The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  The second spectacle could not have been more different. In the early hours of May 19, the day after the student leaders met with Li Peng, a clearly emotional Zhao Ziyang came to the square to talk directly to the students himself. Speaking into a megaphone that a student passed up to him he implored them to end their hunger strike, which was now entering its seventh day. He told them he understood them, that in his youth his generation had also taken great risks for the revolution and in so saying made it clear that he respected their patriotism. He told them if they stopped, dialogue would definitely not be closed and many things could be resolved. They were young with their lives ahead of them, he said, and he asked them to think of what the consequences would be if they continued. It was the nearest to a warning he could give.

  When he finished, the students mobbed him for his autograph, passing up scraps of paper to sign, even pushing forward their pyjama sleeves for him to write on. But they did not heed his warning. It was the last time that Zhao would be seen in public. After June 4 he would be formally removed from all his posts and would spend the rest of his life under house arrest.

  In those last days before martial law was declared, a very different kind of celebrity also came to Tiananmen Square—Cui Jian. ‘Nothing to My Name’ was the students’ unofficial anthem, but on that day he chose to perform another song, which would in the years that followed become just as deeply associated with Tiananmen Square. It was called ‘A Piece of Red Cloth’.

  In this song Cui Jian tells of how someone blindfolded him with a piece of red cloth and then asked him what he could see. ‘Happiness,’ he replied.

  They asked him how it made him feel. ‘Comfortable.’ It made him forget that he had no place to call home.

  They asked him where he wanted to go, and he told them he wanted to follow them.

  They asked him what he was thinking. He said: ‘I want to let you be my master.’

  Before he sang the song he called out to the students: ‘Listen up! The person asking the questions in this song is not a girl, it’s the government!’

  It was the government that had blindfolded them, he was telling them, it was the government that wanted them to find happiness in seeing the world their way.

  In those spring days the students had thrown off the blindfold; they could applaud Cui Jian’s words and sing along. But before long most would be wearing the blindfold again.

  On the morning of May 20 martial law was declared.

  Army units had begun to advance on Beijing from all directions the previous night, but ordinary Beijingers once more rallied to protect the students. Makeshift roadblocks were thrown up at key intersections leading into the centre of the city, and tens of thousands of people surrounded the convoys, stalling the troops in the suburbs. A group of independent traders set up a motorcycle squad they called the Flying Tigers, which zipped around the city bringing news of troop movements back to the students in the square.

  The student leaders called off the hunger strike but clashed over what to do next. Wu’er Kaixi, for all of his fieriness, pushed a moderate line, urging the students to withdraw—for their own safety, but also to undermine the rationale for martial law and give the reformers a chance to regroup.

  But the more radical voices in the movement argued that to give up the square was to give up their power. One passionate student leader, Chai Ling, who had risen to prominence during the hunger strike, argued that the square was the students’ only stronghold and to give it up meant certain defeat. It was her argument that prevailed. In the days leading up to the final crackdown, Chai Ling would become one of the most recognisable voices in the movement, rallying the students to defend the square, resisting arguments to withdraw.

  In the days after martial law was declared many Beijing university students did return to their campuses, but this left the square dominated by students from outside the capital. More than 50,000 of them had arrived in Beijing in the days before martial law. Those recently arrived craved their time in the sun.

  Just as martial law was declared, a new element had been introduced to the protests, one that was particularly threatening to the government. A group of workers had announced the establishment of an independent workers’ union at Tiananmen Square. This raised the spectre of the Solidarity trade union in Poland, which had fought a gruelling ten-year battle with the Polish communist regime, and had just wrung an agreement from the government for parliamentary elections (scheduled, ironically enough, for June 4). The balance in China slid even further away from moderation.

  As army units remained stalled in the suburbs of the capital, some soldiers actually partied and sang revolutionary songs with the local residents. Around the city Beijingers extended small acts of kindness to the soldiers, bringing them food and drink, and they showed little urgency to move on to take control of the centre of the city.

  On May 23, in an extraordinary act of defiance of the martial law order that banned all demonstrations, once again one million people rallied in Beijing, waving placards that read ‘Long live democracy’ and ‘Freedom for the press’. In the square, vendors sold Beijing street snacks and soft drinks and a party atmosphere descended across the city, seemingly making a mockery of martial law.

  But the square was becoming more squalid in the heat and the sense of stalemate sapped the students’ resolve. Moderates among the student leadership again urged a move back to their campuses to regroup. On May 27 this moderate position was carried by a vote of the key student leaders, but almost immediately afterward the more radical among them changed their mind and declared they would stay after all. The students on the square, the majority of whom were new to the protest, supported the radicals enthusiastically. It was one more missed chance.

  ‘There were people who were really trying to achieve something,’ Guo Jian told me later, ‘and others who were just trying to make things worse. I was trying to make people believe we had already achieved things and we didn’t need to sacrifice ourselves there. But, if you said that, people thought you were scared, or you were a traitor.’

  Meanwhile, Deng Xiaoping had rallied the support of army commanders around the country, directing each to send seasoned troops to Beijing to augment the greener ones that were in a holding pattern in the suburbs. Soon there would be some 200,000 troops surrounding the capital, rivalling the number that had been mobilised during the war against Vietnam ten years before.

  As May drew to a close, despite the resolve of the radicals among the students, it seemed that their occupation of Tiananmen Square was petering out of its own accord. Many Beijing-based students had returned to campus, while some of the outsiders were beginning to leave too. But in these last days before the crackdown, two further events would again bring Tiananmen Square to life.

  My friend sat in a corner of the studio watching intently. The student leaders on the square had asked the Central Academy of Fine Arts to create something special to inspire their fading movement. Now after three days’ work by dozens of students the project was taking shape.

  She had watched as the young artists formed the giant pieces of the sculpture out of wood and polystyrene and then swathed them in white plaster. The sculpture’s face was visible now, along with its flowing hair, upstretched hands and the torch they held. She was a goddess, a goddess of democracy. Her features seemed vast; she had been designed to stand more than 10 metres tall. Tall enough to stand eye to eye with Mao Zedong’s portrait above Tiananmen Gate.

  They brought her to Tiananmen on the back of three pedal carts late on the evening of May 29, to whoops of excitement from the square. Overnight they built a scaffold and then raised each piece into place. Before noon the next day the young artists made their last touches, smoothing the goddess’s hair and her flowing robes with fresh plaster. Meanwhile, news had spread throughout the city of this strange apparition at Tiananmen and by noon the square once again hummed with people. The art students had delivered on their promise, and had fanned the movement into fl
ame again.

  They had also delivered an extraordinary provocation. There was no mistaking that their goddess was the sister of the Statue of Liberty. The students had brought a symbol of a foreign power into the very heart of China’s capital and set her face and her flaming torch towards Mao. This theatrical, reckless act was yet another gift to the hardliners. In the previous few days, Li Peng had commissioned reports from the Beijing government and the security services on the ‘true nature of the turmoil’ and Western ‘infiltration’, aimed at demonstrating that the student movement was a front for a foreign plot to overthrow the party. Now the students had provided the perfect cover image for those reports.

  Huang Rui had been watching the demonstrations unfold for weeks on his television in Japan. He understood only too well why the students would want to occupy Tiananmen Square. He knew the excitement of rallying at the heart of Beijing, but he also knew how badly it could end. As June approached he could see the students were in trouble. Finally, he couldn’t just watch any more. He gathered together as much money as he could in donations and flew to Beijing.

  On June 2, Li Peng met with Deng Xiaoping to brief him, the other party elders and the Politburo Standing Committee. Based on the reports he had commissioned, Li Peng painted a frightening picture of a student movement infiltrated by CIA agents and intelligence operatives from Taiwan, of turmoil whipped up by an alliance of Western and domestic ‘reactionary forces’ bent on the destruction of the party and socialism. Foreign students, journalists and diplomats were all part of the plot, as was the United States broadcaster the Voice of America. Even the Fulbright Program was implicated, accused of using academic exchange as a means of ‘spiritual infiltration’, aimed at drawing the country into the United States’ bourgeois web. These foreign forces were in league with ‘black hands’ within China who hid behind university posts, think tanks and private companies to promote their reactionary ideas and manipulate the students.

  In Li Peng’s briefing the new independent student and worker associations were all ‘engaged in underground activities to overthrow the government’. He spoke of their secret oaths and attempts to instigate mutiny among the martial law troops. Tiananmen Square had been occupied to provide ‘a frontline command centre for the turmoil’, a base for counter-revolutionary propaganda and for assaults on the party and the government, a place from which they would direct their final showdown. To achieve their purpose, the student occupiers had gathered around them ‘terrorist’ groups like the Flying Tiger motorcycle brigade and trampled on the sacred and solemn space of Tiananmen.

  There was no mention of the students’ longstanding calls for dialogue and the reversal of the editorial. Their real aim, Li said, was the overthrow of the government. In fact, he said, the students had even drawn up a list of officials marked for execution. His briefing did not explain how a small group of students had managed to manipulate millions of their fellow Chinese to support them. It did not acknowledge that the students who remained on the square might simply have painted themselves into a corner, that under the threat of the People’s Daily editorial they were too frightened to abandon Tiananmen.

  Deng Xiaoping’s mind was made up. ‘Stability must take precedence over everything,’ he said, so Tiananmen Square must be cleared. There were no dissenting voices. The moderates on the Politburo Standing Committee who had earlier argued against martial law—Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili—had already been removed from power. Qiao Shi, who had abstained during the martial law debate, now fell into line. Later that day the order was given for troops to begin their advance on the city centre.

  Overnight on June 2 an attempt was made to infiltrate large numbers of troops into the city wearing plain clothes, while their arms were brought into the city in unmarked vehicles. Although a number of soldiers and arms reached their rallying points around Tiananmen Square in this way, a traffic accident late that night in the west of the city exposed this manoeuvre and by the early hours of June 3 students and ordinary Beijingers had converged again on the main intersections leading into the city to set up roadblocks. Army vehicles were overturned, tyres were punctured, soldiers scattered. Buses carrying groups of soldiers and weapons were surrounded and stopped. A group of demonstrators discovered a bus filled with armaments just near Zhongnanhai and police and soldiers teargassed the crowd to regain control of the vehicle. All through the day on June 3 tension mounted as large crowds gathered in the streets near the square, bringing traffic to a standstill.

  In the square itself a last, somewhat theatrical attempt to engage the government was playing out. On June 2 a group calling themselves the Four Gentlemen announced a new hunger strike on the square. The ‘gentlemen’ included Taiwanese-born pop star Hou Dejian and an iconoclastic critic called Liu Xiaobo. These two men were both stars in different ways. Hou Dejian was handsome, famous and fresh from Hong Kong where he had played a benefit concert for the student movement alongside the beloved diva, Deng Lijun. Liu Xiaobo was popular in student circles for his passionate critiques of Chinese culture and for his vehement belief in the need for intellectuals to get involved rather than commentate from the sidelines. In years to come he would become China’s most famous prisoner of conscience.

  Liu Xiaobo had been in New York when the demonstrations had begun, but he could not resist coming home to participate. Over the weeks he had helped the students out in various ways, and tried to give them counsel, particularly on the need for them to legitimise their leadership through democratic elections, but he now felt it was time to put himself more firmly on the line. He and his fellow ‘gentlemen’ called for martial law to be lifted, dialogue to be renewed, and for an embrace of democratic principles on all sides. The square soon filled again with people eager to witness this new spectacle.

  But it was all too late—there was no one left in power who had any interest in compromise. In Zhongnanhai the fierce resistance to the entry of troops to the city on the night of June 2 and this new hunger strike only served to harden the leadership’s resolve. Late in the afternoon on June 3, the leadership agreed to use ‘any means necessary’ to put down what was now described as a ‘counter-revolutionary riot’ in the capital. Deng Xiaoping made just two stipulations: the square must be cleared by dawn on June 4 and that there was to be no blood shed on the square itself.

  On June 3 Huang Rui wandered uneasily near the square. He was booked to fly out the next day. When he had first arrived in Beijing in late May he had found the situation chaotic, but he had not felt the foreboding he felt now. He had had this bad feeling in his gut before, in April 1976 before the mourning demonstrations for Zhou Enlai had been broken up by the militia. Tiananmen Square was a symbolic space—in 1976 and again now there was a fight between the government and the people to control it. History told him who would win.

  Out in the university quarter, Aniwar had been noticing her for days: a girl crying by the university gates as the students left for the square. She was the last person he expected to see cry. She used to come to his parties, and dance all through the night. Now she stood day after day, crying by the side of the road.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

  ‘Because they won’t be coming back,’ she said.

  He thought it was ridiculous. What reason was there to think that? Later he would remember her and realise how much this sad young Cassandra had understood.

  On the night of June 3, Guo Jian was in the square when the word came. ‘People came running in, shouting, “They’re shooting! They’re shooting!” but in the square it was still quiet.’ He decided to head west to see for himself. He pedalled fast down the Avenue of Eternal Peace with a classmate by his side towards the western suburbs and the major intersection of Muxidi. Surely they were firing rubber bullets, he thought. The army wouldn’t shoot Chinese citizens.

  Since early that night an announcement warning people to stay off the streets had been broadcast on a continuous loop, on radio, television, on PA systems throughout the c
ity and on university campuses. But instead of staying in their houses, tens of thousands of Beijingers were converging on the major intersections leading into the centre to man roadblocks. For two weeks they had kept the troops out of the city. That night they planned to do the same.

  But on the night of June 3 they would face a very different army to the one they had encountered two weeks before. Regiments had been bolstered by seasoned troops from around the country. Tens of thousands of infantry, backed up with artillery and tank units, were under strict orders to reach Tiananmen Square by 1 a.m. on June 4 and have it cleared by dawn. The soldiers carried assault rifles loaded with battlefield ammunition.

  The 38th Group Army entered the city from the west, along the grand east-west axis that becomes Chang’an Avenue—the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

  It might have been expected that the 38th would have had some sympathy with the citizens and students of Beijing. Based near the capital in the neighbouring province of Hebei, they had connections within the city and some Beijing students had even done their military reserve training with them the previous summer. In fact, in the weeks before the final crackdown, the commanding officer of the 38th, Major General Xu Qinxian, had challenged the order to impose martial law. When his corps rolled into Beijing on June 3 he was under arrest.