As for Huang Rui, he escaped arrest on Qing Ming day, having steered clear of the square. But he soon came under investigation. The authorities printed 400 copies of his poem and issued it in the form of an arrest warrant. By the middle of the month he had been detained at his workplace. He was still being held there more than three months later when, on July 28, a devastating earthquake struck 160 kilometres north of Beijing at the city of Tangshan.
The official toll was 242,000 killed and 164,000 seriously injured, but the early reports from the area ranged as high as three times as many. A city that was home to 1.6 million people was sucked from the map as hundreds of thousands of buildings collapsed. The quake was felt 740 kilometres away in the ancient capital of Xian, and in Beijing buildings swayed and cracked.
In the face of such a tragedy the whole country was pressed into the cause of recovery and rebuilding. Huang Rui’s factory could no longer waste resources supervising just one man and he was released.
The crackdown on the Qing Ming demonstrators in April 1976 would prove to be the last bloody act of Mao’s reign. The Tangshan earthquake signalled a change of era, as such natural disasters had traditionally been thought to do.
On September 9, at the end of a boiling hot summer, Mao Zedong died. The man who had led China’s communists to power and who had proclaimed the People’s Republic some 27 years before, the person who had transformed the country and then led it into the serial disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, was dead. Less than a month later Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and the other members of the Gang of Four, were under arrest.
The fall of these four, who at their subsequent trial were held responsible for all the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and for other crimes which might more properly have been laid at Mao’s door, at first seemed to cement the power of the chairman’s chosen successor, the colourless Hua Guofeng, who had expertly sidelined his only true competition, Deng Xiaoping.
But Hua didn’t understand how fundamentally the Cultural Revolution had changed China. After years of chaos it simply wasn’t possible to return to the old rhetoric. When he announced that he would be guided in government by the ‘two whatevers’—whatever policy decisions Mao had made and whatever instructions the great man had given—Hua’s moral authority began to unravel. His time at the top was brief: within two years Deng Xiaoping would force him into early retirement.
Even before that happened, people in the countryside had started taking matters into their own hands. In both the desperately poor eastern region of Anhui and the fertile central province of Sichuan, farmers had begun to work their own private plots of land, turning their backs on Mao’s communes. A new provincial leader in Sichuan, Zhao Ziyang—an economic reformer who was to ascend to the presidency in the 1980s—let the farmers have their heads, and directed that 15 per cent of communal land could now be farmed privately. State industries were also freed from strict control. The results of these once-heretical policies were startling. Grain production jumped by a quarter and industrial production soared.
Other signs of change soon appeared. Deng Xiaoping returned to Beijing in 1977, and in the same year the academics, scientists and professionals who had been banished during the Cultural Revolution also returned and the universities reopened. The rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands who had fallen foul of Mao’s radical agenda had begun.
Like many in Beijing, Huang Rui was restlessly reading the signs. He had been just sixteen when he was sent to Inner Mongolia in 1969, one among millions of teenagers who by Mao’s decree would be ‘re-educated’ in the countryside. In that bleak landscape he had finally lost his faith in the party, and their Great Helmsman Chairman Mao. It was there, too, that he resolved that he would make his future as an artist.
Huang Rui had studied Chinese painting as a child, learning the basics of ink and wash at the age of eleven, but in the Inner Mongolian capital, Hohhot, he discovered an ethnic Mongolian painter who lived under house arrest but welcomed the young man who stole time to visit him and learn about oil paints. In Inner Mongolia, Huang Rui also met a young poet called Bei Dao, who was trying to create a new poetry, much as Huang Rui was looking for a new language of painting.
On his sanctioned trips home to Beijing, Huang Rui sought out books on Western art. His choices were pretty limited, as the Impressionists and all who came after them were banned. Even so, the Western art he uncovered was a revelation for him. He sketched out exercises in anatomy and perspective in a small plastic covered notebook that he carried with him everywhere. The pages became crowded with drawings of muscled limbs, with calculations of perspective and compositions, all sharing the faint ruled pages with poems and diary entries recording his days in a lonely landscape far from home.
When he finally returned to Beijing for good in 1974 it was as a factory worker, assigned to the Beijing No. 3 Leather Products Factory. But whatever the state might decree, he was already an artist, if passion and determination meant anything at all. He thought that there must be many people like himself in the capital, kids who had grown up in the ideological straitjacket of the Cultural Revolution but who were now disillusioned and determined to find a way of making their own destiny.
In April 1976 on Tiananmen Square he saw thousands of them in action. They were driven underground again afterwards, but he knew now they were out there. A few months later in a library tucked behind Beihai Park in the centre of Beijing, he found an image that could honour their cause.
In an old book of Western painting he came on a reproduction of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Sublimely romantic, the work depicted Liberty as a beautiful bare-breasted woman, brandishing the flag of the French Revolution as she urged the people to fight on even as the bodies of the fallen were heaped around her.
Suddenly, Huang Rui saw a way of depicting the events of spring 1976 in Tiananmen Square, of reimagining the people’s defeat as a victory, with the figure of the woman leading the crowd and standing as a rejection of everything that had gone before.
As soon as he met her, Huang Rui knew she was what he needed.
She was tall and strong, beautiful and restless. He had met her through Bei Dao, the radical poet who had befriended him in Inner Mongolia. The best friend of Bei Dao’s young cousin, she was on the fringes of Huang Rui’s band of friends, all alumni of the Cultural Revolution, all on edge for change. The daughter of doctors, her education thwarted by the Cultural Revolution, she now worked as a labourer on a road gang. When he told her what he wanted, she didn’t hesitate.
It was the spring of 1978, four years since Huang Rui had returned home, two years since he had joined the Qing Ming demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in April 1976.
On a warm spring day she came to his house and he took her to his bedroom. He had assembled a canvas out of scraps that he had scrounged and primed with glue, 1 metre by 1.2 metres of rough cloth on which they planned to make their own version of history.
Even 35 years later Huang Rui blushed when he tried to describe to me how he felt that day, seeing a woman naked for the first time, weighing the danger of painting an event that was condemned as criminal, knowing that even to paint a nude body was forbidden. Excitement? Embarrassment? Fear? Exhilaration? Relief. Relief that they were brave enough to see the line they were crossing and step across together.
They worked through the warm days of spring, in the small room heady with the smell of turpentine. He was working from instinct. He had never seen a real Western painting or attended an art class, but his Mongolian mentor in Hohhot had passed on the techniques of oil painting he himself had learned from Russian instructors in the 1950s.
Huang Rui mixed the paints—cool, sad greys, blues and greens, and the warm colours of flesh and light. His composition was focused on the Monument to the People’s Heroes around which the demonstrators had gathered in 1976. In his painting the monument would seem to split apart as his vision of Liberty rose through the centre of the frame, while b
elow, a new monument seemed to coalesce, made up of the uplifted, pensive faces of the demonstrators.
On a spring day in 2013, he showed the painting to me. He had titled it April 5 1976 for the date of the demonstration all those years ago. He traced the joins where the pieces of canvas had been glued together, criticised his brushstrokes and naive technique. In September 1979 he had hung it on the railings outside the National Art Museum of China as part of the first-ever exhibition of contemporary art in the country. Now a Hong Kong museum wanted it for their collection, and he had finally consented to sell it.
I asked him what had become of the girl in the painting. He said he wasn’t sure. They had become lovers, but when she wanted to get married, ‘She frightened me away,’ he laughed. To him, it seemed at odds with the bravery that had brought them together. I thought (but did not say) that marriage might have seemed to her another route to freedom.
Just a few months after Huang Rui finished his painting, in the late autumn of 1978, it was announced that the official verdict on the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1976 had been reversed. What had been condemned in 1976 as a ‘counter-revolutionary riot’ was now re-badged as a display of patriotism. The news travelled through Beijing like a shock wave. It was as if they were finally being given permission to breathe again. And breathe they did.
If you wanted to portray the history of the People’s Republic of China with a diagram, one way to do it would be to draw a waveform across the page, a series of peaks and troughs, like the image on an oscilloscope. Each peak would be a period of freedom and openness, each trough a crackdown—often a savage one—by the government. One of the most famous of the upswings is the Democracy Wall period in the northern autumn and winter of 1978–79.
Just west of Tiananmen Square, near the busy intersection with the bustling street of Xidan, was a low grey wall that didn’t seem to belong to anyone. It ran for around 200 metres from the intersection, set well back from the street on the north side of Chang’an Avenue. A number of bus routes stopped nearby and its grey expanse had long been a place where people would post small ads and notices, confident they would be seen by scores of passers-by.
From spring of 1978 people had occasionally risked posting more daring texts on the wall, and around the city it became known as a place where you could catch a rare glimpse of free speech. But when the news broke that the verdict on the Qing Ming demonstrations had been reversed, overnight the wall became a kind of massive social media site, its bricks covered in paste and paper and hand-inked calligraphy, as people with no access to the airwaves or the official press plastered up handmade posters proclaiming their hopes, their criticisms, their appeals for justice, and their ideas about the path China should now take.
Night after night the pavement beside the wall thronged as hundreds and then thousands of people gathered to discuss the posters in open forums, debating everything from the separation of powers to the rising price of dumplings, condemning the Cultural Revolution, and, daringly, Mao himself, calling for freedom, and for the Communist Party to become a true servant of the people.
All of Huang Rui’s friends came to the wall, and most of his workmates, too. His girlfriend, the goddess of Liberty, joined the crowd, now modestly bundled in a blue padded army coat against the cold. Bei Dao made his way there too, even though he was still exiled to a job far from the capital. The crowd was full of people their age, former Red Guards who had been blessed by Mao in the early days of the Cultural Revolution for their adolescent revolutionary fervour, only to be rewarded with years of exile far from home.
But the crowd was not limited to the young, or to the educated, or even to the urban. People came from the countryside, also armed with petitions—whole families arrived, from grandparents to babies in arms. Just a few hundred metres down Chang’an were the red walls of the Forbidden City, and next to it Zhongnanhai, the ‘New Forbidden City’ where China’s leadership all lived. There was no reaction from those quarters. Did silence mean acquiescence?
As one of the bitterest winters in years closed in, the posters and discussions became more daring until one day in early December 1978 a young man called Wei Jingsheng, a former soldier who worked as an electrician at the Beijing Zoo, posted the most famous manifesto ever to cover the grey bricks of what had become known as Democracy Wall. He called it ‘The Fifth Modernisation’.
To us the title seems prosaic, but to those gathered at the wall it was incendiary. For years China’s leaders had been declaring that to grow and be strong the country needed to pursue the modernisation of agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. Even the recently rehabilitated and soon to be ascendant national leader Deng Xiaoping had nailed his colours to the mast of the ‘Four Modernisations’.
And now this young man was arguing that all four would amount to nothing without a ‘Fifth Modernisation’—democracy.
You do not need to be an expert in Chinese history to appreciate the power of ‘The Fifth Modernisation’. It is one of the most electrifying political polemics ever written, as stirring as any of the writings of the architects of the French or American revolutions.
‘The people should have democracy,’ Wei wrote. ‘When they call for democracy, they are demanding nothing more than that which is inherently theirs. Whoever refuses to return democracy to them is a shameless thief more despicable than any capitalist who robs the workers of the wealth earned with their own sweat and blood . . . Democracy, freedom and happiness for all are our sole objectives in carrying out modernisation. Without this “Fifth Modernisation” all other modernisations are nothing but a new promise.’
He wrote that the time for slogans was over and that the people should not be fooled again:
I urge everyone to stop believing such political swindlers. When we all know we are going to be tricked, why don’t we trust ourselves instead? The Cultural Revolution has tempered us and we are no longer so ignorant. Let us investigate for ourselves what should be done!
Even today it is exhilarating to read what Wei wrote over a single winter’s night in 1978. We are so used to hearing the argument that democracy is a Western concept to which China isn’t suited, so used to nodding at the Chinese government’s assertion that without a single party to run things the country would break up in anarchy, that it is almost a shock to be called out by Wei Jingsheng’s confident assertions.
‘Let us rally together under the banner of democracy. Do not be fooled again by dictators who talk about “stability and unity”,’ he wrote. ‘Fascist totalitarianism can bring us nothing but disaster. Harbour no more illusions; democracy is our only hope. Abandon our democratic rights and we shackle ourselves again. Let us have confidence in our own strength. We are the creators of human history.’
Wei Jingsheng was only 28 when he wrote ‘The Fifth Modernisation’, but twelve years of hard living had brought him to this moment. He had grown up privileged in Beijing, the eldest child of a high-ranking Communist Party official. In 1966 Wei had become a Red Guard, embracing Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution. Falling foul of the struggles that broke out between different factions of the Red Guards, he went to live for a year in the province of Anhui where his family had their ancestral home. It was there that he finally saw the devastation that had been wreaked across the countryside in the early 1960s by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a drive for rapid industrialisation that led to famine and tens of millions of deaths.
Like so many of his generation of urban youth, the Cultural Revolution meant the end of illusions, and the dawn of cynicism about the slogans that had distorted their lives. ‘I felt as if I had woken from a long dream,’ he wrote later. In 1969, as others of his generation were being sent to the countryside, his family connections secured him a berth in the army, where over four years of service he learnt more about the true state of his country. He served as a squad commander in the pitifully poor north-west of the country, where he found himself defending public granaries from starving mobs. He
served side by side with peasant soldiers who told him more about the desperation of life in the countryside.
On his return to Beijing in 1973 he was assigned a job as an electrician, and this was his identity when he stepped forward to Democracy Wall to post his call for China to finally stand up and claim democracy for itself.
Wei Jingsheng was Democracy Wall’s greatest hero, and within a year he would become its most famous victim.
In that fevered season in Beijing there was another place in the city that was drawing people in their thousands, another sight in its own way as liberating as Democracy Wall.
That autumn of 1978 an exhibition from France had opened at the National Art Museum of China. Its bland title ‘Nineteenth-century French Rural Landscape Painting’ gave no hint of its extraordinary impact.
For us in the West, the works of the Impressionists and those who followed—modern masters such as Van Gogh and Cézanne—are so familiar that we can only connect intellectually with the shock they caused more than a century ago in Europe. But in communist China not only had the works never been shown before, their study had been banned.
And so, by a strange trick of history, a century after these works had revolutionised Western art they were going to revolutionise Chinese art too.
Huang Rui stood in the crowded gallery. It was like being at the centre of the world. Everyone he knew was there. Each day he came back to find the gallery thronged with people his age, and many like him were returning again and again.
For decades Chinese art had been so flat, formulaic and—quite the reverse of Madame Mao’s prescription to be ‘red, bright and shining’—pallid.
Now there were these paintings, imbued with a passion that radiated off the canvases. Huang Rui imagined that he could still smell the paint. It was a vision of another world that they had been assured could not exist.
The Phoenix Years Page 3
