by Linda Jaivin
Later that evening, Billy and I went to a rock club. There we watched some truly shite bands, and then were blown away by the performance of the punk He Yong and his band May Day. Afterwards, we shouted He Yong a beer. Billy told him that if he had the chance to do any concerts in China, he'd like He Yong to support him. As we raved on into the night, we pretty well forgot the news about Hu Yaobang's death. Who cared, anyway? One less ageing Communist leader, ex-leader, whatever. He Yong was much more interesting.
Two days later, Billy and I climbed up to the rostrum at Tiananmen, where Chairman Mao had stood to declare the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The ancient gate to the Imperial Palace, it overlooks Tiananmen Square, the biggest plaza in the world. Once one of Communism's sacred sites, unreachable and unknowable, it was, by 1989, open to any worker, peasant or soldier with a few spare quid for the entry fee. Billy and I couldn't resist striking silly poses, taking photos and waving to the imaginary masses below, when we noticed that, uh, hey, there actually were some masses down there.
‘What's that all about?’ Billy asked, pointing to the knot of people clustered around the Monument to the People's Heroes in the centre of the square.
‘No idea,’ shrugged I, the China specialist, and posed for another happy snap.
It was, in fact, the beginnings of the biggest spontaneous mass movement in contemporary Chinese history, the start of the student-led protests that were to accelerate through the next few months and end in terrible tragedy with the bloody massacre of civilian demonstrators by the Chinese army on 3—4 June.
But how was I to know that?
Billy left China the following day. I stayed on. I was working for the ABC as a consultant on a mini-series they were planning to shoot from Nick Jose's novel The Avenue of Eternal Peace. Every day I had meetings with Chinese film studio reps to discuss things like location fees and the best way to assemble a Chinese crew. Having finally figured out what was happening on the square, I'd stop by every day after work to check out the action.
There wasn't a lot of action at first. People climbed up onto the monument to declaim what a great man Hu Yaobang had been, the ‘soul of China’, even. This struck me as odd. I'd never heard any Chinese person say such things about Hu when he was alive. Most people I know remembered him as a clownish little man with ill-fitting suits who'd once tried to get the Chinese people to give up chopsticks for knives and forks. They did give him credit for being more concerned than most Chinese leaders about righting past injustices, and for having a reasonably benign attitude towards writers and artists. But still.
The crowds on the square grew daily. The content of the speeches broadened to cover issues like corruption and inflation, and, more provocatively, people's desire for democracy. Plainclothes police swarmed about, taking photographs. The atmosphere became increasingly confrontational.
On the night of 21 April I happened to be at one of the universities, the Beijing Teachers' College, visiting some friends. The following day was to be Hu Yaobang's state funeral at the Great Hall of the People, a Stalinist-style architectural lump on the edge of Tiananmen Square. The government had announced that the square would be off-limits to the public all that day. At about 10.30 p.m, just as I was approaching the campus gates to go home, thousands of students poured out of the dormitories. Many of them wore white paper flowers, symbols of mourning. Most were on foot, some were on pushbikes. They planned to get to Tiananmen before the police could seal it off.
With clockwork timing, a huge procession of students from other universities came parading down the street. The students from the teachers' college swung into line. All the students marched behind banners identifying them by university and department; they held high other placards calling for human rights, democracy, and an end to corruption. They were well organised. They were disciplined. They had leaders and lists of slogans. And they were singing ‘The Internationale’.
And so the students neatly defeated the official ban on entering Tiananmen on the day of Hu's funeral.
I rode my bike back to the square the next morning, one of thousands of people converging on Tiananmen from all directions, curious to see what would happen. Rows of policemen blocked our path to the square. We learned later that several students knelt on the steps of the Great Hall, trying to get one of the leaders inside to accept a petition. No one did. The students returned to their campuses.
On 26 April, the government published an editorial in the People's Daily referring to the incident and accusing a ‘small handful’ of bad elements of plotting counter-revolution. The students, outraged and insulted, decided to march on Tiananmen in massive numbers the following day. They were aware that when the party started using words like ‘counter-revolution’, it was time to prepare for the worst. Many wrote last wills and testaments.
On the morning of the 27th, police ringed the universities. I had an appointment at the Beijing Film Studio. To get there I had to pass through the university district. I saw students massing behind every campus gate. Outside the gates, lines of grim-faced policemen stood their ground, their brief not to allow the students out. The students had originally planned to march out at 8 a.m.; by the time I passed it was already 9.30, so the tension had been building for over an hour and a half.
About an hour later, inside the Beijing Film Studio, I heard an explosive, collective shout. The students had broken out of the campuses. They were marching towards the centre of the city, stopping every few blocks for yet another face-off with police. By early afternoon they had reached an intersection a couple of blocks from Tiananmen Square and, by coincidence, just outside a Sichuan restaurant where I was now lunching with some people from the studio. The drama outside was too immediate and too exciting. We all ended up out on the street, part of a crowd that now numbered in the hundreds of thousands, most of them watching and cheering on the students.
This intersection, Xidan, was crucial. The police would either block them here or not at all. The police stood in rows three or four deep. The students were shouting slogans and talking to them, taunting, persuading. The crowd yelled out support for the students.
A loudspeaker at the intersection broadcast, over and over, the People's Daily editorial of the previous day. It also reminded the protesters that unauthorised demonstrations were illegal. An elderly lady looked up at the speaker and snapped, ‘The only one shouting counter-revolutionary slogans around here is that loudspeaker.’ Everyone laughed.
Suddenly, the students surged forward and the police gave way. A great cheer went up along the street. People applauded, whistled, bellowed their approval. Now the show began in earnest. The crowds applauded as waves of students swept by, orderly, organised, holding signs that identified them as belonging to colleges of agriculture, medicine, journalism, engineering. When the Institute of International Relations went by holding high a big banner the entire crowd let out a great cheer. Everybody knew that this school was in fact the training ground for the Chinese KGB. Another cheer greeted a protester holding a sign that read ‘A SMALL HANDFUL’, a reference to the editorial. It bobbed up in the middle of this great sea of people—half a million strong now—all apparently happy to be part of that ‘small handful’.
Together with my friend Zoe Wang, I followed the demonstration down the street. Workers perched on scaffolding waved their hardhats and shouted, ‘Long live the students.’ The students shouted back, ‘Long live the workers.’ Soft drink pedlars donated their wares to the marchers. Even the policemen now stood by the side of the road watching, and some of them applauded too. Some people wept. ‘There is hope for China yet,’ someone said. An elderly man approached me and pronounced, in perfect English, ‘This is a great moment.’ Zoe and I experienced an incredible sense of elation.
When we reached Tiananmen, we strained to see into the square. As we're both fairly short, we weren't having a lot of success. A couple of guys who'd clambered onto one of the old carved lions that guard the entrance to the Imper
ial Palace called down for us to give them our hands, and they hauled us up, where we enjoyed an excellent view of the parade.
The marchers continued past Tiananmen to a road which rings the city and leads, eventually, back to the universities. Zoe and I jumped down off the stone lion and followed them into the east part of the city. That night everyone I knew was off their faces with excitement. Only one or two sober souls warned it would end in tears, and possibly even bloodshed.
I left China a couple of days later. I had to return to Australia for a few weeks, to meet with the producers of ‘The Avenue of Eternal Peace’, and tie up a few loose ends at home, after which I'd go back to Beijing. While I was away, the students returned to the square, this time to occupy it, called a mass hunger strike and presented the government with the biggest challenge to its authority that it had faced since the revolution.
By the time I returned to Beijing towards the end of May, the city was under martial law. The students had refused to leave the square. The army was ringing the city, and the atmosphere was one of near-hysteria. The ABC had put me up in a hotel close to Tiananmen Square. The China scholar Geremie Barmé, to whom I was married at the time, brought a stream of Chinese friends back to the hotel from the square for showers and meals.
Here are some random memories of those days. A university lecturer described how he'd gone to Tiananmen Square to ask his students what he could do to help their cause. They'd said, ‘Get us boxes of condoms, we're fucking like crazy.’ The pong-o-rama that blended the pungent sweat of tens of thousands of hot and unwashed bodies with the smells of rotting scraps of food and piss and shit from the inadequate toilets—you could smell the square a block away. The hubris of the student leader who told a friend he wanted to buy an expensive suit from donated funds so that he would look good for foreign news broadcasts. The shocking discovery that one student leader had tried to convince a twenty-year-old friend of ours to set himself on fire. She wasn't going to do this herself, she explained, because the movement needed her alive. Strolling by Tiananmen Gate and stopping dead in my tracks at the sight of Mao's portrait splattered with paint. Later, hearing that students—students—had nabbed the perpetrators (two workers) and handed them over to the police. What the fuck was going on?
I had to go to the southern city of Hangzhou to check out some locations with Wayne, the assistant producer, and Murray, the set designer for the mini-series, who'd now joined me in Beijing. We were passing through Shanghai on the night of 3 June en route to Qingdao. That was the night the army moved into Beijing and the killing started. I spent much of the night, with Wayne, Murray and several Australian diplomats and students, in the hotel room of author Nick Jose, the Australian Cultural Counsellor in Beijing at the time, who also happened to be in Shanghai. Numb with shock and sick with horror, we watched the reports of massacre on CNN and frantically tried to phone friends in Beijing to see if they were OK.
I flew back to Beijing on the morning of 4 June with Nick and Wayne and Murray. The plane was nearly empty. The stewardesses conversed inanely about gold jewellery. I wanted to thump them. When we landed in Beijing, Murray and Wayne caught a plane out to Hong Kong. Nick and I waited in the airport until the embassy could send someone round to pick us up; when he arrived, he was packing a gun. He said it wasn't safe enough for us to go to Nick's flat, and took us to the embassy instead, where we manned phones, tried to round up stray Australians and get news of missing friends.
Finally we made it over to Nick's flat. Our ranks swelled as other Chinese and Australian friends moved in, taking over every available inch of sofa and floor. Outside, crowds taunted the soldiers and set fire to abandoned army trucks. When the soldiers put out the fires, the people lit them all over again. We watched seven lorries burn for nearly three days. Tanks and armoured personnel carriers rumbled through the streets, maintaining an atmosphere of terror. Looking out the window, we could see a corpse lying under a blanket.
With rumours of an impending civil war sweeping the capital, a number of governments, including the Australian, evacuated their citizens on 7 June. As the Qantas jet took off from the by-then chaotic Beijing Airport, some people cheered. I wept all the way back to Australia.
Inside Tiananmen
Soon after the 4 June massacre I began to write a biography of my friend the pop star Hou Dejian, a man whom the New York Times called one of the ‘heroes of Tiananmen’.
It was a fairly mad thing to do.
Biography is a hazardous venture even when you're not planning to cross cultural lines. The British novelist Rebecca West once said, ‘Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.’ Imagine a book written about your life by your closest friend. How accurate would it be? And if it were accurate, would you ever speak to her again?
Little wonder that so many biographies are written about dead people. Having a dead person for a subject gives the biographer, who by nature is part-historian, part-psychologist, part-gossip-monger and part-novelist, more room for creative licence. It is difficult for dead people to sue, or merely criticise a line of interpretation. It also happens to be most convenient for the biographer, who, after all, is a kind of portrait painter, if the subject has stopped moving.
Then there are questions like gender and race and country of origin. For a woman to write the biography of a man, or vice versa, is already an exercise in telling a story across cultures.
Knowing all this, I decided to write the biography of someone who is not only alive but still moving and moving fast, who is male and who hails from a culture and society in many ways radically different from my own. I'm not sure I'll ever really know the truth about his love affairs. I'm probably a complete fool for thinking I might be able to know the truth about any other aspect of his life.
Hou Dejian was born in Taiwan in 1957. His parents had fled to Taiwan in 1949 when the Communists won the civil war for control of mainland China. The Nationalist government in exile considered Taiwan a temporary refuge. Hou attended schools whose walls were bedecked with the slogan ‘Recover the Mainland!’ Yet there was something hopelessly abstract about all the stress on Chinese culture and connections with the mainland. As a kid, Hou Dejian knew exactly where America was—it was where you'd be if you dug a hole straight through the earth. But, though he'd studied the maps a hundred times, he wasn't awfully certain where China really was. It was where he was, and where he was not. He lived on an island that called itself the Republic of China. Yet the stones, histories, myths, palaces, and famous temples and mountains of the ‘real’ China were elsewhere. Taiwan was his immediate environment, the only home he knew, and it was Chinese enough, yet it was foreign to all his dreams of country.
When he was a teenager Hou collected pirated Western rock albums and bought a guitar. He improved his schoolboy English by memorising the lyrics of songs like ‘American Pie’ and ‘Knock Three Times on the Ceiling if You Want Me’. He discovered that being able to sing ‘I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry’ while strumming a guitar helped get girls. He wrote a few songs himself, achieved some minor fame on the campus folk circuit and got even more girls. It struck him that songwriting was a pretty good career if your two main goals in life were to get lots of girls and lots of attention.
In December 1978, while Hou was still at university, the US announced it was breaking off relations with the Nationalist government on Taiwan to establish them with the Communist government on the mainland. All of Hou's mixed emotions and confusion about being Chinese, the weird nostalgia he felt for a home he'd never seen, poured out into a song he called ‘Longde chuan ren’, ‘Heirs of the Dragon’. He wrote it in only half an hour. It became a mega-hit in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South-East Asia, and on the mainland itself.
Hou intended ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ to express a deep sense of frustration and ambivalence about ‘being Chinese’. Yet people turned it into a
marching song, an anthem of pan-Chinese patriotism. He was horrified. Asked how he preferred it sung, he replied, ‘In a corner, very softly.’
Hou was uninterested in living up to people's expectations of him as a great patriot. He did, however, want them to take him seriously as a songwriter. But when he produced a solo album in 1982, it bombed. The critics hated it, the public ignored it. Stuck in an unhappy marriage, he contemplated his artistic future while making a living writing jingles for cream soda and washing machines.
Meanwhile, across the Taiwan Strait, mainland China was opening up to the rest of the world. Peking's leaders proposed a peaceful reunification with Taiwan. But the Nationalists spurned the offer: ‘sugar-coated bullets’, they called it. They kept Taiwan under martial law, in a state of military preparedness for war with the Communists. They forbade its citizens to have any truck with mainlanders. They ruled that going to the mainland was tantamount to an act of sedition. In 1983, Hou Dejian committed that act.
Why? This is one of the central questions of the Hou Dejian story and I still can't tell you the answer. Was it an easy solution to a difficult marriage? A path to fresh creative inspiration? A pick-me-up for his failing career? A clever way of getting back into the limelight? An expression of profound nationalism? A cynical move of political opportunism? Hou himself has answered this question in so many different ways that I'm not sure even he knows which is the right one.
One thing's certain. When Hou defected to China, he didn't know much about socialism and he didn't really care. He did think that he was in some meaningful sense going home.
He quickly discovered that he was even more of an outsider on the mainland than he had ever been on Taiwan.
Hou had some extraordinary adventures on the mainland. He was a key player in the nascent pop and rock scenes there. He became the first individual to sue an entire ministry. He enjoyed the honour of being the first Taiwan defector to be forcibly returned to his place of origin. But before that could happen, he got deeply involved in the protests on Tiananmen Square. Here's the story of what happened to Hou on the night of the massacre.