The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  At the end of the summer of 1984 Sheng Qi took the nine-hour journey in a ‘hard seat’ carriage to take up his place at college in Beijing. ‘Hard seat’ is what the Chinese call third class, and you need to be lucky and fast on your feet to get a seat at all. It’s an uncomfortable but convivial way to travel. On the journey Sheng Qi met a friendly young soldier, happy to share his knowledge of the world with the starstruck aspiring artist. Sheng Qi had nurtured a kind of hero worship for soldiers since he was a child and was excited to find himself talking to one. He asked his companion to tell him about Beijing. The soldier laughed and asked Sheng Qi to imagine China as a bald man’s head on which one single hair grows. ‘Beijing,’ he told Sheng Qi, ‘is that hair!’

  Disembarking at the teeming Beijing Central Station, Sheng Qi saw a series of tables dotted around the concourse. Each of the capital’s universities and colleges had established outposts at the station to greet the new students arriving from around China. After registering he was given the number of the bus that would take him to his school. His adventure had begun.

  He couldn’t know it then, but it was an adventure that in a few short years would lead to disillusionment, horror and a moment of excruciating despair that would change his life forever. Thousands of young people like Sheng Qi were treading the same path and 1984 was the year when everything started to change faster than had ever seemed imaginable.

  To understand what it felt like to live through the 1980s in China, it helps to think about the 1960s in the West. The decade followed a similar trajectory: a slow start followed by rollicking middle years of white hot excitement, when anything seemed possible. Dreams could be big in the 1980s in China and idealism was sky-high. The eighties saw the birth of rock and roll in China and the beginning of a sexual revolution. But just like the 1960s in the West, the 1980s ended in violence and bloodshed for China. As France had the events of May 1968 and the United States had Kent State, China was to draw down the curtain on the decade with one of the darkest episodes in its history.

  Early that same year in the far western province of Xinjiang, in a city further from the sea than any on Earth, a young man slipped away from the noise of the carpet factory where he worked into the quiet warmth of a wool dyeing room. Here, where the heavy woollen skeins seemed to absorb every sound, he had made a nest to study for his exams. It was so peaceful there that sometimes he felt he could hear the blood running in his veins. Inside this cocoon he dreamed of far-off Beijing where he hoped he would become an artist. His name was Aniwar.

  He had been born in the oasis town of Karghilik on the southern fringe of the Taklimakan Desert at the heart of Xinjiang. Karghilik had once been an important way station on the southern Silk Road, where traders would gather before tackling the mountain passes into India. In the 1980s the old culture still persisted in the town of richly coloured carpets and watery ikat silks made by hand, jewel-like tiles and intricate adobe brickwork, shady pergolas heavy with grape vines in summer, and pomegranates, apricots and quinces picked from trees watered by snowmelt from the Karakoram.

  The sky stretches vast above your head in Xinjiang, whether you are in the baked ochre oases of the south or in the rich pastures of the north where nomadic herdsmen still range. One-sixth of China’s territory today is contained in this western province, an area three times the size of France. Buried in its shifting sands are mummies, lost cities and other remains of people who have long since disappeared from history, whose very origins are unknown.

  These lands came late to China, annexed by the Emperor Qianlong in the 1750s. The name that was later chosen for them, Xinjiang (‘new territories’), proclaimed their separateness within a nation that had hitherto been relatively homogenous. With the taking of Xinjiang, China drew ‘the other’ inside its borders. The nation became multicultural and, from that moment on, more difficult to control.

  For millennia before the eighteenth century the people of Xinjiang had dealt with China as traders, adversaries and sometime subjects. They had long supplied China with its treasured jade, while their position at the heart of Central Asia delivered them guardianship of China’s roads to and from the west. Just as silk made its way westward through Xinjiang’s oases, Buddhism made staging posts in those same oases on the way from India into China. Objects as classically Chinese as Ming dynasty (1368–1644) blue-and-white porcelain only became possible when cobalt blue glazes made their way from Persia to China through the oases of Xinjiang.

  Turkic people first came to Xinjiang in the mid-sixth century when the Kök Türks rode out from Mongolia to establish sway over a territory that stretched as far as Afghanistan and northern India and into what are now the lands of Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan and Tajikistan. They mixed with the Indo-Europeans who had come before them and began to forge the distinctive culture that still animates the region today. In Xinjiang the predominant ethnic group are the Uighur people, but they share the province with Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Tajiks, whose ethnic brothers have established independent states along China’s borders. The Uighur mother tongue is Turkic, and closely similar to many of the languages of Central Asia. So Xinjiang’s cultural and linguistic ties are closer to its western neighbours than to China. Overlaying the Turkic culture is Islam, which arrived in Xinjiang in the tenth century, carrying with it another set of traditions and loyalties that deepened Xinjiang’s cultural distinctiveness from China.

  By the time Aniwar was born, Xinjiang was no longer a crossroads. The mountain passes to the west were closed and Xinjiang no longer traded with the outside world. All roads instead led to Beijing and, from 1949, although its provincial capital was some 3700 kilometres away, Xinjiang ran on Beijing time.

  Now reading for hours in the quiet of the wool dyeing room, Aniwar was securing his passage to Beijing. In the same month that Sheng Qi took the train from Anhui to the capital, Aniwar would be boarding one, too.

  Even as the summer of 1984 would find young people like Sheng Qi and Aniwar arriving in Beijing high with excitement, it would see Huang Rui leave.

  The early years of the 1980s were tough for Huang Rui and his fellow Stars. The initial triumph at being able to stage their exhibition had given way to a series of reversals, and finally a real fear about what kind of future they could make for themselves in China.

  At first things had gone well. The Stars had garnered support among many of the older artists and had been accepted into the official Artists Association. In the autumn of 1980, Huang Rui and Ma Desheng had set off on a lecture tour around China, visiting 30 cities and talking to art students and teachers about the Stars exhibition and their vision for art. At one college, the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, more than 800 students came to hear them speak.

  Back in Beijing in the spring of 1981, visiting celebrities such as the composer Jean-Michel Jarre and his actress wife Charlotte Rampling sought out the Stars, and discussed collaborations with Huang Rui. The Stars and their friends held parties in the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, where young Chinese and Westerners danced together among the fallen stones. There was excitement both inside and outside China about where reform might lead.

  But not everyone was excited. Conservative party ideologues like the propaganda chief, Deng Liqun, saw danger in the spread of notions like ‘individualism’ and ‘humanism’ into Chinese intellectual life: he saw them as antithetical to the acceptance of party control. Criticism of artists, writers and intellectuals with ‘bourgeois’ ideas began to ratchet up.

  Today had been banned at the end of 1980 while Huang Rui and Ma Desheng were still on the road, and, as 1981 wore on, the Stars found their newly won membership of the Artists Association cancelled and their landmark exhibition criticised. They could feel themselves being forced underground again, as they were denied a public space in which to work and exhibit.

  As the economy opened up in the early 1980s, corruption and crime also flourished. It was easy for conservatives to link this to the ‘pollution’ of bourgeois thought.
In August 1983 a nationwide crackdown on crime was launched, followed a few months later by the official campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’. Law enforcement around the country was encouraged to ‘strike hard’ against ‘hooliganism’; within a few months, tens of thousands of young people had been sentenced to ‘reform through labour’ in far-off prison camps, and thousands more had been executed for ill-defined crimes. Propaganda suggested a slippery slope from Western hairstyles, clothing and dancing, to pornography, theft and violent crime.

  Huang Rui and his fellow Stars felt their world closing in again. In August 1983, an exhibition by Huang Rui, Ma Desheng and Wang Keping was shut down after just a few days, and the police took to dropping in on them at home. Meanwhile the poetry of their friends Bei Dao and Mang Ke was denounced as ‘misty’, incomprehensible and enslaved to Western ideas. The term ‘Misty Poets’, intended as a criticism, quickly became a badge of honour.

  The anti-spiritual pollution campaign only lasted three months, its hysterical tone causing so much negative publicity outside China and fear within that Deng Xiaoping was convinced to call it off. But the damage was done: Huang Rui was exhausted. He had seen the wheel turn once too often. Hope and excitement in China seemed inevitably to be followed by repression and disappointment. He needed to escape the cycle.

  In the autumn of 1982 he had met a young Japanese woman, Fujiko Tome, who had come from Osaka to study in Beijing. Less than a year later they married. ‘I had never thought of getting married before,’ he told me years later, ‘but I realised I needed to get out of the country.’

  By early 1984 both he and Wang Keping had decided to leave China. Wang Keping had also married his foreign girlfriend, a young teacher from France. The two friends would head for foreign cities at opposite ends of the world. The night they told Ma Desheng, he wept. A year later he too would choose exile abroad.

  Huang Rui boarded the plane for Osaka at the height of summer 1984 with no idea that within months the wheel would turn again and set off what would be the most exhilarating period in Chinese contemporary history. It would last barely five years but it would shake the country to its core. Before it ended, Huang Rui would find himself back again in Tiananmen Square.

  In 1984 an aspiring artist called Gonkar Gyatso was also leaving Beijing, but he was heading back to his home town of Lhasa after four years as a student in the capital. His time in Beijing had been a revelation, and he was determined to create an artistic life for himself in the city of his birth.

  When he had first come to Beijing in 1980 he had, as he told me, been ‘very Red’, one of the Communist Party’s true believers. His father was an army man, born in the town of Amdo in Qinghai province on the Tibetan plateau. He had arrived in Lhasa with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1954 when the Dalai Lama still lived in the city. Gonkar’s mother was a passionate communist. Before the PLA entered Tibet in 1950 she had lived in a kind of servitude that she considered akin to slavery. Under Chinese administration she had been given the opportunity to study and her gratitude ran deep.

  His father’s military connections ensured that Gonkar and his sister would see out the turbulent sixties and early seventies in relative security. In 1979, at the age of eighteen, he had secured a steady job working as a museum guide in Lhasa, and it was there that his enthusiasm and lively intellect caught the attention of some visiting artists from Beijing. They encouraged him to sit the exams for art school, and he was accepted in the summer of 1980.

  It wasn’t long after he started college in Beijing that he realised that the real excitement was outside the school gates, not in the classroom where he was studying Chinese traditional painting. There was plenty of art to see—and he was fascinated by the exhibitions of Western art that were beginning to arrive in China—but it was the books that captured his imagination. In those years Chinese translations of Western books were coming thick and fast. He loved reading about Western art, but it was Western philosophy that really spoke to him.

  Sartre and Nietzsche impressed him, but it was Schopenhauer who inspired him. ‘Even after finishing university I kept reading him, his theories really chimed with me, his sense of man’s loneliness and struggle. He awakened the desire in me to search for something spiritual.’

  When he had first arrived in the capital he had felt secure in his identity. ‘Before I went to Beijing I had no concept of myself being Tibetan and other people being Chinese. I was very ideological, a real Communist, but soon I began to feel a real clash in my heart, and in my head. I suddenly realised, I’m Tibetan, I’m not Chinese, and the philosophy books really helped me consider these questions and to connect with spirituality, which I’d never been exposed to before.’

  He had grown up in a period when religious expression was heavily repressed, and he had never seen a Buddhist shrine. But in the early 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, the practice of religion was no longer deemed a crime and religious tolerance was enshrined in the Chinese constitution.

  In 1983 on a visit to Lhasa he came upon his grandmother worshipping quietly at a small shrine in her home. Gonkar was 22 and experienced for the first time the heady smell of incense, and the sight of the curls of perfumed smoke rising before a statue of the Buddha.

  By the time he graduated in 1984 he was anxious to get home again. The time in Beijing had been exhilarating, but also painful. During these years his whole sense of himself had been overturned. Now he was ready to get out of the classroom and discover what it really meant to be Tibetan. He hoped that back in Lhasa he’d be able to find out.

  Guo Jian hesitated at the door of a darkened studio. It was early autumn 1985.

  He had been in Beijing for a few weeks now but he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. Maybe he would find it tonight.

  He still couldn’t quite believe he was here, in Beijing, 2000 kilometres from his home town in Guizhou.

  He had left the army in 1982 after three years in uniform, but little seemed to have changed when he got home. His girlfriend was still refusing to marry him. She couldn’t understand why he had no ambition to join the Communist Party, and was pressing him to go to university. To Guo Jian, it seemed impossible. He had hardly been to school, and although the universities were, in theory, now open to all on merit, he couldn’t imagine how he would ever pass the exams. All he could do, he thought, was to continue to draw and paint, and trust that his talent might lead him somewhere.

  It was a stroke of luck that took him to Beijing. In early 1985 he was walking with his sketchbook when he ran into one of his old teachers. She was talking to a woman who turned out to be a visiting art professor from Beijing, who took one look at his sketches and asked to see more. As it happened, she was a scout from Minzu University, a college in the capital aimed exclusively at China’s dozens of ethnic minorities. Guo Jian was one of them: his ancestry was Buyi, an ethnically distinct group scattered across three provinces of southern China. At Minzu University, the woman explained, there was a handful of places for students wanting to study art. It was for one of these places, as it happened, that Gonkar had been chosen five years before.

  Later that year Guo Jian found himself in a crowded room in the provincial capital, Guiyang, one of 100 applicants competing for a single place at Minzu University. After two days they had winnowed the competitors down to twenty and on the third day they were set a final test. They were each to create a composition inspired by one of the four seasons.

  All around him his rivals started turning out scarily polished compositions of snowy winter mountains and autumn harvests. Guo Jian chose spring, but instead of birds and flowers he drew an old man coming home from the market just before Chinese New Year, lugging a mirror. On this the man would write—as an old tradition dictated—his wishes for the new year. Wizened with age and smoking his pipe, it was this old man and his air of unquenchable optimism that got Guo Jian into university in Beijing.

  He had travelled for two nights and three days to reach the capital. As his tra
in crossed the Yangtze River Guo Jian saw for the first time the open plains of China’s north. The mountains of Guizhou always seemed to him to block the view. You could look and look, he told me, but never see beyond them. Now he could see for miles and he liked it.

  Arriving at university he found himself on a campus filled with people from parts of China he had hardly known existed. In his dorm room alone there were students from Xinjiang, from Inner Mongolia, and a tiny county called Mohe, which was as far north as you could go and still be in China, where winter lasted half the year and the Northern Lights played across the sky.

  In his first weeks he’d gone to some parties but they were all rather staid. Somehow he hadn’t yet found the door into the world he had dreamt was out there ever since he first heard Deng Lijun sing.

  And then he had got the invitation that had led him to this door. Easing it open, it seemed at first that the room was totally dark. There was music playing and in the distance a small red light was glowing. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he saw people dancing, smoking, lying on the floor.

  This was alarming. Just a year ago he had been painting propaganda posters for the anti-spiritual pollution campaign. Even in remote Guizhou the campaign had seen scores of young people imprisoned and some even executed for activities just like those going on in this room. Guo Jian backed away but someone pulled him back. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said, ‘we’re all artists here.’ If this was meant to reassure him it wasn’t working. Then a group of girls dragged him towards the dance floor. He was older, he thought, he was meant to be a class leader, and his teachers expected him to be serious. But the girls seemed to know he wasn’t that kind of guy. He knew it, too. He wasn’t that kind of guy.

  It was the first night he ever heard Western music and the first time he danced to it, the first time he drank Erguotou. And it was the first time he tasted red wine, which they shared out of a single cup while they rolled cigarettes in scraps of newspaper.