A Writer's Life (68 page)

The swiftness and resoluteness of the crackdown contrasted with the government's slow response ten years earlier to the launching of the students' pro-democracy campaign in Tiananmen Square. At that time—April
1989—students in Beijing began to congregate in Tiananmen Square to criticize the government's unwillingness to negotiate with them on the issue of additional freedom. As days passed and as the protest movement increased in size and intensity (being joined by students from the provinces and applauded by many ordinary citizens and workers), the police and military surveyed the situation closely from the sidelines but otherwise did not actively interfere.

Among the marchers who must have surely drawn their attention was a six-foot blond man of about two hunded pounds—an American named Philip Cunningham, who, after attending Cornell University and the University of Michigan, moved to Asia in the 1980s to begin his career as a freelance writer and television producer specializing in Far Eastern politics and culture. Being sympathetic to the grievances of the students, many of whom he had met while taking courses at the Beijing Teachers University, he not only accompanied them to the square but often served as their interpreter when they began giving interviews to the foreign press. During this time, he also kept a daily journal describing the protesters' six-week-long confrontation with the government, which extended from the latter part of April into early June 1989; the journal would serve as the foundation for a memoir he would eventually complete a decade later while spending a year in the United States as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Philip J. Cunningham's memoir, entitled
Reaching for the Sky
, would be published in the spring of 1999 as a tenth-anniversary commemorative of the mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. In the book, he would recall:

At times the demonstrators numbered as many as one million people. Their organizers and most active supporters installed loudspeakers in the square, held rock concerts, slept at night in pup tents, and during the day blocked traffic along Chang'an Boulevard while strolling around with banners advocating democracy. Their takeover of Tiananmen coincided with the arrival in China of Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Soviet leader to visit the country in decades. Gorbachev kept his distance from the crowd, while his host, China's leader, Deng Xiaoping, “made no secret of his
humiliation at not being able to welcome him with the traditional Tiananmen ceremony,” according to the author and Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times
writer Harrison Salisbury, who was then in Beijing.

The dissent continued with a prolonged hunger strike. When martial law was declared on May 19, the government condemned the protesters as criminals and warned bystanders not to fraternize with them in the square or anywhere else, but the demonstrators would not disappear. Three protesters threw paint at Mao's portrait overlooking the main gate of the Forbidden City. A thirty-seven-foot-high Styrofoam statue called the “Goddess of Democracy” was erected on a six-foot-high platform in the forefront of the square on May 29. It overlooked Chang'an Boulevard and faced the portrait of Mao. When armored personnel carriers were sent to clear the crowd from the square on the night of June 3, they were initially halted by a defiant crowd.

“The crowd cried for revenge on the metal monster that had bullied its way through with reckless impunity,” Philip Cunningham wrote in his memoir. “Despite my pacifist inclinations, it was thrilling to watch the crowd pound the tank with bare hands. The APC wheels had gotten enmeshed in the makeshift road barrier … someone with a Molotov cocktail had set the APC on fire.… I watched from 20-30 feet away as the students tried to extract from the burning vehicle the man who had nearly killed them. Some people in the crowd felt less mercy.… The back door of the ambulance swung open and the injured soldier was about to be yanked out when the vehicle lurched forward, and raced off in the direction of the Beijing Hotel.”

The best-known leader of the 1989 protest movement was a twenty-three-year-old woman named Chai Ling. Prior to the uprising she had been involved with her studies as a graduate student in educational psychology at Beijing Normal University. She was married to a fellow student. It was her husband rather than herself who was passionately engaged in political affairs, she later explained to interviewers. She had merely been a follower. But once the student marchers started to make headlines around the world, it was she who emerged as the movement's main mobilizer and spokesperson. I remembered reading about her regularly in the press throughout the spring of 1989, and my memory of her had been refreshed prior to my impulsive trip to China by Ian Buruma's piece entitled “Tiananmen, Inc.” that appeared in
The New Yorker
in late May 1999.

Columns of Chinese infantry and many tanks invaded the center of Beijing on Sunday, June 4, 1989, having been ordered to do so by a government no longer willing to be reticent. As Harrison Salisbury would report in his book published in 1992,
The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng
, the government had become convinced that “evil elements” had penetrated the ranks of the students, and thus an assault was essential. “Neither then nor later were the evil elements identified,” Salisbury wrote, adding, “There were vague references to foreign agents—presumably the CIA, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In fact, such agents were spotted in the square, but no evidence indicated they played any role except possibly as a conduit for funds from Hong Kong.” Prior to the PLA offensive, the troops had received instructions to keep signs of “violence and bloodshed away from the view of witnesses and cameras,” Salisbury
wrote, but the PLA's aggressions were nevertheless recorded by the media even though “two CBS men lost their cameras and were beaten and held overnight in the Forbidden City,” and reporters from Taiwan and Hong Kong were also arrested and detained for several hours. “The government claimed no one had been killed in the square,” Salisbury continued, but “the volume of gunfire in and around the square made this ridiculous.… Best guess: between 1,000 and 2,000 killed in Beijing, perhaps 300 in and around the square.”

From then, Tiananmen Square would be best known in the Western press, and in the minds of most Americans, as the place where the reactionary forces of China had initiated mass murders of unarmed students. Tiananmen thus became a single word signifying oppression—a catchword, a
cause
word that critics of China would thereafter use to smear and pockmark the square that Mao had earlier designed to memorialize his Long March. “Tiananmen entered our vocabulary as shorthand for the grotesque crushing of dissent,” said an editorial in the
Far Eastern Economic Review
, based in Hong Kong.

Some journalists and commentators, however, would in time amend their findings, maintaining that the square itself had
not
been part of the killing field. “As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square,” wrote Jay Mathews, a
Washington Post
reporter who was in Beijing on June 4 and who in 1998 would publish in the
Columbia journalism Review
a critical essay about the Tiananmen coverage. “A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square,” Mathews continued in his critique, entitled “The Myth of Tiananmen,” “but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully. Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances,” Mathews wrote, adding that “the resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown.” Among the unreliable sources cited by Mathews was a student leader named Wu'er Kaixi, “who said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that [Wu'er Kaixi had] left the square hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.”

Wu'er Kaixi, Chai Ling, her husband, and several other student leaders not only eluded incarceration but managed to get out of the country.

“The circumstances of Chai's escape from China are mysterious,” Ian Buruma's 1999 piece in
The New Yorker
reported.

Buruma's article mentioned that Chai Ling had divorced her Chinese husband and was planning to marry a senior partner in a global strategy consultancy firm based in Boston. Buruma also wrote that Chai Ling was employed as the CEO of an Internet company backed by executives from Reebok and Microsoft.

As I lingered along the edge of Tiananmen Square observing the crowds on this peaceful autumn afternoon in 1999, I wondered if the so-called Tiananmen Massacre (this is how most of the Western press would persistently refer to what had happened in Beijing on Sunday, June 4) was comparable to the Bloody Sunday that I had witnessed along the highway in Selma, Alabama, back on March 7, 1965. Footage shot that day would add Selma's name to the world's gazetteer of places with horrible images, footage linking it in my mind with the square in Beijing that I was now seeing for the first time but
seeing
through the reflected memory of having seen it repeatedly in recent years on American news broadcasts and documentaries. My sense of contemporary history had been influenced by the airing of what television programmers had chosen to show because it had visual appeal—that is, the image of the diminutive Chai Ling shouting and sobbing in front of thousands of her followers in an attempt to inspire them, the image of an unidentified young man stepping in front of a moving tank on Chang'an Boulevard and causing it to stop, the image of young people wearing headbands being chased through the streets by helmeted PLA soldiers firing tracer bullets in the sky while other soldiers demolished the “Goddess of Democracy” statue in Tiananmen Square.

“Reporters created a kind of epic story that showed good pitted against evil, young against old, freedom against totalitarianism,” said Richard Gordon, codirector of the 1995 documentary called
The Gate of Heavenly Peace
. He could have been talking about Selma's Bloody Sunday. No one died in Selma on that day, but the scenes captured by the television cameras were evocative, showing as they did the onrushing lawmen wearing gas masks and brandishing their weapons within clouds of smoke above
the heads of black demonstrators lying on the ground. In covering the Beijing protest movement of 1989, the press “found a simplified narrative irresistible,” wrote Carolyn Wakeman, a journalism professor and author, in her essay entitled “Beyond the Square,” published in 1999 in the
Media Studies Journal
. Wakeman wrote that the “compelling footage” of the turmoil in Beijing “appealed to broad media audiences never before interested in China,” and at the same time it prompted in other Americans deep-seated conflicts about the Chinese people. “For more than a century Americans have oscillated between seeing the Chinese as noble peasants and Oriental demons,” Wakeman wrote. “Missionaries, businessmen, the military, and journalists have each contributed different elements to the picture of China that has emerged in the United States.”