‘You are at the centre of the world,’ said a friend who called me from London during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. It was as if the Middle Kingdom had once again earned its name. In Tiananmen Square a drama of protest was being enacted that would change the course of China’s history. The world watched avidly. Never before had China’s political life been available for so close a scrutiny week after week, proving more compulsive than soap opera and as elemental as Greek tragedy. The full weight of the world’s reporting and analytical powers was brought to bear. How ironical, after the excitement died down, that people started to wonder if they really knew what had happened.
I was warned by a wise old woman before I first came to China that it was a very different country. Many of the foreign observers who arrived cold in China in 1989 to cover Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s May visit were unprepared for the demonstrations that had been growing since late April, and didn’t know what to make of them. For some it was People Power from day one, with the triumph of democracy inevitable. The estimates they made of the number of participants often had a nought too many. Swept up on the all-but-spontaneous student activism, reporters failed to consider what might be going on in the black hole that passes for China’s top leadership, where it must have been clear all along that the demonstration would end in suppression. China’s difference is indeed considerable. The Philippines and Poland, for example, offered only distant points of comparison. There have been atrocities in Tibet, and earlier in the history of the People’s Republic, of which we have only the vaguest idea. The brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in the heart of the capital, where all could see, conveniently for us and inconveniently for the Chinese leadership, provided an opportunity to put the record somewhat straight.
A diplomat was quoted in the September 1989 issue of the Independent Monthly as saying: ‘There are no facts.’ How diplomatic can you get? If there are no facts about what happened in Peking, there are no facts anywhere. Eyewitness accounts, photographs, footage, bullet holes, tank treads, scars, missing people. Are these not facts? There are difficulties, of course, in assembling the information into a coherent, verifiable picture of what happened. Caution must be exercised in extrapolating from individual versions to an overview. What happened in Peking was not a television drama series in which no threads were left hanging. But to acknowledge that new information might lead to revision of original accounts, in the interests of greater accuracy, is quite different from saying as in the Independent Monthly’s headline, ‘We Got It Wrong’.
It is unedifying for journalists to quibble over the figures of how many people were killed, where and at what time, with the sneering implication that the whole thing could have been a beat-up. The terms can be defined so narrowly that it can be truthfully stated that between 4 and 5 am on 4 June in a certain central area of Tiananmen Square very few people were killed. But that is a schoolboy debating tactic. Richard Nations of London’s Spectator has movingly described how the Tolstoyan pop singer Hou Dejian joined forces with the Dostoevskyan literary critic Liu Xiaobo to persuade the last group of students to forsake empty self-sacrifice and peacefully leave the Square. Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and interrogated, probably under torture; his account has not been made fully available. Hou Dejian’s account, published in Hong Kong in August 1989 after he came out of hiding, confirms Nations’s story. Hou adds that at that time and place, with his own eyes, he saw no one killed. It impugns neither report to add, however, that not all the people whom Nations and Hou Dejian saw move off safely actually made it home. Nor does either report conflict with Amnesty International’s conservative conclusion of 1300 dead and many thousands injured. There was a massacre. It happened all over the city, but was concentrated in the area that the locals refer to as Tiananmen.
I suspect that journalists, like all of us, have a certain amount of bad faith towards their profession. A journalist’s aim is to be there on the spot when the big story breaks. That is the raison d’être of ‘our correspondent in Peking’. But it is not surprising that a journalist, whose code of ethics is to guard against distortion, is the one who knows best how easy it is to con the public with sensational sets of words, images and figures. And the Australian public, whose perception of a place like China might be little more than a weird and wonderful congeries of images, will run with the sensation. In a postmodern culture, where everything is believed and disbelieved with equal halfheartedness, the time will come when the sensation dies down, the words and images will be replaced by others, and people will start asking: ‘Did it really happen?’
Such modish scepticism, which prefers hypothetical interpretations to fact, suits the betrayed lover. Australia, with other Western countries, was hurt by the break-up of its love affair with China. When the outrage wears off, the pain is soothed by confessing that you don’t really know what happened, that you never understood and that you don’t care if you never see her again. The attitude approaches that of the Chinese government, which insists that foreigners should not meddle in China’s internal affairs because they do not know the whole story and cannot understand. Many ordinary Chinese take a quite different attitude, placing on the West, especially Western media, the responsibility of broadcasting a truthful record of their plight.
The current regime in China has put its hopes in its capacity to make people doubt the facts. By suggesting that uncertainty about some of the details could lead to a major revision of what happened, the Independent Monthly’s correspondents play into the hands of those orchestrating ‘the big lie’. In Peking, propaganda is a form of hermeneutics in which as much depends on eroding reality as on fabricating falsehoods. In an interview with a French journalist, Premier Li Peng showed his skill as a master of the art of interpretation. He said:
Doubtless you saw the sequence in which a man remained unmoving as a tank approached him, finally persuading the tank driver to stop. These images convinced President George Bush that the man was an extraordinary man, single-handedly able to stop a column of tanks. But there is another explanation. If one looks at the sequence objectively, doesn’t it display the humanitarian aspect of the Chinese army and the orders of non-violence that had been given? As if a man could stop a tank all by himself.
According to an account widely circulated in the West, army tanks rolled over people in Tiananmen Square, with blood flowing in streams, bodies reduced to minced meat. But I am sure you have not seen pictures actually showing someone being crushed by a tank.
If you’ve seen it, says Li Peng, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. If you haven’t seen it, it didn’t happen.
The propaganda campaign continued on a massive scale, working its way into all areas of society. From senior officials and teachers to hotel employees and taxi drivers, people spent days watching videos of the ‘peaceful quelling of the counter-revolutionary rebellion’, studying texts, hearing speeches, and being asked to explain their behaviour around 3–4 June. Fortunately, if they could stay awake, they too could exploit the art of ambiguous interpretation. ‘I am clear now, I understand, I know what really happened,’ they say and, if they’re lucky, they pass. Meanwhile, every night the television news lists half a dozen bumper harvests. The mood of the people of Peking is another kind of fact: not quite as palpable as the stone with which Dr Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley, but almost. A city is not easily filled with a sense of moral anger and righteous hatred – not to mention shock, anguish and despondency so profound as that which existed in the weeks afterwards.
Autumn is the favoured season in Peking, a time of brilliant blue skies and golden days, of festivals and abundance. The market stalls groan with grapes as big as plums, crisp Chinese pears, mountains of melons, and the mutton carcasses brought in for the Mongolian hotpot that is eaten as the weather gets colder. The quality of produce is better than it used to be, thanks to the reforms, including the increased use of chemicals in farming, but inflation has driven prices dramatically higher. People are still buying, but this year there is a sense of garnering in. The price offered by the money-changers has dropped. There is a move away from imported goods. The demand for colour television sets has eased, perhaps in revulsion at the propaganda campaign waged on tv: short-wave radios are a hot item for listening to the Voice of America and bbc.
The government has ordered an austerity campaign, and the people have responded in their own way by battening down the hatches. Families are making long-term plans. There is a widespread but unspoken feeling that things could get worse before they get better. Economic collapse, famine, even civil war, are not impossible, and the spectre of the latter has made many people determined to get out of China. The government distributes largesse – eggs and fish – to mark the festival period, and then orders employees to buy government bonds to the value of a month’s pay. He that giveth also taketh away.
The real festival this autumn is the 100 days anniversary of the Peking massacre, and the regime is reaping what it has sown in a harvest of popular alienation.
The students at Peking University, subject to intensive re-education and threatened with assignment to the countryside on graduation, bang their chopsticks on the canteen tables and hoot when the newly-appointed hard-line president speaks. They slow-march around campus, lugubriously singing, ‘Without the Communist Party there’d be no New China’. A solitary old woman burns paper in a residential courtyard to mourn the death of her son on 4 June, and the neighbours gather silently. A young man jumps to his death in front of the martial law troops, from the bridge where the tanks were stationed. On a streetside stall, the bookseller draws browsers’ attention to an essay by Yan Jiaqi, one of the dissidents now organising abroad. All night long, people are losing themselves in a purposeless frenzy of gambling, clicking the 144 mahjong pieces, which they satirically call ‘Reading the 144th Directive of Deng Xiaoping’. Others respond in a more upbeat way, wearing smarter clothes, more make-up, wilder hairstyles – as if, in the sophistication born of the new-found clarity with which they regard their rulers, they are determined to indulge their ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ to the utmost.
The regime seems to be nervous, paying paranoid and counter-productive attention to detail in the measures taken to stop further unrest. How crass to erect the styrofoam sculpture of united workers, peasants, intellectuals and soldiers where the Goddess of Democracy had stood in Tiananmen Square! For Peking is a city which has not been permitted to grieve for its dead, and the festering grief and shock have produced a lasting defiance, which is the most threatening possible force in a society based on deference. The empty, cordoned-off square at the heart of the state remains haunted ground, an unavoidable reminder. And while this mood continues people are waiting, edgily, for the next explosion.
The determination of a people is not something that can be seen in an organised resistance or spelled out in manifestos, and for that reason it is impossible for the regime to dispel it. Whatever restrictions are imposed, the spirit of 1989 will find its way.
At Liubukou, outside the forbidden quarters where China’s leaders live, and where one of the bloodiest encounters took place on 4 June – like doubting Thomas I have seen the bullet hole in a friend’s leg – a new nightclub opened, valiantly continuing the entrepreneurial spirit. A newly formed Chinese band is playing. They call themselves ‘1989 Love You’. The place is packed, jumping to versions of ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Get Back’ and ‘Let It Bleed’ only metres from where hundreds of people were bleeding only weeks before, in one of the grimmest nights of recent Chinese history. The point is lost on no one. When the band concludes its gig with one of the obligatory patriotic songs, they turn ‘Without the Communist Party there’d be no New China’ into a weird, cacophonous twenty-minute improvisation that can be interpreted as a musical re-enactment of events still imprinted on everyone’s mind. It is electrifying. Nothing is said, and nothing needs to be said.
There are those who claim that the situation in Peking has returned to normal. There are photographs of tourists going to the Great Wall, of old men exercising their birds, of children singing charming songs for the leaders, and merchants signing deals. As the poet W.H. Auden observed, the farmers in the field don’t even look up as Icarus falls from the sky, and ‘the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree’ even as the torturer goes about his work.
But look again. The dangerous liaisons and secret meetings go on, and people disappear in the middle of the night. Perhaps the civil war has already begun, in a clash of cultures and values, regions and generations. Let us hope that moderation and pragmatism prevail, and that a way forward is found, before the armies line up to fight again.
1989