Once committed, Huang Rui realised that as one of the founders of the Stars he must take a leading role. They drafted a declaration condemning the Public Security Bureau’s actions, and requesting that the Beijing government ‘correct’ them. The next morning, they posted their declaration on Democracy Wall and sent a copy to the Beijing Communist Party Committee. Another copy was sent to the highest legal authority in Beijing, giving notice that the Stars intended suing the Public Security Bureau for infringing their rights.
That afternoon, their patron Liu Xun came to beg them not to go ahead. After his long years in jail he knew only too well where this could all lead. But the Stars were too fired up to back off. Together they decided on the slogans for their march. Liu Qing, the co-editor of
April Fifth Forum, proposed ‘Fight for political democracy! Fight for artistic freedom!’ Wang Keping wisely counselled against parading the word ‘fight’ through the streets, and they agreed that Liu Qing’s banner should say, ‘We want political democracy! We want artistic freedom!’
The next morning, October 1, they gathered in the rain at Democracy Wall. Huang Rui read the text of their complaint and then Ma Desheng, wearing his trademark worker’s cap, issued a vociferous call for action. (Before the march he had emptied his pockets of everything he owned and said goodbye to his parents, not knowing when he might see them again.)
Before they commenced, Huang Rui made one final gesture to art over politics. He had created a Stars logo, a stylised red rocket shooting through a blue sky and piercing the moon. He fashioned it into fabric badges and fixed one on the jacket of each of the Stars, as a statement of their allegiance to a new ideal.
With a big crowd falling in behind them, they set off, Huang Rui and Wang Keping in the lead with Ma Desheng swinging along beside them on his crutches, his hair matted by rain and exertion. With them marched Bei Dao and Mang Ke and their friends Liu Qing and Xu Wenli, along with the editors of all the main unofficial magazines. The whole nascent push for freedom of expression in China was on the move. They had planned to head up Chang’an Avenue to the Beijing government headquarters but a police cordon blocked their way, so they took a winding route to their destination, singing the national anthem of the People’s Republic and ‘The Internationale’. By the time they reached the government headquarters an hour later, their ranks had swelled to a thousand.
Once there, Ma Desheng addressed the crowd again, speaking of the need for democracy. Xu Wenli, the co-editor of April Fifth Forum, also called for democracy and denounced the abuses of power he had seen. All the speakers pointed out that the new constitution of 1978 guaranteed their rights of freedom of speech, assembly and association. These were rights that would be pointed to over and over in the years to come.
Among those inspired by the Stars’ actions that day was a young Liu Xiaobo, a student at the time. In an article published 30 years later, he would draw a direct line from the events of that day in 1978 to the resurgent movement for human rights in China in the Olympics year of 2008. He, too, pointed to the words in the Chinese constitution that were in such conflict with the actions of the leadership. By the end of 2008 he was under arrest, and twelve months later he was sentenced to eleven years in prison for ‘inciting subversion of state power’. In 2010 he became the only Chinese citizen to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
At the end of their demonstration, the Stars and their friends flung hundreds of copies of their statement into the sky to drift into the hands of the crowd. That night they celebrated the news from Liu Xun that their exhibition would be allowed to reopen at the Huafang Zhai on November 23.
It was the third time that the little group around Huang Rui had made history: first with the publication of Today, then the Stars exhibition, and finally the national day demonstration for freedom of expression. In those early days of Deng Xiaoping’s China, it seemed that making history was something that the young and the brave could get used to doing. But then just two weeks later, Wei Jingsheng was brought to trial.
When Wei Jingsheng’s trial began at the Beijing Intermediate Court on October 16, he was charged with ‘selling state secrets to foreigners’ and ‘engaging in counter-revolutionary agitation’. It was a double charge of treason: in such a situation there was never any doubt about the verdict.
Wei’s requests for witnesses to speak on his behalf were ignored and his lawyer was never given a copy of the indictment or told when the trial would take place. So Wei defended himself.
There is a photograph of Wei in court, his head shaved as if he had already been found guilty, his face bent to his notes. It captured his situation well—the hopelessness of his position and the indomitable, studious determination he brought to handling it.
The evidence of selling state secrets came down to the transcript of Wei’s interview with Reuters in early 1979 in which he talked freely about the Sino-Vietnamese War. Wei argued that nothing he said came from any special source other than common rumour in Beijing, and the details he provided, such as the name of the commander of the Chinese forces, could hardly have caused any strategic harm. In summing up, he said: ‘First, I had no intention of betraying the motherland. Second, I supplied the enemy with nothing at all. Third, I gave my friends no official secrets, either national or military. Thus the prosecution’s accusation that I committed treason is unfounded.’
His defence took no account, of course, of what a sensitive subject the botched Chinese campaign against Vietnam was, particularly as it had been Deng Xiaoping’s pet project.
On the charge of counter-revolution Wei took a bolder line, arguing that as full democracy must be the ultimate aim of revolution, it was those who imprisoned him who were the counter-revolutionaries, not he. It was his duty as a citizen to critique and discuss the system. ‘If one insists on hearing pleasant criticism only and demand its absolute accuracy on pain of punishment, this is as good as forbidding criticism and banning reforms altogether.’
Which, of course, was the point. Deng, like Mao, was only interested in criticism as a means to an end that he already had in mind. It was fine to let a hundred flowers bloom occasionally to fight off opposition in the party or advance your own agenda, but in the end neither Mao nor Deng was interested in a running commentary from the masses. Leadership was for leaders.
Although Wei’s trial seemed a pre-ordained exercise of power by a monolithic state, the reality was more complicated. Like so many of the events of that period, the Wei Jingsheng episode exposed leadership tensions over freedom of expression that would resonate for years to come.
We now know that Hu Yaobang, a protégé of Deng and later his choice for general secretary of the Communist Party, argued against punishing Wei Jingsheng. The lead editor of People’s Daily at the time and a long-time collaborator of Hu Yaobang wrote later that Hu had argued for Wei’s rights following his arrest, stating: ‘I support anyone exercising their democratic rights under a socialist system. I hope everyone can enjoy the greatest freedom under the protection of the Constitution.’ In this he echoed what would be Wei’s own argument, but then Hu went further to presciently warn his colleagues: ‘I respectfully suggest that comrades do not arrest people who engage in struggle, still less those who merely show concern. Those who are brave enough to raise these problems, I fear, will not be put off by being thrown in jail.’
Eight years later, in 1987, Hu Yaobang would himself fall victim to China’s long struggle over internal dissent. He was forced to resign as general secretary and issue a humiliating self-criticism after he counselled compromise with a student protest movement that had sprung up the previous year. It was Hu’s death two years later that would spark the greatest challenge the Communist Party would ever face—the Tiananmen protest movement of 1989.
When those 1989 demonstrations broke out, Wei Jingsheng would not be there. At the end of his one-day trial on October 16 1979, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Three decades later I sat at a dinner table in
Beijing while a middle-aged Chinese artist tried to explain to a young American that China, too, had had its Vietnam War. Puzzlement turned to irritation as the younger man assumed that there was some mistake in the translation. Finally, the artist jumped to his feet and rolled up his trousers to reveal a left leg that was furrowed like a twisted tree. It was a bullet wound he had sustained as he crossed the border into Vietnam in the first days of the war. There was a moment of embarrassment among the Chinese at the table. The young American had learnt a new fact of history, but the Chinese were reminded that this was something they were never supposed to know. The war that had sent Wei Jingsheng to jail 30 years before was now deeper than a secret. It had been forgotten.
All along the tracks out of town they were holding up flaming torches in farewell.
It was a pitch-black night late in 1979, and Guo Jian was heading for Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. It lay a few hundred kilometres from his home town of Duyun in Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China. Kunming was a major city with good transport links to the Vietnam border, and it was the mustering point for new army recruits like Guo Jian. Around him were the other boys who had enlisted. For all of them, joining the army had seemed like an adventure and a way out of poverty. But now as they looked at the faces of their families in the torchlight, some of the boys were crying. Perhaps they were spooked by the leatherette seats in the carriage. Soldiers travelled in goods trains, everyone knew that. Did first-class travel mean they were going to die?
The army needed them to keep the border with Vietnam safe. The opening phase of the war with Vietnam had ended when the Chinese army had crossed back into China in March that year. But having poked the hornets’ nest the army found themselves caught in a sniping, skirmishing border tussle, and facing the constant possibility of retaliation for their ill-planned invasion.
Guo Jian kept smiling for much longer than his fellows, smoking a cigarette and reflecting on the luck that had finally got him into the army. Before the war broke out he had tried to enlist but they had rejected him. He passed the physical; that wasn’t the problem. He would only find out later that it was his background that had been held against him. His grandfather had been a small landholder and had enjoyed the respect of the Nationalists who ruled China before the revolution. But now the army needed soldiers, lots of them, and when the recruiters rolled into town that year there was no way a keen young man like him would be passed over for a little thing like class background.
He’d been driving trucks since he had left school and he hated it. To say he had graduated would be an exaggeration, since he hadn’t spent much time in class. Nevertheless, he had learnt some important things at school. He had watched his history textbook thin out as purged former ‘heroes’ disappeared; his faith in official pronouncements disappeared with them. He had also learned that he could draw. When his parents first saw him using the margins of his books as a sketchpad they made him stop, but his teacher encouraged him. A bookish urbanite who had been sent to the countryside for being a rightist, his teacher knew talent when he saw it. He spoke to Guo Jian’s parents and from then to the end of his school days Guo Jian was free to draw on whatever spare paper he could get, which was usually the white spaces in his textbooks.
By the time he caught the train that day at the end of 1979, Guo Jian knew the only thing that really mattered to him was art—that, and his school sweetheart, who kept telling him how disappointed she was that he wouldn’t make anything of himself. Joining the army, he hoped, would impress her. And as for art, he could draw anywhere, couldn’t he? And he owned a sketchpad now.
About 40 kilometres outside Duyun they stopped at a siding and were offloaded onto a goods train. In the crush he lost sight of everyone he knew and as he sat in the dark he finally felt scared. He could feel something changing in the air as the train travelled south. After hours in the cramped, noisy darkness the train reached the end of the line and they transferred to trucks.
All around him he heard different dialects. Some were from his home province of Guizhou and the neighbouring one of Guangxi, but that day was the first time he heard the singsong tones of Cantonese and the harsh northern dialect of Hebei. He found out that in the army, Mandarin would be the lingua franca. Like most of the recruits, Guo Jian’s grasp of the official national language was pretty sketchy.
At the same time as Guo Jian was heading for the border, the Stars exhibition was re-opening in Beijing, as promised, in Beihai Park. It was late November; the lilies had all sunk below the surface in the courtyard pool at Huafang Zhai and the water was thickening with ice.
The Stars had never received an answer to their complaint about the police who had shut them down back in September, but three days after Liu Xun finally confirmed that their exhibition would go ahead, the People’s Daily—the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party—announced the exhibition in their pages. The Stars were not going to receive a direct reply to their complaint, but there was no mistaking the message they were getting through the People’s Daily.
In those months it had become clear that words could be dangerous, but it seemed that there was still room to manoeuvre in this new China of Deng Xiaoping’s. A new decade was about to begin and the Stars thought maybe, just maybe, it could belong to them.
On opening day people queued out the door in the bitter cold. Men in fake fur army hats and women in thick headscarves clapped their hands together to keep warm, chatting to strangers in the queue. Work by all 23 artists was back on display, the number of pieces swollen slightly to 163. Liu Xun and Jiang Feng visited again, and this time a host of other older artists came too. These elders—many of whom had suffered terribly over the previous two decades—wanted to show their support for the coming generation. Present on the first day was Wu Guanzhong, who had studied in Paris in the years after the Second World War and had pioneered the teaching of Western modernism on his return to China after the founding of the People’s Republic. Now he was fighting for the right to promote this tradition again after his years in the wilderness.
The Stars put out their visitors’ book again and it quickly filled with the comments of excited visitors. ‘Your hearts are full of human dignity,’ wrote one, ‘and are the conscience of the nation. History will leave a magnificent page for you, because people will not forget you.’ Among the hundreds of other entries:
Thanks to the Stars exhibition I have seen human dignity with my own eyes!
You are indeed the stars of a new culture . . . you have used brushes and engraving knives to create new pictures for the people; you are pioneers of a new culture.
Over the course of the exhibition they counted more than 30,000 visitors; 9000 alone bought tickets on the final day of December 3.
The Stars were thriving in a world of ambiguity, where the interpretation of their works was left to others, and no words of theirs lay ready to trap them. Hating politics as he did, this was somewhere Huang Rui was happy to be. But even as success was all around them, he had received a sickening reminder of how narrow the line was between success and disaster. Just a few days before, his friend Liu Qing, co-editor of April Fifth Forum, had disappeared.
Liu had stood beside them from the start. His family had lent Today the space for their office, he had helped the Stars draft their complaint to the police and helped organise their demonstration. On the day of their march, he had walked beside them in the rain and spoken passionately on their behalf, and now he had disappeared into the system like Wei Jingsheng had done eight months before.
Liu’s crime was simple: he had dared to publish a transcript of Wei’s defence at his trial. A journalist had slipped April Fifth Forum a clandestine tape made at the trial and they had printed it up in special handbills, which they then posted on Democracy Wall and sold in the streets nearby on November 11. That day police arrived quickly to rip the transcript from the wall and confiscate the handbills, detaining also the people who had been selling them. Liu Qing had gone
to the local Public Security Bureau that same evening to complain and now no one knew where he was.
Huang Rui thought about where he was, in this beautiful pavilion that had been built for an emperor, in an imperial pleasure garden that was now a public park. Nearby was the library where he had first seen Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in a battered book. Now Western art books and magazines had begun to flood in. He had seen the works of Cézanne and Van Gogh, and had stood as close to them as the visitors to the Stars exhibition were now standing to his own paintings.
Things were opening up ahead for him, but it seemed that things were at the same time closing up behind him. The Democracy Wall movement was dying, while the Stars were rising. It didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Almost a year after they had pasted up the first pages of Today on the walls of Beijing, Huang Rui was beginning to understand that avoiding politics was almost as difficult as ever. Politics didn’t dominate them like it had during the Cultural Revolution, but their fight to be authentic to their own experiences, to express what they actually felt, was also a political choice.
They had been trucked to the middle of nowhere and told to make camp. They slept in a deserted rice silo, deserted because there were no farmers in this border region any more. Guo Jian had grown up in a sub-tropical world but the dense foliage and choking humidity here was something different. Even though they were still some kilometres from the Vietnam border it felt like another country already.
After a few weeks he was picking up Mandarin quickly, along with a host of other dialects. His commanding officer was from Nanjing so understanding Mandarin was imperative. Even so, it was hard to know what was going on. The training regime seemed designed to frighten them rather than teach them anything. Or maybe, he had started to suspect, that was the point. They were constantly warned of the threat of ‘Vietnamese spies’ crossing the border. Time after time they were roused from sleep for night manoeuvres. Their rifles had no ammunition, so no one was sure what they were supposed to do if they ran into a spy. When they asked, they were told to use knives or martial arts. Since no one had trained them in hand-to-hand combat, this wasn’t a comforting answer. And yet the conflict was real. Soldiers were being killed not far from their camp. After dark, the young recruits, most of whom had lied about their age to get into the army, cried in their tents.
The Phoenix Years Page 7
