China had become two worlds, and they were about to
collide. On Saturday, April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang, the seventy-three-year-old
Communist Party chief who was purged for being too soft on student-led
demonstrations in 1986, died of a heart attack after a politburo meeting.
Throughout the weekend, dozens o posters went up at universities around Beijing
commemorating Hu’s death. Student’s place wreaths at the Monument to the
Revolutionary Heroes in the center of Tiananmen Square, something that hadn’t
been done since the last major protest there, in 1976, to commemorate the
passing of Zhou Enlai.
Hu’s death was the spark China’s students and reform-minded elite had been waiting for. For months, pro-democracy activists had been meeting on university campuses to debate political reform. In early April, Beijing University, which since the early twentieth century had stood at the center of China’s political movements, banned a “Democracy Salon” that had been gathering on campus. On April 5, students defied the ban and met in the open air, bundled up against the early spring chill. Perhaps it was my New Yorker’s skepticism, but I sensed a lot of despair lurking behind the defiance. After student leaders and a dissident spoke, the crowd remained silent. Then a bespectacled young man in a worn Mao suit spoke up. “It’s not so much fear that I feel,” he said,” It’s just hopelessness. Our leaders don’t listen to the people. They never will.”
At Tiananmen Square, posters praised Hu and called for his remains to lie in the mausoleum of the legendary leader Mao Zedong on the square. “Sincere men have died while hypocrites live on,” declared one. The Monday following Hu’s death, demonstrations began in Beijing and Shanghai with hundreds of student’s marching. By Tuesday their ranks had grown to thousands and by Thursday, tens of thousands. Students were marching in more than six cities, calling for political reform and the establishment of an independent student union outside the control of the Communist Party.
Following a memorial service for Hu on Friday, April 21, the head of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, left for a scheduled trip to North Korea. Conservatives within the party seized upon Zhao’s absence to convene a politburo meeting and denounce the demonstrations. Their fulminations appeared in an April 26 editorial in the People’s Daily, the official paper of the Communist Party. The editorial labeled the demonstrators, more than two-hundred-thousand in Beijing alone, “antiparty and anti-socialist and accused the demonstration organizers of “flaunting the banner of democracy” to “sow dissension among the people, plunge the whole country into chaos, and sabotage the political situation of stability and unity.”
In years past, such a clear statement of the state’s intention to hammer dissent, made on the front page of the party’s flagship newspaper, would have cowed all but the most foolhardy Chinese. But unlike my classmates, this younger generation had no firsthand experience of the ruthlessness of the Chinese state. No one had been arrested during the last two spates of student unrest – in the mid-1980s in Shanghai and during the anti-African marches in Nanjing in 1988.
The editorial sparked outrage. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, angered by growing corruption and worried about high inflation, defied the government’s ban on protests. And when Zhao Ziyang returned to Beijing, he publically distanced himself from the conservative position. On April 27, protestors streamed through the gates of Beijing University in the northwest corner of the city, gaining marchers as they streamed south. Just outside the gates of People’s University, about three miles from Beijing University, the marchers confronted a police cordon.
Covering the march for the AP, I was near the front of the crowd as it rocked against the police barricades. People were blowing whistles and banging pots and pans. It was a parade, circus, and protest combined into one. The protestors were elated to be out on a beautiful April day, elated to be Chinese, elated to be righteous. The rocking became more frenzied, and with one climatic push and an enormous roar, the crowd barreled through the police lines.
Thousands of people leaned out windows and cheered as we surged by,. Kindergarten children stood at the gates of their school and applauded. Patients in nightgowns emerged from the hospital to accept pamphlets handed out by students. Students with arms linked sang the national anthem and shouted “Long live democracy” and “Down with bureaucracy, down with corruption.”
By the time we reached Tiananmen Square, more than four hours later, thousands of ordinary people had joined in. The soldiers who had been guarded the square faded out of sight. I had never been in a crowd of that size before, and it was intoxicating. It was by no means a mob. Indeed, people even said “excuse me” when they stepped on your toes. I was swept away in the emotion of the day, marching with people who were peaceful and who wanted what was right and good.
The demonstrations quickly spread to dozens of cities, including Shanghai, Chengdu, and Nanjing. A clearly sympathetic media reported on the marches, marking the first time since 1949 that the press had exercised a semblance of freedom. A few days later, the May 1 International Labor day holidays brought a new surge of demonstrators. Thousands of students from a cross China descended upon Beijing, exponentially expanding the size and scope of the movement. The Consolidated Student Union of Colleges and Universities in Beijing, which had been leading the movement, splintered in two; some members stuck to the students’ original demand for the government to recognize an independent student association. Others pushed for a more radical agenda, the overthrow of the Communist Party. On May 12, the protest leaders from both splinter groups announced a hunger strike, vowing that they would fast until senior government officials met with them to consider their demands.
It was an ingenious move. In a country with such recent experience with hunger, where “Have you eaten?” was a common greeting, the image of students fasting for their beliefs tugged at the heartstrings of people nationwide. As the days passed, scores of white-gowned medical personnel volunteered for duty in Tiananmen Square, by now a tent city teeming with protestors around the clock. Student leaders, fully aware of the dramatic potential of their weakened constitutions, would faint publically in front of the cameras, before being rushed off to a jerry-rigged hospital tent for intravenous drips. Some of it was a stunt. Three students I knew from Beijing Normal Teachers College would each fast for eight hours a day so that together they would constitute one fasting demonstrator. They called their eight hour shifts “being on duty.” As the weeks passed, the government looked increasingly hapless. Each day it issued a deadline for students and protestors to leave the square. Each day the demonstrators’ defiance grew. On May 15, another deadline passed, forcing the government to relocate a welcoming ceremony for the visiting Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev from the Great Hall of the People, which bordered the square, to Beijing’s international airport. By mid-May, more than one million demonstrators thronged the streets of Beijing.
The students leading the charge were by and large a happy-go-lucky group of twenty-somethings. Most were born during the Cultural Revolution but had no memory of it. Because they had not seen the worst of the party’s handiwork, the ease with which it mangled lives and ate its young, they didn’t fear the party the way my classmates did. Those in Tiananmen Square had a greater sense of the possible. As the Chinese say, a newborn calf doesn’t fear a tiger.
I was by no means the best journalist among the group of foreign correspondents in Beijing, but I spoke some of the best Chinese and, just a few years earlier had gone to school with men and women much like the ones that were now marching. While many Western correspondents viewed a conversation with a group of Chinese students as an impossibly challenging language lesson or a trip to a Chinese dorm room like a journey to another planet, for me hanging out with the students felt like home.
One sunny afternoon, I and another American reporter interviewed a student leader named Wu’er Kaixi in his dorm room at a teachers’ college in Beijing. I lounged on Kaixi’s oily bedroll, taking in the stench. My American colleague declined an offer to sit on the bed, preferring the less malodorous safety of a stool.
Wu’er Kaixi was a member of a Turkic ethnic group, the Uighurs, who inhabit China’s Xinjiang Province in the country’s far northwestern corner. He was an electrically charismatic, roguishly handsome young man of many appetites, food being just one. Several days after the hunger strike began, he asked me to pick him up at 2:30 a.m. in an alley by Tiananmen Square. “Bring your car,” he growled, his voice scratchy from days behind the bullhorn.
Kaixi was waiting under a tree. He directed me to drive him to an outdoor food market. “Get out and get me some food,” he commanded, after making me promise to keep the meeting off the record. “I can’t get it myself. If anyone sees me, it will hurt the movement.” After stir-fried pork with noodles, he moved to shredded chicken with noodles, bell peppers and ham with noodles, and noodles in soup – all slurped down at full volume next to me.
Covering the protests, I got caught up in the excitement. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I enthused in a letter to my parents in late May 1989. “I have a sense that it is going to end badly but at the same time it is remarkable to beheld. Today I saw one million people on the street. One million! And what do they want? Just a chance at a better life.”
I avoided the darker side of the student organization. The student union was organized in a way depressingly similar to the Communist Party, configured along Leninist lines with a politburo and Central Committee. Donations flowed in, but there was no way to account for the money. I had a gnawing sense that the students really had no idea what they wanted other than change, any change. Getting interviews with student leaders involved negotiating my way through a phalanx of self-important, self-appointed guards who maintained order during demonstrations and made up rules as they went along. I was once riding my bicycle by a group of fasting students along the norther edge of the Square when one student guard rushed out and gave me a shove, causing me to crash and rip the skin on my right arm from wrist to elbow. “No bike riding,” he barked as I lay there bleeding on the asphalt. No bike riding in the biking capital of the world?
Hu’s death was the spark China’s students and reform-minded elite had been waiting for. For months, pro-democracy activists had been meeting on university campuses to debate political reform. In early April, Beijing University, which since the early twentieth century had stood at the center of China’s political movements, banned a “Democracy Salon” that had been gathering on campus. On April 5, students defied the ban and met in the open air, bundled up against the early spring chill. Perhaps it was my New Yorker’s skepticism, but I sensed a lot of despair lurking behind the defiance. After student leaders and a dissident spoke, the crowd remained silent. Then a bespectacled young man in a worn Mao suit spoke up. “It’s not so much fear that I feel,” he said,” It’s just hopelessness. Our leaders don’t listen to the people. They never will.”
At Tiananmen Square, posters praised Hu and called for his remains to lie in the mausoleum of the legendary leader Mao Zedong on the square. “Sincere men have died while hypocrites live on,” declared one. The Monday following Hu’s death, demonstrations began in Beijing and Shanghai with hundreds of student’s marching. By Tuesday their ranks had grown to thousands and by Thursday, tens of thousands. Students were marching in more than six cities, calling for political reform and the establishment of an independent student union outside the control of the Communist Party.
Following a memorial service for Hu on Friday, April 21, the head of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, left for a scheduled trip to North Korea. Conservatives within the party seized upon Zhao’s absence to convene a politburo meeting and denounce the demonstrations. Their fulminations appeared in an April 26 editorial in the People’s Daily, the official paper of the Communist Party. The editorial labeled the demonstrators, more than two-hundred-thousand in Beijing alone, “antiparty and anti-socialist and accused the demonstration organizers of “flaunting the banner of democracy” to “sow dissension among the people, plunge the whole country into chaos, and sabotage the political situation of stability and unity.”
In years past, such a clear statement of the state’s intention to hammer dissent, made on the front page of the party’s flagship newspaper, would have cowed all but the most foolhardy Chinese. But unlike my classmates, this younger generation had no firsthand experience of the ruthlessness of the Chinese state. No one had been arrested during the last two spates of student unrest – in the mid-1980s in Shanghai and during the anti-African marches in Nanjing in 1988.
The editorial sparked outrage. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, angered by growing corruption and worried about high inflation, defied the government’s ban on protests. And when Zhao Ziyang returned to Beijing, he publically distanced himself from the conservative position. On April 27, protestors streamed through the gates of Beijing University in the northwest corner of the city, gaining marchers as they streamed south. Just outside the gates of People’s University, about three miles from Beijing University, the marchers confronted a police cordon.
Covering the march for the AP, I was near the front of the crowd as it rocked against the police barricades. People were blowing whistles and banging pots and pans. It was a parade, circus, and protest combined into one. The protestors were elated to be out on a beautiful April day, elated to be Chinese, elated to be righteous. The rocking became more frenzied, and with one climatic push and an enormous roar, the crowd barreled through the police lines.
Thousands of people leaned out windows and cheered as we surged by,. Kindergarten children stood at the gates of their school and applauded. Patients in nightgowns emerged from the hospital to accept pamphlets handed out by students. Students with arms linked sang the national anthem and shouted “Long live democracy” and “Down with bureaucracy, down with corruption.”
By the time we reached Tiananmen Square, more than four hours later, thousands of ordinary people had joined in. The soldiers who had been guarded the square faded out of sight. I had never been in a crowd of that size before, and it was intoxicating. It was by no means a mob. Indeed, people even said “excuse me” when they stepped on your toes. I was swept away in the emotion of the day, marching with people who were peaceful and who wanted what was right and good.
The demonstrations quickly spread to dozens of cities, including Shanghai, Chengdu, and Nanjing. A clearly sympathetic media reported on the marches, marking the first time since 1949 that the press had exercised a semblance of freedom. A few days later, the May 1 International Labor day holidays brought a new surge of demonstrators. Thousands of students from a cross China descended upon Beijing, exponentially expanding the size and scope of the movement. The Consolidated Student Union of Colleges and Universities in Beijing, which had been leading the movement, splintered in two; some members stuck to the students’ original demand for the government to recognize an independent student association. Others pushed for a more radical agenda, the overthrow of the Communist Party. On May 12, the protest leaders from both splinter groups announced a hunger strike, vowing that they would fast until senior government officials met with them to consider their demands.
It was an ingenious move. In a country with such recent experience with hunger, where “Have you eaten?” was a common greeting, the image of students fasting for their beliefs tugged at the heartstrings of people nationwide. As the days passed, scores of white-gowned medical personnel volunteered for duty in Tiananmen Square, by now a tent city teeming with protestors around the clock. Student leaders, fully aware of the dramatic potential of their weakened constitutions, would faint publically in front of the cameras, before being rushed off to a jerry-rigged hospital tent for intravenous drips. Some of it was a stunt. Three students I knew from Beijing Normal Teachers College would each fast for eight hours a day so that together they would constitute one fasting demonstrator. They called their eight hour shifts “being on duty.” As the weeks passed, the government looked increasingly hapless. Each day it issued a deadline for students and protestors to leave the square. Each day the demonstrators’ defiance grew. On May 15, another deadline passed, forcing the government to relocate a welcoming ceremony for the visiting Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev from the Great Hall of the People, which bordered the square, to Beijing’s international airport. By mid-May, more than one million demonstrators thronged the streets of Beijing.
The students leading the charge were by and large a happy-go-lucky group of twenty-somethings. Most were born during the Cultural Revolution but had no memory of it. Because they had not seen the worst of the party’s handiwork, the ease with which it mangled lives and ate its young, they didn’t fear the party the way my classmates did. Those in Tiananmen Square had a greater sense of the possible. As the Chinese say, a newborn calf doesn’t fear a tiger.
I was by no means the best journalist among the group of foreign correspondents in Beijing, but I spoke some of the best Chinese and, just a few years earlier had gone to school with men and women much like the ones that were now marching. While many Western correspondents viewed a conversation with a group of Chinese students as an impossibly challenging language lesson or a trip to a Chinese dorm room like a journey to another planet, for me hanging out with the students felt like home.
One sunny afternoon, I and another American reporter interviewed a student leader named Wu’er Kaixi in his dorm room at a teachers’ college in Beijing. I lounged on Kaixi’s oily bedroll, taking in the stench. My American colleague declined an offer to sit on the bed, preferring the less malodorous safety of a stool.
Wu’er Kaixi was a member of a Turkic ethnic group, the Uighurs, who inhabit China’s Xinjiang Province in the country’s far northwestern corner. He was an electrically charismatic, roguishly handsome young man of many appetites, food being just one. Several days after the hunger strike began, he asked me to pick him up at 2:30 a.m. in an alley by Tiananmen Square. “Bring your car,” he growled, his voice scratchy from days behind the bullhorn.
Kaixi was waiting under a tree. He directed me to drive him to an outdoor food market. “Get out and get me some food,” he commanded, after making me promise to keep the meeting off the record. “I can’t get it myself. If anyone sees me, it will hurt the movement.” After stir-fried pork with noodles, he moved to shredded chicken with noodles, bell peppers and ham with noodles, and noodles in soup – all slurped down at full volume next to me.
Covering the protests, I got caught up in the excitement. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I enthused in a letter to my parents in late May 1989. “I have a sense that it is going to end badly but at the same time it is remarkable to beheld. Today I saw one million people on the street. One million! And what do they want? Just a chance at a better life.”
I avoided the darker side of the student organization. The student union was organized in a way depressingly similar to the Communist Party, configured along Leninist lines with a politburo and Central Committee. Donations flowed in, but there was no way to account for the money. I had a gnawing sense that the students really had no idea what they wanted other than change, any change. Getting interviews with student leaders involved negotiating my way through a phalanx of self-important, self-appointed guards who maintained order during demonstrations and made up rules as they went along. I was once riding my bicycle by a group of fasting students along the norther edge of the Square when one student guard rushed out and gave me a shove, causing me to crash and rip the skin on my right arm from wrist to elbow. “No bike riding,” he barked as I lay there bleeding on the asphalt. No bike riding in the biking capital of the world?
When students and intellectuals in the movement got
together, the meetings generally fell into two categories: stage programs where
the assembled would fawn over a featured speaker, or gatherings that started as
shouting matches and degenerated into fisticuffs. There was no give-and-take
between the leader and the led, and no debate, as I was used to in the West. .
.
[Pomfret met Lui Gang, who was a People’s Liberation Army officer and a composer with an interest in America jazz. He had been marching with an army cultural group in support of the fasting protestors. They became good friends and often dined together in the many tiny, private restaurants that had sprung up in Beijing around this time. He would call Pomfret at his AP office with the latest rumor about protests and machinations within the party. Pomfret passed him tapes from the 1950s jazz greats.]
On May 18, Premier Li Peng, the government’s leading hardliner, finally met with several student leaders in Beijing. The meeting was broadcast on national television at 11 a.m. that day. Li blamed traffic congestion for arriving five minutes late. (Actually, the party had deliberately withdrawn traffic police during the demonstrations to enhance the impression of chaos in the capital.) Student leader Wu’er Kaixi, who attended the meeting in a hospital gown, interrupted, pointing out that the premier was not five minutes late but a month late. Furthermore, shaking his finger at Li Peng, it would be the students, not the government, who would set the agenda. Wu’er Kaixi’s performance made for good TV but lousy politics. That night, the party’s politburo decided to enact martial law.
At the politburo’s meeting, Deng Xiaoping accused the party chief, Zhao Ziyang, of splitting the party and suggested that Zhao be relieved of his duties. In the predawn darkness of May 19 Zhao went to the square to visit the students on hunger strike. With tears in his eyes, Zhao stood on one of the buses that had been turned into dorm rooms and apologized. “I have come too late,” he said, requesting that the students who had fasted end their hunger strike. They complied.
By declaring martial law- announced officially that evening, the government banned marches, strikes, class boycotts, distribution of pamphlets, spreading rumors, attacks on leaders and media outlets, and “any other destructive actions.” It said PLA troops had been authorized to take any measures necessary to maintain order in a city of 10 million. Foreign reporters were also prohibited from ‘inciting or instigating Chinese to march” and banned from conducting interviews.
[Pomfret met Lui Gang, who was a People’s Liberation Army officer and a composer with an interest in America jazz. He had been marching with an army cultural group in support of the fasting protestors. They became good friends and often dined together in the many tiny, private restaurants that had sprung up in Beijing around this time. He would call Pomfret at his AP office with the latest rumor about protests and machinations within the party. Pomfret passed him tapes from the 1950s jazz greats.]
On May 18, Premier Li Peng, the government’s leading hardliner, finally met with several student leaders in Beijing. The meeting was broadcast on national television at 11 a.m. that day. Li blamed traffic congestion for arriving five minutes late. (Actually, the party had deliberately withdrawn traffic police during the demonstrations to enhance the impression of chaos in the capital.) Student leader Wu’er Kaixi, who attended the meeting in a hospital gown, interrupted, pointing out that the premier was not five minutes late but a month late. Furthermore, shaking his finger at Li Peng, it would be the students, not the government, who would set the agenda. Wu’er Kaixi’s performance made for good TV but lousy politics. That night, the party’s politburo decided to enact martial law.
At the politburo’s meeting, Deng Xiaoping accused the party chief, Zhao Ziyang, of splitting the party and suggested that Zhao be relieved of his duties. In the predawn darkness of May 19 Zhao went to the square to visit the students on hunger strike. With tears in his eyes, Zhao stood on one of the buses that had been turned into dorm rooms and apologized. “I have come too late,” he said, requesting that the students who had fasted end their hunger strike. They complied.
By declaring martial law- announced officially that evening, the government banned marches, strikes, class boycotts, distribution of pamphlets, spreading rumors, attacks on leaders and media outlets, and “any other destructive actions.” It said PLA troops had been authorized to take any measures necessary to maintain order in a city of 10 million. Foreign reporters were also prohibited from ‘inciting or instigating Chinese to march” and banned from conducting interviews.
Soldiers were deployed around the city in several
directions. At each point, a phalanx of citizen protestors surrounded their
vehicles. Intersections were blocked with trucks, buses, and lane dividers;
marchers formed human barricades. People engaged in lively debate with the
soldiers in their open-air trucks, cigarette smoke corkscrewing under the
streetlights.
With soldiers bearing down on Beijing, I found myself stepping out of my journalistic shell, pleading with my contacts in the student movement to obey martial law and lead the students from the square. One afternoon I spent several hours waiting for an audience with Feng Congde, another leader of the movement, and the husband of Chai Ling, a diminutive woman protest with a radical flair. Feng finally saw me, ushering me into a white tarpaulin tent on the Square that stank of socks and soybean milk turned bad.
“Why don’t you declare victory and go home?” I asked. “Clean up the square and return to school? Feng admitted that he, too, wanted the students to leave but contended that events were out of his control. None of the goals have been achieved, he said, the party had not budged, even on the simplest demand- to allow a student union independent of party control. In addition,the vast majority of the students on the square we were from out of town, having journeyed days by bus and rail to get to Beijing. The new arrivals were no more politically motivated than many spectators at, say Woodstock. The Sun Yat-sen Park, just north of the square, had morphed into a love motel, with couples rustling in the bushes and sprawling on park benches. There was little chance anyone would be able to prevail on them to leave Beijing, much less the square. For them the antiparty party had just started.
By this point, I began stumbling into matronly middle-aged women on the square who stepped gingerly over the bedrolls and frantically peeled back tent flaps to peer inside. When I asked them what they were doing, I always got the same reply: “Looking for my child.” Students from Beijing were abandoning the square, convinced by their parents that a crackdown was nigh. Student leaders were also slinking off. The last time I saw Wu’er Kaixi was on the night of May 30 when I picked him up from an alley near his university and drove to the home of a Scandinavian diplomat, escorting him past the Chinese guards. Wu’er spent the evening inquiring about political asylum: what would happen if he sneaked into the embassy? Could a diplomatic pouch hold one man? The diplomat smiled, well, diplomatically at Kaixi’s naivete without providing him much hope. We left together, and as I drove him into a dark intersection, Kaixi looked at me, his young, handsome faced pinched with worry. “Where am I going to go? He asked me. “I’m too young to go to jail.”
In the evening, four days later, units from an estimated thirteen army corps deployed around the city, a total of 350,000- soldiers, were dispatched to Beijing. Urgent TV announcements telling people to stay in their homes did not stop the people in my friend’s neighborhood of Muxidi from thronging the street. We walked toward a small bridge. Protestors had placed two buses there to block the army from entering the city. A lively debate animated the crowd. “They are the people’s army! Shouted one man. “They wouldn’t dare kill the people.”
As darkness fell, my friend went upstairs to check on her aging father. The crowd thinned. I stayed outside. Shortly after 8 p.m., an army unit appeared on the far side of the bridge and attempted to move the buses. Scores of protestors swarmed over the bridge, blocking the soldiers’ way, Unlike in the past weeks, the soldiers didn’t back down; they swung their truncheons and beat the demonstrators, some of who began throwing rocks. The crowd around me sense something. Alarmed looks were exchanged; many hurried home. The battle between the soldiers and demonstrators lasted more than an hour. In a last-ditch effort, the demonstrators hauled burning rugs onto the buses, illuminating the sky.
The soldiers began to fire live ammunition low into the crowd, hitting people in the stomach and legs. The night, balmy with a calm breeze, crackled with gunfire. People fled in all directions. Some returned, rocks in hand. Armored personnel carriers rolled onto the bridge and began butting the buses aside, cutting a path into the city.
I was petrified. Because I had never heard live gunfire before, it took me a few minutes to realize that I, too, could get shot. I was standing about one hundred feet north of the intersection. The crowd surrounded me and began yelling: “They ate shooting us! They are shooting us! They are shooting the people!” I saw in their eyes a wild insistence. “You must report this to the world,” yelled one man. Then the bullets zinged in our direction. I found what I took to be relative safety by lying flat on the asphalt, pinning up against the curb. Others ran. I remember thinking they must be crazy. As I lay on the ground with my cheek against the roadbed, I saw several demonstrators fall. The armored personnel carriers had done their work, ramming a channel through the burning buses. Then came the troop trucks, fifty of them rolling through the crumpled roadblock. Random gunfire killed housekeeper on the fourteenth floor of one building. Another woman was wounded as she looked out of an eighth-floor balcony onto the scene.
I sprinted north, away from the intersection to where I locked my bicycle. I couldn’t quite grasp what I had just witnessed. With the first fusillade of gunfire, the party had shown its true colors. The two-month standoff had ended. I focused on one goal: beating the army to Tiananmen Square. Too green to worry about security and too pumped by adrenaline to grieve I got on my bike and rode the roads and alley’s parallel to Chang’an Boulevard, towards the square.
For the next several hours, I made my way slowly to the square, heading down alleyways to watch the bloody progress of the army as it moved from west to east along the boulevard.- making calls to the AP bureau chief Jim Abrams. At the intersection of Xiodan and Chang’an, the site of the Democracy Wall in the late 1970s, I saw about one hundred students waving the flags of the Beijing Aerospace and Aviation University and the Nanjing Chinese Medicine College. They faced the army shouting that they were ready to “die for the motherland.” The soldiers approached and, after shooting to the sky, leveled their weapons and shot several demonstrators. The students fled.
As I crept towards Chang’an Boulevard to see the action, I was not alone. A collection of onlookers – a crew of teenagers, a rail-thin old lady, a middle-aged man in an undershirt and shorts – had sneaked down the street, taking shelter in the vestibules of buildings and behind signs. Shots sent us scurrying. Some soldiers were beaten by demonstrators, some were disemboweled, and some escaped. Wounded demonstrators sprawled on the back of three-wheeled pedicabs, were pushed groaning up side streets, where they were deposited at hospitals already reeling from the enormity of the bloodshed. At the front door of Beijing’s main maternity hospital, the mouth of one doctor was red with blood from mouth-to-mouth resuscitations. . .
I reached Tiananmen Square ahead of the army shortly before midnight, entering from the east after biking around the northern edge of the Forbidden City and through one of Beijing’s oldest neighborhoods, Beichizi. Smoke floated through the floodlights illuminating the square. A motely crew of men and women faced off against the army’s vanguard along Chang’an Boulevard. The ‘urgent announcement,” ordering people off the streets, droned through the loudspeakers..
Tanks began rolling across the northern edge of the square; more tanks waited at the southern entrance. Hundreds of PLA troops, their weapons and helmets glinting in the floodlights, massed on the steps of the Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Revolutionary History – along the west and east flanks of the square. They had arrive there by way of a secret military tunnel system under Beijing and announced their presence with a unified whoop. Student leaders, screeching through bullhorns, called on the remaining five hundreds or so demonstrators to gather around the Monument to the Revolutionary Heroes at the heart of the square.
I made it to the monument. Being closer to the other people made me feel safer,. Cycling alone in the alleyways, I had been scared, the darkness and the tranquility somehow more foreboding than here in the center of the storm. But it wasn’t just the students who were naïve. I was a newborn calf, too. We were trapped.
At about 2 a.m., a squad of soldiers entered the northwestern corner of the square and demolished the command headquarters that had belonged to the “Beijing Autonomous Workers’ Union, ending the two-month old existence of the first and only labor union independent of party control since 1949. The tanks flattened the fifteen-foot-tall Goddess of Democracy, a plaster-of-paris knock-off of the Statue of Liberty erected by the students directly opposite the portrait of Mao.
I climbed the steps of the martyr’s monument to get a better view, phoning in the events as I saw them. Around me, students continued to chant, “Down with corruption! Long live democracy!” At 4:25 a.m., the lights in the square were extinguished. In the darkness, students huddled at the foot of the statue and began singing the “Internationale” , the anthem of the Paris Commune, the failed Communist takeover of the French capital in 1848. It sounded pathetic.
In the last moments, the student movement became hostage to the romantic disorderliness that was its most attractive feature. As the army closed in, nerves frayed even more, and leaders who hadn’t already disappeared now fled. A young woman next to me sobbed un-consolably in the arms of her boyfriend. He tried to comfort her, but he looked at least as scared.
Unbeknownst to many students, Hou Dejian, a well-known Taiwanese singer who had joined the demonstrations in late May with his own hunger strike, had stated negotiations with military officials for a peaceful withdrawal from the square. The military agreed, and Hou returned with the news, which was put up to a voice vote by the students. Though the “stay” votes were clearly louder, Feng Congde, the one remaining leader, snatched the bullhorn and announced, “The go votes have won!”
Picking up banners and scattered clothes, several hundred demonstrators and a half-dozen foreign hold-outs like myself began moving across the square, past the mausoleum that stored Chairman Mao’s body, to the southwest corner along a route predetermined by the military. The sky was beginning to lighten. Once we left the square, no soldiers lined the route; a few officers with walkie-talkies peered at us from alleyways, monitoring our progress. After several blocks, the students let their banners sag and either junked them or dragged then behind. I separated from the group at the Xidan intersection and walked over to the Minorities Hotel to file a final bulletin, My mobile phone had run out of juice. There was no food at the hotel, but the concierge opened a small store and slid me a bag of peanut M&Ms.
In the chaos I had lost my bike. I arranged for someone from the AP bureau to pick me up a few blocks north of the Chang’an Boulevard, now closed by the military. I got in the car and rode in silence. Though I wasn’t surprised by the crackdown, the crazed violence of it all had shocked me. I sank into the passenger’s seat, emotionally and physically drained . . .
With soldiers bearing down on Beijing, I found myself stepping out of my journalistic shell, pleading with my contacts in the student movement to obey martial law and lead the students from the square. One afternoon I spent several hours waiting for an audience with Feng Congde, another leader of the movement, and the husband of Chai Ling, a diminutive woman protest with a radical flair. Feng finally saw me, ushering me into a white tarpaulin tent on the Square that stank of socks and soybean milk turned bad.
“Why don’t you declare victory and go home?” I asked. “Clean up the square and return to school? Feng admitted that he, too, wanted the students to leave but contended that events were out of his control. None of the goals have been achieved, he said, the party had not budged, even on the simplest demand- to allow a student union independent of party control. In addition,the vast majority of the students on the square we were from out of town, having journeyed days by bus and rail to get to Beijing. The new arrivals were no more politically motivated than many spectators at, say Woodstock. The Sun Yat-sen Park, just north of the square, had morphed into a love motel, with couples rustling in the bushes and sprawling on park benches. There was little chance anyone would be able to prevail on them to leave Beijing, much less the square. For them the antiparty party had just started.
By this point, I began stumbling into matronly middle-aged women on the square who stepped gingerly over the bedrolls and frantically peeled back tent flaps to peer inside. When I asked them what they were doing, I always got the same reply: “Looking for my child.” Students from Beijing were abandoning the square, convinced by their parents that a crackdown was nigh. Student leaders were also slinking off. The last time I saw Wu’er Kaixi was on the night of May 30 when I picked him up from an alley near his university and drove to the home of a Scandinavian diplomat, escorting him past the Chinese guards. Wu’er spent the evening inquiring about political asylum: what would happen if he sneaked into the embassy? Could a diplomatic pouch hold one man? The diplomat smiled, well, diplomatically at Kaixi’s naivete without providing him much hope. We left together, and as I drove him into a dark intersection, Kaixi looked at me, his young, handsome faced pinched with worry. “Where am I going to go? He asked me. “I’m too young to go to jail.”
In the evening, four days later, units from an estimated thirteen army corps deployed around the city, a total of 350,000- soldiers, were dispatched to Beijing. Urgent TV announcements telling people to stay in their homes did not stop the people in my friend’s neighborhood of Muxidi from thronging the street. We walked toward a small bridge. Protestors had placed two buses there to block the army from entering the city. A lively debate animated the crowd. “They are the people’s army! Shouted one man. “They wouldn’t dare kill the people.”
As darkness fell, my friend went upstairs to check on her aging father. The crowd thinned. I stayed outside. Shortly after 8 p.m., an army unit appeared on the far side of the bridge and attempted to move the buses. Scores of protestors swarmed over the bridge, blocking the soldiers’ way, Unlike in the past weeks, the soldiers didn’t back down; they swung their truncheons and beat the demonstrators, some of who began throwing rocks. The crowd around me sense something. Alarmed looks were exchanged; many hurried home. The battle between the soldiers and demonstrators lasted more than an hour. In a last-ditch effort, the demonstrators hauled burning rugs onto the buses, illuminating the sky.
The soldiers began to fire live ammunition low into the crowd, hitting people in the stomach and legs. The night, balmy with a calm breeze, crackled with gunfire. People fled in all directions. Some returned, rocks in hand. Armored personnel carriers rolled onto the bridge and began butting the buses aside, cutting a path into the city.
I was petrified. Because I had never heard live gunfire before, it took me a few minutes to realize that I, too, could get shot. I was standing about one hundred feet north of the intersection. The crowd surrounded me and began yelling: “They ate shooting us! They are shooting us! They are shooting the people!” I saw in their eyes a wild insistence. “You must report this to the world,” yelled one man. Then the bullets zinged in our direction. I found what I took to be relative safety by lying flat on the asphalt, pinning up against the curb. Others ran. I remember thinking they must be crazy. As I lay on the ground with my cheek against the roadbed, I saw several demonstrators fall. The armored personnel carriers had done their work, ramming a channel through the burning buses. Then came the troop trucks, fifty of them rolling through the crumpled roadblock. Random gunfire killed housekeeper on the fourteenth floor of one building. Another woman was wounded as she looked out of an eighth-floor balcony onto the scene.
I sprinted north, away from the intersection to where I locked my bicycle. I couldn’t quite grasp what I had just witnessed. With the first fusillade of gunfire, the party had shown its true colors. The two-month standoff had ended. I focused on one goal: beating the army to Tiananmen Square. Too green to worry about security and too pumped by adrenaline to grieve I got on my bike and rode the roads and alley’s parallel to Chang’an Boulevard, towards the square.
For the next several hours, I made my way slowly to the square, heading down alleyways to watch the bloody progress of the army as it moved from west to east along the boulevard.- making calls to the AP bureau chief Jim Abrams. At the intersection of Xiodan and Chang’an, the site of the Democracy Wall in the late 1970s, I saw about one hundred students waving the flags of the Beijing Aerospace and Aviation University and the Nanjing Chinese Medicine College. They faced the army shouting that they were ready to “die for the motherland.” The soldiers approached and, after shooting to the sky, leveled their weapons and shot several demonstrators. The students fled.
As I crept towards Chang’an Boulevard to see the action, I was not alone. A collection of onlookers – a crew of teenagers, a rail-thin old lady, a middle-aged man in an undershirt and shorts – had sneaked down the street, taking shelter in the vestibules of buildings and behind signs. Shots sent us scurrying. Some soldiers were beaten by demonstrators, some were disemboweled, and some escaped. Wounded demonstrators sprawled on the back of three-wheeled pedicabs, were pushed groaning up side streets, where they were deposited at hospitals already reeling from the enormity of the bloodshed. At the front door of Beijing’s main maternity hospital, the mouth of one doctor was red with blood from mouth-to-mouth resuscitations. . .
I reached Tiananmen Square ahead of the army shortly before midnight, entering from the east after biking around the northern edge of the Forbidden City and through one of Beijing’s oldest neighborhoods, Beichizi. Smoke floated through the floodlights illuminating the square. A motely crew of men and women faced off against the army’s vanguard along Chang’an Boulevard. The ‘urgent announcement,” ordering people off the streets, droned through the loudspeakers..
Tanks began rolling across the northern edge of the square; more tanks waited at the southern entrance. Hundreds of PLA troops, their weapons and helmets glinting in the floodlights, massed on the steps of the Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Revolutionary History – along the west and east flanks of the square. They had arrive there by way of a secret military tunnel system under Beijing and announced their presence with a unified whoop. Student leaders, screeching through bullhorns, called on the remaining five hundreds or so demonstrators to gather around the Monument to the Revolutionary Heroes at the heart of the square.
I made it to the monument. Being closer to the other people made me feel safer,. Cycling alone in the alleyways, I had been scared, the darkness and the tranquility somehow more foreboding than here in the center of the storm. But it wasn’t just the students who were naïve. I was a newborn calf, too. We were trapped.
At about 2 a.m., a squad of soldiers entered the northwestern corner of the square and demolished the command headquarters that had belonged to the “Beijing Autonomous Workers’ Union, ending the two-month old existence of the first and only labor union independent of party control since 1949. The tanks flattened the fifteen-foot-tall Goddess of Democracy, a plaster-of-paris knock-off of the Statue of Liberty erected by the students directly opposite the portrait of Mao.
I climbed the steps of the martyr’s monument to get a better view, phoning in the events as I saw them. Around me, students continued to chant, “Down with corruption! Long live democracy!” At 4:25 a.m., the lights in the square were extinguished. In the darkness, students huddled at the foot of the statue and began singing the “Internationale” , the anthem of the Paris Commune, the failed Communist takeover of the French capital in 1848. It sounded pathetic.
In the last moments, the student movement became hostage to the romantic disorderliness that was its most attractive feature. As the army closed in, nerves frayed even more, and leaders who hadn’t already disappeared now fled. A young woman next to me sobbed un-consolably in the arms of her boyfriend. He tried to comfort her, but he looked at least as scared.
Unbeknownst to many students, Hou Dejian, a well-known Taiwanese singer who had joined the demonstrations in late May with his own hunger strike, had stated negotiations with military officials for a peaceful withdrawal from the square. The military agreed, and Hou returned with the news, which was put up to a voice vote by the students. Though the “stay” votes were clearly louder, Feng Congde, the one remaining leader, snatched the bullhorn and announced, “The go votes have won!”
Picking up banners and scattered clothes, several hundred demonstrators and a half-dozen foreign hold-outs like myself began moving across the square, past the mausoleum that stored Chairman Mao’s body, to the southwest corner along a route predetermined by the military. The sky was beginning to lighten. Once we left the square, no soldiers lined the route; a few officers with walkie-talkies peered at us from alleyways, monitoring our progress. After several blocks, the students let their banners sag and either junked them or dragged then behind. I separated from the group at the Xidan intersection and walked over to the Minorities Hotel to file a final bulletin, My mobile phone had run out of juice. There was no food at the hotel, but the concierge opened a small store and slid me a bag of peanut M&Ms.
In the chaos I had lost my bike. I arranged for someone from the AP bureau to pick me up a few blocks north of the Chang’an Boulevard, now closed by the military. I got in the car and rode in silence. Though I wasn’t surprised by the crackdown, the crazed violence of it all had shocked me. I sank into the passenger’s seat, emotionally and physically drained . . .
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