Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (32 page)

Parents accused the government of intransigence. Office workers leaned out of windows to scream support and shower confetti on
the marchers. Government organizations, sensing a power struggle in the offing, hedged their bets. The Commerce Bureau of Beijing supplied six thousand straw hats. The Beijing Military Command offered a thousand cotton quilts. State pharmaceutical companies donated medicine.

Wide-eyed students began arriving from the provinces, swelling the already huge crowds at Tiananmen Square to several hundred thousand. There were so many different demonstrations that the marchers sometimes good-naturedly crisscrossed in the square. Several hundred motorcyclists, calling themselves Flying Tigers, roared through the streets like Chinese James Deans, waving flags and screaming slogans. The sit-in sparked copycat hunger strikes in more than thirty other Chinese cities. Workers in Beijing and elsewhere began joining the strike, giving the government nightmares about a Solidarity-style workers’ movement.

Tiananmen Square itself was a mess. Students guzzled beer and hurled the bottles, chanting
“Xiaoping wan sui!”
which meant “Long live Deng Xiaoping.” I thought it rather odd, not to mention uncomfortable, that anyone staging a sit-in would want a lot of broken glass on the ground, until someone told me that the slogan also meant “Smash Little Bottle” – a pun on Deng’s name – “into Ten Thousand Pieces!” The deeper significance of the discarded cigarette butts, newspapers and plastic juice bottles escaped me.

That weekend, Politburo members, anxious to clear the square before Gorbachev arrived, met repeatedly with student representatives, but neither side was truly interested in compromise. As the hours ticked by, the students escalated their demands. They now wanted live television coverage of their talks
and
a public apology from China’s aging leaders.

The Sino-Soviet summit was supposed to be Deng’s crowning glory. He wanted normalization as much as Gorbachev did, but the wily Chinese leader had hung tough until Moscow withdrew its soldiers from Afghanistan, reduced troop levels on the Sino-Soviet border and pressed Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia. Playing hardball was China’s style. The Middle Kingdom always made barbarian devils kowtow for the chance to make fools of themselves
using chopsticks to pick up a slippery quail’s egg in the Great Hall of the People.

But instead of arriving as a flunky from a vassal nation, Gorbachev landed in Beijing to a hero’s welcome. That Monday, homemade banners along his motorcade route hailed him in Chinese and Russian as the “true reformer.” Said one: “The Soviet Union has Gorbachev. Who does China have?” Protesters held up signs that said, “Hello, Mr. Gorbachev,” and “Democracy is our common ideal,” and “Deng, your health may be good but — is your brain?” One poster simply stated their ages: “Gorbachev, 58; Deng Xiaoping, 85.”

At Tiananmen Square, ambulance sirens wailed. White-coated medics rushed around with bottles of glucose, jabbing anyone who looked pale. As bedlam reigned, the Chinese were forced to cancel a wreath-laying ceremony and a twenty-one-gun salute. More than sixty students fainted the first day. Having experienced a surfeit of faked fervor in the old days, I suspected histrionics. Indeed, one person was hustled into an ambulance before he could explain he was a local television reporter covering the story.

To my amazement, for the first time in Chinese Communist history, the state media began reporting the real story about dissent, an indication of the widespread support for Party Chief Zhao within key areas of the government. Until then, I had been contemptuous of my local colleagues for their docility and turgid political reports. But for a brief week that spring, I watched as they scooped the rest of us. “We feel we are finally being journalists,” said a friend at
Beijing Youth News
, her eyes sparkling. She was so excited that she began living at her office.

By Wednesday, the fifth day of the hunger strike, 3,100 people had fainted and required medical treatment, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Many people were incensed by the special privilege and corruption of the elite. One parent carried a placard alluding to corruption in Deng’s family: “A question, Mr. Deng. Our son is on a hunger strike. What is your son doing?” Along the pedestrian walkways underneath the square, protesters had pasted caricatures depicting Deng’s children driving Mercedes-Benzes.

During Gorbachev’s three-day visit, Beijing traffic wasn’t just snarled. It congealed. One out of every ten residents, or a million
demonstrators, jammed the streets at any given time. Everyone seemed hysterically happy that their leaders were losing face big-time. Authorities were forced to cancel the rest of Gorbachev’s public schedule, a humiliating admission that they were no longer in control of their own capital. The Soviet leader never did see the square. To enable his motorcade to reach the Great Hall at all, the Chinese had to dispatch more than a thousand soldiers to seal off the streets. He didn’t make it to the Forbidden City, either. An evening at the opera also was canceled. Nor could reporters reach the official Soviet spokesman for comment; he was marooned after police sealed off the area where the Soviet press center happened to be located. I couldn’t even get a copy of Gorbachev’s banquet speech. The center’s photocopier broke down and the Chinese repairmen were all off demonstrating.

For a man used to the limelight, Gorbachev had been completely upstaged. At night, his aides had shown him videotapes of the amazing scenes. At his only press conference, Gorbachev seemed a bit shell-shocked. One reporter asked what he would do if students occupied Red Square in Moscow. “I would use democracy,” he said, with a glassy-eyed smile, “to solve the confrontation.”

The day after Gorbachev left Beijing, Premier Li Peng agreed to a televised meeting with the student leaders. Li was livid that the Sino-Soviet summit had been ruined. Dressed in a rumpled Mao suit, he thundered: “We will not sit idly by, doing nothing!” A chubby twenty-one-year-old hunger strike leader named Wu’er Kaixi was not intimidated. Clutching an oxygen bag and dressed in hospital-issue pajamas to underline the point that he had come straight from the hospital, he sat sprawled in his stuffed armchair. At one point, he reprimanded Premier Li.

“We don’t have much time to listen to you,” said Wu’er Kaixi, wagging a finger. “Thousands of hunger strikers are waiting. Let’s get to the main point. It is we who invited you to talk, not you who invited us – and
you
were late.” The astonishing meeting ended when he clutched his oxygen bag and made as if to faint. Medical personnel rushed on camera to care for him. Maybe because I was now well past the once-loathed age of thirty, my perspective had changed. I almost felt sorry for Li Peng. It was no surprise to me
when Wu’er Kaixi ended up Number Two on the Most Wanted List of Student Leaders.

Later, Chinese television would smear the student leader by airing footage of him happily chowing down with friends at the Beijing Hotel. His supporters, though, insisted the meal took place after the strike had ended. Whatever really happened, I knew that during the hunger strike Wu’er Kaixi sneaked off for at least one meal with John Pomfret, an Associated Press reporter. At night, Wu’er Kaixi also surreptitiously slurped noodles in the back seat of a car, bending over to hide his face, according to Andrew Higgins of the British
Independent
. The hunger striker told a friend that he needed to eat to conserve his strength because he was a leader and because he had a heart condition.

In fact, a lot of students were cheating during the hunger strike. The second day, I spotted bottles of sweetened yogurt in a student’s knapsack. When I asked about it, he replied airily, “Snacking is okay. It’s not really food.” I reported the yogurt in my story that day, but I never conveyed the sense that the hunger strike was like a game at first, with students dramatically fainting on cue and the world’s media pretending they really were starving themselves.

Yan Yan, my flamboyant news assistant, went to Tiananmen Square as an extra pair of eyes and ears for me. After the first couple of days, she stopped coming back to the office to give me reports. I finally spotted her, wearing a headband and a fatalistic expression, sitting cross-legged among the hunger strikers. I asked with some exasperation what she was doing. “Hunger striking!” she said cheerfully, admitting in the next breath that she never actually missed a meal. One day she asked if she could expense some milk for her comrades in the square. Sure, I said, assuming she meant a bottle or two. When she presented me with a bill for a whole case, I was appalled. I told her the
Globe
was supposed to report on the hunger strikers, not
feed
them.

I could hardly blame Yan Yan. Everyone else seemed to be feeding the hunger strikers. A soft-drink cart did a roaring business in the square. Entrepreneurs, seeing a chance to weaken Communist controls, donated food and blankets. State food companies sent bread and drinks, ostensibly for emergencies, which usually meant
whenever anyone got a bit hungry. Even the Communist Youth League donated twenty cases of drinks. Then I discovered the students were hunger striking in shifts. They’d sit out a few meals, until a classmate came to replace them. And every day hundreds of newcomers would buckle down in the square for a few hours’ deprivation.

But who wanted to hear that the students were just ordinary kids, trying to be heroic by day but nibbling on snacks at night? It made for much better copy to show them as earnest waifs fighting against Evil. The protesters and the media fed on one another. The demonstrators felt their cause was validated by the intense international attention. No sooner had they issued a statement than they heard it broadcast back on the BBC World Service and the Voice of America. For our part, we reporters loved getting our stories on page one. Who wanted to let a few unromantic facts get in the way of a good story?

Tiananmen was telegenic. The majestic backdrop, with its fluttering red silk flags and huge portrait of Chairman Mao, was a television producer’s dream. And the cast of millions, who couldn’t speak a word of English, quickly learned to flash aV-for-victory sign that needed no translation. The students understood the importance of sound bites and played Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
over their loudspeaker system again and again. I saw one young man on the roof of a bus vigorously wave a red banner, a fiery look of determination in his eyes. As soon as the cameramen finished the shot, the young man sat down and lit a cigarette.

With Gorbachev gone and the foreign media packing up, the students astutely claimed victory and called off their week-long hunger strike on May 19. But it was too late. That evening, Premier Li Peng, wearing a black Mao suit and punching his fist angrily in the air, declared on live television that the capital was in chaos. The Party, he said, was being forced to take “resolute and decisive measures.” The next morning, he signed the order imposing martial law. As more than a hundred thousand troops ringed the capital, my Chinese friend at
Beijing Youth News
stopped sleeping at her office – and stopped being a journalist.

The army swiftly took over the Xinhua News Agency, Central Radio and Central Television. The only way soldiers could get into the
People’s Daily
, by now a hotbed of dissent, was by pretending they were medics, disguising themselves in white coats and driving ambulances. Abruptly, the coverage of the protests changed. There was no more news, only polemics. Beijing issued a series of restrictive regulations to try to muzzle the foreign press. Martial Law No. Three, for instance, declared, “Foreign correspondents are prohibited from issuing provocative reports.” Another rule banned all unapproved interviews and photographs.

Perversely, martial law gave the protesters another shot of adrenaline. The students defiantly vowed to continue their sit-in. A fanatic new Dare-to-Die Squad swore to protect the student leaders to the death. A hitherto unheard-of workers’ alliance handed the government an ultimatum: satisfy the students’ demands within twenty-four hours or face a general strike.

Watching this melodrama unfold, I couldn’t decide who was more childish, the students or the doddering gerontocracy. An experienced mediator could have solved things so easily. But the students were drunk with their new-found celebrity, and Communist dictators weren’t used to negotiating. The Communist Party also had an internal power struggle to settle.

But martial law? I sensed China had turned into a banana republic in my absence, but this was ridiculous. Apparently, many Chinese felt the same way. Instead of cowering in their homes, they took to the streets in an exuberant, crazy affirmation of people power. When military helicopters dropped copies of Premier Li Peng’s martial-law speech over Tiananmen Square, people gleefully ripped them up as soon as they touched the ground.

The first evening of martial law, the number of students staging a sit-in swelled to fifty thousand. To thwart the square’s videocameras, everyone donned gauze masks. A rumor swept the crowd that the soldiers would attack at 2 a.m. Nervously, I interviewed an officer on the edge of the square who promised that the military would never hurt the students. I watched the students holding hands, sitting cross-legged on the ground, trying to breathe through their
masks, and wondered how it would all end. By 3 a.m., someone declared victory, again, and tossed on the tape of
Ode to Joy
.

That night, more than a million Chinese of all ages blockaded the streets, vowing to protect the students. They threw up a protective cordon around Tiananmen Square and barricaded virtually every key intersection, using concrete cylinders, dumpsters, cement mixers, city buses, trucks and construction cranes. Beijing police tried using truncheons and cattle prods to clear a path for the army, but their heart was not in it. After all, the police had been demonstrating, too.

I teamed up with several other reporters. Working all night, we counted seventeen tanks, sixty-nine armored personnel carriers, an entire trainload of fifteen hundred soldiers at the main train station downtown and numerous military convoys on the edge of the city. At an intersection near my apartment, some students excitedly dragged a military attaché over to see a large tractor-trailer. “Look,” exclaimed one student. “The government wants to use tear gas on us.” The military attaché was stunned. The cargo wasn’t tear gas but six ground-to-air warhead missiles.