The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  Adding to our optimism was that, as far as we could tell, Deng Xiaoping’s leadership team was pragmatic and outward-looking, too. Both the general secretary of the Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, and the premier, Zhao Ziyang, wore their commitment to the open-door policy on the sleeves of their Western suits.

  It was pretty clear that Hu Yaobang had run dead on the anti-spiritual pollution campaign, and that he welcomed, rather than feared, foreign influences. Zhao Ziyang had been an early pioneer of the reforms that had liberated China’s farmers from the communes and he was known to favour giving more power to managers throughout the economy to run their enterprises without party interference. We believed we were witnessing the gradual retreat of the party from Chinese people’s lives, both in policy and in the personal style of the leaders. Hu Yaobang was seen openly reading a newspaper at dull political events, while Zhao Ziyang was fond of golf. Zhao’s daughter worked as an events manager at a Western hotel.

  But in all our calculations we were too complacent.

  We could see how profoundly Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were exposing the hollowness of the communist project in China, laying bare how little it had achieved and how much had been destroyed in the process, but we failed to see how destabilising that would be. We could join in the jokes about the party’s ‘official verdict’ on Mao Zedong that he had been seven parts good and three parts bad, laughing when our Chinese friends would say that surely the formula was the wrong way round. But we didn’t consider how wrenching such a verdict would be for people who had grown up being taught to venerate Mao and honour the party. We didn’t see how the disillusionment would hit the country’s youth as they were told to put aside one set of ideals and be given nothing to replace them but slogans like ‘to get rich is glorious’. I failed to hear the desperation in ‘Nothing to My Name’.

  They had stripped naked on a freezing day and bound themselves in surgical bandages, then draped themselves in white and black cloth. Dressed in the traditional colours of mourning they drenched each other in red paint, which dripped from their bodies like blood. In white, black and red, the colours of death and violence, they walked through the campus like mourners out of hell. As they walked they screamed out the names of icons of China’s culture, the Great Wall and the Yangtze River, yelling the names as if those of the dead.

  The performance happened in December 1986, at an art festival organised by Peking University. When four young students from off campus had offered to create an artwork the authorities saw no reason to turn them down. But when they saw the result they were appalled. What did it mean?

  Among the four students was Sheng Qi. He had arrived in Beijing in the late summer of 1984 hyped up with excitement, but he had quickly become disillusioned with art school. He had expected his teachers to be how he’d imagined artists would be, with strong, creative, open-minded personalities, but they were just like his parents. They had the same haircuts and the same clothes. He had expected them to be exceptional but they were no different to every other adult he’d met. Many, in fact, were members of the Communist Party.

  Realism was all the rage at his school then, or at least the approved version of realism. The teachers would take their students to the seaside or to some picturesque village in the countryside to capture real life. ‘Real life!’ Sheng Qi scoffed to one of his friends. ‘Why do we have to do that? We grew up in the city, we have our own problems, our own life, why do we have to go to a village for inspiration? Inspiration is inside us, it’s in our daily life. We don’t have to go to some exotic place to find it!’

  He started to ask himself what art really was, burying himself in books and tracing the movements that had driven Western art, seeking out the poets who had inspired him, like Mang Ke and Bei Dao, and meeting young artists like my friend from the Friendship Hotel party who had already dropped out of the system.

  ‘All through our schooling we had been fed this revolutionary, romantic, heroic story and all of us wanted to be heroes. We wanted to make history, and be loyal to our country. We were told that our country equalled our government, that it equalled the state and we should be loyal to that. We had been brainwashed for more than twenty years! Yet deep inside we still wanted to be heroes, we still wanted to make history.’

  It was clear to him that the system had to be broken but he had no idea how. ‘At that time we didn’t even have the basic knowledge or information about what society truly was. We had no point of comparison. We didn’t really know about Western culture. All we knew was communist China.

  ‘As students we were so powerless, we were so weak that we had to shout. Ordinary art would be meaningless, so we decided to make this kind of demonstration.’

  Years later I asked him what they were mourning for that day. ‘We were mourning for our culture, for traditional culture, for traditional morals, for the traditional philosophy of China.’ The students felt they had lost so much which they had never had the chance to know. ‘We chose the strongest colours, we shouted, we were extreme, all because we were the opposite, we were powerless—powerless and hopeless.’

  That day they embodied a right to be seen that was extreme, and those who witnessed their performance were shocked. But in their basic motivation they were not alone. Around the country in December 1986 thousands of students were also mobilising to be heard.

  The demonstrations began in Sheng Qi’s home town of Hefei. Since 1980 students had been trying to exercise the limited democratic rights promised under China’s constitution. That document established a four-tier system of people’s congresses designed to represent Chinese citizens from the village to the national level. Delegates to the congresses at the county, provincial and national level were elected by the representatives of the tier below them, with representatives at the bottom tier elected directly by people at the village level.

  In theory anyone could stand for election to these village congresses, yet despite students around the country waging successful campaigns for election in 1980, 1982 and 1984, the party had stepped in each time to impose their own candidates. In 1986 the students in Hefei had had enough. On December 5 and then again a few days later, around 3000 students rallied in the city under banners that recalled the words of Wei Jingsheng: ‘No democratisation, no modernisation.’ A few days later, 5000 students were marching in the industrial city of Wuhan in the neighbouring province of Hubei. Reports filtered in of protests in remote places like the far southern city of Kunming and the special economic zone of Shenzhen.

  Two weeks later, on December 20, some 30,000 students marched down the Bund in Shanghai behind banners declaring ‘Give us democracy’ and ‘Long live freedom’, while at least another 30,000 Shanghai residents rallied in support. By then the list of grievances had extended to issues such as corruption and broader calls for democracy and freedom of speech.

  On the night of December 23, just hours after Sheng Qi and his three friends brought their own kind of demonstration to Peking University, protests broke out in the neighbouring university of Tsinghua, with thousands rallying in the university quarter. Over the coming days students from other campuses, including Peking University, joined in.

  Peking University had a tradition of being in the vanguard of social movements. It was there in the early decades of the twentieth century that the New Culture movement was launched, seeking to free China from the feudal influence of Confucianism in favour of a new culture based on democracy and science. It was students from Peking University who rallied in 1919 against the Treaty of Versailles, which handed German territorial holdings in China to the Japanese. This was the trigger for the so-called May Fourth Movement, the leaders of which would go on to found the Chinese Communist Party. Less honourably, but more recently, Peking University had been a centre of action during the early days of the Cultural Revolution.

  In the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, posters went up at Peking University proposing that the students should rally in Tiananmen Square—a dramatic escalation. T
he posters argued that taking their protest to the heart of the capital would signal their intention to lead the promotion of democracy in China, as the government had failed to do so.

  Everyone knew that a successful demonstration at the square would elevate the student movement to a different level. It was at Tiananmen Square in 1919 that the May Fourth Movement was born, it was there that the Red Guards had come to receive the blessing of Mao Zedong in the summer of 1966, and it was there that ordinary Beijingers had demonstrated in mourning for Zhou Enlai at Qing Ming in 1976.

  New Year’s Day 1987 was one of the coldest days of a bitterly cold winter. Dozens of police staked out Tiananmen Square, and early that morning a water truck sprayed the flagstones to create a treacherous sheet of ice.

  The students arrived in small groups and formed into lines near the square. They waited until they were several-hundred strong then rushed the police lines. But once on the square they couldn’t manoeuvre on the ice, and within minutes dozens had been thrown into police vans.

  That afternoon it seemed the students had been defeated. It was impossible to discover how many were under arrest and what they might be charged with. There was talk of a few students being taken away for ‘education and interrogation’.

  Back at Peking University thousands began to gather. Outraged at the arrests, students who had been reluctant to join the earlier demonstration determined that they should march again on the square to demand their classmates’ release. At midnight they set out on the long march from the university district in the west to the centre of the city, their numbers swollen to around 5000. On the way, the news came through that their classmates had been released without charge and the students returned triumphantly to their campus.

  In the immediate days following, the government no doubt thought they had pulled off a good result. They had given the students in Beijing a win, but not a substantive one. And with end-of-term examinations and Chinese New Year approaching, students across China would have little appetite for more marching. The government hadn’t needed to engage directly with any of the issues, and they had bought themselves time to regroup.

  But the students had made dissent visible again for the first time since Democracy Wall, and the uncomfortable message for the leadership was that China’s educated youth were significantly out of sympathy with the Communist Party’s directions and ideals. In Shanghai they had seen how easily the students could make allies of ordinary citizens and workers, who may have felt less passionate about democracy but were concerned about the downsides of the reforms: inflation, income inequality and corruption.

  Writing about the demonstrations in a piece for Australia’s Times on Sunday, I found myself uneasy. I noted how the students seemed to have fallen in love with their own image in the glare of Western media attention. I could see how readily they picked up on the references and descriptions that the Western press used. The students saw themselves exercising ‘people power’, and standing for ‘civil rights’, and they could imagine how their struggle linked them with the Western student movements of 1968. I worried about how this might influence them in the future.

  Nevertheless, when I filed the piece I felt relieved that the demonstrations had ended ‘well’. But within less than a fortnight it was clear that they had not ended well at all. News filtered through of ‘troublemakers’ being arrested around the country, among them a young poet I had partied with at the Old Summer Palace just months before. He was no counter-revolutionary, just a romantic spirit with a penchant for Nietzsche who had been caught up in the excitement. Meanwhile high-profile and popular liberals such as the vice-president of Hefei’s University of Science and Technology, Fang Lizhi, and crusading journalist Liu Binyan were sacked from their jobs and expelled from the Communist Party. It seemed that the authorities wanted to send a message to the students without risking attacking them directly.

  Then on January 16 amid a rising tide of denunciations of the evils of ‘bourgeois liberalisation’, it was announced that Hu Yaobang had resigned and had been forced to make a humiliating self-criticism.

  We did not know it then but Hu Yaobang had been vulnerable for a long time. As general secretary of the Communist Party he was responsible for upholding the party’s principles but, unlike the conservatives within the party and indeed Deng Xiaoping himself, Hu did not consider liberalisation and the influence of Western ideas as a threat. He repeatedly ran dead when asked to crack down on liberals within party ranks, and had shown little zeal for the campaign against spiritual pollution. Now the whole blame for the student demonstrations was laid at his feet.

  Scapegoating Hu Yaobang may have been satisfying to his conservative rivals, but to blame the demonstrations on ideological laxity was to fatally miss the point. The government and the party itself were facing a crisis of legitimacy. Economic reform promised greater prosperity and greater autonomy, yet for many students and city dwellers such promises seemed remote. They were longing for greater control over their lives, and for avenues to make their needs heard, and instead were left frustrated and thwarted.

  As winter turned to spring we hunkered down to wait out the campaign against ‘bourgeois liberalisation’. We were confident it wouldn’t last long. The reform and opening up of China’s economy required an engagement with the West and a retreat from ideology and we knew that Zhao Ziyang, now installed as head of the party in Hu Yaobang’s place, was committed to reform.

  My Chinese friends felt they’d seen it all before. They had lived through the crackdown after Democracy Wall, and the anti-spiritual pollution campaign, too. They would just have to fade back again into an underground where they could continue to be free.

  We Westerners assumed it would be a temporary reversal. We believed we knew the way history was heading, and that time was on the reformers’ side.

  Friends in the diplomatic corps advised me that it would be a good idea to lie low for a while, and perhaps cut contact with my friends in the underground. But I knew that without them I would lose touch with what was really going on in the city. Through them, too, I knew that I could get closest to the emotional landscape of the time. And anyway, they were my friends.

  As a concession I decided to be more discreet. In a city where public transport stopped early and taxis didn’t cruise the streets, I’d got into a habit of sleeping over at my friends’ places at the end of evenings together, leaving in the morning once the work day had begun. In early 1987 I was no longer staying at the relatively free-wheeling Friendship Hotel but instead in the diplomatic compound at the western end of Chang’an Avenue. I knew that the guards on the gate and the lift operators kept careful note of our comings and goings. If I made a habit of not coming home at night they might start to take more of an interest in where I was spending my time.

  Getting home at the end of an evening was easier said than done, with most of my friends living a long hike away from Chang’an Avenue where you could usually find a taxi at one of the hotels.

  One night, as I made my way home with a friend through the empty streets, we saw an army truck lumbering towards us down the road. A little tipsy, we decided to wave it down. To our amazement it stopped. ‘Where are you going?’ the driver yelled down over the sound of the engine. We told him. ‘Hop in,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

  We scrambled up into the cab of the truck and set off. On the way he told us he was from the country and was now based in the west of Beijing out near the Fragrant Hills. Being in the army was OK, he said, though he liked driving best. At the compound he brushed off our thanks. ‘Serve the people!’ he replied with a smile, quoting the old Maoist slogan, and we all laughed. Later my friends told me that since the Korean War, soldiers were widely referred to as China’s zui ke ai de ren—‘the most beloved people’. Our driver’s cheery generosity was a typical example of why.

  Later I would wonder what happened to that young soldier, and where he had been in 1989 when the army rolled into Beijing. In the
spring of 1987 getting a ride home in an army truck just seemed like one of those things that could only happen in China, part of the endearing anarchy of the place. Now, like so much about the 1980s, it seems almost unimaginable.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

  At noon on May 15 1989, the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, landed at Beijing airport. It was the first visit by a Russian leader to China in 30 years. Gorbachev had come to the Chinese capital for an historic summit, to bury the longstanding rift between the two communist giants.

  In the early years of the People’s Republic, Soviet money and expertise had poured into the country, transforming China’s industry, infrastructure, arts, architecture and education. But within a decade the relationship had soured. China chafed at its role as little brother to the USSR, was disillusioned when Nikita Khrushchev (leader of the Soviet Union from 1955–64) failed to support China in its disputes with Indonesia and India, and rejected the Soviet notion of peaceful co-existence with the West. In 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew all its experts from China, abandoning hundreds of projects and taking with them the nuclear expertise they had promised to share.

  Now in the spring of 1989 Gorbachev had arrived to pay court to China and its paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping.

  It was a huge story, and media from around the world had flown in to cover it. Both communist leaders fascinated the West. Each with their separate programs to reform and open up their massive countries, Deng and Gorbachev had become poster boys for progress, each separately crowned as Time magazine’s ‘man of the year’. Their summit was supposed to be a great moment in history, but history was to upstage it.