No Enemies, No Hatred
Page 3
Guilt feelings stab at my heart like daggers as I read these transcripts, because it is clear that not one of the people whose lives were so cruelly snuffed out that night was among the “elite.” None of the conspicuous activists—like me—were killed. The victims ranged from a 66-year-old senior citizen to a child barely 9. There were people in their thirties and forties, the prime of life, a youngster of 17, another who was 20-something … But they were all just ordinary students and civilians, people who apparently wanted to live ordinary lives and to enjoy everyday sorts of happiness, and on that blood-soaked night they had made the mistake of acting on impulses of sympathy or of justice, and it had cost them everything.
Some of the dead had been participants in the 1989 movement. They had stayed in the square until the last moment, as if waiting for the bullets of evil to take their lives. For example:
Cheng Renxing, a 25-year-old student at People’s University, was just about to withdraw from the square when a random shot felled him. He collapsed at the base of the flag pole that faces Tiananmen.
Dai Jinping, a 27-year-old M.A. student at Beijing Agricultural University, was shot to death around 11 p.m. on June 3, 1989, right beside the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall.
Li Haocheng, a student in the Chinese Department at Tianjin Normal University, had been among 5,000 students and faculty from his school who traveled to Beijing to protest. Early on the morning of June 4, as martial law troops entered Tiananmen Square, Li stood at the southeast corner of the square taking a photo to document the moment. A flash of his camera, then he fell and died.
Wu Xiangdong, a 21-year-old university student who had been part of the 1989 movement from the beginning, had already written a farewell note to his family: “The fate of a nation rests with each single person. If this costs my life, then so be it …” It did cost his life.
Others had originally been bystanders to the protests, but then, moved by the moral intuition that is native to human beings, they came to the aid of the protesters during their hour of peril. When the massacre began, some of these people rushed straight into the most dangerous scenes. Here are some examples:
On the evening of June 3, Jiang Jielian, a 17-year-old high school student, defying the tearful admonitions of his mother, who had locked all the doors of their residence, jumped out of a bathroom window and ran toward the blood-stained Chang’an Boulevard to join a mass of people who were trying to dissuade the martial law troops from advancing. His dissuasion failed, and a bullet took his life.
Wang Nan, a 19-year-old student in senior high school, felt an urge to “record the true facts of history.” He ran toward Tiananmen Square carrying a camera. But before he could use his camera to document anything, his own life itself was spent as a piece of evidence of the barbaric massacre.
Yan Wen, a 23-year-old student at Peking University, also wanted to record events for history. He headed with some classmates for Muxidi. A bullet struck him in the thigh, crushed a main artery, and led to uncontrollable bleeding. He stopped breathing fairly quickly.
Still other cases were of people who braved danger trying to rescue the dying and assisting the wounded. Here are a few examples.
At 7 a.m. on June 4, Yang Yansheng, 30 years old, went out of his way to help a wounded stranger. Troops delivered a bullet to his liver, where it exploded, and he died.
Du Guangxue was a 24-year-old worker, a passionate young man who had visited the protesters at Tiananmen many times. At midnight on June 3 he heard that people had died at the square, so he hopped onto his bicycle to see what he could do, and was shot to death while biking past Xinhuamen.
Zhou Deping, age 25, was an M.A. student in electrical engineering at Tsinghua University. During the evening carnage of June 3, 1989, he volunteered to a group of his Tsinghua classmates to go to Tiananmen Square to check out what other classmates were facing. He headed off on his bicycle and never returned.
Sun Hui was a 19-year-old chemistry major at Peking University. He, too, volunteered to go look for a group of classmates who had said they were going to withdraw from the square but who failed to appear back on campus. Sun was shot to death while riding his bicycle near the overpass at Fuxingmen.
The transcripts tell of the deaths of three people who, had cameras been able to record their images, would have given us three more heroes to stand alongside the famous “tankman” who stood before a row of tanks.
Duan Changlong, age 24, was a recent graduate in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University. After that night in which bullets flew in every direction, and as bad news kept pouring in, he spent his day visiting emergency wards trying to save the wounded. In the evening he went to the area near the National Minority Palace to try to persuade the martial law troops to stop confronting the people. As he ran toward a military official, he apparently never imagined that a bullet would come flying out of the official’s revolver to greet him.
Wang Weiping, age 25, was a graduate of the Beijing University of Medicine and was about to begin an assignment in the OBGYN department of People’s Hospital. On June 4 she threw herself into the volunteer effort to save the lives of the wounded. Eyewitnesses report that she seemed utterly without fear, as bullets flew and flames burst forth on every side, while she concentrated solely on the people, one after another, who were lying in pools of blood. As she was applying dressing to a wound of one of them, she lifted her head slightly, was struck in the neck by a bullet, collapsed wordlessly, and that was that.
Yuan Li, age 29, worked in the Automation Research Institute in the Ministry of Electrical Engineering. Watching as troops shot recklessly in every direction, and no longer able to endure the sight of the slaughter of innocent civilians, he stepped forward, raised his right arm, and shouted, “I was a graduate student at Tsinghua University …” Before he could finish, a shot rang out and his life disappeared into the black night.
Killings are only part of the story of the suffering of these “nameless” heroes. Among people who were sent to prison for their roles in the protests, the ones who got heavy sentences—ten years or more—were predominantly people of this kind, not famous intellectual leaders. Wang Yi, a student at the Beijing College of Broadcasting, was sentenced to eleven years for blocking a military vehicle. Chen Lantao, a youngster from Qingdao, got eighteen years merely for making a protest speech in public once the massacre had begun. The Sichuan poet Liao Yiwu reports that the ordinary Tiananmen prisoners with whom he was locked up included many who were serving terms of ten years or more. There are uncountable others all across the country, and many remain behind bars today.
Among the well-known figures during the demonstrations—people who have high opinions of themselves and sometimes even look down on their ordinary followers—not one died or was wounded on June 4, and very few got prison sentences of more than ten years. Some of the elite were forced into exile and others were sent to prison, but all escaped the knives of the butchers. They also managed to make names for themselves, of greater or lesser size, and to attract the concern of others. Among the “black hands” who were accused of “causing turmoil behind the scenes,” only Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming got sentences of as long as thirteen years, and even those two were released on medical parole in the mid-1990s. I myself was one of the “black hands”; I have been incarcerated three times since 1989, but my total time of lost freedom, adding the three terms together, still amounts to less than six years.
In raising this topic I am not trying to encourage a competition over whose “sacrifice” was greatest. I am just trying to remind myself, as one of those “influential” figures, of the true facts of the Tiananmen Massacre. How was it that university students and high-level intellectuals led the 1989 movement, but when the dust settled all the people who were massacred, went out to rescue the wounded, or received heavy sentences were common people? Why is it that we scarcely hear the voices of the people who paid the heaviest prices, while the luminaries who survived the massacre can hardly stop talking?
Why is it that, in the wake of the massacre, the blood of ordinary people has gone to nourish the reputations of opportunists large and small, people who run around presenting themselves as the leaders of a “people’s movement”? Fifteen years have passed since the massacre, and yet that spilled blood, except for establishing the place of a few “heroes” at home and abroad, has resulted in almost no advance within this cold-blooded nation of ours.
What is the meaning of “suffering” and “sacrifice”? What have we bought with lost life and blood? Everyone knows that, in this land of ours, the gap between winners and losers is normally as wide as heaven and earth. But does the moral high ground that results from suffering caused by a big massacre also have to apportioned so unevenly—as starkly as the difference between heaven and earth? China’s great writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) observed, after another massacre in Beijing in 1926:
Time just flows along. The streets are peaceful again. In China a few brief lives count for nothing. At most, they provide subject matter for the after-dinner chat of idlers who mean no harm, or for other idlers who do enjoy their malevolent gossip.
The so-called elites of our country have made no progress at all since Lu Xun’s day. It is hard to find any shame or guilt in us. We have yet to learn how to draw spiritual meaning from our encounters with suffering, how to live in human dignity, or how to feel concern for the suffering of actual, ordinary people.
Take me, for instance: a self-styled elite intellectual in the 1980s and an eye-catching leader in the 1989 protest movement. What have I ever done for the massacre victims? This question has been weighing heavily on me. After the massacre, during my eighteen-month stay in Qincheng Prison, I wrote a “confession.” In doing that I not only sold out my personal dignity, but betrayed the blood sacrifices of the massacre victims. Moreover the confession left me, after I got out of prison, with a bit of a bad reputation, and for that a number of people offered me their support. Did I deserve support? Compared to whom? What about all the ordinary people who lost their lives? What about those wounded who, right now, cannot live independent lives? And what about the nameless who still languish in prison? What support has any of them got? Liao Yiwu, whose four-year prison sentence resulted in part from two long poems called “Massacre” and “Requiem,” ended one those poems with the line “And who are the lucky survivors?—They are bastards one and all!”
To look squarely at the suffering of the ordinary people whose misery is recorded in the transcripts makes me feel that I am not qualified even to be called a “survivor.” It is true that I was one of the last people to leave Tiananmen Square on June 4th, but I did nothing to volunteer myself during the bloody terror of the massacre’s aftermath, nothing to show that a kernel of my humanity had survived. After I left the square, I did not go to Beijing Normal University campus to check on the students from my alma mater who presumably had also left the square. Still less did I consider going out into the streets to minister to dead and wounded whom I did not know. Instead I fled to the relative safety of the foreign diplomatic housing compound. It is no wonder that the ordinary people who lived through the butchery might ask: “When great terror engulfed the city of Beijing, where were all those ‘black hands’ ”?
Fifteen years after Tiananmen, we can do nothing about the persistent cold blood in the veins of the massacre’s perpetrators, but at least we can ask the “heroes” of the movement, the people who have all those battle decorations pinned on our chests, this question: When we think about the victims who harvested nothing, indeed whose “gains” were only negative numbers, do we feel no personal responsibility, no guilt? Should we not observe minimal standards of human decency and, with that same passion with which we cherish freedom, be sure that the moral resources that derive from the loss of human life—which are the only resources people have in challenging totalitarian power—are properly apportioned? When we look at those “Tiananmen mothers” who so tirelessly persist in seeking justice for victims, can elite survivors like us not show a bit more compassion, and a better sense of equality and justice, by being sure that moral credit goes to those people who suffered far more than we did, and to whom such credit in the first place rightly belongs?
Let us offer our thanks to these bereaved family members, who have given to Chinese history portraits of the ordinary people who died in the massacre.
Originally published on the website of New Century News, www.ncn.org
Translated by Paul G. Pickowicz
YOUR SEVENTEEN YEARS
Two years after Tiananmen
Foreword: Though your father warned you not to go, you snuck out the bathroom window. When you fell, flag in hand, you were only seventeen. I lived. I am now thirty-six. In the face of your death, living is a crime, and writing this poem for you is an even greater shame. The living must hold their peace, and listen to the voices from the grave. I am not worthy to write poetry for you. Your seventeen years are more precious than any work of words or hands.
I, alive
and with my share of infamy
have not the courage, nor the right
to come bearing flowers or words
before your seventeen-year-old smile
I know
seventeen years cannot hate or begrudge
And I have learned, from your seventeen years
that a life is a simple and unembellished thing
like a horizonless desert
requiring no water
requiring no adornment of tree or flower
to withstand the ravages of the sun
When your seventeen years collapsed upon the road
the road disappeared
your seventeen years rest peacefully as pages
between covers of mud
seventeen years in this world
yearn after nothing
but white, immaculate Age
When your seventeen years ceased to breathe,
miraculously they did not cease to hope
when bullets pierced the mountains
and the oceans writhed in pain
when all flowers became a single color
your seventeen years did not cease to hope
could not cease to hope
seventeen years of unfinished love
were returned to a white-haired mother
The mother who kept your seventeen years
locked up at home
the mother who beneath a five-starred flag
severed the ties of noble blood
which bound her own family
woke when you fixed her with your final gaze
bearing your seventeen-year-old bequest
she has crossed and recrossed every graveyard
every time she was about to fall
the spectral breath of a seventeen-year-old
propped her up
and sent her on her way
Surpassing age
surpassing death
your seventeen years
will last forever
Beijing, June 1, 1991, at night
Translated by Isaac P. Hsieh
STANDING AMID THE EXECRATIONS OF TIME
Ten years after Tiananmen
To me, standing amid the execrations of Time
that day seems so strange
1
Ten years ago this day
dawn, a bloody shirt
sun, a torn calendar
all eyes upon
this single page
the world a single outraged stare
time tolerates no naïveté
the dead rage and howl
till the earth’s throat
grows hoarse
Gripping the prison bars
this moment
I must wail in grief
for I fear the next
so much I have no tears for it
remembering them, the innocent dead,
I must thrust a dagger calmly
into my eyes
must purc
hase with blindness
clarity of the brain
for that bone-devouring memory
is best expressed
by refusal
2
Ten years ago this day
soldiers stand at attention
poses dignified and correct, trained
to uphold a hideous lie
dawn is a crimson flag
fluttering in the half-light
people crane and stand on tiptoe
curious, awed, earnest
a young mother
lifts her baby’s hand
to salute that sky-eclipsing lie
And a white-haired mother
kisses the image of her son
delicately pries his fingers apart
and washes the blood from his nails
she can find no soil, not even a handful
in which her son may rest
she has no choice
but to hang him on the wall
Now she walks among unmarked graves
hoping to expose the lie of a century
from her sealed throat she exhumes
that long-stifled name
lets her freedom and dignity be
a denunciation of amnesia
police listen on the wiretap
and dog her footsteps
3
The world’s largest square
has been given a new face
When the peasant Liu Bang became