Twenty years on, in the week of its anniversary, DAVID RICE recalls his time in Beijing, where he witnessed the protests that culminated in the massacre at Tiananmen Square
‘HE WAS only seven years old, but there was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.” A young girl was describing the dead little boy she saw near Tiananmen Square. “The students had put him in a cardboard box, and they were packing ice around him to keep him fresh until his parents came. But the cardboard got soft from the melting ice, and it all came apart.”
It was the morning of June 4th, 1989, and I was sitting in a Beijing college dormitory a few short hours after the massacre at Tiananmen Square had ended. I was waiting with surviving students as the names of the dead came in. As each name came in, the students taped a photo of their dead comrade to the wall. The photos were taken from lockers or lent by girlfriends or boyfriends or families. Throughout that day I watched the line of photos lengthen, until there were two rows on the whitewashed wall. One picture showed a young man holding his baby daughter of just three months.
There was very little weeping. It was as if those students sitting on the edges of their bunks were turned to stone. A journalist colleague and I just sat there with them, maybe holding a hand or putting an arm around a shoulder. We were like stone ourselves.
It had all begun almost two months earlier, on April 15th, with the death of Hu Yaobang. Hu was a communist leader who had been sacked for being soft on student protest, and was thus revered by China’s students. On the eve of his funeral the Beijing students marched in his memory but, over the following days, successive marches mutated into protest demonstrations that grew bigger by the day, until there were a million people on the streets in and around Tiananmen Square.
Essentially, the protests were because China’s new economic freedom was not being matched by political freedom.
I shall never forget one of those early marches, where the students came through the darkened streets from Beijing’s many campuses, to merge near Tiananmen Square, chanting hypnotically, looking like gaunt gothic saints by the light of their lanterns. There were no smiles, just that “cold face” for which the Chinese are renowned.
Then, about April 17th, the cold face melted. I was there to see it happen. Police were blocking the gates of Beijing University, to prevent a march leaving the campus. We could hear the sound of the Internationale as the students advanced towards the gates. Suddenly the police cordon parted and the marchers pushed through, moving nine abreast down the street, faces stern.
Suddenly the street crowd broke into wild applause, cheering the students on and giving the V sign. The marchers’ cold faces showed astonishment, then joy, then everyone burst into smiles and laughter and began hugging each other as they marched. There were tears too among the smiles. And then the police themselves began smiling and giving the V sign.
And once those smiles began, the cold face never came back during the heady days that followed. The smiles seemed to release an outpouring of generosity and caring and joy, not just among the students but among the rest of Beijing’s population. It was like a kind of spring, coming after a 20-year winter of the Chinese heart which had stretched barren and bleak and cold from the days of the Cultural Revolution.
The springtime mood even extended to criminals. A group calling itself “The Beijing Thieves’ Association” put up posters stating that they too were going on strike. “We, the thieves of Beijing,” the poster read, “hereby announce that we are giving up stealing for the duration of the protests.”
They kept their word.
A young Chinese woman called Song told me what it was like to take part in one of those marches. (I later used her words in my novel about the events):
“I’ll remember it as long as I live. We waited in that side street for our turn to join. Then we moved forward, singing the Internationale.
“Well, I’ll never forget the feeling when we swung around the corner into Chang’an Boulevard. I nearly died when I saw the crowd, and they all cheered and cheered, and they sang the Internationale along with us as we marched.
“We felt so proud, I started to cry. Maybe I’m sentimental, but the others were crying too – the tears were streaming down their faces as they marched. I think, maybe, in all my life I had never done a thing so – so significant, so important. For my own people. For my country. I never had a chance like this to show how I felt about democracy. About liberty.
“I felt, at that moment, the Chinese people are very great – they’re not slaves, like the government wants them to be. And I felt that from our marching would come, somehow, the future of China. I know that the moment when we turned that corner will always be the best moment of my life.”
I had seen it, of course. I had been in the crowd as Song marched by. She was in the front row, where they carried a banner stretching the width of the march. The scene reminded me of Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People, where a young woman strides across the barricades holding high the tricolour, accompanied by a boy in his teens. Those young Chinese had that same heroic manner; their faces had that nobility which a great moment can impart.
The hunger strike began on May 13th. It was meant to shame the unyielding government before the world’s media, who were in Beijing for the visit of the Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev.
I was at the square one night and heard, for the first time, the sound of a hunger strike. It was like a great whisper coming up from the ground, broken by occasional quiet coughing, or weeping, or murmuring, or sometimes even laughter. There was the tiny tinny beat from Walkman earphones. Sometimes a voice would gently rise in a song, and it was like a lullaby.
The strike brought a million supporters to the square, but it was called off on May 20th, to avoid the deaths of many of the youngsters. It was only after the strike ended that Premier Li Peng declared martial law.
Fear was in the air the next day, and rumours abounded that tanks were moving in to attack. I photographed terrified youngsters with arms linked, just waiting for the tanks. Tanks which didn’t actually come – yet. I remember being at the square when a helicopter hovered overhead, and then dropped something like a huge bomb right above us. Everyone screamed and I thought I was going to die. The thing exploded into thousands of fluttering leaflets. These were the declaration of martial law.
FROM THEN on, Tiananmen Square became a kind of commune. There was a tent city, buses were commandeered as housing for the protesters, and the students took over traffic policing as the authorities seemed to melt away.
The following Tuesday was the last time a million people turned out to protest. They chanted, “Li Peng, xia tai (Li Peng, resign)”. As if in answer, the sky turned black, there was a ferocious storm with dust from the Gobi desert, and torrential rain that turned the dust into mud.
People said it was a sign: “Li Peng has lost the Mandate of Heaven.”
But it was the students who had lost it. From then on the movement wound down, until there were only a few thousand left, in a squalid, fly-blown, stinking, littered and filthy Tiananmen Square. In a last attempt to rally the protesters, their leaders erected “the Goddess of Democracy” – a 10m tall, white fibreglass and plaster figure reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty, holding high a torch and staring across the square at Mao’s portrait.
It was then that the authorities struck. When there was no further danger from the protests. An ideal time to strike terror, so such protests would never again happen. And terror is best achieved through deaths. “Kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys” is a proverb that goes right back to imperial times.
On the night of June 3rd/4th, tanks rolled into the square and on top of the sleeping tents, followed by soldiers with guns blazing. “Zhen zi dan! Zhen zi dan!” people were screaming (“Real bullets, real bullets!”). At firsts they could not believe it.
I had meant to visit the square that night (just another ordinary night), but instead had gone out drinking with a couple of journalist friends. That probably saved my life.
Not long before the massacre, leader Deng Xiaoping had been quoted as saying, “It would be worth getting rid of 20,000 people for 20 years of stability.”
WELL, THE 20 YEARS ARE up now, and Deng got his stability, although he did not live to enjoy it. He got it fairly cheaply, indeed. Yet dissidents still speak out, more and more as the years go by. And then quietly await the midnight knock on the door. The genie that was loosed from its bottle in that incomparable spring of 1989 has never been put back. And all the nameless terrors of China’s geriatric rulers will never be able to put it back.
If you cannot march you can mutter, and I am told that there is much muttering in China today. (I cannot return to find out, because of the books I have written. That has been made clear to me.) And China’s muttering recalls for me Browning’s poem on the Pied Piper: “And the muttering grew to a grumbling, and the grumbling grew to a mightly rumbling. . .”
This I do know: that China’s regime lives in constant dread of some Pied Piper awaiting his time to step once more into the street.
David Rice is the author of Dragon's Broodand Song of Tiananmen Square
Starting Monday on the foreign pages: Clifford Coonan talks to people whose lives were changed by the Tiananmen Square massacre