The official memorial service for Hu Yaobang was set for April 22 at the Great Hall of the People. The students began gathering on Tiananmen Square before dawn, their numbers swelling to tens of thousands as the service began. Inside the hall 4000 official mourners including Deng Xiaoping listened as Zhao Ziyang delivered the eulogy, which was broadcast to the silent crowd outside. At the end of the ceremony three students climbed the stairs to the entrance of the hall and knelt, the central figure holding aloft their petition, entreating Premier Li Peng to come out to meet them. It was a shocking gesture. Petitioning on bended knee was an echo of China’s imperial past and a dramatisation of the true balance of power in this nominal People’s Republic.
The students knelt on the steps for half an hour but no one came. It would prove to be the first in a string of mistakes, when chances for dialogue and reconciliation were squandered. Many watching on were enraged that Li Peng would let the students humiliate themselves in this way and not respond. Many in the square wept. The students’ kneeling figures, seeming so tiny on the grand steps, became a symbol of the indifference of the government and swelled the ranks of popular support for the students’ cause.
The very next day, an even graver mistake was made. Zhao Ziyang left the country for a week-long state visit to North Korea, leaving Li Peng in charge. Allies in the leadership urged him to cancel the trip but he was concerned at the message of crisis that would send. Before leaving he believed he had won support from the leadership for his plan to address the student movement through serious dialogue between the government and the student leadership. But in the week he was gone the balance of power would move decisively to the hardliners and on his return he would never regain the upper hand.
Guo Jian did not see the students kneeling that day. Instead he was herded with his campus classmates to watch the official broadcast on television. The university administration was determined to stop their students from joining the demonstrations and had even locked the gates to the grounds, but when Guo Jian heard the students from Peking and Tsinghua universities marching past three days later, he just scaled the wall and jumped.
At first he walked along beside the marchers, not yet ready to join their ranks. The students had announced a mass boycott of university classes, a strike that would last until their petition was answered. There were lots of police on the streets but he noticed that even they seemed to be supporting the students.
Once at Tiananmen Square he roamed around observing, yet still hanging back. But when he returned to campus he saw a notice calling for Minzu University students to march to the square and he immediately went to his class studio to paint a poster. After a bit of thought he decided on the simple slogan ‘Long live teachers!’ Surely, he thought, that wouldn’t get him into much trouble. Although he tried to convince his classmates to prepare their own posters, as they set off he found a group of them trailing empty-handed in his wake, placing him in the unwanted role of leader.
They marched through streets lined by ordinary Beijingers, who urged them on, gave them the thumbs up, even handed them drinks. Arriving at the square Guo Jian tried to convince his classmates to return to campus instead of joining the sit-in on the square. He had a feeling that the police would be sent in to clear them that night. Despite his fear he decided to stay out himself, and he watched the dawn come up over the square without violence.
But in the morning came grim news. It had been broadcast overnight and now it was emblazoned across the front page of People’s Daily. The mouthpiece of the Communist Party had delivered its official damning verdict: the student movement, the paper’s editorial declared, was aimed at creating ‘turmoil’ in the country and must be resolutely opposed.
The use of the word ‘turmoil’—dongluan—was chilling. The period of the Cultural Revolution was routinely referred to as the ‘Ten Years of Turmoil’, and the editorial had deliberately drawn a line between the students’ actions and the worst events in Chinese modern history. To see the People’s Daily headline shriek ‘We Must Resolutely Oppose Turmoil!’ was profoundly shocking, and frightening.
But if linking their idealistic movement to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution was bad, the rest of the editorial was worse. The paper denounced the student movement as a ‘planned conspiracy’ by a small group of people to ‘negate the leadership of the party and the socialist system itself ’ and to put at risk the whole project of reform and opening up. The students’ demonstrations, independent unions and boycotts were all specifically condemned. The message had to have come from the top of the party, direct from the mouth of Deng Xiaoping. At the stroke of a pen, the students found themselves labelled as counter-revolutionaries.
‘We were very scared when we saw the editorial,’ Guo Jian told me, ‘and we felt cornered. It made people want to stay in Tiananmen Square.’ Everyone was talking about an expression in Chinese—‘qiu hou suan zhang’—which literally means ‘we’ll settle up after the autumn harvest’ but carries a menacing subtext of squaring accounts when the time is ripe. ‘We believed if we left the square and went back to our campuses,’ Guo Jian said, ‘they might not come for us straight away, but in the end they would come.’
From April 26 on, the editorial became the primary consideration in the students’ strategy. While it stood they could not simply return to campus, they had to press forward.
In China, Guo Jian told me, people know the best way to stay safe is to ‘make something bigger, to be safe in a crowd, to find protection by being surrounded by other people’. The students decided to ramp up the pressure.
The next day students streamed out from colleges and universities all over Beijing, heading for Tiananmen Square. But this time they weren’t alone. They were joined by their teachers, by journalists, and by the ordinary workers and citizens of Beijing, all angered by the editorial and chanting, ‘Patriotism is not a crime!’ By the time they reached the city centre their numbers had swelled to 100,000.
They marched under the hot sun, alternately singing and chanting, while people on the pavements applauded or pressed cold drinks and popsicles into their hands. The students carried collection boxes and found them stuffed with cash. When they reached the police blockade they simply pushed through it to the square and the police, though standing four deep, let them go.
As they flowed into the square they felt that April 27 marked a great victory. Their teachers were with them, and it seemed the people of Beijing were, too.
But now what?
Zhao Ziyang arrived back in Beijing on April 30. By this time around 90,000 students were boycotting their classes, no meaningful dialogue had been held, and the anniversary of the May Fourth Movement was looming.
The deep divisions in the leadership were now clear for all to see. Li Peng and his fellow hardliners had taken advantage of Zhao Ziyang’s absence to convince Deng Xiaoping that the student movement was dangerous. At a special briefing at Deng’s home, they played up the most inflammatory words and actions of the students, and convinced him that the movement concealed plotters seeking to stir up ‘turmoil’ to bring down the party and the whole socialist system. Having urged him to such a conclusion they then rushed to get it into print.
From the moment he arrived back in Beijing, Zhao Ziyang looked for a way to overturn the editorial. He knew that the only person who could sanction this was Deng Xiaoping. But Deng, he was told, was too ill to receive him.
At the time Zhao Ziyang commanded a bare majority in the top leadership group of the party. On the five-man Politburo Standing Committee he commanded three votes, and his rival, Premier Li Peng, had two. But Li Peng had powerful support among the Old Guard in the party, those ‘elders’ who had officially retired from public life but still exercised influence. Most crucially he now seemed to have won the support of Deng Xiaoping, on whom Zhao had previously been able to rely.
At a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee on May 1 Zhao argued for more transparency and consultation in political
life, for a guarantee of freedom of speech, and for a country that was ‘truly governed by law’. Li Peng countered that stability must be assured before there could be any talk about reforming the political system.
Privately Zhao Ziyang tried to persuade Li Peng that the People’s Daily editorial must be revised but he refused to budge. In the face of this, Zhao decided that he would play down the editorial by setting a new tone himself. On May 3 he gave a speech commemorating the anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. In it he specifically endorsed the patriotism of the students, the validity of their calls for greater political participation and their opposition to corruption. He doubled down the next day with a nationally televised speech along the same lines at a meeting of the Asian Development Bank, in which he specifically supported dialogue with the students.
On May 4 the students held another rally in Tiananmen Square. Again they marched there in their tens of thousands, flowing through the police lines like water. Again the people of Beijing turned out to support them with food and drink. The charismatic 21-year-old student leader Wu’er Kaixi was carried towards the square on the shoulders of his classmates waving a red flag, his flamboyance and exuberance capturing the triumphant mood of the day.
The students declared themselves the heirs of the ‘great patriotic’ May Fourth Movement, reiterated their key demands, and then announced their intention to return to classes and await the promised dialogue.
But even as Zhao Ziyang worked to calm the situation he was being undermined. Since before his North Korea trip he had been directing that there be dialogue with the students, but those tasked with the job by Li Peng were doing everything they could to block and ultimately destroy the process.
The students waited for more than a week for the dialogue to begin. Finally, out of frustration and fear, with no sign of dialogue in sight, they decided on a dramatic new course. On May 13 they announced a hunger strike. The students now listed only two demands: that the People’s Daily editorial be repealed, and that the government hold televised talks with the students. They knew Mikhail Gorbachev was due to arrive in Beijing in just two days’ time. Surely under this pressure the government would act?
The hunger strike was a fateful decision. When the students commandeered Tiananmen Square for this protest and refused to move aside even for the arrival of Gorbachev they doomed both their movement and the reformists led by Zhao Ziyang. Within days martial law would be declared, Zhao Ziyang toppled, and the clock would begin its countdown to the bloody climax of June 4.
And yet, the hunger strike would inspire the most extraordinary and beautiful days in the history of Beijing, as the city rose in solidarity. Teachers, parents, shop and factory workers, farmers, government officials, journalists, taxi drivers, even police marched in support of the students under banners which proudly proclaimed their occupations and workplaces. Even journalists from People’s Daily marched under a banner that read: ‘We did not write the editorial!’ On May 17 and May 18, days five and six of the hunger strike, more than a million people marched in the capital. Tens of thousands of supporters from around the country flocked into Beijing and, for a few short days, censorship was lifted and the Chinese media reported freely on events.
These were the largest spontaneous demonstrations in Chinese history. They were not the organised massed rallies of the Cultural Revolution, which had filled Tiananmen Square with ranks of hysterical teenagers. These were hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of individuals choosing to stand up in support of a movement that they had taken to their hearts. For a brief moment it seemed that China was on the verge of an extraordinary change.
Tiananmen Square turned into a mass encampment. Up to 3000 hunger strikers lay in makeshift tents or in the public buses that the students had commandeered, while tens of thousands of supporters thronged around them in the heat, breaking occasionally into song, or dancing to music that blared out from portable tape recorders.
The music was punctuated by the wailing of sirens as ambulances ferried collapsed hunger-strikers to hospital. The sight of medical workers in crisp white uniforms, red crosses pinned to their sleeves, carrying pale and painfully young students on stretchers to ambulances was heartbreaking—and inspiring.
The strikers wore white headbands on which they had written slogans in stark black ink. Guo Jian, who had joined the hunger strike, chose an inspiring phrase he had read somewhere. He gathered, he told me years later, it was a quote from some foreign writer: ‘“If I don’t have freedom, I’d rather die,” I think that’s what it said,’ he told me. ‘Give me liberty or give me death?’ I suggested. ‘Yes, that was it!’ he said. As he lay in one of the buses, friends came by to sign his sweat-stained headband.
My oldest Chinese friends—the young artist and his feisty girlfriend who had entertained me in their tiny hutong home just over three years before—were now living apart. He had chosen exile in Australia at the beginning of the year hoping to make his way as an artist there. She had remained in Beijing, holding true to her dream of a bohemian life in the capital. The student movement took her by storm. ‘It was so exciting to feel really part of something for the first time,’ she told me later, ‘to believe you could make a difference, that you could change things, that you were making something happen, something for the country.’ Every day she met her friends in the square to discuss ideas. It was like an open-air university crossed with Woodstock. She sent a letter to her boyfriend in Australia predicting that the students would prevail. ‘We will celebrate a great victory!’ she wrote.
She was shocked to find Guo Jian among the hunger-strikers. He had seemed like such a quiet boy when she had first met him. It was amazing to see him transformed into an activist. But then that’s what it was like in those days. People kept transcending themselves, like the ordinary Beijingers who came by every day to check on the students and to lend support. A rumour went around in those weeks that even the pickpockets were on strike in solidarity.
Sheng Qi also came to the square day after day. When Hu Yaobang died he and some friends were just about to open an exhibition, but on hearing the news they abandoned it immediately to go to Tiananmen. All through April and into the hot days of May he wandered there, excited, shocked, trying to make sense of it all. ‘The students from Peking University and the others, their thinking was so advanced, so deep. I thought of what we art students had been concerned with, fighting propaganda art and so on. Such small things! I was so impressed by them.’
But as the weeks passed he also felt the pressure mounting as the city ground to a standstill. ‘The buses had stopped running, and cars could no longer drive on the streets, and you could sense the danger building.’ His parents kept writing, calling, beseeching him to come home. From far-off Anhui, maybe it was easier to see the danger.
In the square the students didn’t yet feel afraid. They felt like heroes. They believed the country was on their side. Having the world’s media focusing on them, too, was seductive.
Yet the ground had already shifted under their feet. Up until Gorbachev’s visit they had the protection of the reformers in the government, in particular Zhao Ziyang. But in holding the square they had humiliated Deng Xiaoping and fatally undermined the moderate position being urged by Zhao Ziyang. Gorbachev’s visit was to have been Deng’s crowning achievement in foreign affairs, with China’s one-time Big Brother coming to Beijing to pay court. The students had robbed Deng of the official ceremonies that would have been so gratifying—Gorbachev inspecting a military honour guard in Tiananmen Square, Gorbachev with bare head bowed placing a wreath at the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Instead the square belonged to the students and all the world’s cameras were trained on them.
The day after he met with Gorbachev, Deng gathered the Politburo Standing Committee at his home. Zhao Ziyang again urged him to revise the People’s Daily editorial to calm the situation, but instead Deng announced his decision to impose martial law. Zhao refused his support, sealing his downfall.
His rival, Premier Li Peng, was put in charge of implementing the decision.
Martial law was not declared until two days later, and in those two days there occurred two extraordinary contrasting spectacles.
The first took place on May 18 when Li Peng finally met with student representatives at the Great Hall of the People in a nationally televised encounter. It was four weeks since the student petitioners had knelt on the steps of the building begging him to receive them, four weeks in which the student movement had engulfed the city and brought it to a standstill. But when he finally met them, Li Peng still showed no sign of actually listening. Instead he talked down to the students as if they were children, telling them that they must bring the hunger strike to an end immediately, and leave the square. He made no attempt to disguise his irritation when the students pressed their conditions, expressing impatience with such ‘quibbling’.
The student leader Wu’er Kaixi, who had collapsed at the hunger strike earlier that day, came to the meeting in his hospital-issue striped pyjamas and carrying an oxygen canister. But he showed no sign of being cowed by the occasion. He spoke directly and vehemently to Li Peng: the students on the square would make their own decision based on the government’s response and their conditions were clear—the People’s Daily editorial must be repealed and genuine dialogue established.
The sight of this young man in pyjamas going head to head with the dour, Mao-suited premier of China was electrifying. The confrontation between the government and the students had been playing out for weeks on the streets but now we saw it vividly made flesh. The students were rejecting the paternalism on which Chinese Communist Party rule was based, and demanding their right to be heard.
But much as I wanted to maintain my optimism, watching the broadcast I found it hard to fight a sense of foreboding. We had been mesmerised by what we had seen on the street, the swelling popular support, the passion of youth, the joy on the faces of the Chinese journalists finally getting a chance to do their jobs, and in doing so we had lost sight of the power imbalance between the students and the government. The power was not on the street with the students, but with this middle-aged man in a Mao suit shifting irritably in his antimacassar-draped armchair as the students pressed their case. And we didn’t even know then that he held two trump cards: martial law was looming and his rival Zhao Ziyang was finished.
The Phoenix Years Page 13
