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| All traffic was halted at Tiananmen on July 29, 1989 |
Philip Cunningham
Tiananmen Square can be forbidding, even in the best of times. It is open to the sky and exposed to the elements, offering no shelter from sun, wind, rain or snow. As it turned out, it rained hard and long the day I chose to visit in July this year, but the skies started to clear in the late afternoon and I made a dash for it.
Emerging from the subway exit at Tiananmen East, I find the square tight under wrap. It was hard to know on any given day what degree of access would be permitted and denied, and the likelihood of being turned away was high in a season fraught with touchy anniversaries. A maddening political juncture, late July was equidistant between the security paranoia about a just-passed commemoration that could not be named and the brusque commandeering of space in central Beijing to prepare for a big parade glorifying the ruling party.
Despite being hemmed in by the calendar, I was keen to retrace some of the steps I made in 1989 to see how life had changed along the highways and byways of the kinetic protest movement, retracing marches to the Square and exploring campuses that had been hotbeds of rebellion at that time, but most of all I wanted to make a quiet ritual visit to Tiananmen Square.
The square remains a special place, at once personal and impersonal, as full of good memories as bad, a place where day trippers can still wander and wonder within shifting confines. Its vast dimensions invite expression and reflection.
If it sounds like a little pilgrimage, it is one that I have undertaken repeatedly over the last three decades, sometimes with my children in tow. It’s not always easy to get to, and getting there does not guarantee access, but I get as close as I can, even if I’m sidelined. It’s a way of paying my respects to the victims of a terrible crackdown but also a way to take the pulse of how China is dealing with its consequences after all these years.
There are days when the atmosphere is relaxed, one might even chat with men flying kites and families with kids, but there has been almost no progress in terms of reconciliation, rehabilitation or reversing of unfair verdicts. Never mind that the party ordered tanks and troops armed with guns to crash through the crowds and crush a peaceful uprising with deadly consequences. The party is always right and the truth of Tiananmen 1989 is relegated to the party’s dustbin of history like scores of other miscarriages of justice that have yet to be redressed or discussed openly in China today.
On July 29, 2019, security is almost air-tight; it took only a few steps to realize I was penned into an inspection zone, blocked from accessing the square. It was touch and go at first as to whether or not I would gain access. I knew from previous visits that a guarded, fenced-in plaza on semi-lockdown had come to be the norm, but I got talking with a bored, but not unfriendly guard who reluctantly waved me after looking at a picture of my passport's visa page on my phone.
Once I get past the checkpoint, the tension of inspection dissipates a bit, and I find something ethereal, almost otherworldly about the atmosphere. Then I realize it's the silence, the utter absence of movement. Even the normal vehicular flow that traverses the north face of the square has vanished, making for an eerie mood. The normally bustling area in front of Tiananmen Gate is devoid of motion, like a still from a film. The square eerily empty.
I knew I was pressing my luck, for July 29, 2019 wasn't just another routine lockdown on a hot summer's day, caught between the taboo commemoration of June 4 and the security-conscious preparations for October 1.
It's the day of Li Peng's funeral.
When death of the most-hated premier in modern Chinese history was announced on July 23, I was asked by the South China Morning Post to write about his political legacy, a commentary published two days later under the title, “Li Peng wasn’t the butcher of Tiananmen, just the man who took the fall for Deng Xiaoping.”
I argued that Li Peng was an enabler, odious enough, but not the architect of the crackdown which bore the decisive hand of paramount leader Deng. Wandering around the storied square on the very day that Deng's successors, Jiang Zemin and Xi Jinping, whatever their private misgivings might be, lined up in accordance with communist party practice to solemnly to salute with full honors a crony associated with one of the party’s most egregious crimes offered bitter food for thought.
The flag ceremony now taking place in front of Mao's portrait holds no interest for me other than to note that the red flag of Tiananmen was not flying high, hoisted as it was at half-mast to mark the passing of the supposedly "revolutionary" hero. Li Peng's casket was being interred at Babaoshan Cemetery which is to Mao’s good soldiers what the Yasukuni Shrine is to Japanese militarists.
It’s one thing to ban the commemoration of an epochal event that China’s ruling party can never forget but is unwilling to confront, but quite another to salute one of the people responsible for the thing you can’t talk about. It was like salt thrown on an open wound to hear the lofty party-speak surrounding the death of Deng’s sycophantic front man, recycling without a hint of revision or regret the shamefaced lies that the party has been circulating for three decades.
A lot of negative things have happened at Tiananmen Square, but there's something essentially neutral about the broad urban plaza, something in its vast scope and scale and sheer exposure to the heavens that invites the mind to recollect and the imagination to soar.
It is an emotive spot, both for the state and its discontents.
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| May 16, 1989 |
On this day, standing by the steps of the Museum of People’s History and the Great Hall of the People, I get thinking of the ebullient crowd that once gathered there, and remember fondly how the colonnaded facade of the museum provided a convenient spot to meet friends and temporary escape the heat of the crowd.
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| The museum steps in 2019 fenced off and guarded by a public security truck |
Looking from the museum to the Monument to the People’s Heroes I thought of the hunger strike that unfolded in its shadow and how the museum steps offered a comfortable perch from which to view a crowd of one million.
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| A meeting of campus friends on the museum steps in 1989, from the inside looking out |
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| Zhang Jian in May 1989 |
The first time I was invited to the student command center in the center of the square, I got pulled aside and questioned by a student guard who I wrote about in my book, “Tiananmen Moon,” giving him the moniker Crazy Zhang.
Zhang Jian, a student at the College of Physical Education, was a great believer in the cause despite being a mere freshman. Passionately protective of his older peers, who for a short time ran a protest a million strong from the vantage point of the monument, he was shot during the crackdown, but survived.
However, after a difficult life made infinitely more difficult by a government that didn’t want him but was reluctant to let him go, he eventually made it to France where he died in exile this past year. I think of his youthful bravado as I look upon the empty square, and think of so many others whose fate was forever changed that day.
Gazing at Tiananmen Gate and the bare flagpole, I am possessed of the sense that restless, hungry ghosts still wander here, awaiting the verdict of history. As Martin Luther King famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward towards justice.”
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| Wide view of the square on the 25th anniversary of the crackdown |
There are so many victims of state violence whose lives were taken away and still cannot be publicly mourned or commemorated. Why is Li Peng, who lived to ninety, being saluted when his politics led so many young idealists to be robbed of life and dispatched to early graves? It was the wrong place and the wrong funeral, but the arc is long and starting to bend.
The news of vigorous protest in Hong Kong had yet to officially break the great firewall of China, but furtive reports were leaking about large-scale protests and street battles raging in places like Admiralty and Wanchai. It was as if justice denied in the three-decade blackout about the Beijing crackdown had come home to roost in the one part of China where free expression was still possible.
Tiananmen is a long way from Hong Kong, but Hong Kong, alone in the Chinese world, has kept the spirit and memory of Tiananmen 1989 alive with annual marches and citizen-driven commemorations.
The martyrs of 1989 were remembered in Hong Kong again this year, and this annual rite of remembrance and mobilization was quickly followed by Hong Kong protests against a bill that would see its citizens extradited to the communist-controlled courts of the mainland.
The two popular uprisings, past and present, somehow became linked in my mind, the commemoration of something old bleeding into the outbreak of something new. As I paced quietly up and down the east side of the square, my phone pinged my location even as surveillance cameras whirred, security vans glided by and soldiers marched in formation. Trying to evade the notice of white-shirted, crew-cut teams of plainclothes guards, I felt like a trafficker in historic secrets trying to slip past the long arm of the thought police.
Blame it on the rain, or the heavy-handed security arrangements for Li Peng’s funeral, but the square on this day was desolate and all but devoid of people from the moment I arrived.
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| A sole cyclist cruises down Tiananmen East |
Yet even as I plod across the balefully empty semi-taboo ground consecrated by the idea that ordinary people could take history into their own hands, a new chapter of Chinese people power is unfolding in Hong Kong. I found gratification in following events on my VPN-enabled phone, checking in on news banned in the mainland, but foreign news has a slant, too.
What a different story was being told from the “legal” news, what with its state-sanctioned edits of flag-wavers saluting the party’s rule and out-of-context reports about civilian brutality against police, yet the official reports could not be entirely discounted. The violent acts of protesters disturbed me.
Beijing students never fought pitched battles with the police, but in more general terms there were some intriguing parallels and linkages. For one, popular participation in both events broke the one-million mark, and in each case the massive outpouring of discontent was interpreted as a challenge to the party’s monopoly on power. The two movements remain unique, yet share a similar gravitas and some sympathetic vibrations, like twin baskets swinging uneasily from a bamboo pole hoisted over the shoulder.
Hong Kong, which to its credit long carried the torch for justice denied at Tiananmen, is now the scene of fiery, smoky, pitched battles in its own streets, driven by questions of identity, fears for the future and resentment of the status quo. Police target masked protesters, masked protesters target police. The lack of restraint on both sides is raising the heat; the lack of leadership among Hong Kong's democratic factions is allowing a vanguard of arsonists and masked bullies to redefine the once-peaceful movement.
It would seem the ghosts of an improperly interred past hovers above the paving stones of Tiananmen and continues to haunt China, even in its furthest corners, especially in its furthest corners.
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| photo of tightly patrolled square taken on 25th anniversary of crackdown |
The celebratory pomp scheduled for National Day, including a big military parade by day and fireworks at night over Tiananmen Square is at risk of being upstaged in real time with fire and fury on the streets of Hong Kong where ragtag parades of furious civilians and masked arsonists mock the ruling party.
In contrast to the unsettling news reports from Hong Kong, it is utterly tranquil here. Almost too still, since the facade of stability comes at the price of oppressively policing freedom.
It is only near the National Museum, where a brief onrush of bodies streams past me, under guard, at a designated opening in the gate, that I feel briefly connected with the Tiananmen of old. Not only does the flurry of foot traffic bring a semblance of life to the otherwise sterile environs, but the press of gently impatient bodies, if only for an instant, brings back the memory of fording the great crowds of the day back in 1989.
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| Tiananmen East on May 16, 1989 |
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| The monument, now fenced off, was a popular vantage point in 1989 |
I recollect the murmur of millions as I drift to the north face of the Square under a darkening sky. A small stream of vehicular traffic is being permitted now, and pedestrians, after strict inspection of ID and the X-raying of bags, are free to promenade near Tiananmen gate.
The Mao portrait mounted on the resplendent imperial Gate still holds the pride of place on the people's square, its visage still gazing recursively at the marble mausoleum that holds the man's mortal remains.
The portrait is an obligatory photo-op so routine and iconic as to seem banal unless one makes an effort to think about it. Why do tourists, local and foreign alike, still vie to be pictured with Mao? Why do the selfie-snapping hordes still permit Stalin's man in China to photobomb their lives? When will enough be enough?
I muse that a humble piece of Tang poetry, rendered in classic calligraphy, would be a good replacement for the anachronistic painted likeness of a tyrant.
And yet today’s youth, innocent of history, solemnly pose with Mao in a way that seems earnest, decent and kind.
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| Children from an art school strike a group pose in front of Mao's portrait |
Where such innocence reigns, can disenchantment be far behind?
The sky above is now a technicolor wonder, a delightful counterpoint to the heavily shadowed overtones of the Square. Despite the ever-present surveillance, intrusive security and political portent, there is a glimpse of the sublime in this forbidden zone, even on a most forbidding day.
