Vijay Gokhale - Tiananmen Square : The Making of a Protest

The leaders are aware that what happened is an extremely ugly mark on their historical record, and they have been eager to have the world forget it as soon as possible.

Fang Lizhi

Contents

I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO TELL THIS STORY SINCE I WITNESSED IT thirty-one years ago in Beijing, but my circumstances prevented me from doing so until now.

It has been called by many names, but is best known as the Tiananmen Square incident because Tiananmen Square was the stage on which the drama that held the world spellbound for fifty days was performed. The happenings in the square led to the sort of chaos and uncertainty that usually presages a regime change. That did not happen.

At the time it was a global phenomenon. Within a few months, however, the Berlin Wall came down and the worlds attention reverted to Europe. The happenings in China in the spring and early summer of 1989 faded from public memory.

A few writers, most Western, wrote accounts from their perspective. Soon business trumped politics and even these accounts dried up. Inside China a massive cover-up that started immediately after the end of the crisis, has blanked out any memories except those that the Chinese Communist Party wants its people to know.

There was a brief revival of interest in the early years of the 2000s, when tapes recorded by the former general secretary Zhao Ziyang found their way to Hong Kong. It was his version of the truth, and was intended to prove his innocence.

In the fifty days that the drama played out in Tiananmen Square, there was no serious effort by the Indian media to cover the happenings. Two intrepid young media persons from India Today Shekhar Gupta and Prashant Panjiar were the only people to cover the events in Beijing. The larger story has remained untold from the Indian perspective.

This is a story that needs telling because China is our neighbour and our people require a much deeper understanding of China than is presently the case. My story is intended to interpret the facts, to some of which I was eyewitness, with the benefit of hindsight. While thirty years have passed, it still remains an event of seminal importance in recent Chinese history. China has changed, yet the communist system remains. Personalities have come and gone, but the Red Aristocracy still rules China and stays focussed on self-preservation and self-perpetuation. Indians can no longer afford to have a superficial understanding of events involving their largest neighbour and to-be-hegemon, other than at their own peril.

I N EARLY APRIL BEIJING CAN STILL BE VERY COLD BUT NOWADAYS THE skies are not the kind of cerulean as they used to be in 1989. Those days there were thousands of bicycles on the roads but few cars, so that it was possible to walk on the Avenue of Eternal Peace from the Jianguo Gate to the Tiananmen Square without any serious threat to life or limb. Greys and blues were still the dominant colours among the Chinese. Fraternization between Chinese and foreigners, though not forbidden, was uncommon and discouraged. We lived in compounds guarded by the Peoples Armed Police, not so much to protect us as, it seemed, to prevent the ordinary Chinese from entering these compounds. The waiguoren (foreigners) were privileged persons, with special shops for groceries and the Friendship Store stocked with Chinese handicrafts, and they even had special money, the Foreign Exchange Certificate, known in Chinese as waihui, to buy things not available to the ordinary Chinese.

Beijing Capital Airport had two small circular terminals and an antiquated arrival hall. Most people still travelled on trains. From the airport there was a single-lane road into the city, lined with old trees and largely rural. The road met the city at the Third Ring Road (there are now seven), where the traveller was met with rows upon rows of Soviet-style apartments. Most buildings were old and unpainted, and few were taller than five stories since there were no elevators. The tiny balconies were stuffed high with bai cai, the ubiquitous white cabbage that was a winter staple and could be stored in the outdoors for several weeks. Behind the Great Hall of the People, where the National Opera House now stands, were the courtyard houses (siheyuan) for which Beijing was famous. These were, at one time, when Beijing was an imperial capital before 1911, the residences of the nobility and mandarins in the service of the Chinese emperors, but were now occupied by many families. The main roads were broad, especially the Avenue of Eternal Peace, which Mao had widened by destroying ancient city walls and buildings that had stood for centuries, for his grand parades and mass campaigns. Two ring roads encircled the city, the first of the two encompassing the Old City of Beijing, and traditional gates such as the Jianguomen and the Deshengmen were still preserved. Beyond these main roads, most of Beijing still had narrow lanes that were densely populated, some too narrow for even a car to traverse, and hidden amongst them were faded gems of Chinese architecture in red and ochre with yellow imperial dragon tiles. Despite the run-down appearance, the city was spotlessly clean, public transport was available and the children looked in rude good health.

The leadership lived and worked in the western wing of the Forbidden City, the imperial palace of the Ming and Qing emperors, in pavilions and houses that ranged around two man-made lakes the Central and the South from which it got its name, the Zhongnanhai. The formal entrance to the complex was through the Xinhuamen, or the New China Gate, located on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, but the leaders themselves drove in black limousines with tinted windows through smaller gates in the western wall of the Forbidden City. They had summer homes in the Western Hills just outside the city. The Zhongnanhai complex was guarded by the Peoples Armed Police. It was out of bounds for the ordinary Chinese.

There were few shops, no malls and no real public entertainment. Wangfujing and Xidan were shopping streets, tree-lined and with state-run stores. Power cuts were not infrequent. Staple foods were never in short supply, but luxuries could not be had by the Chinese. There were few foreign-run hotels including the Jianguo and the Jinglun, both on the Avenue of Eternal Peace which was the main eastwest axis of the capital city. In the summer, temperatures reached up to 40 degrees Celsius, and most Beijingers spent the evenings out of doors, the men usually with their upper garment hitched above the chest to ward off the heat. Many found respite in the public parks bearing lovely names like Altar of the Moon, Purple Bamboo and Taoran Pavilion, and these were the pride and joy of the city. These parks were the go-to place to exercise, play and indulge in Western ballroom dancing. These were also virtually the only places that foreigners could meet and converse with the Chinese. The parks had beautiful lakes which allowed for boating in the summers and ice skating in the winters. Spring in these parks was particularly beautiful with forsythia, magnolia, plum, peach and cherry blossoms, especially in the Beihai (Northern Sea), which was an imperial park.

There were three diplomatic compounds in Beijing in those days, and all diplomats and foreign media were compelled to live there if they did not have residential quarters in their chanceries. We had an apartment in the Qijiayuan diplomatic compound with a balcony that opened directly on to the Avenue of Eternal Peace, some four kilometres from Tiananmen. It was to prove fortuitous in the early summer of 1989 when the Avenue of Eternal Peace became a vast open-air ramp along which all the actors in the drama that came to be called the Tiananmen Square incident, paraded, cycled or drove, to the final tragic ending. We had, so to speak, a ring-side seat to the grand theatre, but in early 1988 the balcony was nothing more than a convenient outdoor refrigerator to store food stuff that might otherwise spoil in the heated interiors of the apartment.