The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  The Maoist project had failed and things had to change. In truth, Deng had no grand plan when he began the reform process: famously pragmatic, he called his gradualist approach ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’. But he certainly intended China to stay firmly within Communist Party control. Reform would be about development, not liberalisation. No doubt he knew there would be risks but, whatever he planned for, he couldn’t have envisaged that just ten years after he launched his policy, the Chinese government would be facing a popular movement that would bring millions to demonstrate in the heart of the capital.

  As that protest movement grew in the spring of 1989, those who believed that democracy would inevitably follow economic development saw their day of vindication coming. But China never follows the script that others write for it: the Chinese government survived the challenge by suppressing the protest movement with a savage military action that saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, cut down by the country’s own People’s Liberation Army. At the end of a year that saw almost every other Communist regime in the world fall, China’s government emerged more in control than ever.

  It was a victory, but it came at a cost. Western democracies were horrified, and for the next few years China was an international pariah. More serious, though, was the impact on the Chinese citizens who had been caught up in the mood of optimism that had swept the country in 1989—that is, a large section of China’s urban class. Few of them had thought of overthrowing the regime: they were loyal to the ideals of the revolution, and during the democracy protests they had nursed an unformed vision of a more open, participatory society. The crushing of the movement flung many of them into a period of disillusion, apathy and depression, which finally hardened into a cynicism that still runs through China’s society today.

  Since 1989, China has pursued a course that many observers in the 1980s, both Chinese and foreign, believed would be impossible: a course of economic development without democratic reform. The Chinese Communist Party, for all its challenges today, still seems unassailable, even though there is now a large private space in which Chinese people can live and express themselves without the state impinging.

  The reforms launched by Deng have transformed China economically, socially and culturally. The lives of hundreds of millions of people have been changed forever. But the huge scale of these changes can make them peculiarly hard to grasp. Certainly you can track them in statistics: the biggest trading nation in the world, the second-largest economy on Earth, a one-time peasant nation in which a majority now live in cities. You can see them too, written across the faces of China’s great cities: in the sprawl of Beijing with its supersized buildings and toxic air, growth spiralling out from its historic heart in ring road after ring road choked with cars; or in the sparkling neon glamour of Shanghai, revel-ling in its renewed claim to be the Paris of the East; or in the teeming anthill that is the manufacturing powerhouse of Guangzhou, which has all but submerged what was once a rural province, turning farmers into factory workers and fields into gated housing estates.

  During this whole wild journey, from the earliest phase of economic reform and the open-door policy to today, the country’s artists have vividly tracked its course. But they have not simply been spectators: looking back, what is striking is how closely intertwined the processes of artistic and economic awakening were for China.

  When Deng launched his reforms at the end of 1978, Beijing was full of young people returned to the city from the countryside where they had been ‘rusticated’ during the Cultural Revolution. They were determined to make up for lost time.

  In the late autumn and winter of 1978–79, despite the bitter cold, crowds started gathering at a wall just west of Tiananmen Square. There people posted their thoughts, ideas, complaints and manifestos—so many and diverse that this nondescript patch of urban territory soon earned itself the name ‘Democracy Wall’.

  One day in late December 1978, a group of young people pedalled up to Democracy Wall with mimeographed copies of the first issue of their self-published literary magazine, Today. The 300 copies of that first painstaking print run sold out immediately, and although it contained poems by writers who would later be acknowledged as the most important of their generation, it was the magazine’s cover as much as its contents that drew people to it.

  The word ‘today’ was emblazoned at the top in Chinese and English, and below were the silhouetted figures of a young man and woman leaning forward as if breasting the tape at the end of a race. What struck people most was the daring choice of colour. The orthodox Maoist choice would have been red and white, but the young designer had chosen blue. One woman who saw it that day recalls that it was as if the magazine had fallen to Earth from another world.

  Why blue? It’s the colour of the sky, the designer told me 30 years later, and to him it meant freedom without limits. His name was Huang Rui. Sent to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, he had returned to the capital with a dream of becoming an artist. He was sent to a leather factory instead, but banded together with some friends to create Today, and just a few months later he organised the first exhibition of Chinese contemporary art ever to be held in the country.

  For nearly four decades China’s artists have held up a mirror to their age, but they have not just reflected history, they have lived and breathed it too. In each succeeding decade a new wave of young artists has made art out of the dreams, hopes, excitements, reversals, contradictions and disappointments of their times. In the 1980s they revelled in a promise of infinite space and possibility, a society whose horizons could only expand; in the 1990s they dealt with the post-Tiananmen weight of despair and cynicism, and a new world in which money was the only guarantee of freedom; in the 2000s and beyond, a generation of artists who have only known the years since Deng’s reforms, have explored the fallout from decades of growth and change, the new relations between the classes and the sexes, the rich and the poor, the country and the city, environmental degradation, globalism and a renewed desire to define what it means to be Chinese.

  When I think about how to relate the history of this period, I think of these generations of artists, and the picture of China they have painted, not just in their work but in their lives as well.

  I think of the best-selling artist whose teenage years were overshadowed by the Cultural Revolution and his mother’s mental illness, who enrolled in art school at the dawn of the Chinese avant-garde, and went on to create soulful images after 1989 that remain among the most iconic works of Chinese contemporary art today.

  I think of another whose older sister died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward and who joined the army to escape his poverty, who survived a war thanks to his flair for painting propaganda for the troops, who was talent-spotted to study art in the capital and achieved success only to be exiled for refusing to forget what he’d seen in Beijing in June 1989.

  I think of another, who rallied in Tiananmen Square with fellow students that spring, overwhelmed with excitement and hope, who left the country in despair after June 4, having performed one last desperate self-destructive act, and yet despite it all returned to live and work in Beijing, seeking in all his works to honour the spirit of the companions of his youth.

  I think of the artist whose father created sculptures in tribute to Chairman Mao, who herself documents the dreams of factory workers, and creates online fantasy worlds for everyone to live in, where Tiananmen Square is turned into a swimming pool and Confucius is swept away in a flood.

  I think of another, who, as a boy, played in a wasteland of decommissioned factories in China’s frozen north, who dreamt of building rockets and making art while his parents and all the adults he knew got laid off, and who grew up to find a success his family could barely understand while his home town rose again to claim a place as a centre of foreign trade.

  I think of the one born in a desert oasis on what was once the Silk Road, whose works shimmer like mirages, saturated with the colours and images
of a way of life that resists the ‘development’ that threatens to crush it.

  I think of the one born in Lhasa, who studied in Beijing and embraced it as a second home and yet eventually was driven to take the road to Dharamsala, who found success in far away London and New York but dreams that one day soon he will return home to Tibet.

  I think of the one whose feet are tattooed with leopard spots, who dreams of being a punk rocker but who nonetheless makes art that aches with the frustrated idealism of her generation and nostalgia for a China that is slipping away.

  And I think of the designer who decided to create a blue cover for a poetry magazine in 1978, and went on to form a group of artists called the Stars, who later turned an abandoned military factory into a safe zone for art, who has seen his work criticised and banned, who has been evicted from his studio as a troublemaker only to create a new haven for himself less than a kilometre away, and who, through it all, persists with his work as if the most extravagant ideals of his youth are still within his grasp.

  In this book I have braided these and other stories into an account of the last four decades in China, told not as economics, nor as politics, but as an emotional history of one of the most momentous periods of change the world has ever seen, written in the lives of artists like these—a group of people who have made it their life’s work to see their country clearly.

  As I set out to tell their stories, the hutong home where I sat with my two friends that late winter day in 1986 is gone, bulldozed in the great clearance of the capital’s historic districts in the early 1990s. Their old district is now just another boulevard of malls, hotels and restaurants, with cascading walls of glass and light, beautiful by night, but exposed and dusty by day. Both of my friends now hold foreign passports. One lives abroad but the other—the artist—has returned to live in one of the sprawling art villages that now ring Beijing.

  The Friendship Hotel has been renovated for foreign visitors and the experts have long gone. It is a place to broker the kinds of deals that only those with the best connections can bring off.

  Foreigners and Chinese can now party together in the thousands of bars that are spread throughout the capital. But some things haven’t changed. Mao’s portrait still hangs above the gate to the Forbidden City. And every day, ‘The East is Red’ still marks the hours on Chang’an Avenue.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I DO NOT BELIEVE!

  In 1978 on a late spring day in the heart of Beijing, a nervous young man called Huang Rui closed the door of his bedroom and asked a young woman to strip to the waist.

  He was 25, but having grown up in the puritanical world of Mao’s China, he had never seen a woman naked in his life.

  He was standing in his family home, a rundown house at one corner of a dusty courtyard wrapped within the grey maze of hutongs that encircled the historic centre of the capital. She stood barely an arm’s length from him, in the room where he had first closed his door against his parents and the outside world.

  Between them stood a canvas, patched together out of four pieces of cloth, primed and ready to be painted.

  They looked at each other.

  She saw a bookish young man with thick-rimmed glasses and pale features apparently untouched by the five years he had spent in the far reaches of Inner Mongolia toiling in the cause of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

  He saw a woman from another age. Stripped to the waist and triumphant, she was a vision of freedom guiding a victorious people out of a time of tragedy. She was Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People come to life.

  He worked in a leather factory, she on a construction gang building roads.

  Together they were going to cross a line.

  Two years before, in April 1976, Huang Rui had witnessed the beginning of a revolution on a rainy spring day in Tiananmen Square. Today the Tiananmen massacre of June 4 1989 looms so large that it blocks out memories of earlier risings on that patch of ground. But what took place in the spring of 1976, when tens of thousands of ordinary Beijingers flocked to the square to mourn the death of Premier Zhou Enlai only to be violently dispersed, proved a turning point for China. Anger over decades of wasted hope and blighted dreams boiled over, presaging both the fall of the Gang of Four (that coterie of hardline Communists including Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had helped steer Mao’s Cultural Revolution) and the start of a new era for the country under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.

  But on the spring day that Huang Rui invited the young woman into his bedroom, the impact of those events in 1976, just two years earlier, was still unclear. The officially approved ‘verdict of history’ was that it had been a counter-revolutionary revolt and those involved had been either deluded or criminal. But he knew it had not been like that.

  He had been there.

  On the evening of April 3 1976, Huang Rui had left his job at the Beijing No. 3 Leather Products Factory and had headed with one of his workmates for Tiananmen Square. It was two days before the festival known as Qing Ming (‘pure brightness’), the day on which the Chinese traditionally honour their dead.

  Premier Zhou Enlai had died that January after a four-year battle with cancer. He had long been seen as one of the few good men in the country’s communist regime, one who had done his best to mitigate the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which had raged across the country for the previous ten years. A grand state funeral had been held for the elite in the Great Hall of the People in January, but the Qing Ming festival gave ordinary Beijingers their chance to mourn.

  In the days before the festival on April 5, people came in their thousands to Tiananmen Square, the heart of the capital and its natural meeting point. They carried flowers and wreaths, banners and placards, and heaped them around the carved granite base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, which stood at the centre of the square.

  The monument, a tall obelisk surrounded by revolutionary sculpture and inscribed with the calligraphy of Mao Zedong, stands opposite the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen), on top of which Mao had stood, with Zhou beside him, to proclaim the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 1949. Those who came to the square in 1976 carried tributes of mourning not just for Zhou but for the ideals the monument had been built to celebrate, the dream of a republic truly dedicated to the people’s welfare, a dream which less than three decades after its birth lay in ruins.

  On those early April days in 1976 the monument floated in a sea of flowers and placards, posters and poems. There were expressions of grief, but also of anger. Some, in a clear reference to Mao, proclaimed that the ‘Emperor’s rule’ was over. Others called for a return to ‘genuine’ communism. The crowd ebbed and flowed across the square, stopping to listen as people stepped up to speak.

  Through the rainy streets to the square, Huang Rui carried a poem he had written, called ‘The People’s Grief ’. When he arrived at the monument he decided to read it out loud.

  As Huang Rui began he was scared, but he was excited too. Something wonderful was happening in the square that day. People were expressing how they felt, something they had not dared to do for years. When he finished reading he heard a voice calling from the back of the crowd: ‘Read it again!’ He knew the cry might have come from an agent of the secret police, offering him more rope to hang himself with. Nonetheless he read it again. As he finished he let his workmate drag him away, but not before he had posted his poem among the others on the base of the monument. Anxious to avoid being followed they hurried from the square, changing buses multiple times before arriving home late that evening.

  When the Qing Ming festival dawned, Huang Rui’s poem was gone, along with every other expression of the people’s sorrow and anger. Not a scrap of paper was left, or a flower. China’s hardline leadership, meeting in anxious session on the night of April 4, saw these tributes as a direct challenge to their rule. To allow them to remain at the centre of the capital, on the same square where Mao had rallied his Red Guards at t
he start of his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was insupportable. By the time a new wave of mourners came to the square on April 5 the police had scrubbed the place clean.

  The leadership of the People’s Republic had successfully rewritten history many times before, but on this day the Beijingers who came upon the sanitised scene would not accept it. Thousands rallied in anger, and soon more than 100,000 people were milling in the square. Police cars were set on fire and government buildings bordering the square were breached.

  As evening drew on many were induced to leave by the veiled threats in a public broadcast which boomed in a continuous loop across the square. In the familiar tones of Beijing’s party leader, Wu De, it warned those gathered there not to be ‘duped by bad elements’ intent on ‘counter-revolutionary sabotage’. But a small group decided to stay. At 10 p.m. the security forces moved in and used batons and clubs to beat the crowd into submission. It was later announced that hundreds had been arrested, but others estimated that more than a thousand people were taken into custody that day. They were later convicted in mass trials or sent to camps devoted to ‘reform through labour’. There were also reports of deaths that night which even now cannot be confirmed. Years later, shortly after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, an old soldier reminisced to a young former student about the day he hosed Tiananmen Square clean of blood. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said hastily to the angry young man, ‘I don’t mean in 1989, I mean in 1976.’

  Meanwhile the vice-premier of China, Deng Xiaoping, who was suspected of having supported the demonstrations, was stripped of all his posts. Deng had already suffered exile earlier in the Cultural Revolution, now he found himself once more on the wrong side of history as the hardliners around Mao prevailed.