The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  Under new command the 38th proved the most zealous that night in carrying out their orders. Perhaps his predecessor’s insubordination made the new commander all the keener to prove his loyalty, or maybe it was because the resistance to the troops was greater in the west of the city, but whatever the reason the 38th Group Army’s entry to the capital proved the bloodiest of that bloody night.

  When they met the first roadblock on the east-west axis at Gongzhufen, they initially used tear gas and rubber bullets to push back the crowd. Then, as the crowd reformed and finally stood in a wall thousands strong, the infantry dropped into battlefield formation and opened fire directly into the crowd.

  From then on they followed the same ruthless pattern: ineffectual attempts at riot control followed by deadly force. Later the government would claim that the army had had insufficient riot gear to control the crowds that night, making the use of live fire unavoidable, but the deciding factor on the night was not resources but the order that they must reach the square by 1 a.m. They were on a deadline and nothing was to be allowed to stand in their way.

  The bloodiest engagement anywhere in the city that night was at Muxidi just two kilometres further along the road to the square from Gongzhufen. Muxidi is now, as it was then, a comfortable residential area, dotted with high-rise apartments housing senior government officials. Those apartments overlooked the bridge where Beijing citizens and students once more tried to stop the soldiers’ advance.

  The crowds had pushed buses across the road and armed themselves with bricks and broken-up concrete with which they battled the anti-riot brigade who arrived first on the bridge. Beaten back, the brigade was replaced by soldiers who rushed across the bridge in waves, firing into the crowd. Each time they fired, the people scattered only to regroup. Slowly the soldiers pushed the people back across the bridge, firing repeatedly into the crowd, who still tried to fight them with whatever fell to hand. Soon at least a hundred people lay bleeding out on the street.

  The residents of the apartment blocks cursed the soldiers from their windows, yelling ‘Murderers!’, ‘Fascists!’, ‘Bandits!’ and raining objects down on their heads. And so the soldiers began to strafe the apartments, too. At least three people died at home that night, one of them while fetching a glass of water by an open window.

  Once the infantry had cleared the bridge, armoured personnel carriers, trucks and tanks drove across behind them, heading east towards the square. In their wake some citizens erected fresh roadblocks and set them ablaze, while others rushed the dead and dying to the nearby Fuxing Hospital. On the road where the army vehicles had passed lay the tangled blood and flesh of some who were beyond salvation.

  The 38th rolled eastwards, stalked by a crowd who followed at some metres’ distance. The soldiers fired into the crowd whenever they felt challenged, whether by Molotov cocktails, rocks or with shouts, as they moved inexorably towards the square.

  As Guo Jian rode nearer to Muxidi with his classmate, he could hear the sound of gunfire but it still sounded to him like fireworks. He couldn’t believe they’d be using live ammunition. But as they got nearer he began to see the dead and wounded by the side of the road and he knew: This is real now.

  They rode up beside the Fuxing Hospital and from there Guo Jian could see smoke from the burning roadblock at Muxidi. Armoured trucks and tanks were rolling towards them out of the haze. He watched in horror as soldiers fired directly into the crowd. They weren’t firing wildly, they were taking aim, firing, manoeuvring, then firing again. It was exactly like when he was in the army. These men were firing as they had been trained to do in battle.

  Guo Jian and his classmate ran down into the entrance of the hospital and found the foyer awash with blood. The wounded from Muxidi and beyond were being brought to the hospital in a constant stream, on the backs of pedal carts, on bicycles, on anything that could serve as a stretcher. Beside the entrance, where bicycles were normally parked, bodies lay in a pile.

  Guo Jian longed to do something heroic but he felt paralysed. He sat down on a chair inside the door, his classmate slumped beside him. ‘And then a doctor came out and said “We need help, come with me” and he took us into a room where we almost slipped in the blood. There was so much blood, I couldn’t look at it and so I just looked at the doctor.’

  ‘He told me he needed someone to take out the dead bodies to create space for the wounded coming in but I just couldn’t do it. I walked out, it was too much for me. I thought, I don’t want to be a man!, and I sat down again feeling so guilty. Then I heard someone say they needed people to carry in the wounded from the street and I thought, I can do that!’

  The wounded were lying where they’d been shot. The army was still passing by. Guo Jian and the other volunteers waved white cloths as they went to lift the first person from the road.

  ‘We carried the first guy back to the hospital. His blood was running out like water. He was alive then but I don’t know if he survived. Then we went out again to collect the next person. But this time the soldiers started shooting. We scattered but one of us was shot. After that we knew there was nothing more we could do.’

  Nothing they could do, they thought, but ride west to their campus and warn their classmates not to come to the square. On the way they passed Muxidi. In an apartment block overlooking the bridge they saw an old lady standing on her balcony screaming down at the soldiers who were still rolling into the city below her. ‘She was yelling “Fascists! Fascists!” and the soldiers fired straight at her. Then she was quiet. Later her neighbours carried her body down into the street.’

  They rode on until they reached their university, where they could tell them what they had seen.

  My friend made her way up towards Chang’an Avenue from her home in the hutongs south of the square. It was past midnight. Earlier that night she had been in the square and afterwards had walked aimlessly through the streets nearby with a young student friend. They had been seized with a kind of restless energy for days. What was the government going to do? They knew something must happen, but what?

  It was such a warm night and after hours of walking she had finally conceded to her friend that her new fashionable shoes didn’t fit her after all. She would have to go home and change them. He’d be fine on his own, he said. They agreed to meet back at the intersection of Chang’an Avenue and Xidan, west of Tiananmen Square.

  But now as she neared Chang’an Avenue she heard a sound like fireworks. But she knew it wasn’t fireworks. The broad avenue was lined with people, thousands standing by the road watching the army roll eastward towards the square. In the distance there was a glow of fire from burning roadblocks. She searched for her friend but couldn’t see him. The street was bathed in a strange light, the glow of fires mixing with the beams from the decorative street lamps into an orange glow. The troops were rumbling up the avenue on packed lorries, their helmets glinting in the light, shooting as they came. As the first truck passed her she saw that under their helmets the soldiers’ faces were young, and many of them looked scared. Pedal carts were speeding up the street ahead of them with bloodied people lying crumpled across their wooden trays. And yet the crowd stayed, lining the avenue.

  As they stood there, like an audience in a ghastly parody of a patriotic parade, someone began to sing. It was ‘The Internationale’. The words rang out:

  Arise ye prisoners of starvation, Arise ye wretched of the Earth!

  All around her people began to sing, and she sang, too. They sang it as loudly as they could, this anthem of the oppressed, as the soldiers rode past. They sang not far from where Wei Jingsheng had once upon a time posted his plea for democracy on an ordinary wall. They sang where they had demonstrated in the weeks before, buoyed with excitement. They sang even as the trucks were followed by armoured personnel carriers, and then by tanks, as the air filled with the guttural sound of an army turning their city into a battleground.

  Up ahead was the square where they would never go again with pleasur
e, a place that in the weeks before had truly felt like public ground, a place where the last demonstrators were now waiting by the Monument to the People’s Heroes for the final confrontation.

  And as she sang her eyes fixed on a single child’s shoe lying discarded on the ground, soaked with blood.

  By 1.30 a.m. the army was surrounding Tiananmen Square. Units had pushed up through Beijing from the north, south, east and west, joining those already sequestered within the buildings lining the square. Each unit had encountered resistance, each had answered with deadly force. Now they sat and waited for the next move.

  For a couple of hours wounded demonstrators had been arriving at the square. Yet thousands of demonstrators still clustered around the Monument to the People’s Heroes. They still clung to their role as heroes, all the more reluctant to leave now that all across the city people were dying in their cause. As in the weeks before, a debate broke out between those urging retreat and those who wanted to stay. Hou Dejian exhorted the students to leave. Enough blood had been spilled that night to awaken the people, he said, and the students had already shown that they were not afraid to die. They need not do more. But the student leader Chai Ling refused to direct the students either to stay or to go. This, she declared, should be their choice to make. Finally, Hou Dejian and Liu Xiaobo decided to try and negotiate safe passage for the students.

  It was almost 4 a.m. when the two men drove in an ambulance up to the army lines and presented their offer to an officer. If the army would agree not to shoot they would organise the students to leave the square. Their offer was accepted but they were told to hurry. Deng’s dawn deadline was dictating the course of events.

  The students then held one final vote. The question to leave was to be decided on the voices. When the vote was called the shouts to stay sounded just as loud as the votes to go. The student leader who called the vote declared it a vote to go. Later, he explained why. Those wanting to go would be embarrassed to yell too loudly, he reasoned, while those wanting to stay would be all the louder in their bravado. So if both sounded the same it must be a majority to go. And so they began to leave.

  The army was already moving in on the students by this time, pushing towards them slowly with their guns at the ready. There was no time left to debate. The student leaders performed one last service, insisting the students drop any weapons they might have and leave in orderly lines. The students retreated under the banners of their colleges, singing ‘The Internationale’ and holding hands. Behind them the goddess of democracy toppled to the ground. The tanks took up their positions on the square. The army had delivered it to the government once more.

  It seems Deng Xiaoping got his wish that morning, and no one was killed within the square itself. It was a distinction that the government would make much of in the days, months and years that followed.

  But even China’s official figures recorded hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries outside the square as the army prosecuted its mission. Figures initially released by the Chinese Red Cross, but then retracted, suggested thousands had died, as did a melancholy news report by Radio Beijing broadcast on the afternoon of June 4. In the immediate aftermath, BBC journalist Kate Adie, who produced some of the most compelling reporting on the massacre, reported a figure of 1000 killed based on sources within Beijing’s hospitals. The most exhaustive attempt to count the dead was undertaken by Canadian historian Timothy Brook, who visited Beijing in the months after June 4. Based on contemporaneous reports of casualties counted at a number of Beijing hospitals, he arrived at a figure very near the initial Chinese Red Cross figure of 2600 dead.

  The true figure may never be known. But the sheer diversity of those who died speaks to the indiscriminate nature of the army’s actions, and refutes the government’s claims that the majority of those who died were ‘counter-revolutionary rioters’. Children died as well as pensioners in their homes, pedicab drivers were shot while trying to deliver the injured to hospitals, as were ambulance drivers. Deaths reached into the highest government circles, too. The chauffeur of one of the elders was killed, as was the son-in-law of a senior official of the National People’s Congress: he was the man at Muxidi shot while fetching water by a lighted kitchen window.

  The actions of some of the bereaved also speak to the immensity of the tragedy. A father carried the body of his four-year-old son around with him for days after June 4 showing his wounds to anyone who would look. University students paraded the bodies of their slain classmates around the campuses of Tsinghua, Peking University, the People’s University and the Beijing Language University. At the Chinese University of Political Science and Law, students laid out the body of one of their classmates on a table and surrounded him with ice, keening for him.

  The violence did not stop once the square was cleared. Many more people were killed in the hours that followed. An official report to the leadership told of one particularly cold-blooded attack on a group of students making their way home to their university on foot, having earlier evacuated the square. A tank charged into their group, killing eleven instantly.

  Despite the danger, as the terrible day of June 4 wore on, Beijingers continued assembling near the square to pay witness to what had occurred and to protest. All through that day Western journalists watched horrified from their vantage points in the Beijing Hotel just east of the square as soldiers fired point blank into small crowds of people who gathered to curse the soldiers. Dozens died in broad daylight on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

  The number of military casualties during the crackdown is also uncertain. There is no doubt that soldiers died in the action, some brutally murdered by the crowd. The official toll announced in the days immediately following June 4 counted 23 soldiers dead and 200 missing. Later research by a Chinese historian, Wu Renhua, identified fourteen military deaths, of whom eight had been killed in direct fighting with demonstrators. In the absence of a full public accounting for the bloodshed, the details of these soldiers’ stories, too, are missing from history.

  Like millions of people around the world, I watched the events unfold on television.

  I had left China the summer before on a high. The chill that had fallen on the city after the removal of Hu Yaobang had been replaced by an almost feverish atmosphere of excitement. At the start of the year, I had witnessed with some amazement the first open press conference ever held during the National People’s Congress; although the rest of the proceedings had taken place behind closed doors, people close to the government seemed to welcome the chance to discuss China’s situation openly.

  River Elegy had been broadcast in the weeks before I left, and it seemed no one could decide which was more extraordinary—the argument it contained or the fact that it had been broadcast at all. My own belief was that it was inevitable that China would ultimately embrace some kind of democracy. Yes, there would be reversals, as there had been in 1979, 1983 and in 1987, but in the end these would only be brief setbacks.

  When students and ordinary Beijingers began to fill the square in the spring of 1989 I felt that the energy and passion I had experienced in Beijing’s underground was finally breaking cover. This is what I had seen behind closed doors, I thought, a sense that the entire society had to change, a longing for a role to play in what could be a great venture. And there was also just a longing for colour, excitement, romance. I’d seen people singing Cui Jian in their homes, and now they were singing him in Tiananmen Square.

  As the weeks passed I watched events unfold, gripped by every twist. When the People’s Daily editorial was issued I felt a chill of fear that was instantly replaced by excitement at the bravado of the students, and, more importantly, of the ordinary people of Beijing. I watched almost with disbelief when Chinese journalists, who I knew as cowed and depressed by their designated role in state propaganda, suddenly took to the streets to demonstrate and later began to actually report what was going on.

  Even as the weeks wore on and the stalemate became more evident
I was still excited, still hopeful that it would all end well. Martial law was a shock but when Beijingers flooded into the streets to reason with the soldiers and they in turn consented to be stopped, I began to believe that the government must surely recognise that only a political solution could work.

  Even on the evening of June 3 as I watched the news pictures of soldiers yet again being prevented from entering the capital, I believed it would be OK. Surely the People’s Army would never turn on the people. I believed the longstanding propaganda as much as any Chinese citizen. The army were the ‘most beloved’ of people, after all.

  I had invited friends to dinner at my home in Sydney on June 4, not realising that it would turn out to be a wake. All through that night as we drank much and ate little I tried hopelessly to call Beijing. Over and over I called the apartments of friends in the diplomatic compounds, hoping they would have news of the friends who we knew had been in the square and who we had no way of contacting.

  The very first Chinese friend I had made was at my house that night. Three and a half years since he had taken me to his hutong home to see his paintings, he was now a Sydney-sider. Given a chance to come to Australia earlier that year for an artists’ exchange, he had chosen not to go back. His girlfriend, my friend, had been in the square every day. Now he sat pale and terribly still, watching me as I tried every phone number I had.

  In the days that followed we rode a rollercoaster of hope and despair. Rumours circulated of dissension in the army, of some units facing off against others on the outskirts of Beijing. Rumours, too, that the government might fall. It would be five days before there was any sign of the leadership and in those days we dared to wonder.

  On June 5 we had a moment that brought a kind of comfort, even joy, as we watched a young man stand in front of a row of tanks rolling down Chang’an Avenue. In his neat white shirt and dark pants, he seemed to stand in for all the Beijingers who had faced down the army for so long.