by James Palmer
The perceived slander prompted rage across the south-east, but especially in Nanjing, where, on 29 March, a copy of the article was pinned up inside a window-case at the university, with the offending line underlined and ‘What does this mean?’ written next to it. Soon copies of Wenhui Bao were being publicly burnt, and Nanjingers were shouting, ‘We’ll defend our beloved Premier to the end!’ and ‘We miss Yang Kaihui!’ (an earlier wife of Mao’s).
But the whole thing may well have been a mistake caused by a grammatical ambiguity. Plurals are barely used in Chinese; singular or plural forms are largely derived from context. The sentence was supposed to be read as, ‘The capitalist roader inside the Party wanted to help the unrepentant capitalist roaders regain power’, with the first capitalist being Deng himself, and the unrepentant capitalist roaders being his political supporters throughout the country, the ‘little Deng Xiaopings’. No insult to Zhou had been intended, but the damage had been done.
The Nanjing students were determined to spread their message to other cities, and about seventy of them marched to the railway station with pots and paste, ready to slather trains with posters. On the way there the bus driver, when he realised what they were going to do, told them they could ride for free, while the station staff happily provided them with train timetables, ink and refreshments. It became something of a party. Passengers came out to help them, while one of the station attendants commented that previous slogans had been washed off up the line, and they should try something more lasting. He produced a large bucket of tar, and the students daubed ‘Somebody behind the scenes is responsible for the Wenhui Bao of 5 and 25 March, and that somebody is at the centre!’ and ‘Whoever pointed the Wenhui Bao’s spearhead at Premier Zhou on 5 and 25 March deserves to die 10,000 deaths’ on the train. It must have livened up the day of anyone who saw the train as it trundled through the countryside later.
The mourning protests sometimes had a paradoxical joy about them. The teenage son of a Nanjing university professor remembered people coming to their house just to stare at his father, who bore some resemblance to Zhou.
A blue-collar worker in his twenties came out of the crowd. I heard him say:
‘If you all want me to read aloud, I will do it.’
‘Read aloud! Read aloud!’ The crowd yelled. The man then started to read.
Sometimes he had to pause because the street light was not bright enough. Someone suggested that he use a flashlight.
‘Who has a flashlight?’ ‘Who has a flashlight?’ The words were repeated until someone said: ‘I have one.’ An even younger man stepped up. With the help of the flashlight the man read more fluently. The readings ended with slogans for the people to follow and repeat. The man read these in an even louder voice and the whole crowd joined in. We shouted as loudly as we could, and our voices burst out through the darkness and echoed in the freezing March air. I felt warmed up by the excitement as I joined in the yelling.17
Only a minority of the population was ever involved in the protests. Most of them preferred the solution exemplified in a popular saying, ‘If the thunder of cannons comes from left and right, cower in the middle.’18 But those willing to risk cannon fire were numerous, and angry. Over 660,000 people visited the cemetery in Nanjing, and nearly 40,000 marched directly in protest. Jiangsu and other provinces exploded in their own mourning fury.
In Guangzhou, villagers woke up to find the ground scattered with pamphlets condemning the leftists, airdropped during the night by southern military officers who, like their commanders, favoured Deng. In Changzhou, a city in Jiangsu, pro-Deng marchers shouted, ‘We won’t believe Deng’s a counter-revolutionary even if we’re beheaded for it!’
The protests scared the Gang of Four; they spent many hours that March reading detailed reports and telephoning provincial leaders and demanding action. They were convinced, as Yao wrote in his journal, that there was ‘some underground capitalist force at work here’,19 a hidden hand coordinating the movements. The leftists were trapped in a worldview where any wrong decision ‘the masses’ made was inevitably the result of conspiracy and deceit; the idea that these might be genuine grassroots movements was unthinkable.
But as thick as the protests came in the south, they were nothing compared to the weight of events in Tiananmen that April. While in other cities the revolutionary martyrs were safely tucked in graveyards, in Beijing the Monument to the People’s Heroes was right in the centre of Tiananmen Square. It bore an inscription from Mao on one side, and from Zhou on the other. The first wreath to Zhou was placed underneath his calligraphy by a primary school on 19 March, and another one four days later.
Both were quickly and quietly removed, but between 25 and 30 March, a group of middle-school students left their wreaths, followed by a group of workers, then an army unit. None of them were taken away, and by 1 April the word had spread. Slogan-painted trains were arriving in Beijing so thick and fast from other cities that the railway workers couldn’t keep up with washing off the offending characters, so word of the protests elsewhere was spreading quickly.
Everybody who could went to the square. Whole factories marched past the monument, hundreds at a time. ‘My whole work unit went together,’ one woman recalled, ‘We were a long way away, but our supervisor was the one who took us to the bus. Everybody else there was carrying wreaths. When we got there it was like an army pressed into the square; we could barely find room to leave our tributes.’ Real flowers weren’t the usual form; instead people crafted home-made flowers from paper, with ribbons hanging down from each side recording the tribute to Zhou and the name of the makers. Something like two million people visited the square in a single day on 4 April, which was a Sunday and therefore most people’s only day off, and perhaps as many as four million visited over a five-day period.
Scientific and technical institutions, such as the Railway Ministry, the Academy of Sciences, and the Seismological Bureau, were unusually ardent in getting their people into the square. They had a particularly strong investment in the kind of scientific modernisation process pushed by Zhou and Deng, and a strong dislike of the leftists. Technicians, engineers and intellectuals had all suffered over the past decade for being more ‘expert’ than ‘red’, forced to watch know-nothing ideologues promoted above them.
There were not as many students as in Nanjing, as the campus authorities barred the gates and patrolled the grounds to prevent their charges from getting into the centre of the city. But present, too, were hundreds of thousands of former Red Guards. Zhou had epitomised the old order they had once set out to attack; now they came to mourn him, and to protest the ideas they had once unwittingly supported. As Wei Jingsheng, one of present-day China’s most famous exiled democratic activists, put it,
Many of those who in 1966 had stood in Tiananmen like idiots, with tears in their eyes, before that man who stripped them of their freedom [Mao], returned courageously in 1976 to oppose him in the same place.20
As the wreaths were placed, plain-clothes militiamen struggled to record the names of the people leaving them, and to remove the tributes at night if possible. Somebody scrawled a piece of doggerel on the monument on 26 March: ‘I came to make trouble at Qing Ming; plain-clothesman is my name. I destroyed all the wreaths when it was dark; I am a ghost stealing the flowers.’21
Some of the poems were simple expressions of mourning and regret, like the disturbingly prescient:
As thunder shocked heaven,
As the earth broke the horizon open,
Silence over China, speechless are the tears,
Try to tell it but words can’t be formed,
Try to tell it and tears run down again.
Heard it, but couldn’t believe it,
Believed it and our hearts broke.
Even such lines were worrying enough, since they implied a lack of confidence in the government left behind after Zhou’s death. Far more disturbing to Jiang and her allies were the numerous memorials attacking them. Jiang alw
ays bore the brunt of the attacks, with Yao and Zhang closely associated with her. Wang was a distant fourth, mentioned only in passing. The insults levelled at Jiang were sometimes blunt:
You must be mad
To want to be an empress
Here’s a mirror to look at yourself
And see what you really are.
You’ve got together a little gang
To stir up trouble all the time,
Hoodwinking the people, capering about
But your days are numbered.22
Sometimes they were thick with historical allusion: ‘We want Premier Zhou, we don’t want Franco [Mao] and even less the Empress Dowager [Jiang Qing].’23 Jiang received special abuse as a female ruler, with the protestors comparing her to Wu Zetian, China’s only female empress, who had become a stock symbol of manipulative female power. Significantly, Wu had taken the throne following her husband’s death – and had come in for a slating from traditionally minded critics, especially after her death, when she couldn’t have them executed any more.
Jiang means ‘river’, which the protestors had fun with. ‘Don’t let the river waters wash away the memories of Zhou!’ One poem included the line ‘The swaying bridge over the Pu river’ (pu jiang yao qiao), which could also be read as ‘Arrest Jiang, Yao, and Zhang Chunqiao’.24
Other poems called directly for action.
I mourn but the ghosts are screaming,
I cry but the jackals are laughing.
Tears are shed, in memory of the hero,
Eyebrows are raised, as I take my sword from my scabbard.
But the mourners didn’t just challenge Jiang and the jackals in her court. Some of them pointed to Mao, at least indirectly. One placard read ‘The day of Qin Shihuangdi is done!’ (Qin was the first emperor of China, famous as both a unifier and a tyrant; Mao had repeatedly praised him.) Across Tiananmen Square, protestors holding up pictures of Zhou directly faced the giant portrait of Mao under the gate itself. They pasted his photo on to Chinese maps and flags, a collage previously reserved for Mao. Some people hung small bottles from trees, a punning reference to Deng, whose given name can be made to sound like ‘xiao ping’ – small bottle.
Deng was rarely referred to directly, but the economic disasters that he had been trying to cure were. There were hard words for people who believed that the economy could be maintained through political campaigns rather than reforms. Posters called for a revival of Zhou and Deng’s economic modernisations. ‘We don’t want all those other nice slogans any more! The troublemaking and the sabotage of those people are the reason why the economy is stagnating! The peasants do not have enough to eat, and the workers’ lives are growing harder and harder.’25 They didn’t envisage the overthrow of the system but, like many reformists in the Eastern bloc in Europe, wanted a changed socialist system, one concerned with national well-being rather than ideological shibboleths.
The crowds did not limit themselves to poetry. They became impromptu discussion groups, talking about the high-level leaders, what constituted true Marxism, how society could be changed. Some stood on boxes and addressed the crowds, or led songs.
This was a million miles away from the regimented, ritualised politics of fear people had grown used to, a genuine expression of popular will, grief and anger. But also celebration. Like the other protests, it had an atmosphere of festive release about it, of speaking up for the first time in years. A revolution can sometimes be a party, and the psychological release of speaking their minds was enormous for many of the protestors. People linked arms and sang, not because anybody was telling them to, but out of spontaneous fellow feeling. The atmosphere of comradeship, joy and popular unity that state propaganda claimed was normal in China manifested itself for real.
Little ‘fighting groups’ formed, composed of young people who had only met each other a few hours before swearing eternal friendship. (‘When the TV showed the Egyptian people in Tahrir Square, singing against Mubarak, I saw the same thing,’ commented one veteran of 1976 to me in February 2011.)
People passed around poems they had long kept hidden, while amateur photographers snapped the crowds; 27-year-old Zhao Zhengkai, later to be famous under his pseudonym of ‘Bei Dao’, but then just an ordinary worker, read his poetic cry of defiance, ‘The Answer’, to a stunned audience.
Let me tell you, world
I do not believe!
If a thousand challengers fall under your feet
Count me as challenger a thousand-and-one.
I don’t believe the sky is blue
I don’t believe in thunder’s echoes
I don’t believe that dreams are false
I don’t believe that death has no revenge.
Factories used their mimeograph machines to print out pamphlets, and people collected and read each one as eagerly as children devouring fairytales. As one visitor put it, through most of the seventies you ‘felt lonely even in a crowd’,26 but here people came together. It wasn’t all good; on the edges of the throng gangs of Beijing teenagers scuffled with each other, while a few pickpockets worked the crowds. But for many, there was a kind of magic about these days of relative freedom.
Late on the evening of 4 April, Hua Guofeng gathered the Politburo in the Great Hall of the People, the huge government building that overlooks the square itself on the east side. Deng and his allies were deliberately excluded. Wang Hongwen had made a late-night visit the day before, and reported on the disturbing slogans he’d read by torchlight, but the main speaker was the 63-year-old Wu De, the mayor of Beijing and Party vice-chairman, who commanded the capital’s security forces. There had been deliberate attacks on the leadership and the Party, he complained, and it was clearly a pre-planned counter-revolutionary attack – led, no doubt, by Deng. They were getting word, too, of more protests in the provinces, prompted by news of the Tiananmen events.
They agreed the mourning was both unprecedented and dangerous, and dispatched Mao Yuanxin to his uncle’s bedside to get approval to do something about it. Pitching the need for action to the Chairman, he emphasised that people were not commemorating Zhou at all, but using his memories to support Deng – and worst of all, to criticise Mao himself. He compared the situation to Hungary in 1956, claiming that it was clear the protests were being organised by some controlling hand – with the heavy implication it was Deng himself.
Deng had often been labelled ‘China’s Imre Nagy’, a reference to the Marxist Hungarian leader during the revolution against Soviet rule in 1956. Memories of the Hungarian revolution terrified China’s leaders. It was the first time a whole people had shucked off communism and abolished the one-party system. Despite Soviet propaganda about fascists, hooligans and counter-revolutionaries, the Chinese were bitterly aware of the truth: the people had turned on the Party with a vengeance. Of course, there had to be a sinister hand behind it, and the idea of a ‘Petofi club’, which in reality had been a gathering spot for young intellectuals in Budapest, became one of the great bogeymen of Party thought.
Mao agreed to action, but it had already been taken. Between 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning of 5 April, 200 trucks arrived to carry off the memorials. They were taken, like Zhou’s body, to the Babaoshan Cemetery to be cremated. Police cordoned off the square, denying entry to the public.
Beijingers were furious. ‘I heard about it from my workmate’s brother,’ one of them said many years later, ‘He came up to me. “Did you hear? Those bastards won’t let us mourn the premier!” I was so mad I wanted to smash something, but my mother found me before I could get into the centre of town. She was so scared something was going to happen she forbade me from going in.’
Other Beijingers didn’t have such cautious parents. By 10:00, a crowd of thousands had gathered in the square, shouting slogans like ‘Give us back the wreaths!’, ‘Down with those who oppose Premier Zhou!’, ‘Stamp on the cockroaches!’ and ‘Be ready to die in defence of Premier Zhou!’ They scuffled with police and militia, manhandling t
hem out of the square. The government troops had been cautioned against using force by their superiors, worried about the mood of the crowd if someone was killed.
Many of the militiamen present melted away, either out of sympathy or fear. Earnest students attempted to persuade them to join the crowds, reciting poems about how the army and militia served the people. When two loudspeaker vans started broadcasting against counter-revolutionary sabotage and class enemies, one of them was overturned and the loudspeaker smashed, and the other only allowed to drive away after it began broadcasting ‘Long live Premier Zhou!’
Around noon, somebody noticed a small building on the south-east corner of the square, the joint command post of the security personnel, the police and the militia. The crowd began to sing the good old revolutionary songs – the ‘Internationale’, the ‘March of the Volunteers’ – and to head towards the security station. Surrounding it, they started to overturn cars and other vehicles parked outside – but over a period of some hours, with the peculiar caution of a mob that’s not certain how far it wants to go; one person jumping in to kick a bumper or smash a window before others joined him, rocking empty jeeps and vans from side to side, then scurrying back as they were heaved over. Improvised Molotov cocktails were used to set the overturned vehicles on fire. As those in the crowd became more intoxicated with their own power, at around 5:00 they smashed the windows of the security station, bursting in to set it on fire as the terrified personnel escaped through the back door.