Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (23 page)

In the early 1970s, the entire Chinese leadership, except Chairman Mao, would turn out at the Beijing Airport to greet a visiting dignitary. In the center in the light coat is Jiang Qing (Madame Mao). To her immediate right is Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping, then Premier Zhou Enlai, and Gang of Four member Wang Hongwen. To the left of Madame Mao (who was a Gang member herself) is Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua (a Gang sympathizer), an unidentified woman, Gang member Zhang Chunqiao, and Gang member Yao Wenyuan
.
Photo: John Burns/
Globe and Mail

Classmate and snitcher Bright Pearl Tang far left) washing her laundry under a slogan exhorting us to attack Deng Xiaoping’s policies: “Enthusiastically develop a massive criticism in academic fields!”
Photo: Jan Wong

T
he swelling chords of China’s state funeral dirge boomed from the campus loudspeakers. It was January 8, 1976. Premier Zhou Enlai had died of cancer at 9:57 that morning. His health had been a state secret. We had been vaguely aware that he was sick, but there had been no television reporters doing stand-ups outside his hospital, no day-by-day bulletins.

I had never seen such universal grief. It seemed everyone was weeping, men and women, old people and children. Some were almost hysterical. Bus drivers, street sweepers and shop clerks all went about their chores with swollen red eyes. My professors especially mourned his passing. My classmates wept on each others shoulders. I cried, too, overwhelmed by the reaction to his death.

Of the top Communist leaders, only Zhou had tried to mitigate the suffering of the Cultural Revolution, to stem some of the madness and to protect some of his old comrades from Mao’s wrath. Although Zhou was a yes-man who never crossed Mao, many Chinese loved him because he was the best of the lot. What they didn’t know was that he was so politically weak that he had failed to save his own adopted daughter, who in 1968 was tortured to death in prison at the age of forty-seven.

Every heir apparent had come to grief. President Liu Shaoqi died naked on the cement floor of his prison cell during the Cultural
Revolution. Marshal Lin Biao perished in a plane crash in 1971 while fleeing allegations that he had tried to assassinate the Great Helmsman. A few months later, when Mao caught a bad cold and thought he was near death, he impetuously crowned Zhou Enlai his successor. “Everything depends on you now,” Mao told Zhou, according to Mao’s personal physician, who was present. “You take care of everything after my death. Let’s say this is my will.”

Mao soon changed his mind, appointing instead Wang Hongwen, a member of Madame Mao’s radical and powerful clique, subsequently known as the Gang of Four. The move was vintage Mao. By playing off Zhou against the Gang, Mao ensured no faction was strong enough to challenge his authority. With the premier’s passing, many Chinese felt they had lost the last voice of reason in the government. Everyone was apprehensive about what would happen next.

My classmates began making white tissue chrysanthemums to wear as a sign of mourning. One PLA classmate, Liang Haiguang, was so upset that he composed a poem in the premier’s memory. Liang, who came from an elite family, was privy to inner-circle gossip. Unlike the rest of us, he knew that Zhou had been under attack for months by Madame Mao and her cohorts. He was not surprised when the Central Committee instructed Chinese embassies around the world to lower flags to half-mast for just one hour. And he knew why Beijing University banned black armbands. Madame Mao was determined to suppress public mourning for her arch enemy.

When Party Secretary Pan heard about Liang’s sudden burst of creativity, he dropped by the dormitory. “A poem in memory of Premier Zhou is inappropriate,” he declared, and ordered Liang to hand over the poem. My classmate refused. Pan repeated the order. Liang rolled the poem up into a little ball, glared at Pan and popped it in his mouth. Pan grabbed Liang by the arm. Liang, the tallest soldier in our class, gave him a shove that sent him flying across the room. As Pan lunged at Liang, other students rushed forward to separate them.

The day of Zhou’s funeral, Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping read the eulogy. Madame Mao scandalized everyone by wearing a bright red sweater, the symbolic color of happiness, which could be
glimpsed under her dark tunic. Mao did not attend. The university forbade my classmates to go into the city that overcast day, but a million weeping Beijingers braved icy winds to line the Avenue of Eternal Peace as his cortege made its way to the crematorium.

Mao kept both Deng and the Gang off balance by picking a nonentity named Hua Guofeng as acting premier. “With you in charge, I’m at ease,” Mao scribbled shakily to Hua in a note that wasn’t made public until later.

That winter, we threw ourselves into another political campaign. Whereas I naively thought we were attacking bourgeois thinking in the abstract, by now most Chinese understood it was a veiled attack on Deng. I had no idea that my classmates and I were bit players in the power struggle. Over and over again, the Gang of Four had used Beijing University to score political points against Zhou. Our stint of hard labor at Big Joy, for instance, was really a broadside at the premier’s moderate educational policies.

As Qing Ming, the Festival for Tending Graves, drew near that spring, many people, angered at the earlier suppression of mourning activities, began placing homemade paper wreaths in Zhou’s memory at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. It was the first time that wreaths for an individual had ever been laid there. Others tied so many white paper chrysanthemums to the shrubs that by early April, it looked like an unseasonable snowfall had blanketed the square. I didn’t realize I was witnessing the first spontaneous anti-government protest in Communist Chinese history. By commemorating Zhou Enlai, the Chinese people were indirectly expressing their anger at Mao and the Gang of Four. Under a dictatorship, commemorating a dead Communist premier was the safest, perhaps
only
, way to stage a protest.

My classmates had been warned to stay away from Tiananmen Square. Few dared disobey. Liang Haiguang, my poetry-eating classmate, slipped down and took snapshots of the mountains of wreaths. But he lost his nerve and exposed the film – the only place to develop it was in a state store. No one had told
me
not to go to the square, so I began biking there every day. The Monument to the People’s Heroes was plastered with handwritten poems, and the floral tributes were piled ten feet high so that they covered the top plinth. The
wreaths bore signed banners such as: “The Revolutionary Masses at the Number Seven Ministry of Machine Building” or “Your Sons and Daughters of the Border Region.” People were no longer afraid, it seemed, to stand up and be counted.

On Sunday, April 4, the Festival for Tending Graves, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the square. As I pushed my way up the steps of the monument, I realized people were copying down the poems. I pulled out a notebook and began jotting them down, too, without quite understanding why.

It was signed Wei Zhou, a pun for “Protect Zhou.” Other poems attacked Empress Wu Zetian, a seventh-century Tang dynasty empress who reigned after her husbands death. Still others criticized the first Qin emperor, who executed scholars, burned books and built the Great Wall with corvée labor.

As I copied them down, I could not figure out why thousands of perfectly normal people had developed a sudden passion for melodramatic Chinese poetry. I did not understand that Empress Wu and the first Qin emperor were surrogates for Madame Mao and Mao himself and that the poets were using the hoary Chinese technique of using the past to attack the present. Similar outpourings occurred in other cities – Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, Nanking – but I knew nothing of this at the time.

A middle-aged man with hard eyes stopped me as I tried to leave. He must have seen me copying down the poems. “Who are you?” he demanded, gripping the seat of my bike so I couldn’t get away.

“I’m a worker,” I lied nervously.

“Where?” he persisted.

“The Number One Machine Tool Factory,” I blurted, wondering if he would believe I was a member of the Iron Women’s Team. But he didn’t ask further, and let me go. Thoroughly rattled, I bicycled the hour back to the university. Only a plainclothes agent would be so aggressive. What was going on? Why were police in Tiananmen Square? Why had my classmates been forbidden to go to the square? What was wrong with putting up some wreaths in memory of Zhou Enlai? And what if the agent had jotted down the license number on my bicycle? Would I be expelled – again?

The next morning in class, word spread quickly that I had some of the contraband verse. As our professor droned on for four hours about Engels’s analysis of Crete as a slave society, my classmates surreptitiously passed the poems around. Unlike me, they understood the literary allusions. But none of us realized that by then the original poems had already disappeared.

On Sunday night, a few hours after I left the square, the ruling Politburo had met in emergency session in the Great Hall of the People, a hulking Stalinist structure that bordered the west flank of the square. Madame Mao peered out at the sea of wreaths and ominously labeled them “the work of class enemies.” Wang Hongwen, the Gang member who had briefly been anointed Mao’s successor, advocated a showy burning of the wreaths. Acting Premier Hua Guofeng recommended quietly clearing them away and hosing down the poems. With the Politburo deadlocked, a messenger was dispatched to seek Mao’s opinion. The Great Helmsman concurred with Hua. In the middle of the night, security forces scraped off the poems and trucked away the wreaths.

On Monday morning, the news that the wreaths had been removed spread like wildfire through the city. Tens of thousands of citizens began flocking to Tiananmen Square. Police cordons prevented anyone from pasting up new poems or delivering new wreaths. When plainclothes agents began snapping photos of the
crowd, scuffles broke out. Inside the Great Hall of the People, the Politburo watched the protesters with growing alarm.

“People are trying to burn down the Great Hall of the People,” Madame Mao screamed, according to later accounts. The Politburo debated whether to bring in troops or militia and whether to use live ammunition. Deng Xiaoping kept silent. Hua Guofeng sent Mao’s nephew to Zhongnanhai to seek the Great Helmsman’s guidance. Mao Yuanxin, a Gang of Four ally, told his uncle about the growing protests at Tiananmen and pinned the blame on Deng. In a panic, Mao issued three directives. He ordered that Deng be “isolated and investigated.” He labeled Tiananmen a “counterrevolutionary rebellion.” And although he explicitly forbade the use of guns, he authorized the use of “necessary force.”

The nephew rushed back to the waiting Politburo and read out Mao’s directives. The vote, of course, was unanimous. Deng Xiaoping knew his fate was sealed, but asked permission to go outside to persuade the crowds to go home. Zhang Chunqiao, another Gang member, retorted, “It’s too late.”

Norman called me at noon just after I got out of my four-hour lecture on Crete. We agreed to bike to Tiananmen after we finished our regular Monday-evening study session of
Das Kapital
. At ten-thirty that night, we got to the square, only to find it cordoned off and completely empty. All the floodlights were switched on. The milling crowds, the tiny white flowers, the huge floral wreaths had all disappeared. A recorded statement by Beijing mayor Wu De blared over the loudspeakers. Parroting Mao’s line, Wu called the protests counter-revolutionary. We watched work crews hosing down the square, which glistened under the bright lights. I assumed they were cleaning up debris.

I was wrong. They were mopping up blood. Had Norman and I arrived an hour earlier, we might have had our heads bashed in, too. I later found out that around dusk, when the floodlights in the square suddenly snapped on, people began drifting home, nervous that something bad would happen. By 9 p.m., only a few thousand die-hards remained. At 9:25 p.m., security agents sealed off the square. Suddenly, the gold-studded red gates of the Forbidden City swung open, and thousands of militiamen, many of them workers
from Capital Iron and Steel, poured into the square. Backed by police and five battalions of soldiers, they waded into the crowd, clubs swinging. Soldiers forced the crowd toward the north end and shoved them into waiting trucks.

Several weeks later, China’s vice-minister of public security reported that hundreds were beaten and four thousand were arrested. He did not mention any deaths. But rumors persisted. A year later, a well-connected Chinese friend told Norman that about sixty people had died that night. The friend, who was the sister of Zhou Enlai’s chief English interpreter, a man who later became ambassador to Britain, said that sixty protesters had been dragged into the Forbidden City and beheaded — because Mao had expressly banned guns. The corpses had been shipped by train to Shanghai, a Gang stronghold, where they were cremated. Shanghai had adequate cremation facilities, the friend explained, and was one place where silence could be ensured.