A Heart for Freedom (26 page)

When help arrived, Wang Wen raised his voice and claimed he wanted to investigate us for embezzlement. This came out of left field. I couldn’t believe this boyish-looking young man, with whom I had sat on our first night at the Square watching over the students, could harbor such a deep and violent hatred for having been excluded from the leadership group and could direct all his anger and resentment toward me.

After Wang and his cohorts managed to flee the scene, we held a press conference to disclose the attempted kidnap and call for greater vigilance and unity, which had become increasingly difficult to maintain.

That day was June 1, the Children’s Day holiday in China. The students made an effort to create a festive mood for the kids who visited the Square. We cleaned up the trash, and it helped to have the colorful tents and the Goddess of Democracy as points of interest. Nevertheless, the steam had begun to run out on the movement. The local students had almost all packed up and gone home, and out-of-town students began to leave. Toward the end of May, the railway system added more outbound trains, and railway workers handed out free tickets to get students to leave town. During the first ten days of martial law, four hundred thousand students reportedly boarded trains in and out of Beijing. Because Li Peng had canceled many inbound trains, most of these students must have been leaving. On May 29 alone, thirty thousand students reportedly left Beijing by rail.

The
People’s Daily
published a letter written by eight Peking University professors calling on students to return to school. The
Beijing Daily
ran an article titled “Tiananmen, I Cry for You” about chaos on the Square and disillusionment within the movement. The student author called on the remaining students to withdraw. Then, late on the night of June 2, an army vehicle speeding down Chang’an Avenue struck several pedestrians three miles west of the Square, killing three people. Thousands of angry students and residents rushed to the scene under the impression this was an intentional killing by martial law troops. Meanwhile, also on Chang’an Avenue, people discovered buses and trucks loaded with helmets, rifles, and bayonets.

It appeared all hell was about to break loose.

22

The Last Stand

One hundred years ago on a tranquil night,

in the deep of the night before enormous changes

Gun and cannon fire destroyed the tranquil night,

surrounded on all sides by the appeasers’ swords
8

On June 2, pop singer Hou Dejian and three intellectuals, Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo, and Gao Xin, came to the Square and began a hunger strike in support of the student movement. Together they became known as the Four Gentlemen.

Hou Dejian’s presence attracted new waves of people to the Square. The students began to chant for Hou to sing his hit song “Heirs of the Dragon,” and the entire Square seemed to hum along as he sang. It was an interesting song. The lyrics echoed the sentiments we had been taught while growing up in China. The “gun and cannon fire” that “destroyed the tranquil night” refers to the Eight Alliance Army of foreign troops that invaded our ancient capital in 1900 to relieve the siege of the Legation Quarter by the Boxer rebels. That was the last time gunfire had brutalized the city. When the Japanese occupied Peiping, as the city was called in 1937, it was accomplished without gunfire. In 1949, not a single shot was fired when Mao’s People’s Liberation Army took possession of the capital. Who could have known that the same PLA that had peacefully liberated the city forty years ago would one day roll through the streets in tanks, firing machine guns?

“Mighty dragon, mighty dragon, open your eyes, forever and ever, open your eyes.”
9
The final refrain of “Heirs of the Dragon” reverberated in the air above the Square throughout the day of June 3, and only years later did I finally understand the song’s full impact and its spiritual meaning at that critical time of history.

The next morning, the gentle voice of a female student volunteer greeted the day with the morning broadcast from the headquarters on the Square.

The sun has slowly risen from the east. Today, June 3, 1989, our peaceful sitting has entered its twentieth day, and there are twenty more days to come before the National People’s Congress meets. We hope the people’s representatives will give assent to our request and lift martial law as a matter of constitutional right. We believe liberty will rise like the morning sun and arrive in the long-suffering land of the East. History will remember these many days and nights of 1989. History will remember the contributions students made toward the building of democracy.

The students woke up in their tents to welcome another day on the Square. A line of soldiers marched out of the Forbidden City, crossed the Golden Bridge in front of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and advanced toward the Square to raise the national flag. The national anthem sounded from the government loudspeakers while the five-star red flag slowly ascended. All the people in the Square stood to salute the flag as it rose. It was a moment of harmony, as the soldiers, the students, and the Goddess of Democracy all stood facing the ancient Forbidden City and our nation’s flag. The early days of summer in Beijing were beautiful and serene, even during that chaotic time on the Square. As we opened our hearts to the morning sunshine and the music of the national anthem, no one could have foreseen that all this would come to a brutal end that very night.

We knew that for the first time in the two weeks since martial law had been declared, the army was seriously pushing into the city toward the Square. People began to set up barricades on Chang’an Avenue near the Square to block all traffic.

* * *

Around eleven o’clock at night, after an otherwise peaceful day, a young man burst into the headquarters tent, shouting, “They’re really shooting!”

He instantly had our full attention. “We were all in line,” he continued, “holding each other’s arms. Ping was standing next to me. He was telling me how tired he was after several days without any sleep. I saw a flash. Then I heard a crack over where the soldiers were. Ping fell down. I kicked him, laughing. ‘Don’t fool around like that,’ I said. ‘You can sleep
after
tonight.’ He didn’t answer.”

The young man’s mouth was wide open. His face was wet with tears. “I reached down to get him up, and”—his hands formed a big circle—“he was dead. He had a huge hole in his back.”

Around midnight, news of casualties in other parts of the city became more frequent. One worker broke into the tent and pointed a gun at me. “Chai Ling,” he shouted, “so many of my fellow workers have died to protect you students. If you withdraw from the Square, I’ll shoot you. And I’ll shoot you if you don’t ask students to arm themselves and join the fight too.”

No sooner had I calmed him down than another student came in. This one had a knife, which he pointed at me. “Chai Ling, so many students are being killed. . . . I’m going to cut your throat if you don’t order the students to leave.”

Growing up, I was trained to speak softly and treat people gently, as befits a humble Chinese woman. But I was fed up with taking this kind of abuse. I stood up and pressed my body against his knife. “Go ahead,” I said, “cut my throat now.” This surprised him and he paused for a second, looking into my eyes. Then a weird grin stole over his face and he fled.

In the distance, I heard the crack of rifle shots and the intermittent, staccato bursts of automatic weapons. It unnerved me to realize we were in the midst of a battle.

As the commander of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters, however, I had to remind the students our movement was nonviolent. “We cannot—we must not—resort to force or the use of weapons,” I said. “And if you choose to do so, please leave the Square.”

Feng came back and reported that a second broadcast center had been set up on the steps of the Monument to the People’s Heroes. He said we should abandon our current headquarters and move to the monument.

* * *

By two o’clock in the morning on June 4, the army had surrounded the Square, and the sound of gunfire had died away. The moonless night was so dark I could not tell how many soldiers, tanks, and weapons were assembled along the edge of the Square. Beyond the flickering lights on the Square, the city was a sea of darkness.

Death is an abstract concept to people in their youth, but in that dark hour, it became suddenly, inescapably real.

Out of the pitch-black night, the first row of tanks began to roll toward us. Fear and anger erupted all around me on the Square. A feeling of futility overwhelmed me. In that initial moment of panic, I knew for certain, and perhaps for the first time, that I was powerless. I could not believe this was really happening. We had wanted a dialogue with the government, and now the government was going to kill us, along with all the other unarmed people on the Square.

Within minutes the army had encompassed us on every side. As we clustered together around the base of the monument, I tried to imagine what my parents would feel when they heard I was dead. Would Mom make it? Would Dad also collapse? If Dad collapsed, what would happen to our family? How about my own little family? It was probably lucky Feng and I had no children, because they would have grown up as orphans whose dead parents were labeled “enemies of the state.” This line of speculation was too frightening to pursue. I had made a pledge to protect the Square, and I intended to keep my promise.

A female voice began to sing the words of a popular song that had been composed for PLA soldiers sent by Deng Xiaoping to fight a border war with Vietnam in 1979—a catastrophic effort that reportedly cost two hundred thousand soldiers their lives, though the official government report placed the number at twenty thousand.

Perhaps I take leave, never to come back again,

If it were so, would you forgive me?

Would you understand?

Perhaps I would fall down, never to open my eyes again,

If it were so, please don’t grieve,

For where you look at our national flag,

You will see its glories have been written by my blood.

This song reflected how we felt at the last hour, as soldiers of the PLA marched toward us.

The safety of the students remained my utmost concern. It was a foregone conclusion that as student leader, I was doomed to be captured or killed; but the students did not have to be part of this sacrifice. What could I do to protect the holdouts, the last of the students who had remained on the Square?

“You cannot let the students leave,” a worker from Beijing had told me earlier in the night. “Your departure would be an insult to the sacrifice the citizens have made on Chang’an Avenue.”

Those words tore at me as the night wore on, as new information continually came to us.

“Stay until 6:00 a.m., Zhao Ziyang’s army will rebel.”

“Hold on until morning. The U.S. government is going to intervene.”

Meanwhile, two hundred yards from where I was sitting, I could see glimpses in the dark of machine guns and tanks.

Then I heard voices from the south side of the monument. The Four Gentlemen were talking to the remaining students and urging withdrawal. I listened in silence for half an hour while they talked.

“Those cowards,” I heard Li Lu say in a low voice. “In peaceful days, they staged a hunger strike to show off. Now, in a time of real danger, they’re afraid of death, but they can’t just run away in full sight of all the students.”

I did not reply. I was thinking about what he’d said earlier: “We will just wait here. If they really dare to open fire on the students, so be it. Let our red blood pour over the People’s Monument. Let the whole world know what really happened.”

Some students used the loudspeakers to encourage people to stay on the Square.

“Citizens have risked their lives to block the tanks and troops so we can stay on the Square,” one student said. “To leave now would render those sacrifices meaningless.”

Another said, “If we hold out until sunrise, two million Beijing citizens will come to our support. If we leave now, we’ll never get back onto the Square.”

Hou Dejian came to see me. “What do you think, Chai Ling?”

I told him we had received information that if we held out, Zhao Ziyang’s army would come to our side.

“Is that so?” Hou said. He seemed surprised.

He returned to his colleagues and came back in a few minutes. The Four Gentlemen thought the student leaders should consider negotiating a withdrawal with the troops. But that was out of the question. The leaders would never take a position that might involve surrender.

“You are free to do whatever you want,” Feng said. “If you go to negotiate with the army as a third party, you have my personal respect. But you cannot tell them you represent the students. The students must give their final approval to any deal you arrange with the army before it can be effective.”

As Hou Dejian departed with another gentleman and two doctors, Li Lu came to where I was standing. “Let’s go,” he said. “You’ve got to pay a visit to your students at this final hour. They want to see their commanders, and we should let them know the leaders are with them before the last moment arrives.”