Foundinchina.com

http://minzhuwansui.blogspot.com/

China Beat continue their excellent series of excerpts from Philip Cunningham‘s soon-to-be-released Tiananmen moon, with the latest installment shedding some light on the author’s role as interpreter for a BBC camera crew, while at the same time describing the moment he encountered Chai Ling (I assume for the first time) and other student leaders in the lobby of the Beijing Hotel at midnight. Earlier that day Cunningham had befriended a student from Xi’an, Wang Li, on the Square.

Wang Li and Hu gulp down the juice and ravage the snacks as if they had just ended a private hunger strike. While they eat, I look at the other table where a group of four young people are talking in low whispers next to the ornate ghost screen that blocked view from the entrance.

“Listen, troops have arrived northeast of Beijing. There are thousands of soldiers, tanks, and I heard there are trucks full of ammunition,” Wang Li says, as if trying to earn his keep.
“How do you know?”
“We were there,” he says with a hint of pride. And then anticipating further questions, he adds, “We know a journalist needs evidence, so we want to go back and take pictures.”
“Isn’t that kind of risky?”
“No, we must do it, Jin. Can I borrow your camera?” He reads the doubt on my face. “You can keep my ID card until I return with the camera.”
“No, no, that’s not necessary. I trust you,” I respond, using the immortal words of someone about to be conned. Actually I didn’t trust him. If anything his offer of the ID made me a little suspicious. If he were really a student why was he flashing his ID around? No one else did that.

“I’ll tell you what, tomorrow you can shower and nap in my room if you want, okay?”
Even as the words left my mouth I wasn’t sure why I made the offer, but it got me off the hook tonight. And I did feel for these ragamuffins. We shared a powerful curiosity in common; we were interested in finding out what was really going on, but we weren’t journalists, not them, not me. I couldn’t forget how I was almost reduced to sleeping on the streets during the early vigils at Tiananmen.
“Can you give me some film, too?” he pleads, revealing sharper bargaining skills as my skepticism softened.
“Yeah, okay. By the way,” I ask, pointing to the figures in the shadows about 20 feet away, “Who are those people sitting at the table over there?”
“They’re our student leaders. That’s Wang Dan, Wuerkaixi, Chai Ling and Feng Congde.”
“The student leaders?” I ask in disbelief. Isn’t this a government hotel?

We got up to leave. I walked past the other table to get a closer look. The quiet conference in progress momentarily went silent as we walked by. On the way out, I give my camera to Wang Li, not sure if I’d see it or him again. Even so I felt a pang of guilt. Is it right for me to encourage him to go running after troops?

Intriguing stuff. I recommend Cunningham’s own serialisation, updated as a twenty-years-ago-today chronology, not least because of some of the amazing pictures he captured at that time.

We’re a couple of months away from remembering the 20th anniversary of one the bloodiest atrocities of modern times. The Times today ran the following article from its archives of two decades ago. The numbers quoted are open to question, but reading the article provides a flashback to Tiananmen ‘89 and the sick brutality of a regime that turned the army on its own people and got away with it:

June 11, 1989: with up to 7,000 already dead, the killing goes on

Jon Swain in Beijing

I WITNESSED the sickening reality of murderous repression last Friday morning and checked my watch. It was 11.42am, five days after the People’s Liberation Army launched its devastating assault on Tiananmen Square.

Pinned to a wreath was a simple statement: “June 4, the darkest day in the history of the motherland.”

Then, the soldiers stabbed and slashed at students and onlookers with their bayonets, shot them with their pistols and rifles before tanks mangled their bodies in an act of barbarity that will be remembered as one of the darkest days in China’s history.

More than ever last Friday morning, Beijing was a city of anguish and fear. Troops and secret police were out in force to arrest anyone suspected of involvement in the pro-democracy movement.

CCTV, the state television network that just a week before had been broadcasting honest news about the pro-democracy demonstrations, was again fettered, giving telephone numbers for people to denounce and rat on “counter-revolutionaries”. In a grim exercise in propaganda it showed pictures of people being led away to confess their crimes.

With the hardliners of the Communist party under Deng Xiaoping, China’s senior leader, relentlessly gathering power this was, above all, a moment to remain inconspicuous.

For one young man whose world had collapsed on bloody Sunday in Tiananmen Square, the struggle against oppression went on despite the reign of terror. He fearlessly rode his bicycle out of a side street on the east side of the square, waving a red student protest banner in a lone act of defiance against the crackdown.

He was only in his twenties, dressed in slacks and a white shirt. As he emerged onto the main Boulevard of Eternal Peace, two armed policemen seized him and tore the banner from his hand.

There was no struggle and no time to cry for democracy or liberty. With sickening thuds, truncheon blows rained down on the young man in full view of a gathering crowd. He was dragged to an army tent beneath the high red walls of the Forbidden City. From there came a single shot.

A few in the crowd shouted angrily. Abrupt orders to disperse, backed up by a menacing wave of rifles, stilled the dissent.

By such an event one knows that China has reverted to a police state, its ideal of more democracy crushed. The People’s Liberation Army is supposed to love the people, but since the massacre a week ago its soldiers, with rare exception, have been behaving like a foreign army of occupation.

After the slaughter, western diplomats say the army now arouses as much dread and hatred as the Gestapo did in occupied Europe. At a bus stop in the centre of the city on Friday a man said: “This is a fascist state. If we had guns we would overthrow it now.”

The trigger-happy soldiers, who had gunned down people with abandon throughout the week, had by Saturday occupied positions across Beijing. “They have a knife at the city’s very throat,” said an attendant at one leading hotel. “I was in Tiananmen on Sunday morning and my best friend was killed.”

Estimates of western intelligence officials range from 3,000 to 7,000 dead and 10,000 wounded. It seems bizarre, but the first event that led to the bloodbath was a traffic accident. Until that moment, despite the imposition of martial law, both sides had shown remarkable restraint.

Then a police vehicle crashed into cyclists, killing at least one. As word of the accident spread, it generated fresh anger and revitalised the flagging protest movement.

Many atrocities were committed by troops that night. A western military attaché told how a young mother in the Avenue of Eternal Peace had pleaded with the troops to shoot her but spare the baby in her arms. A soldier bayoneted her to death.

One had only to stroll through a residential area of Beijing yesterday to gauge the revulsion for the regime. A statue to youth and vitality was garlanded with wreaths in memory of residents who had been cut down by the army. They included a six-year-old girl and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. 

Read that last bit again. The “revulsion for the regime” has been swept away through repression and propaganda to the extent that today’s Chinese youth (and most of their parents) thank the regime for saving them from criminals. The rest of us aren’t so easily fooled. Get ready to remember.

I place the image of the Dalai Lama above that of Hu Jintao for a good reason: His Holiness is a far, far, better person than Hu could ever hope to become and towers above the Chinese leader on any measure of human dignity, compassion, humility, and morality.

Hu began paving the way to the top of the CCP hierarchy when he displayed such alacrity in dealing with Tibetan discontent in 1989. Two decades later he is in the hot seat at Zhongnanhai and has just initiated another repressive campaign on the Himalayan Plateau.

No doubt Hu is eager to punish the indigenous inhabitants of Lhasa for having the temerity to display the anger of occupation on the eve of China’s Olympic showcase. Well, that’s what you get for systematically diluting, dismantling, and marginalising an entire culture against its will: opposition.

This week’s campaign seems to be a pre-emptive strike at deterring possible protests during the forthcoming (and newly created) anniversary of serfs’ emancipation day.  Only North Korea could possibly match this choreographed nonsense on such a grand scale.

Not content with forcing the people of Lhasa to celebrate the 50th anniversary of invasion liberation in 2001, Tibetans must now throw a party in honour of day they said goodbye to the person they respected, and still respect, above all others. The CCP book of thuggery knows no limits of brutality when allegiance is directed towards Dharamsala.

And what is the easiest way to qualify for a good beating, imprisonment, or worse? Try putting a picture of His Holiness above the mantelpiece or listen to a “reactionary tune” on your phone and you’ll find out. Want extra torture credits? Then simply wave the Tibetan flag and seek discourse over Beijing’s Tibet policy.

Cultural genocide is nothing new; and maybe there’s nothing to be done to save the Tibetans from becoming a minority in their own back yard. But that doesn’t mean we should sit back and say nothing for fear of ‘hurting’ the pathetically sensitive unelected Chinese leadership, especially when they display all the hallmarks of a global power drunk on their expanding sphere of influence.

China seems unaware that responsible behaviour, both domestically and internationally, must come before respect. And responsibility means wielding the power you have with compassion and tolerance. By this definition, for his Tibetan campaigns alone, Hu Jintao remains a figure of contempt rather than respect.

There was on Monday, precisely one week and three minutes after the deadly Sichuan earthquake, a mass outburst of spontaneous feeling in Tian’anmen Square. 

As an announcement signalled the end of three minutes silence, the crowd surrounded the flag and began shouting their devotions to the people of Sichuan and the Motherland. 

Two things are of great significance here. First, the gathering was unauthorised but tolerated; second, the flag wasn’t lowered for either an emperor or a dictator.

The last time people gathered in huge numbers on the Square to speak with one voice – a voice of hope – it all ended very differently. That was arguably the defining moment in China’s modern history, and yet it remains an incident forbidden as the subject of debate or review. The supreme irony is that the compassionate and immediate response to this disaster has shown the Chinese government to be the caring, responsible leaders that the demonstrators were demanding 19 years ago.

Given that the Chinese leaders are currently riding the crest of an immense wave of popularity, why not take this moment to enhance their reputation still further? To achieve this they need only authorise the lowering of the flag in 14 days time. No announcements. No fanfare. No propaganda. Just a simple act of humility and remembrance that is long overdue. Everyone would immediately grasp the significance and it would be met with unprecedented and universal praise.

But there are reasons greater than earning domestic and international plaudits for a half-mast gesture on June 4. Yesterday’s flag lowering for the common man was fully justified, but ultimately a response to great suffering wrought by Mother Nature; an unavoidable tragedy. When tragedy struck Nineteen years ago, it was a premeditated strike against the common man.

Prior to the massacre of innocents, Beijing in ’89 had, in common with this past week, also been a time when the People’s Liberation Army had found a place in the hearts of the populace when they refused to turn their guns on the teachers, students, farmers and others who had gathered under the same banner. The local PLA units, sympathetic to the plight of the protesters, were cheered as they left the Square. Ultimately, mass murder would be committed, under direct orders from Zhongnanhai, by PLA units from outside provinces.

The loss of face had been too much for the hardliners like Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping to bear, and in common with all history’s craziest acts of despotism, they chose to send in a disaster of their own making.  Desperate to cling to power and eager to punish, a mechanical earthquake was ordered onto the Square and the surrounding streets to crush, maim, and destroy. The only things in common with a natural disaster were the indiscriminate nature of the killings and the large number of innocent victims.  

On Monday the leaders bowed their heads in remembrance at Zhongnanhai. It would be appropriate, although unrealistic, for them to bow their heads in shame in two weeks time. However, allowing the flag in Tian’anmen Square to be lowered in memory of those that died needlessly on June 4 ‘89 would be a welcome, responsible, and safe step for the government to take.

Of course, accountability and openness are pre-requisite, so I won’t be holding my breath waiting for it to happen. But I will remember, in company with millions of others, the event that China continues to wipe from the pages of history. Mark your calendars; 14 days to go.

Update: (May 24, 2008) 11 days to go.