Tiananmen Moon: Beida Summit

Philip J Cunningham marched with student protesters in 1989 at Tiananmen Square and conducted interviews with student activists for BBC and ABC news. His memoir of that time, Tiananmen Moon; Inside the Chinese Student Uprising in 1989, will be published in May by Rowman & Littlefield, but he will be sharing excerpts of it here (such as the first and second in this series).

By Philip J Cunningham

For the second time in a day I’m on the run with Chai Ling. For the second time in a month I find myself in a beat-up jalopy racing towards the Beida student center at Sanjiaodi. Again I am huddled together with members of the vanguard, only this time it’s not musicians wanting to know what the students are up to but the student leadership itself.

The interior of a moving van is a reasonably good place to hide, assuming the driver is trustworthy and the vehicle not bugged. Chai Ling sits behind me in the third row, curled up like a kitten, snuggled next to her puppy dog husband Feng Congde. They look like feuding lovers who have just made up. I am seated in the middle of the second row with a bodyguard named Yang on one side, a professor on the other. Way in the back, and up front, yet more students are squeezed in, keeping pretty much to themselves.

The driver turns north then eventually works his way west. Chai Ling is reviewing the familiar scenery with the intense appreciation of someone ready to take an extended trip abroad. Both she and her husband had been talking about studying abroad; maybe they had one foot out the door already. Start a revolution, then fly away in time for the start of a new school year.

"There's that restaurant!" she exclaims. A few minutes later, she gets nostalgic about another landmark known to her and her husband. "Remember the time we went there?"

The mop-headed driver, who could have passed for the fifth Beatle, zooms at high speed along the ring road, only shifting gears to slow the van down when we get to the busy streets of Haidian District.

"Do you think we could visit Beida one more time?" Chai Ling asks. She does not seem to be addressing the question to anyone in particular.

"That's possible,” the bodyguard next to me says after a pause. "But let's wait till it gets dark."

"Beida, Beida, I want to go to campus! I want to go home one last time!" she pleads with a girlish flair.

Talk turns to politics again. I choose not intrude and cannot fully grasp what is going on, but I don’t want to bring undue attention to myself asking too many questions. From what I could gather, Chai Ling is still on the verge of running away, but due to the intervention of her husband and some friends, she dumped Wang Li and is now going to postpone "going underground" until a more necessary and appropriate time. More importantly, she seems to be enjoying some kind of high-level support for her political line, and even the protection of bodyguards. If so, who was the ultimate protector?

Are the students working in tandem with protégés of the fallen Zhao, or perhaps a military protector? There had been rumors of old generals being supporters of the cause, but students also liked to say they were free agents, not aligned to any faction. That’s what the May 27 meeting was about.

Who could possibly be lending support to the students at this late stage, enough tacit support to make them utterly unafraid of arrest in the Beijing Hotel? Was it Public Security? A rogue intelligence group? Or just plucky citizen volunteers?

And how does the interview we did this morning fit into all this? At that time she expressed disappointment with fellow students but she also talked of overthrowing the government! ABC News had already indicated they were going to use the tape, and it was nothing if not highly incriminating. If Chai Ling is still in town when the interview is aired, her likeness and passionately expressed anti-government ideas will be all that much better known.

Finally, I decided to interrupt their back-seat musings. "Chai Ling?”
“Hi, Jin Peili,” she smiles as I turn around to face her.
“You know, that interview, the interview today, you said a lot of things that could, like, get you in trouble. Are you sure you want it to be broadcast?"
"Yes."
"It's not too late to call ABC and ask them not to air it, or at least delay it," I advise. "If your life is in danger."
"I want it to be broadcast," she answers pointblank, without batting an eyelash.
"But you said some things. . .like about the government, you know, wanting to overthrow it."
"When will it go on the air?" asks Feng, with a sudden perk in interest.
"Sometime tomorrow."
"Don't worry, we will be gone by then."
"You're sure?"
"Yes. After we visit Beida, one last time," he says.

I was beginning to feel the immense responsibility that goes with putting something provocative on the air, especially something political. Millions would see it, but more to the point, it would be closely monitored by Chinese security.

Feng grins at me to dispel my doubts "Don't worry, you've done a good job. We all appreciate your help."

"Since satellite transmission has been cut," I explain, "ABC has to take the tape out of China by hand. It will be carried to Hong Kong or Japan, and then relayed by satellite to New York. The earliest it could be on the air is the evening news, American time, which means early tomorrow morning here."

"It's fine, no problem," he says. Feng is disarmingly self-assured.
"It's not too late to call, if you need more time."
"Jin, don't worry. We will be gone by then."

So, they still plan to run away, and this little jaunt, this little joy ride they have invited me to partake in, is for what? For fun? Or a mix of business and pleasure, saying goodbye while just taking care of some last-minute logistics.
I have trouble putting together the young woman who confessed and cried her heart out earlier today, face contorted and full of pain, with the breezy young woman in the van.

What's going on? Why is Feng Congde so confident that nothing will happen to them? Was he reckless or did he know something that his wife did not when she made her mad dash for the train station? What happened at the train station, anyway? There were so many things I wanted to ask, but given the gentle cooing sounds behind me it didn’t seem like the right time.

Chai Ling was no stranger to the Beijing Hotel, she had been there twice today. A few days before, I had seen her meeting there at midnight in a darkened coffee shop with Wang Dan and Wuerkaixi. Yet on the square, one had to pass through all kinds of security ropes just to get in her vicinity.

The student leaders seemed unnecessarily stringent in their security, but an illegal movement of that size required vigilance. So why was it that, in the most-heavily monitored hotel in town, the student rebels seemed so at home, if not outright welcome? I knew from talking to the floor attendants that many ordinary workers supported the students, but ordinary workers also knew not to get in the way of police.

Beijing Hotel workers had marched under banners indicating their work affiliation and a gigantic ten-story banner proclaiming solidarity with the striking students had been draped from the top of the hotel during the height of the protest. The multi-storied banner, partially draped in front of my room, each character the size of a person, read:

WHO IS TO SAY WHAT IS THE FATE OF SO VAST A LAND? DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM ARE THE SHARED IDEALS OF ALL HUMANITY!

With a banner like that, suspended from the 17th floor, running all the way down to the seventh floor, right past my window as it turned out, one could imagine why the students might be attracted to that particular building, but why was the banner permitted in the first place? Was there some kind of connection between the security staff of the Beijing Hotel and the student movement?

If there was support, it was hidden and erratic. Even now, the van took precautions in ferrying us across town. Not only had the driver made some unnecessary turns on the way, but he took to circling Haidian District like an airplane, awaiting official permission to land.

When I ask about this the bodyguard explains that the driver is killing time, waiting for the cover of darkness before slipping onto campus. But Beida is a gated community. Would the guards let this vehicle, the student command on wheels, pass through the gated checkpoint? It was no secret Beida harbored activists, wouldn’t the secret police be looking for student radicals on campus, or were they such Keystone cops that it never occurred to them to look in obvious places?

As Yang shrewdly observes, the driver will not attempt to enter Beida until darkness falls. When he at last pulls up to the front gate on the south side of campus and greets the guards, I worry how they might react to my presence, --did the presence of a foreigner make the entourage look less innocent, or more? One guard presses his face up to the window, mentally registering my presence with eye contact, but it ends with that. We are then waved in. Once inside the huge walled campus, the driver again adopts a defensive posture, crawling in long slow circle around the lake and tree-dotted grounds while Chai Ling and her friends heatedly discuss if they should get out of the van, and, if so, where.

The tentativeness of the travelers upon arriving at Beida reminds me of my midnight visit to Beida with Cui Jian on the eve of May 4. Sitting inside a vehicle creates a certain perception, perhaps illusory, of security. One feels safer inside than outside. For me, sitting in the back of a car reminded of the security of childhood when everything important was decided by your parents sitting up front. For an American like me, being in a car had deep associations going back to childhood. But what comfort did the hum of a vehicle give Chai Ling and Feng Congde, for whom riding in a car was still a novelty?

The tree-shrouded campus is quiet and dark. We make a clockwise sweep, tooling past Shao Yuan, the foreign dorm, then the library and then back down a dirt road leading to the Chinese student dorm adjacent to the hot spot of Sanjiaodi.

The van draws up to the stairwell of the dorm and the driver tells everyone to get out. As soon as we have all clambered out, he hits the pedal and speeds away. We are whisked into the unlit hallway by waiting escorts. We mount a dark, dank stairwell, then turn down an empty corridor. A door is opened, revealing a plain room lit by a bare bulb, a room packed full of people.

Once we are inside, the door is closed and Chai Ling is greeted with hugs and pats on the back by her comrades, like a war hero just in from the battlefield. A few of her supporters eye me curiously, with stares neither friendly nor unfriendly, because I arrived with her group, but the attention is clearly focused on her.

We are led up another flight of stairs and into another room. Again the door was closed quietly but firmly behind us. Chai Ling is no stranger to the makeshift student headquarters, and quickly assumes the role of host rather than guest. Sensing my bewilderment if not discomfort, she leads me by the arm into an adjacent dorm room, where the furniture has been rearranged to serve as an office. She is a known entity on her home turf, just being seen with her makes my presence more acceptable, just as being with me made it easier for her to navigate the Lido Hotel earlier in the day.

We squeeze into a dorm room that had been converted into a primitive communications office. There are three bunk beds and a desk in the middle of the floor, from the ceiling dangles the usual no frills light bulb. In the corner there is a rack of metallic washing basins, hot water mugs, toothbrushes, and thermos bottles. What made this room different from nearly every other dorm room in China was the addition of a communications devise both rare and highly useful: a telephone.

Seeing the phone made me think of my friends. Was Bright still waiting for me back in my room? What about Lotus? And where did Wang Li run off to after Chai Ling changed her mind about taking the train south?

"Can I make a phone call?" I ask.
"You may," one of the students answers, "But be careful about what you say, the phone is bugged."
As often is the case in China, convenient communication comes at a price.
"I want to call the Beijing Hotel."
"Go ahead."

I dial my room number, wondering what cryptic words I should use for a phone call bugged on both ends, but no such luck for the eavesdroppers tonight. No answer.

Chai Ling is preoccupied, instantly immersed in student dealings, though she manages to flash a friendly little smile my way every once in a while. For the second time today we sit on the same bed, she on one end, me on the other. At one point she breaks from her group to come over and offer me a drink of water, perhaps trying to return the hospitality of the morning. But basically she is too busy to chat, let alone field my questions.

I lean back against the wall, sipping hot water, trying to take it all in. One by one her friends and followers pop in to talk with her, sometimes waiting on line to do so. It’s like a campus version of the broadcast tent.

Some of the talk is semi-confidential, judging from excited whispers, cupped hands and hushed tones. I overhear talk about going somewhere by airplane. I hear talk about the military. Just at a moment where the conversation takes an interesting turn, with military overtones, my appointed companion Yang, the young bodyguard, takes a seat next to me and, almost deliberately it seems, begins to distract me with a different sort of conversation.

"What sports do you like?"
"What are your hobbies?"
"Do you like music?"

When I tell him that I like to play guitar, he gets up and retrieves a cheap folk guitar that had been abandoned on the other bed. He presses me to play something, anything. I refuse several times but can’t bring myself to say I’d rather be eavesdropping than singing, so at last I yield to his request.

I finger a few chords, tune the strings a bit, and strum some more. The reverberations of the guitar comfort me and without even a glimmer of conscious thought, my hand starts to finger chords to “Tiananmen Moon.” I strum lightly and sing quietly to myself, in a whisper really, because I don’t like to perform. The song sounded so innocent, so anachronistic now.

"Midnight moon of Tiananmen,
When will I see you again?
Looking for you everywhere,
Going in circles around the Square."

The Tiananmen Protestors, Then and Now

China Beat sent out a note to a few scholars and journalists who have carefully watched and written about the events of 1989, asking them to send in short commentaries detailing what they wish more people knew, associated with, or remembered about that spring. We ran the first piece in this limited series, by John Gittings, last week. This is the second piece.

Jonathan Unger is a Professor at Australia National University, the former editor of the China Journal, a co-author of Chen Village, and editor or co-editor of many books, including The Pro-democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces.

By Jonathan Unger

Looking back in time from a distance of two decades, we are apt to forget the economic circumstances in which the nationwide protests of 1989 arose, as well as the vantage points of the protests’ participants.

In the late 1980s, people across China felt frustrated and angered by inflation and mounting corruption. This dissatisfaction had been moving toward a crisis point over the previous couple of years despite the fact that urban living standards, on the whole, had been rising steadily throughout most of the Eighties. But expectations of a better life had been rising even faster, and when inflation in 1988 began to overtake wage rises in the state sector, frustrations sharpened. Workers who had been willing to countenance the corruption of officials when their own wage packets were growing healthily became resentful in 1988 and 1999 when they saw that the close kin of officials were cutting themselves an undue share of the pie while their own slices shrank.

What held the protesters together was the very fact that theirs was a protest movement, without a clear platform. Had there been one, far fewer people might have participated – for the solutions to China’s economic ailments favored by different groups among the protesters were very much at variance. Some of the protesters who came into the streets – in particular the leading intellectuals and most of the students – wanted the economic reforms to proceed faster. Others among the protesters contrarily had discovered that the economic reforms had not been to their advantage: particularly those in the working class whose incomes were declining, and those whose jobs were no longer secure or who had already been laid off. Only a fragile unity was pasted together among these groups. The better educated had little sympathy for the circumstances of the laborers, and for much of the time the university students sought to keep the working class at arms’ length, preventing workers from entering the perimeters of their own demonstrations.

All the same, more than merely anger at economic woes and corruption held the various protesters on the same side of the political divide. They did project a vague common vision of what they wanted, and it was summed up in the word “Democracy.” The word was blazoned on a multitude of their banners. But by “democracy,” few of the protesters meant one person, one vote. Most of the university students and intellectuals had no desire to see the nation’s leadership determined by the peasants, who comprised a majority of the population. Many urban residents held the rural populace in disdain, and their fear was that the peasants would be swayed by demagogues and vote-buying.

Some of the protesters were nonetheless vaguely pro-democratic just so long as democracy could be put off to a future time. The then-Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang favored a policy called “neo-authoritarianism,” under which the Party would act as a benevolent autocracy until such time as the middle class had developed sufficiently to predominate in a very gradually democratized polity. Until then, China would remain in a state of tutelage, much as Sun Yat-sen had proposed in the 1920s. This was the program of the Party’s reform camp, and it drew support from among the urban educated elite.

If not immediate political democracy in the shape of multiparty elections for the nation’s leaders, what some of the educated protesters in Tiananmen Square wanted, rather, was an independent press that could play a watch-dog role over the political leadership. They wanted access to more interesting magazines and films. They also wanted what they considered a more fair distribution of incomes, in which they would be beneficiaries. They wanted academic freedom, and the ability to safely advise and constructively criticize the government.

But their use of the word “Democracy” also represented more than that, and its mass appeal lay in this additional dimension. Above all, the great bulk of the participants in the protests wanted freedom from the petty constraints imposed upon them at their place of work or school. For decades, access to travel tickets, entertainment, accommodation, medical care – a vast range of advantages and sanctions large and small – had been controlled by work-unit bureaucrats, who dispensed favors to those who kept their noses clean or, worse yet, to those who obediently kowtowed to these Party hacks. People wanted out from under these stifling controls.

Everywhere across China, they named their new student groups Autonomous Student Associations (in China, literally Student Self-ruling [zizhi] Associations). So too, the organizations that the intellectuals established almost invariably were titled Autonomous associations. The workers’ groups were titled Autonomous Workers’ Leagues. The key demand quickly became that the government recognize their organizations, and not exact retribution for having established them. What the urban populace of China was demanding, in short, was no less and no more than “civil society” – an intermediary sphere between state and society that is not controlled by the state and that creates a ‘space’ between the polity and the populace. In China, even innocuous independent organizations had not been allowed. For the previous forty years all “mass organizations” were creatures of the party-government. What the populace essentially demanded was simply an opportunity to relate to each other without interference or oversight. It was for this reason that this word Autonomous held importance to them.

It was precisely these demands, harmless though they might appear, that seem to have frightened the old men of Zhongnanhai, China’s Kremlin. It is likely that the crisis could have been brought peacefully to a close had they formally recognized the new organizations’ right to exist. But from beginning to end, China’s leaders felt they needed steadfastly to refuse that recognition. Their whole conception of the reformed Leninist state was at stake. Earlier in the Eighties, they had already bent enough to allow advisory forums containing “leading personages” to be formed. But even if some semi-autonomous forums were to exist in the new China, they, the Party leaders, would initiate them. First the students and then quickly other social groups were taking that initiative out of the Party’s hands, were grabbing the nettle for themselves. It signaled to the aged Party leaders a dangerous political environment in which people not only were shaping their own operational sphere but, worse yet, might well wish to use that new-found ground in future to play an active role in the political arena. In fact, they were in the midst of doing so in Tiananmen Square. This went against everything that the Party leaders were accustomed to or believed in – which is that the Communist Party is uniquely positioned to steer China into a better future, without interference. They were not willing to see the Leninist polity, their polity, successfully challenged and weakened.

Out in the Square, meanwhile, a new rights consciousness was quickly emerging, but it was still a crudely formed consciousness. As noted, the protesters who had joined one or another of the new jerry-built associations had been acting on an emotional feeling about what they were against – irritated by corruption and the difficulties in the economy and tired of the Party’s control over so many aspects of their lives. But very few of the activists and protest leaders held any real notion of what type of political structure might conceivably take the place of the strong-handed Party machine. Very few, even among the intellectuals, had any coherent political program to offer – just very vaguely worded demands for a liberalization and relaxation of the system. It was a movement of protest that was groping blindly in the dark.


Then and Now
If anything, many of the protesters at Tiananmen were more in favor of political liberalization than they are now. At the time, they admired Mikhail Gorbachev and the political reforms he was carrying out. But the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the corruption and plunging living standards that soon followed under Boris Yeltsin’s rule soured China’s educated on the idea of Party-led political liberalization along Gorbachev’s lines. By the mid-1990s, young Russian women were flowing into China to work as prostitutes. Chinese considered this shocking evidence of Russia’s penury and humiliation. Many of the urban educated who had demonstrated in 1989 began to feel relieved that China had followed Deng Xiaoping’s policy of economic rather than political reform.

Nevertheless, many of them today still think of themselves as pro-reform, albeit in modest ways. They are apt to shake their heads in dismay at China’s environmental problems and express hopes that the government will give greater priority to the issue. Those with expertise are often eager to offer up suggestions on how to enact this or that small, incremental reform. What pass in China for academic papers are often really policy prescriptions on how to improve one or another aspect of China’s physical or administrative infrastructure, or relieve traffic congestion, or provide for a more effective education curriculum.

Generally, the urban educated today have what they wanted at the time of the Tiananmen protests. They feel they can make such recommendations and that their expertise is respected. They and their children also now have their personal space, in the shape of access to websites, chat rooms, and a wide variety of publications and films. They can say what they want so long as they stay within increasingly generous boundaries and do not challenge the Party’s political monopoly.

Above all, in their material livelihoods the urban educated are doing very well, whereas at the time of the Tiananmen protests in 1989, they had good reason to be angry. Their salaries were low, and sour jokes circulated about private barbers earning more with their razors than hospital surgeons with their scalpels. But in the years since, there has been a deliberate government policy to favor the well-educated. Year after year the professionals on government payrolls have been offered repeatedly higher salaries. During one year in the late 1990s, the pay of all of the academics at China’s most prestigious public universities was literally doubled in one go. Opportunities to earn high salaries opened up just as much in the private sector. Many of the university students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 now drive cars and live in fancy high-rise apartments. They have gained a lifestyle that they had never imagined possible, and they do not want to upset the apple cart. If the government’s plan was to co-opt the salaried middle class, it has worked.

Reflecting on the Tiananmen protests, one of the most famous of the student leaders, Wuer Kaixi, flippantly articulated their desires, “So what do we want? Nike shoes. Lots of free time to take our girlfriends to a bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone. And to get a little respect from society.” They now have all that, in spades.

As a result, the members of the educated middle class, including many of the former university students who crowded Tiananmen Square two decades ago, have become a bulwark of the current regime. Summarizing a large survey of political attitudes in Beijing, a recent book concludes that, among all urban groups, “those who perceive themselves to belong to the middle class and who are government bureaucrats are more likely to support the incumbent authorities.” If there is another outbreak like Tiananmen, in fact, many of them might prefer to be on the government side of the barricades.

The Forgotten Meaning of Tiananmen

China Beat has been running excerpts from Philip Cunningham's forthcoming memoir, Tiananmen Moon, over the past few weeks, and Cunningham will continue to share selections from that work in the weeks to come. However, he also recently wrote this essay, which reflects on the way 1989's events are remembered and written about. It was also posted at Informed Comment, History News Network, and the Bangkok Post. We thought it was of sufficient interest readers to run it again in full here.

by Philip J Cunningham

“Tiananmen” is a taboo topic in China. But even in places where it is remembered and commemorated, the Beijing student movement of 1989 is best known for its bloody ending on June 4, a tragic turning point of unquestioned significance, but one which tends to obscure the amazing weeks of restraint, harmony and cooperation in crowds that swelled to a million at the height of an entirely peaceful and extremely popular social movement.

Twenty years ago, as hundreds of thousands demonstrated day after day in Beijing, as ordinary citizens joined in or supported the student protesters with offers of food, drink and hearty cheers, crime all but disappeared and with it everyday suspicions and the habitual selfishness of an alienated populace. A remarkable degree of forbearance was evident on all sides, the government included, making it possible for a truly peaceful mass movement to emerge and blossom in the sunshine of that fateful Beijing spring. Even the provocative hunger strike, despite its grim overtones of self-starvation, did not claim a single victim and was wisely called off after one week.

Given the way the media works, perhaps reflecting something intrinsic to the workings of memory itself, there is undue focus on the big-bang at the end, the ultimate failure of the movement, rather than its peaceful flowering. The brutal crackdown of June 4 tends to eclipse the breath-taking accomplishments of April 27, May 4, May 10, May 13 -- indeed nearly every day in mid-May 1989 —until martial law was declared. After the troops were moved in, protesters started to panic and mutual threats became more pointedly violent.

Of course, mourning the dead and injured, mourning the lost opportunities for China, bemoaning the injustice is essential in taking measure of what happened. But what about the good times that preceded the blow-out, the soaring dreams taken wing, the beauty of a peaceful uprising?

The understandable, but ultimately misplaced media focus on a handful of nervous politicians and their hot-headed student interlocutors has obscured not only the considerable restraint showed by the communist party and its leaders for much of the period in question, but also occludes the positive, in some cases, outright remarkable contributions of the student leadership who performed brilliantly as crowd facilitators and morale boosters. Key actors on both sides of the barricades were less than democratic in word and deed, but they were adept at utilizing native, communist-influenced political tools to manage people power to an impressive degree.

The focus on the failure of the movement, and the foibles of those best known as its representatives, also obscures the even more weighty and valorous contributions of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens whose defiance was singular and courageous, who made China's biggest peace fest both peaceful and festive. Nobody was really in charge of the crowd, as much as student activists and government emissaries might try, the crowd was self-policing and constantly undergoing spontaneous transformations, at once creating the conditions of its own existence and reacting to subtle shifts in the prevailing political winds.

While focusing on a handful of individuals is perhaps necessary for narrative simplicity, if not coherence, we need to constantly remind ourselves about the multifarious ‘silent majority' who were out there in the streets of Beijing, hoping to augur in and witness the re-birth of a more equitable and just China. Even for those without a clue as to what democracy might mean, there was courage and conviction in the way so many showed their feelings with their feet, voting with their bodies rather than ballots, putting their lives on the line, come sunrise, come sunset, at Tiananmen Square.

Now that twenty years have passed, it is time to go beyond the hate inspired by the crackdown, beyond the ad hominem attacks on inept octogenarians, dithering party cadre and inexperienced student activists, and instead to look at the larger picture of a million souls gathered purposefully and with great self-discipline on the streets and plazas of Beijing, and many more across China, who were part of a rare transformative moment in history. Nearly everyone involved, despite their disagreements, stubbornness and imperfections, exhibited a potent love for country and fellow citizens.

Now that twenty years have gone by, it is a time for reconciliation, a time to ponder the tragedy not with a desire for revenge or recrimination but with a plain telling of the truth, as best as a multidimensional and in some respects unknowable truth can be told, and to accept that this revolutionary drama-turned-tragedy, this alternatively uplifting and gut-wrenching karmic kaleidoscope, was composed of ordinary, mostly well-meaning people acting in predictably human, if not always completely noble, ways.

When mourning the victims of June 4,1989, when challenging the uncomfortable silence that has descended upon an otherwise much reformed, much more open China, let us recall not just the bloodshed that ended the popular uprising at Tiananmen, but the sustained participation of hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who, simultaneously empowered and laid vulnerable, contributed to the inspirational flourishing of peaceful protest in May 1989.

Reflecting on Tiananmen, 20 Years Later

China Beat sent out a note to a few scholars and journalists who have carefully watched and written about the events of 1989, asking them to send in short commentaries detailing what they wish more people knew, associated with, or remembered about that spring. Here is the first of their responses.

John Gittings is a research associate with the Centre for Chinese Studies at the School of Oriental & African Studies and a former writer and editor at The Guardian. He is the author of The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market and numerous other books and articles, including this 2008 review essay, “Here Be Dragons…”

There are always two points I make about 1989:

1. It was the Beijing Massacre, not the Tiananmen Square Massacre: only one or two seemed to have been actually killed in the square (I'm not even entirely sure of the evidence for that); though some students were crushed by tanks at Liubukou after they had marched out of it. This is not a pedantic point but reflects the important fact that it was the laobaixing, the people of Beijing, including students, who were killed, not students alone. Most were killed either as the army made its way in or, after it had occupied the square, when it fired lethally to keep protestors (and bystanders) at bay, and in subsequent days up and down the avenue. I don't think it helps either to continue to say that thousands may have died (as in the weaselly formula "hundreds if not thousands" used by one wire agency). Most estimates of massacres are likely to err on the high side: this was hundreds not thousands -- and it does not diminish from the horror in the slightest.

2. While the students were the mobilizing force, the events of May-June 1989 should be understood as the time when a coalition emerged of students, dissenting scholars, worker activists, and the ordinary people of Beijing -- particularly the mums and dads who watched over the barricades and who reproached the soldiers for forgetting about army-people unity. It was this coming together of different social forces which so freaked out the reactionary/conservative/dinosauric leaders.

Tiananmen Moon: Excerpt

Part II
(Read Part I here)


By Philip J. Cunningham

“Tiananmen,” whispers Chai Ling.
“What?” I ask, comprehending without comprehension.
“I'd like to see Tiananmen, one last time.”

We skip the turn to the train station—she and Wang Li had been talking about catching the first train out of Beijing-- and instead continue east on Chang’an. As the car approaches the familiar student-controlled zone around Tiananmen Square, I try to make sense of what we are doing.

I had just delivered to the international media a candid interview with a wanted student leader who said she is going to run away, while speaking forthrightly about imminent bloodshed and the desire to overthrow the government; if she was at risk before the interview, she’s at even more risk now. What was the right thing to do?

It wasn’t just a question of abstract journalistic ethics; I suffered from the vague sense that I was the one being taken for a ride. I had no objections to being a partisan in principle, but the behavior of those I was trying to help was confusing me.

The car putters slowly in deference to the thin but irregular flow of pedestrian traffic as we cut across the largely empty north face of the square.

Chai Ling peers out the rear window, studying the scene of her rise to fame in silence. The precipitous drop in the number of protesting bodies is offset somewhat by the profusion of new tents. The bright tarps and canvas from Hong Kong made the student command zone at the monument look busy with color, if not people.

It seems crazy, taking this confused fugitive, alternately frightened, alternately fearless, to the place most likely to get her in trouble. Then again, Tiananmen was still more or less under the control of her people. Have I lost my faith in people power? Reluctantly, I told the driver to swing to the south when we get to the Great Hall.

Traffic is light and what protesters there were, were widely dispersed. The thinning ranks of student volunteers serving as traffic police did not demand to know our business today.

Waved on by a weary student sentry standing on the northwest corner of the Square, we head south, halting when we reach the nearest point to the monument. All at once, Chai Ling seems to have second doubts, expressing a reluctance to get out of the car. She asks me to run over to the Monument, to see if I could find her husband.

"Tell Feng Congde I need to see him right away," she says in a grave whisper, leaning on me lightly.

"Where is he?"

"I’m not sure." She hands me another one of her little cryptic notes. "Please give this to him, my husband. He will know where to reach me."

"But how am I supposed to find him?"

"I think he is still on the Square," she says.

"Where?"

"Probably by the Broadcast Tent," she clarifies.

"I'll go with you," Patricia volunteers, switching to English. "You and me, we can get out here and walk. They are in danger. They need the car, don't they?"

"Why don't you wait for us at Kentucky Fried Chicken? It's walking distance for us, the driver can park there, and I think it will be safe."

"Kentucky?" The fugitives consider the idea. "Okay, Kentucky."

I paid the driver the meter fare plus some extra in case they need to make a quick escape.

"Be careful, you two," I say in parting. "Keep the car as long as you need to, it might be hard to find another one."

"Thank you, Jin," says Chai Ling, biting her lip, at once coquettish and shy about all the trouble.

"See you in Kentucky!"

Patricia and I ford a path through the thick but listless mass of day-trippers on the perimeter of the Square who give way to die-hards, student wardens and hardcore operatives as we get closer to the student HQ. Unwittingly imitating the government they speak of overthrowing, the student elite had become super paranoid about security. Undercover police were undoubtedly a problem, I had noticed men taking my photograph ever since May 4 and many of the photographers were older than the students, but so was I. Did that make me a spy in their eyes?

Latecomers to the cause from the provinces, for whom a mere claim of student status was initially sufficient to get access, were subsequently banished to the east periphery, though they now started to squeeze closer to the center, vying for prestige by seizing high ground.

Access to the Martyr's Monument is still tightly restricted, however, with security at the southeast corner being unusually tight, roped-off and zealously guarded for the exclusive use of the current pick of student leaders only. The center is bustling as before, but the surrounding crowd is a skeleton of its former self. The array of tents encircling the student command and control center stand open to passersby, once tightly guarded university camps are violated by passing foot-traffic. Worse yet, for one who still carries the after-image of a million souls gathered peacefully and purposefully, large swaths of the Square are empty.

As we wend our way through the depressing litter and mess, Patricia and I are stopped and questioned by student wardens and vigilante types, though the security is less comprehensive today. The burden of suspicion falls more often on Patricia, who flashed her Hong Kong press ID to get through. As for me, I had no press pass but an unusual and familiar profile --the Chinese-speaking laowai in the indigo shirt—and that generally suffices to let me move about freely.

***

As we neared the student-controlled inner perimeter, I turned around to check on the taxi, but it was gone. Once inside the inner zone, the security tightened, and we had to laboriously pass two more security rings before getting to the broadcast tent where influential students still congregated. Patricia was immediately turned away, flatly told that the inside of the tent was off-limits to journalists. To get cross the frontier of this final inner sanctum I had to produce the personalized all-points security pass signed by Commander in Chief Chai Ling.

The signature of “the leader” scribbled on a piece of cardboard did the trick and we were free to step inside. Gone was the tidy, homey atmosphere I remembered from earlier in the week. The inside of the tent was a mess, awash with litter and upended equipment, the mood chaotic if not frantic. Nobody seemed to be in charge.

There was no hospitality corner. There were no smiles, no offers to have a drink or take a seat. No one was willing to help us find Feng Congde, and no one seemed to care that I carried an urgent message from Chai Ling. It suddenly occurred to me I might be dropping the wrong names at the wrong time. What if there had been a student coup? Perhaps she and her husband had fallen from grace with factional infighting flaring up. Maybe that's why she came to see me in such a hurry; maybe that’s why she was on the lam.

Sensing political fortunes had changed, I play it coy, the Wang Li way, asking if anyone had seen student commander in chief Chai Ling. The response was underwhelming. Although a few people paused long enough to show familiarity with the name, nobody seemed to know what was going on. There was an undisciplined, free-for-all, anything-goes atmosphere.

When I finally find a student willing to spare a few seconds to humor the foreigner, he states that I must go "upstairs" to the second level of the marble platform, just above the tent. When we try to go that way, we are stopped at a rope barrier. Adjacent to the checkpoint is a wooden table shaded by a canvas tent.

“This is the student information center,” I am told. Although the tent is open to the elements on one side and flimsy in appearance, it had the dank bureaucratic air of a Chinese government office. Student who needed to consult the leadership solemnly queued in line, impatient and irritable, hoping for "official" assistance.

Among those who waited in the sun, there erupted shoving matches and shouts, like desperate travelers trying to snag seats on a sold-out train. Some of them were looking for lost friends, much as we were, passing back and forth notes scribbled on little scraps of paper, hoping to win the attention of a “responsible person” inside student information bureau. This bureau is not only inefficient, but redolent of a bureaucratic arrogance. It is the holding pen one got sent to when student guards when unimpressed with one’s credentials. Trying to get an audience with the student leadership was an act in frustration, like petitioning Li Peng on the steps of the Great Hall a month before.

Impatient, like everyone else on line, I resort to shouting out my request, hoping to get some immediate assistance. Whether it was my blond hair or amusing foreign accent that managed to catch the “responsible authority’s” attention, I don’t know, but at least I got an answer.

“We are not clear about that.”
“But where is he?”
“His location is unknown,”
“But…”
“Not clear about that.”


Philip J. Cunningham was a participant and observer of the events in Beijing in 1989. Now a professor of media studies at Doshisha University, Cunningham has a forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield, May 2009) that details his story of the events.

In honor of the 20th anniversary of 1989, Cunningham will be sharing selections from his book at China Beat over the coming months. You can read more at the Tiananmen Moon website. Cunningham also blogs at the group blog, Informed Comment: Global Affairs.

The Last General of the Red Army

Xiao Ke: Chinese revolutionary who fell foul of both Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping

By Ed Jocelyn

General Xiao Ke, who died last month in Beijing at aged 101, was the last surviving commander of the Chinese Red Army that made the legendary Long March. Only 27 when he led his troops out of their Communist base in south China, Xiao never reached the career heights promised by his youth and ability. Instead, his later life became notable for a commitment to principle that put him at odds with political reality.

Xiao Ke was born in Hunan Province to a scholarly family that had fallen on hard times. Three of his eight brothers and sisters died in infancy, yet by rural Chinese standards the Xiao family was still relatively well off. They possessed a small landholding that in the early 1920s was regularly raided by warlord soldiers and local militia – during this era, Chinese armed forces of all descriptions commonly supported themselves by looting. In his memoirs, Xiao recalled that his brother and cousin blamed at least some of this thievery on men who worked for a powerful local landlord, with whom they began a bitter dispute. In 1923, wrote Xiao, his brother and cousin were tricked into visiting this landlord’s estate, where they were seized and taken to the county government for summary execution.

The persecution of his family encouraged the young Xiao Ke to think about a military career. With soldiers at his command, he could punish the guilty and protect his own. He was further inspired by the example of another brother, who moved to Guangzhou in 1925 to enter military school. The following year, Xiao also moved to Guangzhou, where he studied for four months at the Central Military Committee Military Police Academy. After graduation, he entered the Guomindang’s National Revolutionary Army, taking part in the Northern Expedition that began in July 1926.

The Northern Expedition’s aim was to defeat the warlords of central, eastern and northern China and unite the country under Guomindang rule. Xiao Ke, however, fell under the influence of Communist officers in his regiment, which was led by the Communist Ye Ting. Xiao was already losing faith in Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-shek; this disillusionment was confirmed by Chiang’s massacre of Communists in Shanghai in April 1927. Xiao Ke joined the Party in June 1927.

One month later, his regiment was on its way to Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province. Ye Ting had committed his men to participating in the Communists’ first armed revolt on August 1. The uprising was a disaster. Although the Communists took control of the city easily, they lacked the means to hold onto it. After four days, the 20,000-strong rebel army marched south, aiming to establish a revolutionary base in Guangdong Province. But while the Communists had plenty of officers, they had few adherents among the rank and file. Within a fortnight, more than half the soldiers had deserted. On October 3, the remainder were scattered in battle. Xiao Ke was captured and imprisoned shortly afterwards.

Under interrogation, Xiao denied being a Communist and he was released after a few days. He returned home, where he was reunited with his brother and discovered that the elder Xiao had also joined the Party and been a soldier in the Northern Expedition. Not knowing where else to turn, the brothers decided to re-start the revolution themselves.

Having organized the few local Communists into a Party cell, they soon learned that a Communist army under Zhu De was inciting revolt around the southern Hunan town of Yizhang. This army was the sole fighting force to remain intact after the Nanchang Uprising. Around Spring Festival 1928, Xiao Ke and his comrades resolved to find and join Zhu De, the future commander-in-chief of the Red Army.

Instead, they met a group of Communist peasant rebels in Qishi, close to Yizhang, whose leader Peng Xi had been appointed by Zhu De. They formed an “Independent Armed Peasant Battalion,” with Peng Xi as commander and Xiao Ke as his deputy. From around one hundred men, this unit quickly swelled to more than six hundred, but it also came under severe pressure from enemy troops. Learning that another Communist force under Mao Zedong was nearby, Xiao Ke and his peasant army crossed the intervening mountain range and in April 1928 united with Mao’s “Red Army” at Longxidong.

Mao had temporarily left his base in Jinggangshan in Jiangxi in order to aid Zhu De, whose army was in trouble. Having repelled the enemy, Mao and Zhu De retreated together to Jinggangshan. Xiao Ke and his men went with them. In May, the combined Communist forces were grouped into the Fourth Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army, soon afterwards rechristened the Fourth Red Army. Xiao Ke became a company commander in the 29th Regiment.

In Jinggangshan, Xiao Ke revealed one of his lifelong talents: that of choosing the wrong side. Party propaganda tells of unity and the creation of the “Zhu-Mao Army,” the vanguard force of the Chinese revolution. In fact, Mao and Zhu De quickly fell out. Particular difficulty arose over Mao’s view of the Red Army. Mao was adamant that the army should serve the Communist Party - “the Party should control the gun,” as Mao put it. Zhu De disagreed, believing that in military matters, the views of military men should take precedence over those of politicians. The 21-year-old Xiao Ke took Zhu De’s side. But Mao’s view prevailed: first and foremost, the Red Army would be the Party’s army. More than sixty years later, Xiao Ke would once again take the losing side in a similar debate, this time with Deng Xiaoping over the army’s role in dealing with the Tian’anmen Square demonstrations.

There was little time to dwell on such disputes in 1928. The Communists were quickly forced out of Jinggangshan, from where they moved into the area around Ruijin, a small town in southern Jiangxi. Here, they established a base that survived repeated attack by Chiang Kai-shek in the early 1930s. Xiao rose swiftly through the ranks, becoming commander of the Red Sixth Army Group.



In July 1934, Xiao received orders to take his troops out of the Communist base area and move west. The Long March was about to begin. Under intense pressure from Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces, the entire Red Army and Communist Party leadership was to abandon the base in southern Jiangxi and transfer to a new, safer location. Xiao Ke’s task was to identify that location.

He failed. After being harried through Jiangxi, Guangxi and Hunan, the 6th Army was almost destroyed at Ganxi in northeast Guizhou Province. On October 7, 1934, they were trapped by a three-pronged attack that wiped out around two thirds of the 9,000-strong army. Xiao himself escaped thanks to a local hunter named Liu Guangrong, who guided Xiao and several other officers up the heavily forested mountain above Ganxi. The battle was hardly mentioned in post-Revolutionary histories of the Long March, but in later years Xiao hung a large painting of Ganxi in his home, a permanent reminder of the place where up to 6,000 of his men died.

Shortly after Ganxi, what was left of the Sixth Army met another small Communist army led by He Long, future Marshal of the People’s Republic of China. In its ranks was a 19-year-old woman named Jian Xianfo; she and Xiao Ke married in December 1934, a union broken only by Xiao’s death.

The two armies joined forces and established a base in northwest Hunan, before making their own 5,500-kilometer Long March to northwest China between November 1935 and October 1936, arriving twelve months after the main force under Mao Zedong. Already pregnant when the march began, Jian Xianfo gave birth to a boy in the Tibetan grasslands of northwest Sichuan Province. The child finished the Long March, but was later sent to live with his grandmother near Changde in Hunan. He is thought to have died in the Japanese germ attack on Changde in 1941.

Xiao Ke’s army was accompanied by an unwilling witness, a captive British missionary named Alfred Bosshardt. After his release in April 1935, Bosshardt wrote of the young commander:

“It was soon obvious to me that he was a cultured, educated man and born leader. I could not help but admire him, though we came from such different backgrounds.”

The night before releasing him, Xiao invited Bosshardt to dinner. When the conversation turned to religion, wrote Bosshardt, Xiao said, “I cannot understand how one educated abroad as you have been, can possibly believe in God. Surely you know we came from monkeys. I supposed that anyone with any brains at all knew that evolution is a fact.”

Xiao’s political acumen failed him once again during the Long March. In June, his and He Long’s forces united with the Red Fourth Front Army, led by Mao’s greatest rival, Zhang Guotao. Zhang had split from Mao the previous year and established a rival “Party Centre” with himself as leader. His Fourth Front Army was by far the largest of the Communist forces; if he could persuade He Long and Xiao Ke to support him, he seems to have believed he could march to Mao’s new base in the northwest and take full control of the Communist Party.

He Long was unequivocal. He is said to have publicly threatened to shoot Zhang if he did not toe the Party line. Xiao Ke, however, was swayed. The details of what passed between him and Zhang Guotao remain obscure. Xiao wrote nothing about it; in his own memoirs, written in exile, Zhang glossed over their meeting, knowing that candor could cost Xiao his life – Zhang’s political commissar, Chen Changhao, is said to have committed suicide in 1967 after being attacked as “Zhang Guotao’s running dog.” But it was accepted in the Party that Xiao had supported Zhang, who appointed him commander of the Fourth Front Army’s 31st Division. And Mao had a long, long memory for those who had slighted or opposed him – as Xiao had now done twice over.

After failing in his struggle with Mao, Zhang Guotao abandoned the Communist Party in 1938 and handed himself over to Chiang Kai-shek. As past relationships with Zhang proved a death sentence for many, Xiao Ke could be said to have fared well. After the Long March, his career merely stalled. He was sent to the front line in the Anti-Japanese War as deputy commander of the 120th Regiment, led by He Long. This was a typical Maoist manoeuvre: Mao knew Xiao and He Long had a poor relationship, despite (or more likely because of) their years of close cooperation. Xiao ended the civil war in 1949 as Chief of Staff to the Fourth Field Army led by Lin Biao, one year his junior and a still more precocious talent – as well as a supporter of Chairman Mao in Jinggangshan in 1928. After the establishment of Communist power in Beijing, Xiao was assigned to the Military Academy in Beijing, a backwater for those who did not want or were not allowed to pursue an active military or political role. When military ranks were established in the People’s Liberation Army in 1955, he was listed first among the 55 generals (previously, there had been no formal distinction between officers and enlisted men). Above him, however, were a number of senior generals and marshals who, many felt, lacked his background and abilities. This was taken as a deliberate slight by Chairman Mao, but it was a minor blow compared to what was around the corner.

In 1958, Xiao Ke and several colleagues came under political attack. Their crime was to be in favor of learning from the Soviet Army in order to “regularize and modernize” the People’s Liberation Army. In fact, such modernization had been official policy since the early 1950s, but Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai now declared that it represented mistaken “dogmatism’ because it lacked “political content.” At an expanded meeting of the Military Affairs Commission, Xiao was branded a “representative of the bourgeois military line.” Peng accused him of “military revisionism,” while Mao himself weighed in, declaring Xiao a “bad person, a member of the bourgeois team.” After the meeting, Xiao was subjected to “struggle sessions,” some of which went on all night. After one such session, he began coughing up blood; the doctor who treated him was criticized for “sympathizing with an anti-Party element.”

Xiao could not have been naïve about the Party’s capacity for vicious internal upheaval. He had participated in the bloody purge of the (fictitious) AB tuan in Jiangxi in the early 1930s, an episode he described thus:

“Our division had killed sixty [of its own] people… Then one night in our Divisional Party Committee, it was decided to kill sixty more. Next morning, I went to report… But at the Fourth Army Military Committee, [they] said, ‘You’re killing too many. If they are from worker and peasant backgrounds, you can just let them confess…’ After that, I went back at once. The prisoners had already been taken to the execution ground. I said, ‘Don’t kill them. The Divisional Party Committee must discuss this again.’ Afterwards, they decided to release more than thirty of them. But more than twenty were still killed. Altogether in the Fourth Army, 1,300 or 1,400 out of 7,000 men were struck down.”

But in 1958, Xiao was shocked and distressed to find himself the object of attack. Defiant at first, after four months of criticism and “struggle” he decided to give in and make a “confession” to satisfy his persecutors. He wrote later: “I had been in the Party more than thirty years…had taken part in the Northern Expedition, the Nanchang Uprising, the Southern Hunan Uprising, the Struggle in Jinggangshan, the Long March… The man can be struck down, but his history will stand.”

The official verdict on Xiao Ke’s “bourgeois military line and anti-Party activity” was handed down in May 1959. He retained his Party membership and was not imprisoned, but his career went into limbo. At the end of 1969, he was exiled to rural Jiangxi, where he took up carpentry and endured further interrogations. An accomplished poet since his early years, he recorded his feelings in verse:

“The yellow blooms long withered on the old battlefields
As the bitter west wind howls in deep winter
At Yunshan I write these verses of return
An old steed in his stable still longs to gallop.”

Just two months after the verdict on Xiao Ke, Peng Dehuai himself was struck down for “opposing Chairman Mao” and conducting “anti-Party activity.” Years later during the Cultural Revolution, Peng sent his nephew to apologize on his behalf to Xiao and the others persecuted in 1958. Xiao wrote in his memoirs that he had, in fact, long since stopped being angry with Peng because, “through the experience of the Cultural Revolution, I had acquired a greater understanding of internal Party struggle.” In other words, he didn’t blame Peng because he felt Peng’s actions were dictated by the political context of the time – a context set by just one man, Chairman Mao.

In 1972, Xiao’s fortunes began to improve. Back in Beijing, he was restored to a senior position in the Military Academy and appointed deputy Minister for Defense, a less elevated position than the title suggests as the Ministry’s most important responsibilities had been transferred to other departments after Peng Dehuai’s fall. After Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the verdict on Xiao’s “bourgeois military line and anti-Party activity” was overturned. He was appointed in 1980 as a vice chairman of the Fifth National Political Consultative Committee, and from 1982 sat on the Central Consultative Committee, a highly influential body composed exclusively of Party members with at least 50 years of service behind them.



The events of 1989 shook Xiao and many of his old comrades in the Central Consultative Committee. As the crisis over the Tiananmen Square demonstrations intensified, Deng Xiaoping decided to call the army into Beijing. Xiao Ke adamantly opposed this move. Together with former Minister of Defense Zhang Aiping, another veteran of the Long March, he composed a letter to Deng, which was signed by five other generals. They told Deng that if the army entered the city and opened fire, “the common people will curse us for 10,000 years.” Inspired by this example, more than one hundred other retired generals and Party leaders, mostly also members of the Central Consultative Committee, signed and sent a similar letter.

Gravely concerned at such opposition, Deng dispatched two of his most senior supporters, Yang Shangkun and Wang Zhen (political commissar to Xiao Ke’s Sixth Army Group during the Long March) to see Xiao Ke and the other six original signatories. They demanded retraction of the letter, arguing that such influential men could not be seen to oppose the Party leadership. None of them retracted, but their call went unheeded.

After the Tiananmen massacre, Deng dealt with his high-ranking opponents by trying to eliminate their political influence. As most of them were already retired, Deng contented himself with denying them official resources and forums to express their opinions. The Central Consultative Committee was abolished in 1992.

Cast out, Xiao Ke devoted his last active years to scholarship and literature. He and Zhang Aiping were among the founders of the Yanhuang Cultural Study Association, which in 1991 launched the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, which continues to rank among the most progressive publications on the Chinese mainland. Editor Du Daozheng recalled how there was trouble over the very first issue, which contained an essay by Li Rui, Chairman Mao’s former secretary and a man considered representative of the “dissidents” of 1989. Du went to see Xiao Ke, who told him, “Just publish it! If someone has an issue afterwards, you just reply: ‘This essay was reviewed and approved by Xiao Ke. If you have a problem, please call Xiao Ke. I can give you Xiao Ke’s telephone number right now.’”

Xiao became particularly concerned about history and its truthful telling. During the 1980s, he remembered the British missionary Alfred Bosshardt and asked Chinese embassy officials to see if they could find out what happened to him. It turned out that Bosshardt was still alive and well, and the two men shared a brief correspondence. When Bosshardt’s account of his Long March captivity, The Guiding Hand, was translated and published in China in 1989, Xiao Ke wrote in a foreword: “Historical facts are the best authority… We did make some mistakes after the establishment of the Communist Party. We do not want to talk about them, but it is not right to prevent others from doing so. Those who criticize may have their own standpoints and we must see whether this is the truth. In his book Mr Bosshardt could not praise us… It will not harm those already dead to reveal past mistakes, and could be educational in the present.”

He returned to this theme in his foreword to a monumental, two-volume history of the Long March, whose preparation and publication he oversaw in 1996. Flying in the face of Party orthodoxy, he insisted that where there were different accounts of any given event, all should be included. That same year, during a meeting commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Long March he lost patience with the endless speeches in praise of Mao. He rose and spoke impromptu: “The real Long March [was achieved through] the efforts of every single Red Army soldier. We should not, as we did in the past, make a cult of personality.”

Sixty years earlier, Alfred Bosshardt wrote of his thoughts on first meeting Xiao Ke: “Why, I wondered, did this man, who could have enjoyed a life of ease and pleasure, throw in his lot with those who were striving to bring justice to the poor, oppressed peasants?” Xiao wrote little about specific motivations, but he expressed his feelings eloquently. In his foreword to Bosshardt’s book, he considered how people with very different backgrounds and beliefs could still become friends, but his words could just as well apply to his revolutionary ideal. He wrote: “Mencius said, ‘Everyone is compassionate.’ Indeed, this must be the common concern of all mankind.”



Xiao Ke spent the final years of his life in No.301 Hospital in Beijing, which he entered in April 1999. He is survived by his wife, Jian Xianfo, and son, Xiao Xinghua.

Xiao Ke, revolutionary, born July 14 1907, died October 24 2008.

Ed Jocelyn holds a Ph.D in history from the University of Bradford in the UK. In 2002 Jocelyn launched the New Long March project with Andrew McEwen. Together, they set out to retrace the Long March of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, on foot. In the following five years, Jocelyn trekked 8,000 miles through remote parts of China. The story is told in The Long March, published in five languages in 2006-7. Jocelyn's current research explores the history of the revolutionary era in Kham, focusing particularly on the Tibetan rebellion in Zhongdian, and he also runs the Red Rock Trek and Expedition Company with fellow adventurer Yang Xiao.