinese exiles and activists, I found almost no one with anything good to say about anyone else. Mention a name, and I would be told that person was a liar, a government agent, a spy, an opportunist, a gangster, an extremist, or corrupted by sex or power—or both. I was often reminded of a Japanese ex-convict who said the most-used word inside Japanese jails was liar. In a climate of denunciation, nothing that anybody says can be trusted: “X is going to be released next week”—“Liar!” “An extra ration of meat on the emperor’s birthday”—“Liar!” “The weather was fine today”—“Liar!”
Mutual suspicion is not just an exile’s disease, however. It reveals a deeper wound in Chinese civilization. If cynicism is pervasive in a country where telling lies is a matter of daily survival, then slander is the main tool of oppression. Lying trickles down from the top to the rest of society. Survivors develop a facility for it. They know what subjects to avoid, how to affect ignorance, and how to say one thing in public and something quite different in private. Chinese themselves are the first to state how “double-faced” they are as a people. They often say this with an air of distress and embarrassment, but sometimes also with a perverse kind of pride, as though a habit of duplicity were a sign of superior sophistication. “We are such a complicated people,” one is told over and over. “Our culture is so complicated, you foreigners can never understand us,” as if “you foreigners” are a bit simpleminded in your earnest attempts to blurt out the truth.
The culture of duplicity, however, is older than Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. “Correct thinking” articulated by a class of highly educated scribes or scholar-officials and enforced by the state, has been a feature of all East Asian societies, where authority is justified by Confucianist dogmas. One of the dogmas is that “harmony” and “unity,” at the expense of individual liberty, define Chinese culture and are indeed the essence of “Chineseness.” The extreme orthodoxy of North Korean communism is a grotesque perversion of this kind of thinking. In Korea, China, and Vietnam, communism simply adapted itself to the worst features of the older tradition.
To blame Confucius for this would be to miss the point, for the sage often talked about the need for cultivated men to tell the truth, however unwelcome it might be to the ears of their rulers. As a warning against tyranny, he recalled the story of a despotic king who tested the loyalty of his subjects by pointing to a deer and calling it a horse. Naturally, the subjects were too terrified to contradict him. So Chinese were already aware more than two thousand years ago that lies corrupt politics. Only if the truth can be told, preached Confucius, and false names rectified, can good government follow.
And yet the Japanese, who have more freedom to speak their minds than most East Asians, still consider the tension between public truth (tatemae) and personal motive (honne) to be the key to their social behavior. Because words are always suspect and true motives rarely stated, Japanese and Chinese idealize the virtue of sincerity. A sincere person doesn’t always need to speak the truth as long as his or her motives are pure. This, too, is perverted under Communist rule: It isn’t enough for a political prisoner to repeat the official dogmas; he must do so “sincerely”—that is, his spiri
t must be purged of any vestige of individual critical thought. Like the Christians in seventeenth-century Japan, the heterodox must correct their errors by acts of apostasy: stamping on images of the Virgin Mary in the case of the Japanese Christians, denouncing “reactionaries”—even if they were your parents or best friends—if you were a prisoner under Mao. One of the reasons ordinary citizens in Beijing came out in such large numbers to support the students in 1989, especially after the hunger strikes in May, is that the students’ professions of martyrdom and sacrifice for the nation were seen as the highest forms of sincerity.
In the winter of 1998, I flew to Taichung, a large, brash, ugly, businesslike city in the center of Taiwan. I wanted to meet Wu’er Kaixi, the most charming, most eloquent, most swaggering of the student leaders. Who can forget the sight of him in May 1989, after the first hunger strike, fresh from his hospital bed, still dressed in his pajamas, sucking his oxygen bottle like a big baby, wagging his finger at Premier Li Peng in the Great Hall of the People? It was like a farcical reenactment of “struggle sessions” during the Cultural Revolution, when students tormented their elders, often to death. Except this time the student held no power, and violence would be the elder man’s choice of weapon. Wu’er had still had the pudgy looks of a teenage idol in Beijing despite the fast. He grew fat in exile. His first years in the U.S. are legendary—drunken rock star behavior, unlimited cash, girls, parties, and two-thousand-dollar suits. Talent agencies beckoned. A Hollywood contract to play himself in a movie about Tiananmen was in the offing. But after those few fat years, things began to slide. The money dried up. Exile organizations shunned him. He fainted rather too conveniently during public debates. As with the other student leaders, except Wang Dan, who was still in a Chinese jail, Wu’er Kaixi’s image as a sincere freedom fighter had been tarnished.
