A Heart for Freedom (20 page)

From time to time I got up and walked around the picket lines to check on the students. Many were lying on the cold concrete. Some had insulated themselves with newspapers. They used books for pillows and lay closely packed together to stay warm. I felt like a mother passing over her slumbering children, and I bore the weight of obligation to protect them from harm if I could. I thought of Joan of Arc, with her troops on the battlefield, and wondered if she had felt the same burden of responsibility I carried in my heart that night.

“Mom, I Am Hungry,” one banner read. These young students had grown up in relatively better times than their parents. They’d never gone hungry the way their elders had. They’d also been spared the worst chaos of the Cultural Revolution, which had broken up so many families and scattered them throughout the countryside. All they’d ever done was study, study, study, and that’s how they’d earned admission to fabled Peking University. They were the “good kids,” who had never done anything remotely like this: starving, shivering, lying all night in the open. Their parents would never have allowed it.

As I surveyed these brave, innocent child crusaders, my heart went out to them. I was profoundly moved by their willpower and devotion. No one had forced them to come, and no one was forcing them to stay. And yet they stayed for one shared reason: They loved our country.

I kept a vigilant eye on the eastern sky, hoping to see the first rays of dawn. Along with a new day came new hopes. Chief among them was the hope the government would accept our two requests so we could return to school and celebrate with a hearty meal. I expected that we would have to go hungry no longer than forty-eight hours. I believed the government would respond to our hunger strike before May 15, when Mikhail Gorbachev was due to arrive.

The cold and hunger had sapped everyone’s energy. I could see the signs of fatigue. I talked to the students through a bullhorn and told them how encouraged I was by their unity and strength of purpose. Today, I told them, we expected to begin a dialogue with the government; and once we had arranged to do that, we’d all leave the Square and welcome the arrival of Gorbachev.

Feng was among the first to show up at the Square in the morning, and the sight of his smile and dark eyes filled me with a warm thrill. He was exhausted too. He’d bought a broad band of black cloth nearly sixty feet long on his way back from the Soviet embassy. Using a teacher’s sewing machine at Beida, he’d turned it into a giant banner on which he’d painted two words in bright yellow paint: Hunger Strike. The rectangular black banner measured thirteen by ten feet. It was hoisted high above the crowd, near the monument. From a distance, its blackness added a somber, funereal note, conveying something tragic and heavy, as if it, too, were an omen. Black cloth is used in Chinese funerals to express mourning. There was a run on black cloth in Beijing after the massacre. People bought out the supply and tore the cloth into strips, which they fastened on their shirts as armbands. The sound the huge banner made as it flapped in the wind seemed to echo the words on the cloths of white we all wore around our heads: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.”

17

Solidarity

On the morning of May 13, while we were preparing for our hunger strike, Zhao Ziyang went to see Deng Xiaoping. It was the first time he had visited the paramount leader since returning from North Korea. Deng, meanwhile, had come back from his summer retreat in time for Mikhail Gorbachev’s impending state visit. President Yang Shangkun was also present at the meeting.

The three men talked at great length about the situation in Beijing. A hunger strike during the Soviet leader’s visit would portend a massive loss of face for Deng, who had orchestrated the Sino-Soviet Summit to demonstrate his power to the world. Imagine the paramount Chinese leader playing host to the architect of
glasnost
at a state dinner while thousands of fasting students lay on the Square outside the banquet hall, demanding democracy.

Glasnost
, which called for transparency of government and freedom of speech and information for the Soviet people, was the last thing Deng would permit the Chinese people. Indeed, when Gorbachev had first proposed a Sino-Soviet Summit to reinstate diplomatic relations and trade between the two countries, Deng had brushed him off. He was in no hurry to break the ice between the two countries. He had set the timing and the agenda for this summit, and it could only take place on his terms. Just as Richard Nixon had been the first American leader to visit Communist China, Gorbachev would be the first Soviet leader since the 1960s to come to Beijing.

Zhao Ziyang, not knowing the hunger strike would begin that evening, focused his discussion with Deng on ending corruption. He even offered to allow his own children to be investigated. Yang Shangkun, meanwhile, assured Deng that he could count on the army to line up behind the central government whatever it decided to do.

* * *

Though the hunger strike officially began at 6:00 p.m., when Wang Dan made an announcement in the presence of a few journalists, the 8:00 p.m. news broadcasts completely ignored it.

Support in the capital city, however, was unprecedented. The morning after our first cold and hungry night on the Square, when we stood to sing the national anthem as the honor guard in its daily ritual raised the national flag, students all over Beijing once again walked out of classes and streamed into Tiananmen Square, from all directions, to show their support. Teachers, professors, and intellectuals expressed solidarity, and a big poster signed by famous intellectuals, headlined “We Can No Longer Remain Silent” appeared simultaneously at Peking University and a number of colleges. The banner exhorted intellectuals to join a march of solidarity on May 15, the day of Gorbachev’s arrival: “We must show the world our conscience, our courage, and our social responsibility! Let us write history!”

Three hundred teachers and professors at Peking University signed a letter addressed to the Central Party Committee, urging the top leaders to take the hunger strike seriously, to treat the striking students with genuine concern, caution, and kindness, and to use every available measure to safeguard their health. On the Square, we cheered—and wept—when a young teacher read this letter out loud.

All through the day, more students arrived on the Square with banners and pennants. Whenever a new contingent arrived, they first circled the Square and then merged with the vast sea of people already there. From their upraised flags, I could see more than forty colleges from Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai had come to support us.

I had told my fellow students this new day would bring us hope that our hunger strike would soon be over. Now it was happening before my very eyes as thousands upon thousands of students, teachers, and Beijing residents poured into the Square to support our demand for a dialogue with the government.

* * *

At 4:00 p.m. on May 14, I was called to join a student dialogue with the government, led by Yan Mingfu, head of the United Front Department of the Communist Party, whose offices were situated in a small alley across from the Zhongnanhai compound, a half hour by foot from Tiananmen Square. The United Front had been created in 1937 so the Communist Party could form a front line with Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Nationalist party to fight the Japanese. After Mao’s victory and ascension in 1949, the department had evolved into a symbolic facade organization that worked with so-called allies of the Communist Party, such as ethnic minorities, Tibetan Buddhists, non-Communist intellectuals, and compatriots from Hong Kong and Taiwan, all of whom survived at the mercy of the Communist Party.

It was puzzling, to say the least, that the government would hold this hard-earned dialogue at the United Front Department. Did the ruling party view us as a potential ally, or was this the most idle government office, an empty shell that had time to linger with students? On the Square, some students were happy to hear we were about to have this dialogue. Others, however, were skeptical. They contended the government could not possibly be taking us seriously if they were assigning such low-ranking representatives to meet with us.

I could not give much thought to all this because I was preoccupied with other matters. The hunger strike had lasted more than twenty-four hours, and our second night was fast approaching. If we couldn’t reach a satisfactory agreement during this dialogue session, how would I be able to help the striking students endure another hungry and chilly night on the Square? I gathered some banners, notably the one that read “Mom, I Am Hungry,” along with the cassette tapes on which I’d recorded my hunger strike manifesto. We intended to ask the government to broadcast the dialogue live on Central TV so the whole nation could witness it, and I was hoping to play my tape on national TV so people would understand and support our action.

* * *

The setting for the dialogue was a conference room on the second floor of the United Front building. When I arrived, people were already seated at a large oval table covered with a white tablecloth. It was formally arranged like a diplomatic negotiation. On one side sat Yan Mingfu, flanked by ten government officers, such as the minister of education. The student dialogue delegation sat on the opposite side of the table. Each member had a topic to discuss, and they all seemed to have rehearsed their lines. This was their first opportunity to put their collegiate debating skills to use.

Two weeks earlier, State Council spokesman Yuan Mu had announced that the government would not, under any circumstances, hold a dialogue with an illegal student organization. So it was a big concession for them to engage in talks with our student dialogue commission.

Yan Mingfu had already warned us the welcome ceremony for Mikhail Gorbachev might not be held at Tiananmen, regardless of whether the hunger strikers evacuated the Square. So we knew we would have to settle for talking to minister-level officials, not to Zhao Ziyang or Li Peng. Yan Mingfu knew the decision had already been made to hold the welcome ceremony at the Beijing airport, but he thought he still had time to persuade the students to end the hunger strike. No one wanted to embarrass our country and disrupt an international event that the top journalists in the world had arrived in Beijing to cover.

The representatives from the hunger strike sat behind the student dialogue representatives, facing the government ministers. Our dirty clothes, drawn faces, and white headbands emblazoned with “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” made a sharp contrast to the neat, well-dressed officials. We were serious, even solemn, and stood with composure, even though we had not eaten for twenty-four hours and had hardly slept. We wanted the nation to see us on TV and realize we were not playing a childish game; we were doing this in the best interest of the country and the people.

The dialogue began as a careful, cordial, sincere, and respectful discussion and then grew heated. At one point, student leader Xiong Yan asked Yan Mingfu, “What do you really think of the student movement?” This was the first time any of us had seen a government official confronted with an unscripted question. All eyes were on Yan Mingfu for his reaction.

Yan appeared taken aback by this blunt question, but he was in no position to speak freely. With evident discomfort, he looked at us and said, “Personally I’d like very much to say you are patriotic, but I can’t say that.”

“Why not?” Xiong Yan replied with great disappointment. He wasn’t prepared to let the issue drop. A positive and affirming statement about the movement and assurances of no later repercussions might go a long way toward convincing students to return to class.

Yan Mingfu again looked pained as he searched for the proper words, and we waited in hope and silence. Just then, the door to the conference room burst open, and a loud shout came from the hallway: “Stop, stop the dialogue!”

With stunned faces, we all turned to look at the door. Outside, a few students shouted, “We cannot hear the direct broadcast as promised. The dialogue must come to an end.”

Yan Mingfu seemed just as surprised by the news as we were. “Why was it not directly broadcast?” he asked one of his deputies. “I thought it was.”

While the deputy went to the side door to see what was going on, the room lapsed into silence and a precious moment of a deeper connection with Yan Mingfu was gone.

Back on the Square, the hunger strikers had grown impatient and increasingly suspicious about the dialogue. They had not seen any sign of it on TV, as they had been promised, because the broadcast had been delayed for an hour. They felt they had made a sacrifice for this dialogue and were entitled to be kept informed. When no news was immediately forthcoming, they sent students to break in on the session and stop the dialogue. I was surprised that in one short hour the hunger strikers had become so impatient.

The dialogue ended badly soon after, and Yan Mingfu walked slowly out of the conference room. Soon after the Tiananmen crackdown, when the students looked up to him as an endearing father figure, Yan was accused of sympathizing with the students and stripped of his title.

* * *

When the dialogue ended with nothing to show for it, I had to hurry back to the Square. Outside the gate of the United Front Department, I met twelve leading scholars who had volunteered to visit the students at Tiananmen. By then, Chang’an Avenue had become a parking lot jammed with people. To move even a foot became almost impossible, and the mile-long journey to the Square was like going to the moon. We hoped somehow these scholars would bring the magic needed to bridge the gap between the government leaders and the students; but by the time we reached the Square and the scholars got a chance to speak, we realized how big the gap had grown. No one had the power to penetrate the bubble surrounding the Central Party Committee or to influence the Party leaders. Just like that, a critical deadline to change the minds of the government leaders and end the hunger strike before Gorbachev’s formal visit came and went.