‘I used to be able to walk up the hill at the end of my street and look out on a beautiful landscape,’ Guo Jian told me. ‘Now walking around the town I can hardly even see the hills for the buildings.
‘In these small places they are so in fear of being left behind that they embrace development, however bad,’ he said, ‘even if it is meaningless and of no benefit to them. All around China there is this fear of being luo hou—of being left behind, of being poor, being backward—and so you can’t argue with development.’
It was hard to find much beauty in Dayun, but it struggled on in pockets. The river where Guo Jian had learnt to swim still ran through the town, and children still played in its fast-flowing water. Behind his school a small hill still stood covered in ferns and wild rhododendron. He had spent much of his teens playing there, skipping school and raiding the nearby orchards for apples and bayberries.
In the streets there was no sign of the traditional dress of the Buyi and Miao people who still dominated the town, but the women at least kicked against the dictates of conventional fashion. Proudly made up, they tottered down the streets in off-kilter boots or sparkly high heels, dressed in lace filigree, lamé and embellished leather, heavily embroidered pullovers and plush tight skirts.
Guo Jian’s parents no longer lived in the town, and the house where he grew up was no longer identifiable on his old street. But some of his oldest friends were still around, not just the classmates from high school who had shared the pilgrimage to his grandfather’s grave, but the ones who had run wild with him when he was just a boy. These old friends had grown up with him on the same street, sharing everything in their poverty, one friend’s mother even suckling Guo Jian’s young sister when his mother’s breast milk was exhausted.
Guo Jian wanted me to meet them. While his schoolmates had sought out steady jobs and modest comfort, his old street companions had taken chancier and more colourful paths through the new China. One had grown rich as a professional mah-jong player, another had ended up as a gangster’s bodyguard in Shenzhen, a third was driving his own taxi, while his wife ran a restaurant where we met for lunch.
Around a meal of bamboo rat stew, the four of them traded stories of long lost friends. In the 1980s it had been a popular choice to go to Shenzhen. Less than twenty kilometres from Hong Kong’s border, the new special economic zone had quickly become a home to smugglers, drug traffickers, gamblers and pimps, and the tough Duyun boys had made their name as fighters and prized underworld recruits.
One of their friends—the smartest of the lot, they said—had become a gangster himself, accumulating wealth and power before falling foul of a rival gang. No one knew for sure, but they assumed he was dead.
The one-time gangster’s bodyguard stayed quiet through most of this conversation. He had become an alcoholic while he was away and he drank steadily through lunch. He was heavily tattooed and missing most of his teeth, a scary sight for those who didn’t know him. But he spoke kindly and slowly for my benefit in standard Mandarin Chinese, and opened the car door for me later as we got into their friend’s taxi to drive up above the town and look at the view.
The last stretch was too steep for the car, so we walked, winding our way up the hill in the shade of the firs, the sunlight filtering through their soft needles onto the ferns that grew in abundance on the forest floor. Birds darted across our path and there was a smell of honey on the air. Up here you could see how beautiful Guizhou province could be, until you turned to look at the view.
Back in the town, giant diggers were eating away at a hill, leaving just the rind, its heart exposed in churned red soil that stood out against the green of the remaining wooded slopes.
In the city again, Guo Jian and I walked through the streets looking for landmarks from his past. He found the small bridge over a canal where 30 years before he had met the recruiter from the Minzu University who had changed his life. The water was full of rubbish, much of it brightly coloured packaging. Guo Jian photographed it, focusing on wrappings that featured the faces of Chinese celebrities—actresses endorsing soap or toothpaste, comedians selling instant noodles. ‘Rubbish culture,’ he observed, with a laugh.
When Mao declared the People’s Republic in 1949, honouring the dead at Qing Ming was outlawed along with all other such displays of ‘feudalism’. But in the years following his death, China’s leaders started positioning the government as the inheritor rather than the destroyer of China’s traditional past. They recognised the power in these ancient customs and endorsed them as a way of usurping them. In 2008 they declared Qing Ming a public holiday.
But while this stroke of the pen was meant to pronounce the government’s respect for the right to remember, the kind of remembering that is tolerated remains tightly circumscribed.
Each year the government presides over a massive state-imposed act of forgetting about the events of 1989. In 2014, the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, they would go to greater lengths than ever to prevent even the smallest act of remembrance, imprisoning people who held private memorials, keeping victims’ relatives under police surveillance, scrubbing the internet clean of any reference, and even sending foreign students out of Beijing to keep them from sharing information with their Chinese classmates as the June 4 anniversary loomed.
In the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, the government conducted public mourning for the soldiers who had died in the crackdown but there has never been any public act of mourning for the demonstrators and ordinary Beijingers who were killed, and attempts by the bereaved to have the victims’ names listed have been blocked. The government handed down its official verdict on the events in 1989, declaring the demonstrations a ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’, and they have resisted all calls since to change that judgement.
Since 1989, history and memory have been key battlegrounds for the government in a war that they are determined will be fought and won on their terms. This insistence extends far beyond the Tiananmen events to other disasters of the People’s Republic, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and beyond, setting the correct line on the whole sweep of what they like to call China’s 5000 years of civilisation.
In their version of history, the 100 years leading up to the declaration of the People’s Republic was a ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of foreigners, which was only ended by the triumph of the Communist Party in 1949. In this narrative the party is China’s historical saviour and the only force that can ensure the nation’s continuing rise. With breathtaking nerve, the party claims credit for the defeat of Japan on Chinese soil in 1945, a gruelling feat that was almost entirely achieved by the Nationalist forces, the Communist Party’s rivals in the Chinese Civil War who were crushed in the communist victory of 1949.
In 1989, as he prepared to send the troops into Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping mused that the biggest mistake the government had made had been to neglect the proper education of its young people. Too much had been made of the ‘mistakes’ of the communist era and too much respect paid to what China could learn from the West. A new program of patriotic education must be instituted to ensure that young people were reminded of what the party had saved them from—a series of humiliations by the same Western countries whose systems the Tiananmen demonstrators had pointed to for inspiration.
Accordingly, since 1990, all Chinese students have taken compulsory courses on the Century of Humiliation, which begins with the Opium Wars and runs through the war with Japan and only ends with the triumph of the communists in 1949. Manmade disasters such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are reduced to mere missteps on an otherwise glorious road of national rejuvenation.
When I first arrived in China in 1986, the Cultural Revolution was discussed everywhere. The so-called ‘ten years of turmoil’ from 1966–1976 had weighed heavily in the balance in judging Mao Zedong’s legacy. True, most of the commentary focused on individuals rather than the ways in which the system itself had contr
ibuted to the disaster. It was also true that, rather like in France, where everyone alive during World War II claims to have been a member of the Resistance, in China you only ever seemed to meet victims of the Cultural Revolution, never perpetrators.
But there was a general acknowledgement that the period must never be forgotten and that remembrance would ensure that such a disaster would never again engulf China. However, as I write in 2016, 50 years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the period has been reduced to not much more than a footnote in China’s textbooks. Young Chinese have very little conception of what happened in that time, their ignorance so profound that, in recent years, fashionable youngsters have embraced a kind of Cultural Revolution chic, as if the period was only about unisex clothing and army surplus.
The approved historical narrative is laid out in China’s National Museum, situated on Tiananmen Square opposite the Great Hall of the People. There you can view a permanent exhibit entitled ‘The Road of Rejuvenation’, which takes the visitor on a journey from the ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial society’ to which China had been reduced at the time of the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century to the ‘glorious history of China under the leadership of the Communist Party’. In this exhibit you will find whole rooms and dioramas devoted to the humiliations meted out to China by the West and yet search in vain for more than one ill-lit picture to illustrate the Great Leap Forward, during which tens of millions of Chinese died. The proverbial Martian visitor would conclude that during the 1960s nothing notable happened in China at all save a successful hydrogen bomb test.
Needless to say there is no sign of the events of 1989 in the museum, no sign either of the leaders who steered China’s government in the 1980s, no pictures of Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang.
But there is room for the Texan hat Deng Xiaoping donned on his triumphal visit to the United States in 1979, and the jacket that he wore on his ‘southern inspection tour’ in 1992—each object sealed in its own glass case.
Despite this state-imposed amnesia about inconvenient events, there are still ordinary people and citizen historians around China who attempt to make other stories heard, and take back their history from official control.
The most poignant of these efforts is that of a group who call themselves the Tiananmen Mothers, bereaved relatives who since 1989 have worked to collect the names and stories of the victims of June 4. The mothers are led by a retired professor of philosophy from Beijing’s People’s University, Ding Zilin, whose seventeen-year-old son was killed when he headed for Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3 1989. Together with the mother of another young student who died on that night, Zhang Xianling, they have gathered the stories of 202 victims whose families were prepared to risk having their loved ones’ names listed on the Tiananmen Mothers’ website.
The names include people who were killed when the army fired randomly into residences on their way into the city, like the elderly woman standing on a fourteenth-floor balcony overlooking the Muxidi intersection, or the 66-year-old worker with a wife and four children taking shelter in the hutong home of a relative. There are also the names of young students such as Zhang Xianling’s son, who was shot while photographing the army making its way down the Avenue of Eternal Peace towards Tiananmen Square. He bled out on the street while soldiers waved away bystanders who tried to help. Still in high school, he was an aspiring photojournalist, telling his mother that he ‘wanted to record events for history’. Alongside the painstakingly assembled stories of named victims, the mothers’ investigations also have turned up evidence of people whose bodies were cremated by the authorities without being identified.
Over the past quarter of a century the mothers have issued repeated open letters to the government calling for a full accounting of all victims, and compensation for their families. They also seek a guarantee of being able to mourn peacefully in public. None of these requests has been granted; instead they have been forced into early retirement, have seen their website blocked, been put under surveillance and harassed, and been required to undertake their small acts of mourning under police supervision.
The Tiananmen Mothers are just one group working to reclaim China’s history from official silence. There are also small bands of citizen historians who publish their research in informal journals that circulate only via email so as to circumvent the controls on registered publications. And there are independent documentary makers such as Beijing-based Wu Wenguang, who in recent years has established a program to send young people back to their home villages to record the memories of those who lived through the Great Leap Forward. Around 200 twenty-something aspiring documentarians have in this way discovered the horror of the event, as it played out in their own home towns years before they were born. Having gathered the names of the victims some have then raised money to erect gravestones to honour the dead, providing a focus for public mourning in their villages that has been delayed for six decades.
The most exhaustive study of the Great Leap Forward and the famine that followed in its wake was written by a now retired reporter from China’s official news agency called Yang Jisheng. Over a period of fifteen years Yang researched this manmade disaster, which claimed somewhere between 36 and 45 million lives in the period 1958–1962, using his official status to dig into local archives throughout the country and interview surviving witnesses to put together a story that the government has been determined should not be told. The official line continues to assert that the famine was a natural disaster, not a catastrophe brought on by Mao’s crazed ambition for China to vault straight into the top league of industrialised nations via rapid industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture.
Yang Jisheng’s account is called Tombstone. It is banned in China, but around 100,000 illegal copies circulate on the mainland. In the West the book has been acclaimed as a milestone in Chinese historiography. In the introduction to the English-language version, Yang Jisheng writes:
A tombstone is memory made concrete. Human memory is the ladder on which a country and a people advance . . . The authorities in a totalitarian system strive to conceal their faults and extol their merits, gloss over their errors and forcibly eradicate all memory of man-made calamity, darkness, and evil. For that reason, the Chinese are prone to historical amnesia imposed by those in power. I raise this tombstone so people will remember and henceforth renounce man-made calamity, darkness, and evil.
The government’s determination to control the historical narrative extends to the entire sweep of Chinese history, and it is here that the greatest risk in their approach may lie. Their approved account imagines a single, indivisible, changeless China. The historically distinct regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, which lie at the country’s far western and northern borders, are declared to have ‘always’ been part of China. But the frontiers of the modern state were only drawn in the eighteenth century under the Qing Emperor, Qianlong. For the next century and a half, China’s hold on its most far-flung territories strengthened and weakened as power ebbed and flowed at the centre.
After 1949, the communist regime cemented Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia into the People’s Republic. But to claim that these regions have always been Chinese negates millennia of independent history and turns rich cultural legacies into footnotes to the official Chinese narrative.
The truth (which the government vehemently rejects) is that China’s relationship with its border cultures is a colonial one. Just like colonial powers in years past, the government is struggling with the question of how their subject peoples’ sense of their own identity and history should be accommodated. These are not easy questions, but as the recent history of Xinjiang and Tibet has shown, denial and negation is not the answer.
I first encountered Xinjiang in a suburb of Beijing, one spring night in 1986. In those days there still existed in the north-west of the city a mysterious area called Weigongcun, a onetime village that had been home to the Uighur community in the capital since the Y
uan dynasty (1271–1368). Deep into the night, in a dark unpaved street that hugged the north wall of Minzu University, a small restaurant served out platefuls of long, slippery, chewy noodles smothered in tomatoes and peppers.
I rode there on my bicycle with my friends Bruce Doar and Sue Dewar. They were sinologists, fluent in Chinese both classical and modern. Brilliant scholars of China’s archaeological past, they had a particular fascination for the cultures of the borderlands of China, Xinjiang and Tibet, and it was through them that I first began to understand those regions.
Inside, the restaurant was warm and bright and crowded, the air heavy with the scent of lamb and tomatoes, with a fleeting undertone of hashish. Through the kitchen hatch you could see a young man in an embroidered cap performing the nightly miracle of lamian (as the noodles were known). He started with a round of dough which he rolled, twisted and spun and then, with a conjuror’s trick that I never spotted, formed a skein of thick noodles with his fingers, divided and doubled them, redoubled them again and flicked them into the bubbling pot.
That night was the first time I heard Uighur spoken—a Turkic language of long rills and whip-crack consonants. I knew that Xinjiang lay at the heart of the Silk Road, and that ancient traders had made Xinjiang’s south-western city of Kashgar into one of its most important trading posts. But I knew nothing then of the history of the Turkic peoples, whose khanates, kingdoms and empires had spread across Central Asia and Siberia long before they moved west into Anatolia to found the Ottoman Empire, the precursor to the modern state of Turkey.
It took me another eight years before I finally got to Xinjiang itself, taking the train to Urumqi with an ABC camera crew in the autumn of 1994. Sally Neighbour and I had been talking about going there from the first time we met. We shared a romantic craving for it, and particularly to see Kashgar, that fabled crossing point of cultures. We had also heard rumours of trouble out there, a stirring of agitation for autonomy, which drew us as journalists.
The Phoenix Years Page 26
