Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (35 page)

As the soldiers massacred people, the loudspeakers broadcast the earlier government message warning everyone to stay home. I leaned over the balcony to watch some people cowering in the parking lot. The crowd ran away after each heavy volley, then to my amazement crept back slowly, screaming curses and weeping with rage. Perhaps like me, they couldn’t believe that the People’s Liberation Army was shooting them. Or perhaps the decades of propaganda had warped their minds. Perhaps they were insane with anger. Or maybe after stopping an army in its tracks for days, armed only with moral certitude, they believed they were invincible. By now, I was recording heavy gunfire every six or seven minutes. It occurred to me that was about as much time as it took for people to run two blocks, calm down, regroup and creep back.

In the darkness I could make out a double row of soldiers, approximately one hundred and twenty men across. At 2:35, they began firing into the crowds as they marched across the square. With each volley, tens of thousands of people fled toward the hotel. Someone commandeered a bus, drove it toward the soldiers and was killed in a hail of gunfire. The crowd began to scream, “Go back! Go back!” The soldiers responded with another hail of bullets.

By 2:48, the soldiers had cleared a wide swath at the north end of the square. The crowd had thinned a bit. At 3:12, there was a tremendous round of gunfire, lasting several minutes. People stampeded down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Some hopped the hotel’s iron fence. I saw someone hit in the parking lot. Three minutes later, thousands of people were still running and bicycling and screaming hysterically past the hotel.

The soldiers strafed ambulances and shot medical workers trying to rescue the wounded. Some cyclists flung bodies across the back of their bicycles. Others just carried the wounded on their backs. Beijing’s doughty pedicab drivers pitched in. Between 3:15 and 3:23, I counted eighteen pedicabs pass by me carrying the dead and wounded to the nearby Beijing Hospital, diagonally across from the
hotel, or to the nearby Beijing Union Medical Hospital. I realized that I had seen the same driver in a red undershirt several times. The straw matting on his cart was soaked with blood.

At the Beijing Union Medical Hospital, someone had the presence of mind to photograph each corpse. The hospital put out an emergency call for all staff to return to work. In the next six hours, they treated more than two hundred victims, cleaning the wounds and stanching the bleeding. The staff sent home every victim who could possibly leave. Every bed was needed, and doctors feared the soldiers might come to the hospital to finish off the wounded. “It was terrible,” said one surgeon, who operated without a break for twelve hours. “We are used to handling industrial accidents. We had never seen gunshot wounds before.”

A Western military attaché told me the army used Type 56 semiautomatic rifles, a Chinese copy of the Soviet AK-47, which fires copper-clad steel-core bullets. The bullets cause terrible wounds because their soft copper jacket often flowers on impact, tearing through the first victim like a jagged knife. At close range, the steel-core bullets are powerful enough to rip through one or two more victims. The Chinese army also fired anti-aircraft machine guns that night, apparently loaded with armor-piercing bullets as thick as a man’s thumb. Designed for use against light armored vehicles, their high-tensile carbon-steel bullets have a range of three miles and can easily pass through ten victims at close range.

Across Beijing, supplies of blood, plasma and bandages ran out that night. Red Cross workers stood on the sidewalk outside the Children’s Hospital and appealed for blood. Chinese, who normally are afraid to give blood even when offered large cash incentives, streamed in to donate. “As soon as we went on the street at 3 a.m., we got a hundred volunteers,” Xing Lixiang, director of Beijing’s Blood Donation Squad, told me later.

I sat on Cathy’s balcony and wrote in my notebook: “The people are all unarmed. The army has been firing on them for two hours.” Over the loudspeakers, a cultured voice repeated: “The People’s Liberation Army has a duty to protect the great socialist motherland and the safety of the capital.” Soldiers were now shooting their way into Tiananmen Square from every direction. The barriers
people had spent so long making did not stop the tanks at all. I looked at the wounded and dying below, at the pavement chewed up by tank treads, at the smashed barricades and the smoke rising from the square. Amidst the carnage, the traffic lights kept working perfectly, switching from green to yellow to red, and back to green.

Beijing was burning. I later learned that enraged protesters killed a number of soldiers with savage ferocity. After an army officer named Liu Guogeng shot four people, he was pulled from his jeep and beaten to death in front of the Telegraph Building, near the Central Committee headquarters. The crowd doused his corpse with gasoline, set it on fire and strung his charred remains, clad only in his socks, from a bus window. So everyone would know he was a soldier, someone stuck an army cap on his head and, in a chilling attempt at levity, put his glasses back on his nose. The furious mob still wasn’t satisfied. Someone yanked him down and disemboweled him.

A twenty-year-old soldier, Cui Guozheng, met a similar fate just across from Pierre Cardin’s swank Maxim de Pékin restaurant. Eyewitnesses said that he and another soldier got out after their truck got stuck on a piece of pavement. When the mob attacked the other soldier, Cui jumped back in the truck and fired his machine gun into the crowd, hitting an old woman, a man and possibly a child. The mob stormed the truck. Cui tried to flee and made it as far as the sidewalk before he was tackled. His charred corpse swung from a pedestrian flyover for several days. The government later said that Cui never fired, “in order not to wound the masses by accident.”

Outside on the hotel balcony, I continued taking notes as bullets flew. At 3:45 a.m. there was another mass panic. This time, the crowd raced all the way down the street, until I was sitting in the middle, between them and the soldiers. Some young men wanted to toss Molotov cocktails. I saw others restrain them. At 3:56, the soldiers let loose another thunderous volley that lasted twenty seconds. I wondered how many other massacres had occurred where a journalist could sit on a balcony with a notebook and record the event down to the minute and the second.

At exactly 4 a.m., the lamps in the square snapped off. My heart froze. I could still see the students’ tents near the edge of the square.
Inside the Great Hall of the People, the lights blazed. I wrote in my notes: “This is it. They’re going to kill all the students. Are China’s leaders watching from inside the GHOP?” I concentrated on counting a convoy of more than five hundred trucks as it rumbled into the square from the west. I could hear the thunder of distant gunfire to the south. By now, I was too tired to sit in the chair, so I slumped on the cement floor of the balcony, wrapped in a hotel blanket. By 4:30 a.m., the soldiers had sealed off the northeast corner of the square. Below me, a few thousand die-hards lingered. I couldn’t believe my ears when they began singing revolutionary songs and chanting slogans. Some cyclists biked back and forth in the killing zone in front of the hotel.

I learned later that about five thousand students, many from the provinces, huddled that night around the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Chai Ling led them in singing the “Internationale.” Many had joined the hunger strike as a springtime lark. Now they were sure they were going to die on a cool night in June. When the lights went out, many students started weeping.

At precisely 4:40, the lights snapped back on. A new broadcast tape started. “Classmates,” said a metallic male voice. “Please immediately clear the square.” The message was repeated. I heard shots ring out in the square. Were they killing the students in cold blood? I later found out the soldiers were blasting away the students’ sound system.

The students took a hasty vote and decided to leave. At 4:50, I recorded more heavy gunfire and thick black smoke in the south. At 5:17, the soldiers allowed the frightened students to file out through the south side of the square, making them run a gauntlet of truncheons and fists. The students straggled past the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet and then north. As they turned west onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace, they saw a row of tanks lined up between them and the square. A retreating student hurled a curse. Suddenly, one of the tanks roared to life and mowed down eleven marchers from behind, killing seven instantly.

Afterwards, the government denied that tanks had crushed students at Tiananmen Square. But there were too many eyewitnesses, including an AP reporter. Eventually I tracked down two of the four survivors. One was a Beijing Sports Institute student whose legs
were crushed when he pushed a classmate out of the tank’s path. Another was a young factory technician whose right ear was torn off and right arm crushed. When I found him six months later, he was still afraid to leave his home because he knew he was a living contradiction of the government’s Big Lie.

Dawn broke cold and gray on Sunday, June 4. As convoys of trucks and tanks rumbled in from the east, people frantically tried to push a bus into their path. One young man ran out and tossed a rock at the tanks. At 5:30, another convoy of a jeep and nine trucks went by, firing at random. People cowered in the bushes. At 5:36, a convoy of thirty trucks entered the square, followed by twenty armored personnel carriers and three tanks. At 5:47, two soldiers dismounted and started shooting their AK-47s into the crowd. I saw many fall to the ground, but I couldn’t tell who had been hit and who was simply trying to take cover.

As Beijing awoke, ordinary people streamed toward the square, even as the pedicabs brought out more casualties. I saw a little girl and her parents take refuge behind a gray pick-up truck in the Beijing Hotel parking lot. The thick smoke from a burning bus gave some protective cover. By now, I was aware of the bullets whistling past. Still, it seemed unthinkable to stay inside. Over the next hour, I counted dozens of armored personnel carriers and tanks. It was overkill. Whom were they fighting now? Some of the tank drivers seemed lost. I saw three make U-turns, change their minds, then turn around again.

With daylight, I could see better. At 6:40, a tank plowed into the Goddess of Democracy, sending her plaster torso smashing to the ground. I saw flames and lots of smoke. Chai Ling, in a dramatic video released in Hong Kong, later testified: “Tanks began running over students who were sleeping in tents. Then the troops poured gasoline on tents and bodies and torched them.” (This turned out to be false. The tents
were
set on fire, but apparently no one was in them.) By 6:47, dozens of tanks had lined up in formation at the north end of Tiananmen Square. From a distance, the square looked solid green. The army had finally retaken the square. The broadcast stopped.

Cathy switched on the early-morning newscast. Through the open balcony door, we could still hear gunfire. “A small minority of hoodlums created chaos in Beijing,” the government announcer said. “The army came in, but not to suppress the students and the masses.” I left Cathy, an insomniac, to take notes of the broadcast while I fell into an exhausted stupor on the bed. I had been working day and night without a break for more than seven weeks, and had had almost no sleep in the past seventy-two hours. I awoke with a start a short while later as three military helicopters roared by our window on their way to the square to pick up wounded soldiers, casualties of friendly fire. More ambulances whizzed by From the balcony, I recorded a lull as a crowd massed outside the hotel. Fifteen minutes later, the soldiers charged forward, firing directly into the crowd. Bodies littered the ground. I saw a couple of people use their own blood to smear slogans on a sheet of plywood propped against a barricade at the intersection. “Kill Li Peng!” said one slogan. “Blood debts will be repaid with blood,” read another.

By then, I was numb. It seems strange in hindsight — perhaps it was my Chinese starvation genes — but I felt I had to eat. I could tell it was going to be a long, bloody Sunday, and without some food, I knew I would not last the day When I suggested we try to get breakfast downstairs in the hotel dining room, neither Cathy nor Norman objected. We left Simon Long behind to take notes.

Downstairs, I discovered that many other journalists had spent the night on their balconies and seemed to have the same surreal craving for scrambled eggs. Mitch Farkas, a husky soundman for CNN, told us that we had just missed a fight. When the Chinese waitresses announced there was only coffee, no food, because the chef was too upset to cook, a couple of reporters became unhinged and started yelling that they would cook their own breakfast. Suddenly the chef appeared in the dining room. He was crying. “I’ve seen too many people killed last night,” he said, his shaking hand resting on a doorknob. Everyone stared at the ground, ashamed of the boorish behavior of their colleagues. A waitress broke the silence. “We are all Chinese,” she said. “We love our country.” Everyone began apologizing to everyone else, Mitch said,
and the cook pulled himself together and announced that he would feed the reporters because “you are telling the world what happened.”

As he recounted this, Mitch himself started crying. Like us, he was physically and mentally drained. When he broke down, Cathy and I did, too. I — who cried at the drop of a hat, when Beijing University was going to expel me, when I couldn’t hack the labor at Big Joy Farm — realized that I hadn’t shed a single tear all night. The enormity of the massacre hit home. So many people had been killed. Although it had been years since I was a Maoist, I still had harbored some small hope for China. Now even that was gone. I sat there weeping as the waitresses passed out plates of toast and fried eggs. None of us could eat.

By the time we returned to Cathy’s room, it was after nine in the morning. A French tourist asked if she could look from our balcony. Tens of thousands of enraged people were streaming toward Tiananmen Square, and a huge crowd gathered at the intersection in front of the hotel. It was such an extraordinary moment, and yet they looked so ordinary. The men wore shorts and sandals. Some of the women carried purses. A few people even brought their children, because Chinese never use babysitters. In the background, city buses smoldered. Two blocks away, a double line of soldiers sat cross-legged, facing them, along the northeast edge of the square, backed by rows of tanks.