A Heart for Freedom (15 page)

* * *

I was back with our Beida contingent when Feng reappeared. He had been gone for ten hours and looked distraught. He handed me a handkerchief on which he had written, “Premier Li Peng, people” with his own blood. He had intended to write, “Premier Li Peng, people were calling you,” but he could not force any more blood to flow from his fingers.

Suddenly there was another massive push from the crowd toward the Great Hall.

A cry went up. “Let’s break into the Great Hall!”

A tsunami of people pushed forward to crush the thin line of resistance formed by the soldiers. This could mean only one thing: bloodshed.

Feng and I exchanged glances. We both knew we could not allow this to happen.

“If we hold hands in a line, we can stop the momentum,” Feng said.

We moved among the Beida students, quickly urging them to join hands to stop the rush to violence.

Students at first were reluctant. I had to force them to join hands.

“This is a tragedy in the making,” I told them. “We have to stop it.”

Gradually, students began to link arms, standing protectively around the Beida students who were sitting on the ground. When I looked around, I saw other student marshals doing the same thing.

Feng and I exchanged smiles of relief and solidarity. It was a moment of supreme understanding and unconditional unity that gave me a surge of joy. Our action had created a sense of purpose and clarity that transcended the angry chaos of the crowd. In the seething ocean of people, Beida students formed an island of calm.

At 1:30 p.m., a new wave of anger caused the crowd to surge forward again. Feng saw soldiers rushing down the steps of the Great Hall and became alarmed.

“Beida students,” he called out. “We have to leave. Form a line. We’ll follow each other. Let’s get out of here.” Ten students fought to make a path through the crowd so our students could make a break from the Square, like water flowing through a dike. I was thrust forward against my will until I saw a break, an open space. Feng called to me and I ran toward him, tripping over myself to catch up with him. When I looked back, I could see the crowd was following my lead, pouring after me and Feng. We knew that without any other form of communication, a body of movement could direct an entire crowd. That’s the lesson Feng had learned from observing the old man in the Square in 1987.

As Beida students took the lead, thousands of students from other universities began to follow us out of the Square. We had avoided a huge tragedy.

“You did an amazing thing,” I later told Feng. “You saved lives today.”

He blushed and was too moved to reply. Instead, he gazed at me silently, tears rising in his large, deep, brown eyes.

It took us three hours to make the trip on foot back to Beida. “Boycott classes, boycott classes,” the students chanted along the way. Citizens of Beijing lined the streets, cheering us on.

“Students, we support you,” they cried out.

I felt someone pull on my arm. I looked to see a short man in gray, shabby clothes, a local worker with a pale face and big eyes full of fear, shyness, and embarrassment. He pushed a piece of paper at me. I took it, and he stepped away. When I looked at my hand, it held a rumpled five renminbi bill, old and soft, like a little rag.

I left the march and found an ice cream stand. An old couple at the stand gave me a box of ice cream for my five renminbi. Then they added another half box on top of that. I distributed the ice cream to my fellow marchers, all of them parched and hungry. As I moved back and forth among them, I saw other residents who had come out to line the streets bringing water to the students. It made me profoundly grateful to the good people of Beijing.

I believe the way the government treated the students on the day of Hu Yaobang’s funeral incited their anger and led directly to the demonstrations on Tiananmen Square and the aftermath that shocked the world. As a beloved leader was laid to rest, a movement was born. I have often wondered whether events might have turned out differently if the government had invited a few students to attend the funeral.

13

Dawn of New Beginnings

Later memoirs and reports recorded that the next day, April 23, Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Hu Yaobang’s successor, boarded a train in Beijing and departed on a scheduled state visit to North Korea. Zhao, who was the second most powerful leader in China after Deng Xiaoping, later professed to be sympathetic to the students on Tiananmen Square and their peaceful agenda, but it seems odd in retrospect that he would leave Beijing at such a pivotal moment. That decision cost him the power to influence events and ultimately his political career. In leaving, he turned the situation over to Li Peng, his rival for the ear of Deng Xiaoping.

Zhao’s instructions to Li Peng were as follows: Make sure the students return to classes immediately, avoid bloodshed at all cost, and open a dialogue with the students. Zhao Ziyang secured Deng Xiaoping’s approval before he handed the instructions over to Li Peng, who then could be counted upon to turn them to his own advantage.

That evening, Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing, convened a meeting between Party secretaries and the presidents of seventy Beijing colleges and universities. Students from eighteen schools had announced plans to boycott classes, and some were setting up new organizations to replace their official student associations. The mayor scolded the university officials and told them to go back to their schools, gather information through the Youth League and the official student organizations, and come back with a solution.

At about the same time, students from twenty-one universities gathered to establish the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation, which was charged with the mission of leading a citywide student movement. Based on someone’s suggestion, democratically electing a true student leadership group had become a new focus for the movement.

Feng remained busy with the Preparatory Committee, which was setting up an election for a new organization to replace the official student association at Beida. It would be the first time any such election was held on our campus.

The room in Dormitory 28 became the Preparatory Committee’s command central. Feng and his committee members met continuously, and I took on the job of running secretariat, fielding questions and registering the innumerable ideas that a stream of visitors brought to the Committee. I was the liaison with the general student population at Beida, and I created a press center at my desk out in the hallway. On the first day alone, I met hundreds of people and gathered many suggestions that helped to shape the direction of the movement. An older man who stopped by told me he saw in us the same passion and enthusiasm he recalled from the early days of the Communist Party. That made me proud.

It was midnight before the last people lingering in the headquarters room began to leave. I was exhausted. A student who had helped me at the desk began to play his guitar. The music filled me with tranquility. It sounded like soft raindrops in the fragrant spring night. I jumped up from the bunk bed where I had been resting to look for Feng so we could share this moment. He was out in the hallway, engaged in a heated discussion. I dragged him into the room.

The magic of the music began to work on Feng. His whole day had been filled with political debates and strategy sessions; but as he began to relax, the romantic Feng, the young man with whom I had fallen in love, returned.

A girl named Tang Ye, who had also helped me at the desk, sat curled up on one of the beds, quietly listening to the song.

“Isn’t this the life we’ve been struggling for?” she murmured, to no one in particular. “A peaceful life, without fear?”

Her words touched my heart, but Feng shot into a sitting position.

“Yes,” he announced in a loud voice. “That’s why we’re here. To fight. That’s why we have to boycott classes.” He was back in debate mode.

“Oh, Feng,” I said. “Please don’t ruin it.”

He flopped back on the bed and flashed me a boyish grin. I forgave him anything when I saw that grin. Still, he’d broken the spell. The student went on playing a little longer, but when he finished the song, he put down the guitar and stood up.

“Feng is a politician now,” he said. “Whenever he opens his mouth, out pops a speech.”

But Feng was fast asleep, the faint trace of a smile still on his face. I pulled up a blanket to cover him.

* * *

The next day, sixty thousand students from forty-eight colleges and universities in Beijing refused to go to class. The boycott was official. It was also a reprieve. At Beida, students streamed over the campus in a holiday mood. Our first independent election was scheduled for two o’clock in the afternoon on a large sports field known as the May Fourth field on the eastern side of campus.

On May 4, 1919, almost exactly seventy years earlier, Beida students had led a demonstration on Tiananmen Square, which in those days was a bucolic, grassy field. They were protesting the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. One provision of the treaty, which established new boundaries and rearranged entire countries, permitted Germany to transfer its rights to Shandong, my home province, to Japan. The warlord government ruling China at the time was allied with Japan, and the Peace Conference justified its decision on the basis of that somewhat covert relationship. But in handing this rich, delicious coastal province to the Japanese, the Great Powers ignored the sovereignty of China.

It would be hard to compare the students of 1919 with those of 1989. The students who opposed the Treaty of Versailles took the future of China into their own hands. Their boycott throughout China inspired a national resistance movement, called the May Fourth Movement, and workers went out on strike. The Chinese government never signed the Versailles treaty and soon crumbled in the face of opposition.

The May Fourth Movement had started a revolution. That was real power. Seventy years later, nearly eight thousand students gathered in the May Fourth field to exercise our vote because we wanted to advance democracy in China. We wanted to make a discovery, not a revolution. Yet we were always aware of those brave students from an earlier day. Political reality had forced them to grow up fast. To save China, they’d had to confront a weak, corrupt government. We were only trying to capture the attention of the monolithic, all-powerful leadership that had grown out of that earlier movement. We were children fighting to grow to maturity within a system ruled by a generation demanding total submission.

As I was leaving for the May Fourth field to cast my vote, a student appeared at the Preparatory Committee headquarters and announced that Li Peng had called a politburo meeting to address the students’ concerns. This, I thought, was promising news. At last the central government was beginning to pay attention to us. I asked another student to post this news at the Triangle. One boy created a poster with beautiful calligraphy. Another student reminded him not to leave any trace of handwriting the government might later use to incriminate him. The calligrapher, without skipping a beat, switched his brush from right hand to left and finished the poster.

Terror was present in ways the May Fourth students could never have known. Feng’s department head had warned him not to get too deeply involved in the student movement because the government had been recording all its activities with infrared cameras. After I heard that, I was always nervous for Feng, who was never afraid to stand up in front of a crowd. In the words of a Chinese proverb, “The wind always destroys the tallest tree in the forest.” Only recently we had found a listening device in our makeshift office. The government was everywhere, an unseen presence.

At the election on the May Fourth field, Wang Dan gave a speech, followed by other candidates, who introduced themselves and explained where they thought the movement should go next. Everything seemed to go smoothly. Tang stood with me in the crowd and we watched from a distance.

Then two students who were not scheduled as candidates wanted to get up on the podium to speak. Students sitting in the field shouted, “Let them up! They have a right to speak too.” Another student climbed onto the podium and grabbed the microphone. “He’s a spy!” he shouted, pointing at one of the two students. “Don’t listen to him.”

The outcry sent a wave of commotion through the field of students.

Somehow Feng ended up with the microphone. He’d been preparing for this moment all morning in the library. He was so intent on his speech, he somehow failed to notice the agitation in the crowd.

“I have a dream,” Feng declared. Martin Luther King’s speech was not well known to Chinese students at that time, but Feng loved it. He’d won a prize for reciting it a few years earlier in an English language contest. It was not, however, what the crowd wanted to hear at that moment. They didn’t care about somebody’s dream. They wanted to know why one of the unscheduled speakers was being accused of spying for the government. The crowd began to jeer at Feng and laugh so raucously that he had to stop. By the time Wang Dan took over and urged the crowd to be patient, students were already drifting away. They had come to exercise their right to vote, and they voted with their feet.

Feng and the other candidates and organizers were left marooned on the podium in embarrassment. We were all crushed. Tang Ye looked as if she’d witnessed a public hanging. I patted her on the back, but I couldn’t find anything encouraging to say. We walked back to the Preparatory Committee headquarters in silence.

The student who had interrupted the speaker and called him a spy was Xiong Yan, a law student from a peasant family in Mao’s home province of Hunan. He had been involved with the Committee from the outset. His passion, his direct temperament and fearless personality, and his resounding Hunan accent endeared him to us all. We had heard his open critiques of the government as early as 1987, when he gave speeches at the Triangle. Once, referring to government officials who fattened their pockets at the expense of reform, Xiong had called them “well-fed ghosts.” This time, however, Xiong’s hot temper had undermined the election. He was mortified.