Tiananmen Square, 20 years later

The morning was already sweltering at 5 am when I walked out of the Bell Tower Hotel in Xian, China. A middle-aged man grabbed my arm, and my first thought when I looked into his watery eyes was the overwhelming heat and humidity. Then he sobbed and I knew what had happened. “Our children,” he said. “They are killing our children in the streets of Beijing.”

Tiananmen Square, June 4, 1989. Twenty years ago. From the perspective of China in 2009, it may as well be a century.

I’d spent much of the late winter and early spring of that year in Beijing for the San Francisco Chronicle, talking with students far into the night. When May arrived, their protest had grown into a sit-in of 150,000 people, with an estimated 1,000 participating in a mass hunger strike covered by journalists from every corner of the globe.

It was difficult to imagine the government putting up with a lengthy occupation of the square. Tiananmen was the final resting place of Mao Zedong, the gate to the Forbidden City, the symbolic fulcrum of China’s history.

I interviewed many of the student leaders – the fiery Chai Ling, the sarcastic Wu’er Kaixi, the low-key but intense Wang Dan – and it was also impossible to imagine them accepting a compromise.

Yet as late as mid-May, it had been equally impossible to imagine the tanks rolling in, crushing or blasting away nearly everything and everyone in their path. “The people’s army will never use its guns against the people,” a senior official in Shanghai had insisted just weeks before the assault.

That faith was destroyed on June 4, and its loss, perhaps as much as the killing itself, explained the weeping crowds I encountered in the weeks that followed.

THE LAST WORDS OF ZHAO ZIYANG

Most articles on the Democracy Movement and the subsequent crackdown were datelined Beijing, filed from offices and hotel rooms within a few blocks of Tiananmen. Virtually all of China’s foreign reporters were based there. Under the relentless glare of television lights and pack journalism, the front-page story had narrowed to an angry stand-off between the students and the government in the capital. The tinder waiting for a spark.

On May 19, Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Communist Party Secretary General, made an emotional visit to Tiananmen. I managed to get inside a police cordon at the upper end of the square that day, stumbling by sheer chance onto an open door into the basement of the Beijing Hotel, then making my way through its complex of underground kitchens and tunnels.

The cooks and their helpers looked up from their work as I passed, but nobody said anything. Astonishingly, no cops were stationed in the main tunnel, which led directly to Tiananmen. Even more astonishingly, there was another unlocked door at the basement’s western end.

I climbed a stairway and found myself standing about 50 yards from Zhao.

Shouting into a megaphone, he praised the students’ idealism but pleaded for an end to the strike. “We are already old, and do not matter,” he told them. “You are still young and have much time ahead of you.”

It proved to be the last time he was seen in public, the last the world would hear from him until the release of his secret memoirs in 2009. He died in 2007, after two decades under house arrest.

I was close enough to see his grimace as the roar of the protesters mounted and he could no longer speak. Zhao had done all he humanly could to defuse the crisis, but to no avail. I didn’t grasp that at the time. I too wanted to believe that the People’s Liberation Army would never turn its guns on the people.

But I also believed the story was broader than a single square in Beijing. On May 20, I set out to test that hunch in the immense hinterland of provincial China.

JUNE 4

I was on the road for roughly a month, 15 days before the assault on the square and ten days afterward, filing 30 dispatches from six provinces. With the exception of Shanghai, where a small foreign press community was resident, I never encountered another western journalist.

Young people were on the march everywhere, from Canton in the southeast to Xian in the northwest, and almost everywhere they were flanked by factory workers, civil servants, farmers, and on occasion even PLA soldiers in uniform. It was as though the entire cast of characters that carried the Communist Party to victory in the world’s most populous nation had once more taken to the streets – this time, to ask that the party itself change.

In the months leading up to June 4, it was commonplace in international coverage to suggest that the protesters were politically naïve, that they didn’t really understand what terms like “democracy” and “personal freedom” meant. I’d partly agreed with that judgment in Beijing, where the movement was at its most inflexible and its media-aimed gestures – notably the installation, right under Mao’s portrait, of a towering “Goddess of Democracy” modeled on the Statue of Liberty – were heedlessly flamboyant.

“We too were young once,” Zhao had told the demonstrators on May 19. “We too protested, and we too ‘laid on the tracks’ without considering the consequences.”

No one listened. No one paid any attention to the urgent warning implicit in Zhao’s railroad track metaphor. The call for democracy in the square had degenerated into a shrill cry of contempt, leveled by the nation’s most privileged students at the party leadership – men and women who had survived a brutal civil war and the madness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, experiences that forged their own stubborn inflexibility.

But in the provinces, young people spoke with quiet respect for that older generation, and far more eloquently about political freedom and individual rights than most Americans. Their understanding of democracy, their hunger for it, was palpable and deeply moving.

For two weeks on that tumultuous road trip, I heard a nation express its collective dreams and hopes, not to turn back the clock, but to build on what was best in the new China and move forward.

Then came the horrifying night that Chinese refer to simply by its date: “Liu Si” – “Six-Four.”

Over the following two weeks, I reported on the run, heading east along the Yangtze River through the embattled cities of Wuhan and Nanjing, then south across the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, seldom spending more than a night or two in one place. My articles had made unpleasant waves at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, and I was fairly certain the “Gong An,” the security police, were looking for me.

China, in those fearful weeks, seemed on the verge of disintegration and civil war. “Nobody will blame you if you get the hell out of there,” my editor, Dan Rosenheim said, on one of the few occasions I was able to make a telephone call to America. Dan, who is now the news director of CBS5, had covered the war in Central America during the 1980s. He understood the stakes.

Often, I traveled after dark in the company of young people fleeing toward British-controlled Hong Kong and Portuguese Macao. Their only hope now was to get out.

The eloquence of May was gone, evaporated in the sweltering heat into terror and regret. Into the weeping crowds of June.

On the 15th day of that cataclysmic month, I was tracked down by the Gong An in a small town on the Pearl Delta and expelled from China.

THE LEGACY OF TIANANMEN

More than 15 years passed before I returned to the places I’d known best as a correspondent in China, on an assignment for National Geographic. I was lost at every turn, surrounded by gleaming skyscrapers where half-crumbled Qing courtyards once stood and racing along six-lane freeways that had been carved out of ancient rice paddies.

Many in the West, especially in business circles and organized labor, insist that this China is a fantasy – that the “real story” of the post-Tiananmen economic boom is overseas dumping of exports and domestic exploitation of starving workers.

The critics are the fantasists. Never in history have the economy and living standards of a large nation been so dramatically transformed in so short a time. There are, of course, places the boom hasn’t touched and workers whose lives have been ended or ruined by the new industrial order, rather than enriched by it. Exceptions and abuses are sadly inevitable in the wake of such headlong, development. For the vast majority of China’s 1.3 billion people, however, the miracle is real.

The weeping is long gone now, dulled by the passage of time, swamped by a tidal wave of money and consumer goods.

Yet so too are the hopes and dreams of 1989, the fierce debates over the meaning of freedom and the rights of the individual.

The Communist Party of China killed those dreams when it sent the People’s Liberation Army into Tiananmen Square, and in the two decades since it has carefully silenced their feeblest echoes. It has seeded the conviction, widespread today, that a choice must be made between democracy and prosperity, that freedom and progress are antithetical.

This is the great lie of our time, and the most tragic legacy of June 4, 1989.

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5