Of all the events that eroded their faith in the party, few had a more corrosive effect than the strange episode now known as the ‘Lin Biao incident’.
A brilliant military commander, Lin Biao was a key architect of the Communist Party victory over the Nationalist forces in the civil war that ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. He became a crucial ally of Mao Zedong and was named as his designated successor in 1969. Few figures in the party’s leadership were more respected.
Then, in September 1971, Lin was killed in a plane crash in Mongolia in circumstances that to this day remain a mystery. Whether he had planned to assassinate Mao and then tried to flee to the Soviet Union (the official story) or was running away because he feared a purge, the impact was devastating for the party. The first official reaction was silence, but word of the event quickly leaked over radio broadcasts from Mongolia. That was how Huang Rui found out: listening to foreign broadcasts was illegal, so naturally he, like tens of thousands of other curious young people, did just that every night.
Even as the news ricocheted around the world and the Soviet Union sent experts to their client state of Mongolia to examine the crash site, no official statement came from the Chinese capital. It would be a month before party cadres around the country were called to secret briefings to be told the official story of Lin Biao’s ‘treachery’, and another month before that tale was made public.
The Chinese people were accustomed to political reversals of fortune. They had nodded at the downfalls of plenty of once-powerful men. But Lin Biao? As they heard the news for the first time almost every one of them had a Little Red Book in their pocket, and now they were being asked to believe that the person who had assembled that bible, the man whose name and words were on its frontispiece, was a traitor. And not just a traitor but a man who had chosen the hated Soviet Union as his refuge.
Over the years following Lin Biao’s fall, the Chinese government would try again and again to massage this story to make it more plausible and less damaging. Later they would find Lin a convenient scapegoat for all sorts of excesses of the revolution. But for many ordinary Chinese the fall of Lin Biao was the end of innocence and the beginning of cynicism.
In the poor southern province of Guizhou, the students at the local school in the small town of Duyun had grown used to being asked periodically to hand in their history textbooks to their teachers, and have them returned a little later with pages missing. Down there they had no money for new books, and so page by page they saw hero after hero ripped from the official account.
‘We saw Marshall Peng Dehuai, and Deng Xiaoping removed this way,’ one of these students recalled later. ‘And then President Liu Shaoqi. But then we were asked to hand up our books to remove all trace of Lin Biao!’ He told me that the moment when he ran his finger down the ragged inside spine of his text book from which his teachers could no longer be bothered to even remove the pages neatly was the moment that he decided he would never again place faith in official history. The student’s name was Guo Jian, and we will meet him later in this story.
In the autumn of 1971 as the Communist Party cleaned up after the Lin Biao incident, they probably did not recognise how deeply the event had wounded them. Madame Mao rallied her fellow members of the Gang of Four into a campaign to ‘Criticise Lin Biao and Criticise Confucius’ and the population seemed to respond, but under the surface flowed a new mood—one that would explode at the Qing Ming Incident in 1976 and then find full expression at Democracy Wall. Years later the now-imprisoned dissident and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo would remember the Lin Biao incident as the moment when his generation first began to think for themselves.
On the day before Bei Dao, Huang Rui and Mang Ke rode through the streets of Beijing posting copies of Today on the city walls in December 1978, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party concluded a key meeting in the capital. Deng Xiaoping had finally triumphed, clearing the way for his grand experiment in the reform and opening up of China.
His ascendancy had been given a major push by the events at Democracy Wall. The fervour could have been made for him. Posters were denouncing his rivals and calling for the rehabilitation of his allies. Democracy Wall also demonstrated what he had been arguing behind closed doors—that the country was ripe, indeed clamouring, for change, and something must be done to harness energies that could run out of control.
Since his return to Beijing in 1977, Deng had pushed for the rehabilitation of exiled and imprisoned intellectuals and officials, not just those who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution but also those whose persecution dated back as far as 1957 when Mao had cracked down on a period of open liberal debate by launching the Anti-rightist campaign.
Deng was looking to gather around him the kind of people who could implement his pragmatic vision for the future of China. He saw a path to recovery for China in opening up to Western know-how and technology. He had seen during his time in the countryside what could be achieved by granting some level of autonomy and personal responsibility.
Deng was no democrat, and he would have been appalled by some of the sentiments being expressed at Democracy Wall. But when the United States reporter Robert Novak asked him in November 1978 for his opinion of what was happening there, Deng endorsed it, knowing he was sending a message.
He had a date with President Jimmy Carter in January 1979 and he had no intention of spoiling the image of the newly open society he planned to promote. The United States should have no fear of sharing its expertise, its university places and its money with China.
When his remarks to Novak reached people at the wall, the news was greeted with wild cheers, even though Deng had also cautioned that he did not personally agree with all that was being said there. That night, thousands marched from the wall to Tiananmen Square in triumph, chanting ‘Long live the people! We want freedom! We want democracy! Carry forward the April 5th movement!’
The ‘April 5th movement’ was the label the Democracy Wall activists gave themselves as inheritors of the spirit of the Qing Ming demonstrations two years earlier. Deng would ride the energy of the witnesses of that day and use their passion at Democracy Wall while it suited him. Later he would put them down without compunction.
It is now commonly said that it was Deng Xiaoping who sparked China’s modern reforms. But there is an argument to be made that the biggest push for change came not from above, but from below. As Liu Xiaobo wrote on the 30th anniversary of the events at Democracy Wall, people like Mang Ke and Bei Dao changed China by galvanising the latent energy of the population: ‘These spontaneous popular forces for reform,’ he wrote, ‘were rooted in the human longing for freedom and justice, not some slogan of the rulers, and once they got going they were hard to turn around.’
Now firmly in control of the government, Deng honed his message and used it to marshal confidence in his new policies. He endorsed an old slogan of Mao’s which was itself taken from a traditional Chinese saying dating back to the first century. As they plotted their path into the future, Deng said, the Chinese should ‘seek truth from facts’. This slogan would become his mantra, repeated endlessly to indicate that pragmatism, not ideology, was now the watchword.
As a slogan, it did not soar, but it worked. For farmers around the country it promised a return to some autonomy, and over the following decades it would revolutionise their lives. To technocrats and intellectuals it seemed to say that in future it might—in an inversion of the old Maoist phrase—be ‘better to be expert than red’.
And for a while it chimed with the people at Democracy Wall, too—the poets and artists of Today and the bolder aspiring reformers such as Wei Jingsheng. For wasn’t that what they themselves were doing, honouring what they believed to be true, rather than the received truth of ideology?
And for the seventeen million young people who had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, it seemed to promise a return to normality, a chance to co
me home and get on with a life they could choose for themselves. For some it would even promise the chance to go abroad.
As Deng got on the plane to the United States in 1979, Huang Rui and his friends were determined to push things as far as they would go. For Huang Rui that meant seeking out a band of brothers who could do for art what Today had done for literature.
For now, his painting of Liberty, his secret tribute to the spirit of Qing Ming 1976, was hidden under a sheet in his bedroom.
But its time was coming.
CHAPTER THREE
THE STARS
On the first day of 1979, a joint communiqué established full diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. The détente reached between President Nixon and Mao Zedong in 1972 was bearing fruit under the presidency of Jimmy Carter. On January 28 Deng Xiaoping boarded a plane for the United States.
His visit, so vital to his strategy of securing American knowledge and investment, was a resounding success.
A series of powerful images defined Deng Xiaoping’s trip: Deng applauding the Harlem Globetrotters at the Kennedy Center, Deng admiring the astronaut training facilities at NASA, Deng chatting amiably with President Carter and former President Nixon at the official reception at the White House. Deng had insisted that Nixon be invited to the party, and the sight of him at ease with two such powerful figures enhanced the message of his ascendancy back home.
But the moment that captured the most attention in both countries was when the diminutive Deng (who was only 4 feet 11 inches tall) donned a huge Texan hat at a rodeo outside Houston. There was something about the ease of the gesture, his ability to have fun with something that could have made him look ridiculous that confirmed him as being both comfortable with the West and effortlessly in charge. Today visitors to the National Museum of History in Beijing will search in vain for any meaningful mention of the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward but they will find (in its own sealed display case) that Texan hat.
For President Carter, though, it was Deng’s performance behind closed doors that left the deepest impression. At a specially convened private meeting, Deng coolly outlined China’s plan to launch a military strike against Vietnam. He was dispensing with decades of mistrust, taking the United States into his confidence and inviting its tacit support for what he believed was a common goal, to curb Soviet influence in Asia.
China had always regarded its fellow communist state of Vietnam as a ‘little brother’, but a series of incidents had soured their relationship. Incursions into China along their common border were increasing, and ethnic Chinese in Vietnam were being expelled from the country. In late 1978, Vietnam shocked China by signing a treaty with the Soviet Union, and a month later compounded their offence by invading Cambodia, a regional ally of China.
Vietnam argued that the invasion was imperative in order to oust Pol Pot, whose genocidal regime had turned Cambodia into a charnel house and was threatening Vietnam’s own security. But to China the Vietnamese action was brazen interference by a Soviet pawn in China’s sphere of influence—part of a Soviet plot to encircle China from the south.
Deng told Carter that China planned a ‘limited’ punitive campaign to pull Vietnam into line. Carter, just three years on from the United States’ humiliating withdrawal at the end of the Vietnam War, counselled Deng about the dangers of a military and public relations calamity. But he stopped short of opposing the plan outright, and Deng flew out of Washington determined to go ahead.
The army was his power base, and he was concerned at how much its involvement in the ten chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution had cost it, both in training and respect. It was a long time since it had mounted a serious military campaign, and Deng thought that action in Vietnam would give the army a chance to come back into its own.
It proved to be a massive miscalculation, one of the few that Deng was to make during his time in power. On February 17, 1979, waves of Chinese troops crossed the border into Vietnam, attempting the kind of shock and awe that had served them so well, if so bloodily, in the Korean War 29 years before. But China’s tactics failed to draw the Vietnamese army north to fight. Nor did the Vietnamese command move any of their forces out of Cambodia. Instead, battle-hardened Vietnamese militias mauled the Chinese, using the guerilla tactics they had perfected in their long wars with the French and the Americans.
Within days of the invasion both sides had suffered heavy casualties. By the time China began to withdraw on March 6, they had not forced Vietnam out of Cambodia nor had they demonstrated their military superiority.
The main phase of the war was over within a month but the border skirmishes would continue for the best part of a decade. Before hostilities formally ended in 1989, thousands of Chinese soldiers would lose their lives and tens of thousands would be injured.
China’s official announcement of the conflict was only made once China’s troops had completed their withdrawal on March 17, and foreign journalists found themselves scrambling for information and seeking out any sources with army connections. The Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng was one, and he happily shared what he believed to be common knowledge with at least one journalist. It was a decision that would cost him dearly.
In early 1979 the voices at Democracy Wall were multiplying and organising, even as rumours of a crackdown began to spread. When Deng Xiaoping returned to China, the wall was barely three months old, but already dozens of unofficial magazines and several other walls acting as platforms for dissent had appeared around the country. While Today remained strictly a literary magazine and avoided political discussion, many of the new publications were different. A friend of Huang Rui by the name of Liu Qing published April Fifth Forum, which adopted the stance of a respectful adviser to the government. Liu believed they had Deng Xiaoping’s support and advocated a gradualist approach to political change.
Wei Jingsheng had no time for gradualism. In January 1979 he launched Explorations, which was by far the most radical publication to appear at Democracy Wall. The journal posed deep and uncomfortable questions. Why was China still so poor despite 30 years of communism? Why were women so exploited? Why were there so few opportunities for ordinary people to live a meaningful life? And in a provocative foray into investigative journalism, Wei published an exposé of conditions at China’s most infamous political prison, Qincheng.
Nobody who was in Beijing during that extraordinary year of 1979 has ever forgotten it. The universities, which were deserted wastelands during the Cultural Revolution, had come alive again. Restored, too, were the teachers, many of whom had been brutally persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.
A young People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officer and aspiring artist named Hu Ming arrived back in Beijing on furlough in the spring of 1979 and was intoxicated by what she found. During her service with the PLA she had had her share of challenges and excitement. She had ridden the meadows of the far western Turkic-speaking province of Xinjiang on horseback, and had gone into the earthquake-ravaged city of Tangshan as a documentary filmmaker in 1976. Yet even 30 years later, when asked to write about life in the capital in 1979, she couldn’t contain her excitement.
‘Beijing in 1979 is an eternal spring in our memory,’ she wrote. ‘Dancing in the spring rain were many young hearts! They were manic, free and pure.’ She listed all that was new, strange and exciting that spring: portable tape recorders, foreign film weeks, the music of Jean-Michel Jarre, leather jackets, Frédéric Chopin, dancing with boys, and queuing all night for tickets to Swan Lake.
Most exciting was that the capital seemed to be full of young people like herself who dreamed of creating art. ‘Everywhere, at cross streets and at the railway station, at the long-distance bus station, you would find groups of people riding bicycles or walking with painting gear strapped to their backs.’ She was finding a whole world of kindred spirits who had been invisible before.
She soon entered the orbit of Today, as her bes
t friend Shao Fei had met Bei Dao and fallen in love. Meanwhile Hu Ming realised her own dream by securing a place at the art school in the nearby port city Tianjin. But as she remarked wryly later it was those artists who didn’t get into art school—people like Huang Rui—who would prove to be the masters of her generation.
Huang Rui had sat the entrance exam for the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts but missed out. So he continued his art education as he had started it—ferreting out art books in libraries and tracking down retired painters to be his mentors.
Finally he discovered an art course for workers at the Beijing Working People’s Cultural Palace, east of Tiananmen Square. There he encountered another talent as passionate and iconoclastic as himself, a young man called Ma Desheng, who had contributed two woodblock prints to the first issue of Today. Ma’s work was a million miles from the stock state-approved imagery of smiling workers and peasants: it had more in common with the stark vision of German expressionists like Käthe Kollwitz.
A ferociously energetic figure who had spent a lifetime on crutches after suffering childhood polio, Ma Desheng was the ideal collaborator for Huang Rui. Both men had a vision for a new kind of Chinese art. Both kept works hidden away at home that needed to find an audience. Both were in search of others like themselves, who worked humdrum day jobs but created art at night because it was the only thing they wanted to do. It was just a matter of finding them.
The Phoenix Years Page 5