China in Ten Words (3 page)

When I left again on June 7, service between Beijing and Shanghai had been suspended because a train in Shanghai had been set on fire, so my plan was to take a roundabout route: by train to Wuhan and by boat from there to Zhejiang. Some classmates and I hired a flatbed-cart driver to take us down Chang’an Avenue to the railroad station. Beijing, seething with activity a few days earlier, now looked desolate and abandoned. There was hardly a pedestrian to be seen, only smoke rising from some charred vehicles and a tank stationed at the Jianguomen overpass, its barrel pointing at us menacingly as we crossed. After pushing our way through the scrum outside the ticket office, we finally managed to buy tickets, though it was impossible to reserve seats. As we entered the station we were scrutinized minutely by the soldiers on duty; I was waved in only when they were sure I didn’t look like any of the fugitives whose photos appeared on their wanted list.

Never before or since have I traveled on such a crowded train. The compartment was filled with college students fleeing the capital, and everyone was so crammed together there was not an inch of space between one person and the next. An hour out of Beijing, I needed to use the toilet. It took all my strength to squeeze any distance through the throng, and before I was halfway there I realized that my cause was hopeless. I could hear someone yelling and banging on the door, but the toilet itself was full of people—“We can’t open it!” they shouted back. I just had to hold on for the full three hours until we got to Shijiazhuang. There I disembarked and found a toilet, then a pay phone, to appeal for help from the editor of the local literary magazine. “Everything’s in such chaos now,” he said after hearing me out. “Just give up on the idea of going anywhere else. Stay here and write us a story.”

So I spent the next month holed up in Shijiazhuang, but I had a hard time writing. Every day the television broadcast shots of students on the wanted list being taken into custody, and these pictures were repeated again and again in rolling coverage—something I’ve never seen since, except when Chinese athletes have won gold medals in the Olympics. Far from home, in my cheerless hotel room, I saw the despairing looks on the faces of the captured students and heard the crowing of the news announcers, and a chill went down my spine.

Suddenly one day the picture on my TV screen changed completely. Gone were the shots of detained suspects, and gone was the jubilant commentary. Although manhunts and arrests carried on as before, broadcasts now reverted to the old familiar formula: scenes of prosperity throughout the motherland. A day earlier the announcer had been passionately denouncing the crimes of the captured students, and now he was cheerfully lauding our nation’s thriving progress. From that day on, just as Zhao Ziyang disappeared from view, so too Tiananmen vanished from the Chinese media. I never saw the slightest mention of it afterward, as though it had never happened. And memories seemed to fade even among those who took part in the protests of spring 1989; the pressures of life, perhaps, allowed little room to revisit the past. Twenty years later, it is a disturbing fact that among the younger generation in China today few know anything about the Tiananmen Incident, and those who do say vaguely, “A lot of people in the streets then, that’s what I heard.”

T
wenty years may have gone by in a flash, but historical memory, I am certain, does not slip away so quickly. No matter how they currently view the events of 1989, I think everyone who participated in them will find those experiences etched indelibly profoundly in their minds when one day they have occasion to look back at that chapter of their lives.

In my case, the thing that has left the deepest mark on me is a realization of what “the people” means.

Sometimes one needs an opportunity to truly encounter a certain word. We encounter all kinds of words in the course of our lives, and some we understand at first glance and others we may rub shoulders with but never fully understand. “The people” belongs in that second category. It’s one of the first phrases I learned to read and write, and it has clung to me in my travels through life, constantly appearing before my eyes and sounding in my ears. But it did not truly penetrate my inner being until my thirtieth year, when an experience late one night finally allowed me to understand the term in all its potency. It was only when I had a real-life encounter with it—disengaged from all linguistic, sociological, or anthropological theories and definitions—that I could tell myself: “the people” is not an empty phrase, because I have seen it in the flesh, its heart thumping.

It was not the enormous rallies in Tiananmen Square that imparted this understanding, but an episode in another part of town one night in late May 1989. Martial law had been declared by that time; students and residents alike gathered spontaneously to defend every major intersection in Beijing as well as all overpasses and subway exits, to block armed troops from entering Tiananmen Square.

I was then studying at the Lu Xun Literary Institute in Shilipu, on the east side of the city. Practically every lunchtime I would ride my rickety old bike to Tiananmen Square, lingering there through the evening and into the early hours, when I would cycle back to the institute.

Beijing in May can be hot at midday but cold at night. I remember I was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt when I set off after lunch, and by late that evening I was chilled to the bone. As I cycled back from the square an icy wind blew in my face, making every part of me shiver—and every part of my bicycle, too. The streetlights were dark, and only the moon pointed the way ahead. The farther I rode, the colder I felt. But as I approached Hujialou, a current of warm air suddenly swept over me, and it only got warmer as I rode on. I heard a song drifting my way, and a bit later I saw lights gleaming in the distance. Then an astonishing scene appeared before me. Now bathed in warmth, I could see the intersection flooded with light; ten thousand people must have been standing guard on the bridge and the approach roads beneath. They were fervid with passion, lustily singing the national anthem under the night sky: “With our flesh and blood we will build a new great wall! The Chinese people have reached the critical hour, compelled to give their final call! Arise, arise, arise! United we stand.…”

Although unarmed, they stood steadfast, confident that with their bodies alone they could block soldiers and ward off tanks. Packed together, they gave off a blast of heat, as though every one of them was a blazing torch.

This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed that light carries farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what “the people” means.

*
In Pinyin romanization,
renmin

leader

T
he leader
^*
I have in mind here is one who enjoys a special prerogative. When reviewing the National Day parade from Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he alone can wave to the marchers as they pass; other members of the ruling elite can only stand at his side and clap their hands. There is just one leader, of course, who fits this description. His name is Mao Zedong. During the Cultural Revolution years Mao would wear a military uniform when he stood on Tiananmen and—maybe because he was happy or maybe just because he was hot—would often take off his cap and wave it at the assembled multitude in the square below.

At the outset of the Cultural Revolution “big-character posters” started to appear. Political screeds rendered in clumsily handwritten characters—and now and again some elegantly written ones, too—these were the first acts of the disenfranchised masses in challenging the power of officialdom. Written on broadsheets as big as decent-sized windows and posted on the walls that ran alongside city streets, shorter versions took the form of two sheets of paper mounted one on top of the other, while longer ones involved five or six sheets set out in a horizontal row. In the years to follow, these big-character posters would become the largest exhibition of calligraphy China has ever seen: all across the country, in cities and towns, big streets and small, walls were decorated with them. People would gather in the streets and read the posters with undisguised relish, for although they all employed much the same revolutionary rhetoric, they began to criticize officials and their high and mighty ways.

In Mao a politician’s grasp of the historical moment was coupled with a poet’s whimsy, and it was often through some improvised flourish that he would unveil his program. When the Communist Party Central Committee and the top brass in Beijing tried to clamp down on popular protests, Mao did not use his supreme authority as party chairman to set his colleagues straight. Instead, he employed the very same approach as the masses by writing a big-character poster of his own, entitled “Bombard the Headquarters,” protesting that “some leading comrades” had adopted “the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie … encircling and suppressing revolutionaries” and “stifling opinions different from their own.” You can imagine people’s reaction: what can it mean when the great leader Chairman Mao has gone so far as to write a big-character poster? It can mean only one thing—that Chairman Mao is in the same boat as ordinary people like themselves! No wonder, then, that the great proletarian Cultural Revolution soon engulfed China with the speed of an unquenchable wildfire.

Historically, emperors have always cut the kind of figure and spoken the kind of language expected of an emperor, no matter how exalted or how humble their origins. Mao was the only exception. After he became leader, he often acted quite out of keeping with accepted norms, taking his comrades in the Communist Party leadership completely by surprise. Mao understood very well how to whip the masses into a frenzy, and by appearing on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and greeting fanatical “revolutionary students” and “revolutionary masses” there, he impelled the high tide to ever greater heights.

The Yangtze swim was a fine example of our leader’s distinctive style. On July 16, 1966, Mao appeared unexpectedly at a mass swimming event in Wuhan. Cheered on by the ecstatic roars of the spectators lining the banks, with the strains of the revolution’s anthem, “The East Is Red,” blaring from the loudspeakers, Mao, then seventy-two years old, braved the wind and waves in the company of several thousand other swimmers, who, carried away with delight, shouted “Long Live Chairman Mao” at the top of their voices as the Yangtze swirled around them. The water they gulped down as they shouted must have been quite filthy, but when they returned to shore, they were unanimous in pronouncing it “unbelievably sweet.” At the end of his swim Mao clambered onto a boat, hitched up his swimming trunks, and waved majestically to the dense throngs lining the banks. After a brief wave he ducked into the cabin to change. In the newsreel documentary released after the event, the scene of him waving was edited in such a way that Mao appeared to be waving to the people for a good couple of minutes. If you count the propaganda posters that freeze-framed this famous moment and reproduced it endlessly during the Cultural Revolution, then Mao’s wave lasted a full ten years.

The next day the
People’s Daily
had this to say: “It is the greatest joy of the Chinese people—and of the revolutionary peoples of the entire world—that our revered leader, Chairman Mao, is in such excellent health!” Mao himself wrote about swimming the Yangtze in one of his lyric poems: “Let the wind blow and waves beat / Better far than idly strolling in a courtyard.”
^†
With such offhand gestures this leader of ours propelled the Cultural Revolution forward into the madness that would follow.

The film of Mao’s swim was shown repeatedly inside China and out, and posters commemorating the event lined the walls of Chinese cities and villages. They showed Mao in his swimsuit, smiling and waving his hand, surrounded by a throng of beaming workers, peasants, soldiers, students, and shop clerks, all striking eager, attentive poses. What other political figure would make a point of waving to his people in a swimsuit? Only Mao could carry this off.

It was a style that, in fact, preceded his becoming China’s leader, for we see evidence of it during the War of Resistance Against Japan, when he was living a hardscrabble life in the caves of Yan’an. During an interview with an American reporter Mao groped around in the crotch of his pants, catching lice, as he confidently predicted China’s victory over the Japanese.

Once the Cultural Revolution was launched, Mao kept on waving, but the party officials around him stopped clapping. Instead, their right hands would be doing a little wave of their own, because they would be clutching copies of
Quotations from Chairman Mao
. The Little Red Book, as it was called, had given them a chance to wave as well, though they never dared raise their hands as high as Mao or swing them in as wide an arc.

In the Cultural Revolution, even when Mao was not present, the party officials would wave the Little Red Book as a way of greeting the revolutionary masses. Just as today no famous actress would ever appear in public without makeup, the leadership in those days would never show their faces without the Little Red Book in hand. It was their political makeup kit.

Today the Chinese Communist Party takes the form of a collective leadership, and when the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee attend a news conference, they wave simultaneously to reporters, their hands at the same height, waving in the same arc. This always makes me think of Mao on Tiananmen, and of how impressive it was that he waved and everyone else clapped. Reflecting on the past in the light of the present, I have a sense that in today’s China we no longer have a leader—all we have is a leadership.

M
any years after the 1976 death of a genuine leader, ersatz leaders are sprouting up everywhere in China. Since 1990, as beauty contests have swept across the country, competitions to select different kinds of leaders have followed hot on their heels—contests to decide fashion leaders and elegance leaders, leaders in charm and leaders in beauty.

Although there are many varieties of beauty contests, they ultimately are all somewhat confined in scope. For example, there’s the Silver-haired Beauty Contest for women over sixty, the Tipsy Beauty Contest for pretty girls who have knocked back a few shots, and the Artificial Beauty Contest for veterans of plastic surgery.

Contests for leaders, on the other hand, are not subject to any particular limitations, and so leaders from every walk of life are emerging thick and fast. Youth leaders, child leaders, future leaders, innovation leaders, real estate leaders, IT leaders, media leaders, commercial leaders, and enterprise leaders—their numbers make one’s head spin. With so many leaders on the loose, there are naturally lots of summit meetings to go along with them—summits that make practically as many claims for themselves as does the G8. Leadership contests even extend to geography and technology, so that now we have leaders in natural scenery and leaders among elevators. Such is China in the post-Mao era: even elevators have leaders. When the sun comes up tomorrow, who knows in what corner of the land we’ll find a new pack of leaders sprouting up. If we were to hold a contest to choose the word that has lost the most value the fastest during the past thirty years, the winner would surely have to be “leader.”

In the Cultural Revolution, however, “leader” was a powerful, sacred word, a synonym for “Chairman Mao”—Mao’s exclusive property, one might say. Nobody then would have had the temerity to claim that they were a leader, not even in their dreams. “Sacred and inviolable is the motherland” was a line much favored in those days, and “sacred and inviolable” could equally well have applied to the word “leader”—and to the surname Mao as well.

In the little town where my wife grew up there was a workers’ union whose branch chairman was named Mao. “Chairman Mao” was what the locals called him, naturally enough, and it was a name he answered to quite readily. But as a result he became a target in the Cultural Revolution: he had set himself up as a second Chairman Mao, and there was hell to pay. Stung by the charge, he tried strenuously to defend himself, tears streaming down his face. “That’s what other people call me,” he cried. “It’s not what I call myself!” But the revolutionary masses would have none of it. “Other people can call you that if they want,” they said, “but you shouldn’t have answered them. By acknowledging the title, you were counterrevolutionary.”

When I was little, I thought it very unfortunate that I had the surname Yu and wished there had been a Mao on either my father’s or my mother’s side of the family, not realizing that for ordinary folk like us Mao was a name that projected authority but could be dangerous, too.

Another figure of speech was much in vogue in those days: the Communist Party was “mother of the people.” If there’s a mother, I thought to myself, then there has to be a father, so who is the people’s father? The answer was obvious: Chairman Mao. Logically, the Communist Party was Mao’s first lady, but where did that leave Madame Mao, Jiang Qing? Being a junior Red Guard, I knew only of monogamy and the equality of the sexes, not realizing that men in the old society used to have concubines and never imagining that in two or three decades it would be common for men to have mistresses and second wives. Much as I racked my brains, I never found a solution that could reconcile the legitimate claims of both Mao’s partners.

Apart from Mao I was aware of four other leaders, all foreign. In my first-grade classroom Mao’s portrait hung on the blackboard, and on the wall behind were arrayed the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin—the first foreigners I ever saw. For us, Lenin’s and Stalin’s hairstyles fell within the normal range of men’s haircuts, but we didn’t know what to make of Marx and Engels, whose hair was long even by women’s standards, for women in our town—like Chinese women everywhere then—cropped their hair short below the ear. Hair length was the established yardstick for distinguishing the sexes, and so Marx and Engels left us baffled, especially Marx—his curly hair practically covered his ears, much like the women of our town, whose ears revealed themselves only occasionally beneath their thick heads of hair. Marx’s bushy beard, of course, tended to deter us from further speculation about his gender. One of my classmates, however, brushed aside this evidence and went so far as to publicly declare, “Marx was a woman.”

For that he almost ended up being branded as a little counterrevolutionary. He wouldn’t have been the first, of course. One girl in second grade had folded a portrait of Mao in such a way that a cross had appeared on his face; somebody informed on her, and we all called her “the little counterrevolutionary.” She broke down in tears at the school assembly where her crime was reported, and she blubbered so much when making her confession that we could hardly follow what she was saying.

Afterward our first-grade teacher called our class together and asked us to expose other little counterrevolutionaries who might have burrowed their way into our ranks. Fingers of suspicion were pointed at two young children. The first had a name unknown to us, and it took some time for the teacher to establish that he was the three-year-old son of the informer’s neighbor, guilty late one afternoon of a reactionary comment. “The sun went down,” he had been heard to say. In those days Mao was commonly compared to a bright red sun, so the sun was not something to be talked of lightly, and at nightfall the most one could say was “It’s getting dark.” For him to say “The sun went down” was tantamount to saying “Mao Zedong went down.”

The second suspect was the classmate who had identified Marx as a woman. White as a sheet, he completely fell to pieces under the teacher’s questioning. Tears streamed from his eyes and snivel dripped from his nose when he was asked whether he had indeed uttered such a reactionary remark. “I think maybe”—he gave a cough—“I—I did say that.”