Reporters flying into Beijing found a city not in the grip of preparations for an historic summit, but in thrall to quite a different drama. As Gorbachev touched down, instead of columns of soldiers and photogenic children arrayed to meet him in the heart of the city, there were some 2000 students on a hunger strike and a half a million Beijingers lending them support.
Gorbachev was welcomed in a hurried ceremony on the tarmac at Beijing airport and forced to enter the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square by a back entrance when he arrived to meet Deng Xiaoping. That week the media feeds from Beijing were full of the students’ demonstrations, and the summit was reduced to a footnote. As a visiting CNN reporter put it in his broadcast: ‘We came here to report a summit, and we walked into a revolution.’
In the square the students made posters in Russian greeting the Soviet leader, and petitioned the Soviet embassy for a chance to meet with the great man. Guo Jian, who had joined the hunger strike, read with excitement an article on the prophecies of Nostradamus that was circulating among the students. It claimed the Soviet leader’s rise had been foretold and that it presaged massive change in both China and the USSR. Guo Jian wasn’t superstitious but in those superheated days of May he began to wonder whether maybe it was all meant to be. Irrespective of prophecy, he was ready to stand up: ‘All my life I had lived in fear and I thought by joining the demonstrations, by joining the hunger strike, that it was my chance to throw off fear. This was what we were fighting for. I just didn’t want to live in fear any more.’
Meanwhile, Deng Xiaoping gathered the Chinese leadership at his home on the morning of May 17. The demonstrations had been going for a month and China had now been humiliated in the eyes of the world. The morning after shaking Gorbachev’s hand and formally ending the Sino–Soviet split, Deng Xiaoping made the decision to impose martial law.
The hinge year of Chinese contemporary history is 1989. Looking back you can see how events from the beginning of the reform and opening up of policy in 1978 rushed towards the denouement of June 1989, and how everything since can be seen in relation to that moment, either as a reckoning with, a reaction to, or a retreat from the time before.
Today people in China refer to ‘before 1989’ or ‘after 1989’ as routinely as an earlier generation in the West might have referred to before and after World War I. There is the same acceptance that June 4 1989 marked an end, after which nothing would ever be the same again.
The events of 1989, like World War I, were long in the making. They were coming from the moment Democracy Wall was closed down and Wei Jingsheng was imprisoned ten years earlier. Those actions had simply deferred the showdown between the government and the governed about what kind of nation China was meant to be. The students and citizens who rallied in Tiananmen Square in 1989 may have had only a hazy idea of what democracy might mean, but they knew what they wanted: greater respect from their government and a greater say in the running of their country. They wanted a dialogue, to no longer be treated as supplicants but as equals.
The demonstrations were sparked by the death of Hu Yaobang in April that year. As with the death of Zhou Enlai in 1976, Hu’s passing would serve as both a catalyst and a cover. Tension had been winding tighter for more than a year. When Hu Yaobang died it was like the crack from a starter’s gun, signalling that an event long anticipated could at last begin.
In the summer of 1988 the national network, China Central Television (CCTV), broadcast a series called River Elegy. Originally conceived as a conventional celebration of the Yellow River as the ‘cradle of Chinese civilisation’, the project was entrusted to an iconoclastic young director who transformed it into a blistering critique of the backwardness of Chinese culture, and a call to arms.
In River Elegy the Yellow River was presented not as a symbol of China’s ancient civilisation but instead as a metaphor for its decline. The river was silted up and sluggish, the culture it represented sclerotic, moribund, insular and feudal, doomed unless it embraced modernity and openness, as represented by the West. China could not produce another great civilisation, the series argued, if it relied on its old ways. It needed to pursue industrialisation, free trade, greater economic reform and—it hinted—political reform, if it was to be reborn.
The iconoclasm did not stop with the Yellow River. The Great Wall, according to River Elegy, did not embody strength, but insularity and fear. The dragon—that greatest of Chinese symbols—was not noble and powerful, but tyrannical and cruel.
River Elegy was like a hand grenade thrown into the debate about China’s identity. Two hundred million people watched it across the country and the Communist Party’s official paper, the People’s Daily, published the scripts in full. Scores of literary salons had been popping up in universities across the country to foster discussion about the future direction of China, and now River Elegy became a key text in stimulating debate and in engendering a sense of urgency and crisis. The series argued that in the absence of a middle class it was from China’s intellectuals that the momentum for change should come. Students throughout the country believed that it was up to them to respond.
Conservatives in the leadership were appalled. It was clear that the series supported the reformers in the government: footage of Zhao Ziyang appeared when the series struck a positive or dynamic note, while Mao Zedong was seen when the mood was dark. When CCTV wanted to re-broadcast the series later that year, major cuts were made but it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle.
1988 was a fevered year of surging inflation and increasingly visible corruption. Price reform had been botched, setting off panic buying and hoarding. People well placed in the system exploited the difference between state and market prices, making fortunes in the process, while workers’ wages were being eaten by inflation. Across the country there were scattered strikes. Meanwhile, students discovered that a place at university no longer guaranteed you a job. The old system of job assignments on graduation may have been stultifying, but at least it had provided some sense of security. While people with connections scored lucrative jobs in the special economic zones, those without struggled to find decent jobs at all. A popular saying captured their predicament: ‘As poor as a professor, as dumb as a PhD.’ Everywhere there was a sense of agitation and stress. A frustrated population of Chinese youths looking for a place in the world were more than ready to answer a call to arms.
That 1989 should be a landmark year in China was almost overdetermined. It marked 200 years since the French Revolution, 70 years since the launch of the May Fourth Movement, 40 years since the founding of the People’s Republic, and ten years since Deng Xiaoping’s triumphant trip to the United States, which had heralded China’s opening to the West. It would prove to be China’s ‘year of living dangerously’ as the party and the people competed to seize the symbolism of the times.
In January, Fang Lizhi, the liberal scientist who had been sacked from his job and expelled from the party for his role in the 1986 student demonstrations, wrote an open letter to Deng Xiaoping. He proposed that in honour of the anniversaries of the May Fourth Movement and the founding of the People’s Republic, and in the spirit of the ideals of the French Revolution, an amnesty should be declared for political prisoners in China, and, in particular, that Wei Jingsheng should finally be released.
Wei had been in prison for ten years but he had not been forgotten. During the student demonstrations in 1986, posters had appeared, declaring rhetorically: ‘If you want to know what freedom is, just go ask Wei Jingsheng.’ He was no longer just a man but a symbol. A few weeks after Fang Lizhi published his open letter, Bei Dao rallied 32 writers, academics and artists to sign a petition in support. Addressed to the leadership of the National People’s Congress and the Communist Party, it called for a general pardon of political prisoners and specifically the release of Wei Jingsheng.
The response from China’s leaders was silence, while spokespeople down the food chain batted the issue aside. As China had no po
litical prisoners, they said, there could be no question of amnesty.
Meanwhile passionate discussion about China’s future bubbled up in the university salons. There were debates about deeper economic reform and democratic participation, about freedom of speech, and about corruption and nepotism. There were debates about the very nature of Chinese culture. At Peking University, the salons were often attended by Fang Lizhi, who expounded his idea that democracy was not something that could be handed down from above, but instead must be fought for from below. Among those who listened were students who went on to be leaders of the movement at Tiananmen Square.
Around the country scores of unofficial art groups had sprung up, too, from the tough Manchurian city of Harbin in the north to the sub-tropical special economic zone of Xiamen in the south. The young artists ganged together, encouraging each other to push the limits of their art. Much of the work was surreal or unnerving, or sometimes simply absurd.
The year 1989 was an anniversary for them, too. It was ten years since the Stars had hung their work outside the National Art Museum in Beijing. Now artists from around the country had been invited to exhibit inside the museum in a major show, boldly called ‘China/ Avant-Garde’. The young curators had chosen more than a hundred artists and 250 works to introduce Chinese contemporary art to the nation and the world. The logo for the exhibition was a sign indicating ‘no U-turn’, signalling boldly in red, white and black that there would be no turning back now for China’s avant-garde.
On the morning of the opening on February 5, giant exhibition banners were laid out on the steps of the museum, the ‘no U-turn’ logo standing out starkly on a dead black background. February is Beijing’s cruellest month. In the dry cold, the skin splits on your fingers and static electricity crackles in the air. And yet despite the grim weather a large, excited crowd arrived in time for the opening at 9 a.m.
The main exhibition hall was dominated by a massive triple portrait of Mao, the standard image rendered in the tones of newsprint and overlaid with a grid, as if someone had produced an image of the chairman from an instruction sheet. It reduced the great leader from an icon to something that could be painted by numbers, a commodity.
Around the portrait there was a sense of chaos, as many of the works seemed to mock the very idea of an exhibition and the whole project of reform and opening up. In one corner an artist sat on a bed of straw surrounded by eggs and a banner with the word ‘Waiting’. Around his neck he wore a sign that read ‘To avoid disturbing future generations, no debates during the hatching’. Another artist set up a stall to sell shrimp and called the work Big Business. Soon hustled away by police for illegal trading, he returned later to put up a sign that read ‘Closed for stocktaking’. Yet another threw condoms and coins into the air, which fell like confetti on some of the art works on display. The owner of one of them complained that the condoms were rendering his piece unrecognisable, a little ironic given his work was a pile of paper pulp, claimed to be the result of putting The History of Chinese Painting and The History of Modern Western Art through a washing machine.
The list of artists involved reads like a who’s who of today’s upper echelons of Chinese contemporary art, their works in 1989 just hinting at the qualities that would one day make them famous. Among them was Zhang Xiaogang, who would become China’s most famous artist, and who we will meet later in this story. All of these artists, however, even Wang Guangyi, whose portrait of Mao initially dominated the exhibition, were destined to be upstaged by a young artist called Xiao Lu.
Her work was titled Dialogue. Installed in a prime position on the ground floor of the museum, it comprised two phone booths, each with a mannequin inside. One was a man, the other a woman, both with their backs turned, both on the phone. Between the two was a table backed by a mirror, with a red rotary dial phone, the receiver off the hook. Two hours into the show Xiao Lu approached the installation, produced a pistol and fired two shots at it, cracking the mirror and plunging the hall into panic.
She later claimed that her act was not meant to be political, that she was simply expressing the impossibility of dialogue between men and women. But in China in 1989, ‘dialogue’ was a loaded word. A call for dialogue between the government and the people had been a key theme of River Elegy, and it was an idea that was also being promoted by Zhao Ziyang.
That Xiao Lu’s portrayal of failed dialogue ended in gunfire gave her performance that day the status of a play within a play, the story of the Tiananmen movement acted out in a gallery before it had even occurred.
Marx wrote that history repeats itself ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’. Here his maxim was reversed. In that year of 1989 the story of dialogue was repeated, first as farce, then as tragedy.
As for the exhibition itself, after Xiao Lu’s intervention it was closed down. The curators gained permission to reopen a few days later, only to be closed again for good after bomb threats. It hardly mattered: the exhibition already had its place in history, another way station along the road to the events of June.
On April 15 1989, Hu Yaobang died and the curtain rose. The students knew their history. They knew that mourning for Zhou Enlai had triggered the 1976 Qing Ming demonstrations, which were harbingers of the fall of the Gang of Four and the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the reform era. In their mourning for Hu Yaobang they saw their opportunity to make history.
Within hours of the news of Hu’s death, posters were going up at Beijing’s universities, mourning his passing but also demanding a reversal of the criticism that had accompanied his fall from power. By the morning of April 17 students across 26 of the capital’s universities had held spontaneous memorials and the mourning posters had been joined by others launching scathing attacks on the current state of Chinese society. Wreaths and elegiac poems had already appeared around the Monument to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square.
After midnight on the night of April 17 a column of around 1000 students set out to march the 18 kilometres from Peking University to Tiananmen Square. Passing through the university district, they gathered another 2000 students, marching behind a banner proclaiming ‘Hu Yaobang—the Soul of China’.
Arriving at Tiananmen Square before dawn, they hung their banner from the Monument to the People’s Heroes and together sang ‘The Internationale’:
Arise ye prisoners of starvation,
Arise ye wretched of the earth!
If ‘Nothing to My Name’ would be the anthem to the student movement, ‘The Internationale’ would be its hymn. It was a song everyone knew—students, workers, ordinary Beijingers. By singing it they linked themselves to revolutionary movements around the world and to the noble history of struggle that had given birth to modern China. They would sing it often over the next fevered weeks, even as they were surrounded by soldiers and tanks on their last night in Tiananmen Square.
From this distance you can see how the whole tragedy played out from the moment of elation before dawn on April 18 to the desperate denouement in the dark hours before dawn on June 4. You can see the bad decisions, the bad luck, the forks in the road where a different choice would have changed the outcome. By the end, less than two months later, some students were speaking openly of dying for their cause, but on that spring morning in April they felt only excitement and self-confidence.
The students announced their demands, which they drew up into a formal petition. They asked for the affirmation of Hu Yaobang’s views on democracy and freedom, for the repudiation of the campaigns against spiritual pollution and ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ and the rehabilitation of those who had suffered under them, for the public declaration of the assets of government leaders and their families, for freedom of speech and the press, and increased funding for education. The students then began a sit-in in front of the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s ‘parliament’, the National People’s Congress, to wait for a response.
Tension grew as the students waited. Some junior officials were sent to re
ceive the petition but the students wanted to hand it to someone in authority. That night they dramatically upped the ante by moving their demonstration to the real seat of power, the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai just west of the Forbidden City. On the night of April 18 and then again on the night of April 19 some 2000 students stood at the gates of Zhongnanhai and, surrounded by spectators, called for Premier Li Peng to come out and meet them. There were chaotic scenes as some surged towards the gates and were only held back with difficulty by lines of police.
Inside Zhongnanhai a split was already opening up in the leadership. In the face of concerns from the Old Guard, Zhao Ziyang argued that the students’ stance should be considered patriotic, despite the actions of a rowdy minority, and that their right to memorialise Hu Yaobang should be respected. His premier, Li Peng, urged a hard line.
At base the split reflected a dramatic difference of outlook between the two men. Zhao Ziyang was interested in the potential for dialogue between the regime and the people as a way of advancing reform and the rule of law. Li Peng was aligned with the Old Guard, who were keen to put a brake on reform, re-establish old-style central planning and put an end to bourgeois liberalism. Li’s approach was traditional and autocratic: the Communist Party equalled the people. What need was there to negotiate with themselves?
Back at the universities the situation was evolving fast. The students were already setting up independent organisations to lead their movement, turning their back on the official student bodies sanctioned by the party. The leaders of these new unions would become the face of the student movement in the following weeks—earnest, intelligent, passionate advocates whose prominence would earn them a place on the ‘most wanted’ list after June 4.
The Phoenix Years Page 12