by Ian Buruma
I asked him whether he remembered June 4. A stupid question. “Of course,” he barked. “Everyone in Beijing remembers.” He himself had driven wounded students to the hospital in his taxi. “How can we forget? The government feels so guilty that every year on June 4, the city is swarming with police. If they didn’t feel guilty, would they still need to protect themselves like that from the people?”
We were nearing the museum. The driver negotiated his way through the traffic at murderous speed as though by instinct, looking at me as he spoke. “The problem,” he said, “is that anyone who resists the Communists gets shot. And because the people can’t criticize the government, the government makes big mistakes. It’s not like in your country. We live in a prison here. Everything you hear is lies. All those years of communism, and we still have nothing.” The taxi came to a halt. He took my hand and said: “You foreigners must help us Chinese people. We all want to be free, like you.”
One of the speakers in Hong Kong on the tenth anniversary of June 4 was a retired philosophy professor named Ding Zilin. A white-haired motherly woman, she was not permitted to use her phone, so she spoke by a videotape, recorded in Beijing, which was projected on a large screen in Victoria Park in front of the seventy thousand people gathered there. Ding didn’t have to say much about herself, for everyone knew who she was. Her presence was fitting in the quasi-religious atmosphere of candlelight and tears.
In 1991, just before Qing Ming, the festival when Chinese sweep the graves of their loved ones, Professor Ding decided to break the silence in Beijing. Together with another woman, she began to talk openly to Hong Kong and American reporters about how they had lost their children on the night of June 3. Ding’s son was a seventeen-year-old high school student when he was shot in the back while running for cover. The two mothers demanded an investigation into what had really happened, not just to their children but to others who died in obscurity. And so the Tiananmen Mothers were born. They wanted to live within the truth, like the Argentinian mothers who gathered every week on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, dressed in black, the names of their “disappeared” children on white headbands.
A year before she decided to speak out in public, Ding was handed a note found in a cemetery in Beijing. It was from a woman who had lost her husband on June 4. She wanted to contact others so they could break the silence together. Ding, with her husband and a few friends, set themselves the task of finding as many relatives of victims as possible so that the deaths could be recorded, the names remembered, the truth established. She traveled all over China, often acting on the slightest information—a name, a half-remembered address, a grave inscription. The police harassed her constantly, tapping her phone, stopping her from leaving her apartment, barring guests, once even preventing her from buying offerings for her son’s grave. She was threatened with arrest and called a “traitor to the nation,” by policemen, but also by anonymous callers, who would phone her late at night.
In 1994, on the fifth anniversary of June 4, Ding published a book with private funds, listing the names and circumstances of ninety-six victims’ deaths. The list has grown since then to more than 155, while the official obstruction, the threats, and the intimidations continue. Sometimes it is possible to see her, sometimes not. Lois Snow, the widow of Edgar Snow, the American journalist who did more than any other Westerner to promote the Maoist revolution, was not permitted to see her. Snow’s grave in Beijing is marked with the words FRIEND OF CHINA. But his widow’s friendship with the Communists finally soured on June 4, 1989. When she came to Beijing with her son in March 2000 to offer solidarity to the Tiananmen Mothers, plainclothes policemen kept Ding Zilin away from her. Lois Snow then threatened to take her husband’s ashes back to America. She still was unable to see Ding.
Ding reckons that during the fifty years of communism, 80 million people died of unnatural causes. In the light of this catastrophe, 155 dead may not seem much9. And yet, she wrote, “I have come to realize that even if I had documented only one of these names, I would still consider my life to have some sort of significance. If our fellow countrymen had squarely faced the successive onslaughts of death that occurred in China’s past, perhaps we could have prevented this most recent tragedy.”
I was unable to see Ding Zilin, although I spoke to her on her cell phone. But a friend in Beijing passed on the telephone number of another Tiananmen Mother, close to Ding, who was also actively trying to live in the truth. She is Su Bingxian. Her son was twenty-one when he caught three bullets in the chest, somewhere on Chang’an Avenue, not far from the Square. She had warned him not to go out that night. Already on the afternoon of June 3, the streets were filled with menace. But Su Zhaolong wanted to be “a witness to history,” he said. When the shooting started later that night, his mother thought of firecrackers on New Year’s Eve.
It wasn’t easy to find Mrs. Su’s apartment in a block of redbrick flats in Beijing’s university area surrounded by other blocks, for I had been given the wrong number. Officious-looking women with armbands guarded the gates. A man in a green uniform smirked and nudged his friends as I walked by, anxiously trying to find my bearings. I finally got there after an elderly lady guessed whom I was looking for and told me where to go.
The two-bedroom apartment was sparsely furnished, like most Chinese homes. We sat at a simple wooden table drinking green tea. Two large black-and-white photographs hung on the walls, like ancestral portraits. One was of a thin, scholarly old gentlemen dressed in a Mao jacket. The other was of Su Zhaolong, a handsome boy with thick hair and a pensive expression. His father, Su’s husband, was in the countryside. I sensed a degree of tension when Su spoke about him. A retired naval officer, like Su herself, he was, she said, “disillusioned.”
Su, a round-faced woman with frizzy hair, noticed that I was looking at the portrait of the old man on the wall and told me it was her father, a famous poet, Su Jinsan, who “suffered from all the Chinese troubles of the twentieth century.” She spoke in the clear Mandarin of a highly educated person. The story she told of her family would fill a book of tragedies. It was, in many ways, the story of China’s modern fate.
When Su Jinsan graduated from Beijing University, he was full of literary ambition and patriotic idealism. The two were linked in his mind. He wanted to be a writer and save China. Like many early Communists, including Mao, Su had joined the KMT for three years in the late 1920s. Those were murky times, full of infiltrations, short-term alliances, and betrayals. Suspected, rightly, of being a Communist, Su was arrested during a purge of the left and managed to escape from prison, and almost certain death, only through the help of a sympathizer in the KMT. He joined Mao in the caves of Yan’an, for Su loved the Communist revolution, which saved China from the “black gang” of the KMT. He loved it, but not blindly. He still had half a mind to live in the truth.
This was not easy, for even in those early days, writers and poets with minds of their own were persecuted for deviating from Mao’s strict guidelines. Mao demanded absolute loyalty, especially from writers and intellectuals, whom, as a class, he never trusted. Perhaps he felt inferior, a provincial lacking in style. He always suspected treachery.
After 1949, Mao needed a literary scapegoat to whip all intellectuals into line. He picked on a gifted poet named Hu Feng, an ardent Communist, who, like Su, still retained his critical faculties. Hu particularly resented Mao’s rigid, dogmatic rules on style as well as content. He was too good a writer to have to conform to Mao’s literary regulations. So Mao unleashed a public assault on Hu Feng and his “clique” for being “bourgeois reactionaries.”
Su Jinsan not only defended Hu Feng but followed Mao’s orders in the 1950s to be critical of the Party’s mistakes. For this he was arrested, tortured, and robbed of his rights. To be branded an “extreme rightist” in the 1950s was to be an outcast, a non-person, who could be bullied by anyone at will. Su Jinsan was still able to find refuge in a lowly job at a library. But ten years later, during the
Cultural Revolution, he was terrorized once again, not just for being a “rightist” this time, but for having been a member of the KMT in the 1920s. The distinguished poet was taken from his home, beaten, and made to kneel in front of young thugs, some still in their teens, who made him “confess” his “crimes” while yanking his arms back behind his neck in the “airplane” position. His wife, who had been sent to a labor camp in 1957 as an “extreme rightist,” was forced to publicly denounce him, which didn’t save her from being sent again to work in the countryside, where she almost starved to death. And yet, despite every horror that came his way, Su never lost his loyalty to the Party. He died as a firm believer in the faith that had wrecked his life.
At this point in her story, Su Bingxian paused to wipe the tears from her eyes. She had loved her father, and his treatment shook her own faith in the Party, but she had to keep her doubts to herself. She could not talk to her husband, for “he didn’t understand a lot of things.” It was only in the 1980s, after Mao’s death and Deng’s reforms, that she and her husband began to question the dogmas they grew up with. But she never told her son what had happened to his grandparents. It was too dangerous, and too painful. He grew up ignorant of his family history.
“You know,” she said, “my husband and I were of the Mao generation. We had closed minds. And people of my father’s age had to be interested in politics, because politics was interested in them.” But Zhaolong, her son, had no interest in politics or literature, including his grandfather’s poems. “My son’s generation,” Su said, “had no use for reading. They like to go shopping, have fun.”
Zhaolong also liked to play his guitar. But he was evidently a bright boy who wanted to go to university. In the spring of 1989, Zhaolong was working in a clothes market, hoping to earn enough for his tuition fees. Many of his former schoolmates were sleeping in Tiananmen Square, and Zhaolong would bring them food and water. It was the first time he felt any interest in the wider world. He joined the protest marches. Suddenly there was hope and excitement. Politics was no longer dull propaganda. The heady air of freedom touched him too. His mother saw a big change in him. She realized that he “had learned to think critically.” For the first time he reminded her of her father.
It took three days to track down Zhaolong, three days of going from hospital to hospital, mortuary to mortuary. His face was twisted out of shape when they found him, but the bloody yellow T-shirt, the blue jeans, and the Nike shoes were clearly his. He was buried in a cemetery opposite the grave of his grandfather. Three years later, the police came to Su Bingxian’s apartment. They told her to remove her son’s ashes from the cemetery. Otherwise they would be disposed of. Too many graves marked with the same date would not do. People might start asking questions. Silence had to reign even among the dead.
Few Chinese, whether on the mainland or Taiwan, compare June 4 (6-4) with that other bloody date on the Chinese historical calendar, February 28, 1947 (2-28), when thousands of Taiwanese were killed in the “white terror” of the KMT. There are huge differences, of course. June 4 lacks the component of quasi-ethnic resentment. Whatever else Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng might have been, they were not regarded as foreigners. The idea of national independence isn’t part of 6-4 as it is of 2-28. But in political significance, they are comparable. This was pointed out by Bao Tong, right-hand man in the 1980s to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Party secretary-general who was fired for being too sympathetic to the students.
Bao Tong is a loyal Communist in the Dubcek or Gorbachev mold, a reformist who believed that the Party could become democratic without abolishing itself, or even losing power. He was at the heart of reformism, as deputy director of the State Commission for Economic Reform and, later, as director of the Office of Political Reform of the Party’s Central Committee. But his cause, too, was smashed on the night of June 4. Or perhaps two weeks earlier, on May 19, when Zhao Ziyang told the students in Tiananmen Square that it was “too late,” that he had lost his capacity to influence his government. Or, maybe, even earlier than that. Bao Tong now regrets that economic reforms weren’t matched with political reforms in the early 1980s. When corruption and abuses of power drove the country into a crisis in 1989, it was too late; there was no other public forum for people to express their discontents than the streets.
Zhao Ziyang was put under house arrest in June 198910, for “supporting turmoil and splitting the Party,” but he was still allowed to play golf, though not on courses open to foreigners. Bao Tong, accused of leaking plans of the crackdown to the students, was purged from the Party and jailed for seven years. The Party elders had never liked the look of Bao Tong anyway. Li Xiannian, the former state president who advocated force in 1989, is reported to have disapproved of Bao’s style as much as his politics11: “I know the man. He’s over fifty but follows fashions like a youngster. He wears gaudy jackets and blue jeans inside Zhongnanhai—what kind of Party official is that?” Bao is still under permanent surveillance; his phones are tapped. Whenever he leaves his house, men with walkie-talkies follow him in unmarked white Mercedeses. Things get particularly tense on the anniversaries of June 4. In the spring of 2000, he was shoved into a police car in the center of Beijing, and his wife, who was almost seventy, was wrestled to the ground. When Bao demanded to see a legal document, the policeman sneered: “Don’t talk to us about the law.”
Bao’s writings cannot be published in China. Yet his words get out, on the Internet, through magazines and publishers in Hong Kong. He has sent open letters to President Jiang Zemin, criticizing the government for its poor human-rights record and demanding a reversal of the official verdict on June 4. It was in one of those open letters12, in 1999, that he compared 6-4 to 2-28. He wrote: “You cannot really believe that these ten years of covering up have succeeded. The history of bloodshed remains in people’s hearts; they will not forget. No one can ever successfully cover up such an event. Remember that after 50 years of attempted cover-up, the truth about the February 28 incident in Taiwan was revived.”
Bao Tong is a courageous man. But perhaps even he still lives in a half-truth. For he still believes that reversing the verdict on Tiananmen will save the Communist Party. Those who reverse the June 4 decision12, he writes, “will win the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. . . . If such a legacy were to fall into the hands of non-Party members, it would be a tragedy for the Party.”
Bao joined the Communist Party fifty years ago, because he believed it would set the Chinese people free. He saw Mao as a democrat. Later, when Mao’s “mistakes” could be publicly acknowledged, Bao believed his boss13 Zhao Ziyang when the latter talked about solving China’s problems in “the framework of democracy and law.” And now Bao believes that once the problem of June 4 “is solved . . . the common people will be extremely happy. Everybody would raise all kinds of suggestions. Everybody’s political activism would immediately increase. Their sense of political responsibility would also increase.”
The Party and the people, then, will be reconciled, and Zhao Ziyang’s ideals will win the day. Bao believes that the media will become the true “voice of the people.” And corruption will be defeated. After all, he says14, “Marxism is a work-in-progress, and the Communist Party ought to change with the times. . . . There is a scholar named Tsou Tang. He said that China should move from ‘totalitarianism’ to ‘totalism.’ And then move from ‘totalism’ to democracy. I think that if we can successfully make this transition, then the whole world will see that the Chinese Communist Party is at the forefront of all other communist parties in democratic development. What’s wrong with that? I can’t see what’s wrong with that.”
There is nothing wrong, except that it is yesterday’s dream, reflecting the hope of a believer to redeem the faith of a lifetime. It is too late for that. Most other Communist parties have already died. And the Chinese Communist Party has learned its lesson from Gorbachev. It knows that suicide lies at the end of that reformist road. So even good Communists like Bao Tong must
be silenced. And if Communist reformers are treated that way, what hope is there for real democrats?
The suggestion that I meet Bao Tong in Beijing came from Dai Qing, the independent scholar and journalist, who was home again when I returned to China in the spring of 2000. She was in a feisty mood, and recalled some recent confrontations with officialdom with cackles of sardonic laughter. The only time her lips would purse and her voice sharpen is when the subject of June 4 came up. For her hopes, too, had been smashed on that occasion. Like Bao Tong, she had invested too much in the reformist dreams.
We arranged to meet at a tea shop near her house. The idea was to record a discussion about the problems of speaking the truth in China, which we might publish in an American journal.
Yes, she said as she sat down. She understood exactly what I wanted to talk to her about. She asked for my pen and scribbled some Chinese characters in my notebook. She had written: “From ‘calling a deer a horse’ to ‘speaking the truth.’ ” It was of course Confucius’s phrase, from his story about the despot who tested the loyalty of his subjects by pointing to a deer and calling it a horse. And Dai spoke about her discovery of the truth about her real father, a Communist executed by the Japanese, and about the poet Wang Shiwei, persecuted to his death and only rehabilitated in 1991. She had written a book about him. She spoke of her own, and subsequently her readers’, discovery of having been “cheated of the truth” by the Party. And finally, with a sense of melancholy resignation, she spoke of being attacked, mostly by dissidents abroad, for her take on June 4, which she still regards as a reckless “Great Leap Forward” by student extremists and not as a democratic rebellion.
Democracy can only come slowly, she said. The Party must keep some kind of control. Chaos has to be avoided at all costs. For the cause of reform must not suffer another setback, as it did in 1989. So what could be done to make it go forward? She thought about that for a while, and said: “To break through the lies. To tell the truth. To tell stories, like mine about Wang Shiwei. To give a different view from the orthodoxy.”