5/15/89: Looking for Gorbachev

This piece is excerpted from Philip J. Cunningham’s manuscript of his forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham's book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

By Philip J. Cunningham

Setting up a shot in a methodical manner--tripods incrementally adjusted, white balance achieved, illumination enhanced--allowed for the recording of clean, well-lit images worthy of prime time TV, but much of it came at the price of spontaneity. That which we sought to observe was constantly reacting to us and regrouping due to our presence. Cameramen know all about this of course, and a long lens can, with some foreshortening, capture unadulterated spontaneity, but more than once we simply scrapped the shot when members of the crowd seized up or returned our curiosity in an obvious way.

Which brought us back full circle to the solipsism of the TV standup; one of the few tasks we could do convincingly was a phony setup in which one member of our crew talked to the red light of the camera hoping to simulate an intimate conversation with unseen viewers in faraway land in the not too distant future.

It was hard to get away from the feeling that television news was at least as much about “television” as it was about “news.” The starving students and their rowdy supporters on Tiananmen Square were, for our current purposes, but a colorful backdrop; BBC wanted to shine light on one of its own. But even that proved an elusive task.

To get the angle necessary to see both the correspondent and the crowd, and, if humanly possible, Mao’s distant portrait floating somewhere in the foggy night air, we had to find some way to put the solidly built, silver-haired John Simpson head and shoulders above everyone else. But a plaza as wide and unadorned as Tiananmen Square offers few natural promontories other than the monument, which was already staked out by students and at this juncture off-limits to the crew.

After Eric, the cameraman, made it clear he needed something, anything, to elevate the correspondent, I procured, at length, two flatbed bicycle carts to serve as platforms, one for the correspondent, one for the cameraman.

The cameraman signaled he was ready to roll, which was John Simpson’s cue to mount the flatbed cart and commence his standup. He squeezed past curious spectators in a reasonably dignified manner, but he had to step out of the dignity of his persona in order to clamber up on the cart, one knee at a time, and rise, tentatively and awkwardly, to a standing position on the top of the slightly wobbly cart.

Eric was perched atop the other bicycle cart, which he and his soundman Fred had expertly aligned with John Simpson’s temporary pedestal to obtain optimal background visuals, effective depth of field and a precise focal length for the standup shot. Yet even they, despite their workaday clothing and self-effacing work style, created through their silent labors enough commotion to draw a circle of onlookers.

As eager onlookers inched forward to see what was going on, they pressed against one cart or the other. Even the slightest wobble or shift in position caused the shot to fall out of alignment, ruining the setup, creating a new delay.

Fred, curly blond hair sprouting every which way from the black frames of his glasses and big black headphones, attended to technical difficulties in his usual calm and unruffled way, expertly handling both sound and illumination, while trying to detect the source of the trouble. He adjusted the lights, hoisting the sound boom in place while Eric and I tried to re-align the carts. The “talent” remained aloft, only slightly ruffled from two near-miss tumbles, his shiny, neatly groomed hair now mussed up from the effects of a light breeze.


Simpson did what any conscientious television anchor or on-air reporter would do, which was to focus on making himself as presentable as possible while silently practicing his lines for the unforgiving eye of his intended audience in television land, but in doing so, he made himself look, to his unintended local audience at least, like a madman on a soapbox.

The correspondent got about halfway through his stentorian address to an unseen audience when peals of laughter ruined the sound and a shake of the cart ruined the shot. Eric called “cut” and requested another take. Again the cart was bumped or shaken, again it was hard to keep the spectators quiet. What was an imperceptible movement to the rest of us, Eric saw magnified through the shaking viewfinder and concluded to be intentional sabotage. He made a grimace, turned off the camera, pleaded with me to address the onlookers, to demand that everyone be still.

Wary of issuing orders with no authority, at an illegal gathering where, to put it lightly, the forces of law and order were neither in view nor on our side, I super-politely requested those around me for their cooperation. Satisfied, Eric gave the correspondent the signal to start over again.

On the third take, a young Chinese man, perhaps inspired by sight of foreign journalists taping what appeared to be an important speech, lifted his own tape recorder, a cheap cassette player, high over his head, his outstretched arm mimicking Fred’s boom mike, shoving the tape recorder right in front of the important white man to better capture his important, if indecipherable, words.

“Cut!”

The subsequent take was also ruined, this time by a comically aggressive onlooker who was straining to smile for the camera. The take after that was nixed by the soundman, as two of the standers-by next to him started a loud, animated conversation the minute the lights went on.

Seeing the exasperated faces of the BBC crew, I formally addressed the crush of bodies around us, hoping to win some cooperation. In response I was told that we foreigners were offending the dignity of the Chinese people due to our arrogance.

“Tongzhimen…Comrades,” I said out of textbook habit, then softened it to reflect changing times.

“Peng-you-men. Friends. Please help us here tonight,” I offered, desperately trying to strike the right tone. “We are making a news report for BBC English television. Would it be possible for everyone to be quiet and still for just a minute?"

"We can talk if we want to!" A voice shot out from the back.

"Of course you can,” I sallied back. “But please, talk quietly."

"This is China!" he said indignantly. "You're foreigners."

Because this xenophobic line of thought, with its unhappy echoes of foiled past encounters truly irritated me, I turned my back on the man, which riled him up all the more.

"I demand that you translate everything the “old Whitey” is saying," a man in a cheap Mao jacket said, giving us the look-over with a jaundiced eye. "Otherwise we, that is, we Chinese, we will not cooperate!"

"Hey listen, friend.” I said sarcastically, my patience straining. “I will translate for you, but after we are finished filming, okay?"

"We demand you tell us now!" he shouted, rallying for support.

"Where are you from?" asked another young man.

"It will only take a few minutes and then we will have lots of time to talk," I promised. "Okay?"

"Foreigners!" a new voice rang out.

"Look at old Whitey up on the cart!" shouted another, followed by a caustic laugh.

With at least a hundred people now pressing in on us in a deeply congested corner of a plaza containing, all told, over a hundred thousand demonstrators, we were vulnerable, at the complete mercy of the illegal assembly.

…

"Today a crowd gathers in peaceful protest at Tian-an…” Simpson started. “Hello! Hey, --who’s shaking the cart?" After almost getting knocked over by a particularly violent thrust, Simpson regained his balance but not his composure.

The deliberate thrust against our man felt like an attack on all of us. "Who did that?" I asked sternly, studying the faces closest to the cart. My interrogative glance was met with indignant protestations of innocence, sullen stares, and a few weak smiles.

"What is your relationship with the foreigners?" I overheard someone quizzing the bicycle cart drivers. The vigilante-style interrogation that followed left both drivers looking shaken and worried. One driver approached me sheepishly, saying he’d like to get his cart back. I indicated I understood. The other driver sportingly agreed to wait, and even went so far as to ask the trouble-makers for their cooperation. He did so in a culturally sensitive way, asking his fellow citizens to quiet down so that the laowai would get done already and he could go home to eat, but it didn’t placate everyone.

"Oh, you're a fine one, telling us to shut-up because you are in the pay of the foreigners," challenged a young man with an unruly mop of hair.

"That’s it,” chimed another. “How much are the laowai paying you?"

"How much, traitor? That's what we want to know!" another unfriendly voice cried out.

The almost magical, all-encompassing harmony I had experienced moving amidst the student-dominated crowd in the past two days had evaporated, causing me to wonder how much of the harmony had been in my mind.

…

"So, how much is the foreign boss paying?” shouted a threatening voice.

“Yes! How much? How much?" echoed several others.

Oblivious to the content of the arguments storming around them but hyper-sensitive to vibrations as perceived through the lens and microphone, the crew gamely tried to accelerate the shoot, attempting to race through the short standup while I worked the crowd. At last, Eric, who struck me as being a most sensible and patient man, started cursing under his breath.

"Phil," he whispered, "There's someone doing it on purpose. They wait until the lights are on and then they deliberately shake the cart. Can you find out who it is?"

I carefully watched both carts, but honestly couldn’t pin down the culprit. As it was, I was hearing pre-emptive pleas of innocence.

"It wasn't me. Nope, wasn't me. Wasn't me either."

It was on the ninth or tenth take that I heard a shockingly stupid rumor going around. The distinguished-looking Caucasian man up on the cart was said to be a famous politician. A really famous one.

"That's Gor-ba-chev!" a voice cried out, as if in confirmation. "Look, they're interviewing the leader of the Soviet Union!" A momentary hush was followed by a wave of excited murmurs and a forward thrust of onlookers. Then there was a sudden, total breakdown in order as the Soviet leader’s name was chanted in Chinese.

"Ge-er-ba-qiao-fu! Ge-er-ba-qiao-fu! Ge-er-ba-qiao-fu!”

Something hit the cart hard, knocking John Simpson off balance. He broke his fall with an outstretched arm, tumbling safely into the arms of the crew. Pale and shaken, he tried to regain his sangfroid by batting the dust off his jacket. "Can someone tell me what is going on?"

I didn’t want to say that the rumor of the Soviet leader appearing on the Square to mix with Chinese protesters was a positively explosive development, plus Simpson wouldn’t understand how he could possibly be confused with another white man who looked so different from him, so I let it go.

The rhythmic incantation about Gorbachev, though apparently incomprehensible to the crew, was alarming enough that they knew it was time to beat a quick exit. I emptied my pocket, handing each of the drivers a wad of small bills, crisp FEC notes mixed with wrinkled renminbi.

"Are you trying to buy us Chinese with your foreign money?" an eagle-eyed spokesman for the masses asked maliciously. "Foreigners! Imperialists. Ha!"

The drivers, now completely intimidated, refused all money, hastily mounted their bikes and slid away into the darkness, begging cooperation as they pedaled against the inward push of the throng. It was terrifying to realize that just a handful of malicious hangers-on could put so many decent people in jeopardy. At a time of uncertain political outcome such as this, it didn’t take much to manipulate the mood of listless bystanders, and I despaired to see how a small misunderstanding could trump the overall mood of solidarity.

"You see that? The arrogant foreigners used the cart," one of the more devious troublemakers said in accusatory tone, after scaring the drivers away. "And didn't even pay!"

"They are taking advantage of the Chinese people!" yelled his co-conspirator.

"Who the hell are you?" I shot back in rude Chinese. By now I had had it. I didn't want to fight, but gambled that a strong response might get the wise guys off our backs and stop the conflict from escalating. We were surrounded, so if the crush got any more hostile, it might be hard to extract ourselves without a bloody fight.

"Don't you dare talk to me like that," the man steamed angrily. "This is China!"

"China? China has nothing to do with it," I shouted back. “The problem is you. What kind of thing are you?"

I had really lost my cool, and it was wrong to use such a coarse expression, even though I heard Chinese use it among themselves. The situation had deteriorated in a way that needed no translation. The BBC crew wasted no time in packing up and packing off while I tried to hold my ground in an intemperate verbal exchange.

Just as my crew was on the verge of extracting themselves from the scene, a middle-aged man with a thin beard came up to me, effectively blocking my exit. He spoke fluent, educated English with a soft American accent.

"You should not have talked to that man like that!" he chided me.

"He shouldn't have made so much trouble for us!" I answered in Chinese. "Who does he think he is?" And who do you think you are, I might have asked.

"Your Chinese is very good, but you must be careful," the soft-spoken man said, continuing to speak in impeccable English. "This is a very special night for the Chinese people."

"What do you mean? That guy was bothering us.”

"It is very important that people like him be here," he said. "They may seem rude to you, but they support the students. It is especially dangerous for common Chinese to be here."

Who deemed it important for the "common people" to be here tonight? The man passed for what in China is called a “knowledgeable element” or intellectual. He was clearly educated, confident, and had something of a superior air.

Who was he? He reminded me of Zhu Jiaming, a Zhao protégé I had met at the University of Michigan, and was not unlike other brilliant young intellectuals in government think tanks such as the Academy of Social Sciences, many of whom had studied on American campuses. Was he one of those reformist intellectuals working behind the scenes for Zhao Ziyang?

"And if I may, just what unit are you with?" I asked in Chinese, to the apparent delight of a few in the now momentarily subdued mob who had been straining to understand the exchange in English. The soft-spoken man had a definable presence, an unassailable font of self-assurance, almost a cockiness that reminded me of film director Chen Kaige. His erudition and elitist élan could not be completely disguised by his untended facial hair or his baggy trousers and plain shirt.

"Never you mind that," he said dismissively, steering the conversation back into English, "But I know your country, I did research at the University of Chicago."

"Why are you talking to me in English?"

"I don't want them to understand."

"So where do you work?"

"The Academy of Sciences," he said. "And you? Tell me about yourself."

"Well, we're from BBC," I said, turning only to discover that my colleagues were out of sight. It was my responsibility to get them back to the Great Wall Hotel, after which we could safely commiserate about the dangers of the mob over cold beer in the lobby bar.

A familiar feeling swept over me, pulling me two ways at once. I wanted to talk more to this enigmatic man who had been observing us and the people’s reaction to us with insight and attention.

But I had agreed to take the crew to the Square and worried, probably unnecessarily given their finely-honed vocational resourcefulness, about them finding their back to the hotel without a word of Chinese between them, so I pulled myself away.

"It’s interesting talking to you,” I told the self-possessed intellectual. “And I’d love to chat more, but I gotta catch up with the crew. See ya."

On the way back, I explained to the crew that John Simpson had been mistaken for Gorbachev, and we all got a good laugh out of an otherwise harrowing experience. If our ace reporter had been frustrated by the failure to do a proper standup, or if his ego had in any way been bruised by the public humiliation of being forced off the cart, at least he could console himself with the thought that he had been mistaken for a great man.

The Hunger Strike Begins

This piece is excerpted from Philip J. Cunningham’s manuscript of his forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham's book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website. 

By Philip J. Cunningham

The idea that the campus was under student control struck me as a dangerous illusion. Bright and others said campus life had changed for the better, and in the aftermath of May 4, I could see evidence of the soaring change in spirit. But what if the whiff of freedom turned into a mockery of the same, a transient window of openness that served to make people implicate themselves? It had happened before in the 1950s, when Mao urged “a hundred schools of thought to contend,” only to punish those who expressed themselves too freely.

…


To date, the campus strike was having its desired effect of keeping people out of class, but cutting class does not a revolution make. Sleeping late and not doing homework is a temptation few students can easily refuse. The non-action implicit in not going to class had to be accompanied by some kind of action to have any meaning at all.

The courtyard was abuzz with loud announcements blurting out of the hijacked, jerry-rigged amplification system. What might in theory be freewheeling talk akin to the ramblings of a college radio station was instead sounding uncompromising and strident, like a new party line. The drive to convince the moderate student body not to attend class, having largely succeeded, cleared the way for more radical action. The buzz was all about a big hunger strike.

As the BBC crew continued to track down colorful visuals, I approached a forlorn-looking young man who was sitting alone amidst the swirl of activity kicking up in the middle of the dusty courtyard. He was wearing a white headband with two black characters inked on: *JUE-SHI.*

"Why do you write ‘refuse food’ on your headband?" I asked, adopting the tone of a reporter without really thinking about it.

"The government just ignores us. We want dialogue. Maybe if we starve ourselves they will pay attention," he said.

There was something off-putting about his explanation. It was unfathomable to me that a young person would starve to death as an attention-grabbing stunt. Here the stated cause was laughably hollow--risking the ultimate sacrifice for a chance to talk with Li Peng. I pressed the would-be martyr on the matter, curious about his personal reason for joining.

"I don't know," he said dully, no doubt taken aback by the volley of questions from the inquisitive foreigner. "It's not personal."

"What if the government ignores you?" I moved closer to him and lowered my voice, aware that our conversation was attracting curious ears.

"We demand dialogue and a reversal of the unjust April twenty-sixth editorial!" he declared with unexpected volume, to the approval of his contemporaries who were now tightly squeezing in around us.

"What if there is no dialogue?"

"Then we die," he said, winning somber nods of approval. His performance gave me the goose bumps.

I moved on, but subsequent conversations with other individuals quickly turned into group affairs. It was sad and frustrating to meet such earnest young men and women, all apparently willing to put their lives on the line, only to hear them give pat answers, sometimes even grandiose answers, magnified by peer pressure. Did those nodding in approval realize they were urging psychologically confused, approval-hungry classmates to court death? To what end?

Things were polarizing rapidly, making me feel hopelessly lost in the middle. Overturning the unjust verdict of an incendiary newspaper editorial was an aim both discreet and desirable, but what could possibly be the end goal of “dialogue?” Who was to say that dialogue had been achieved, or not? If hunger strikers started to drop, where would it all end?

The May 4 rally and the May 10 protest were framed largely in the name of free speech. Both events were peaceful, good-spirited and I supported them wholeheartedly. I had plunged into a turbulent sea of confusion in both instances, trusting the instincts and judgment of friends. The result was uplifting; I was pleased to lend moral support to a movement driven by good cheer and an idealistic outlook. But now things were taking a potentially destructive turn, for a hunger strike implied a kind of self-inflicted violence.

A hunger strike also introduced a ticking time bomb into the equation; things must be resolved in less time than it takes to die of starvation. It subjected both supporters and “the enemy” to emotional blackmail, not unlike a person who threatens suicide to manipulate or punish others for their lack of attention. Short of capitulation, terms of which were left dangerously undefined, on the government side, the unspoken end result would be death. This was no celebratory parade calling for free speech and cultural revival; it was a veritable death march.

Sitting on the steps of the small monument in the middle of the courtyard I watched as more and more grim-looking young men emerged from the residence hall wearing white headbands emblazoned with *JUE-SHI* painted in black. The strikers gathered around the monument in the middle of the rectangular quad, bringing to mind the way the protesters in recent days had gravitated to the Monument of the People’s Heroes, which commemorated martyrdom in Mao’s calligraphy, in the very heart of Tiananmen Square.

Headbanded delegations of students from other colleges began to arrive, giving Shida the doom and gloom of a kamikaze camp. Whither the joyous, life-affirming spirit of May Fourth?

We had stumbled upon this radical stab for attention quite fortuitously, a combination of BBC's search for a non-existant "Democracy Wall at Xidan," Min's erratic driving and my curiosity to see what was happening on my home campus. I mingled with the strikers and their supporters, aware I was being watched more closely than before, but curious to see where the idea of a hunger strike came from. I couldn’t think of any examples in Chinese history, though India had elevated the hunger strike to an almost spiritual art. I had just seen some quotes by the progressive Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore in one of the student posters but no mention of Mahatma Gandhi. Where the student admirers of Tagore aware of his famous criticism of Gandhi, saying that even non-violent tactics were a hurtful weapon of sorts?

None of those queried could point to a precedent for this type of protest in China. The strikers I talked to tended to give knee-jerk answers to my questions, to the tune of dialogue or death, unwilling to consider the implications of the strike in honest terms or even begin to question decisions made by their “leaders.” It bothered me to see such courage coupled with an unquestioning attitude. To me, these young patriots had lost perspective and were fired up by peer pressure to take part in a dangerous "quest."

As with the kamikaze pilots of Japan and the daring guerilla martyrs of the Chinese Revolution, extreme devotion coupled with intense social pressure made it possible to cast a false glow on pointlessly suicidal activities. But I was baffled that otherwise privileged students in a nation that had known much too much hunger should starve themselves for any abstraction, let alone such a poorly conceived one.

Brian found me, asking if I had lined up some students to interview.

"Well, it’s hard to say. I just talked with a few students over there. They are on a hunger strike," I explained. “They demand dialogue with the government. There one of them, see, with the headband?”

"How good is his English?" he asked.

"I don't know. I wasn't speaking English."

"What's the point of talking to someone in Chinese?" he said, which I thought was a pretty incredible statement to make in China. But he had a job to do, an overseas audience in mind, whereas I was indulging my own curiosity.

"Well, I say we have enough. We're finished doing the posters, that's what we came for, isn't it?"

"But I think this is a good chance to talk to some of the hunger strikers."

"Phil? We can talk to them later."

We were on the verge of going back to the hotel for lunch when I learned that the hunger strikers were signing "wills" and making pledges to maintain group unity, to be unswerving in their determination to the death. The courtyard was now swirling with students wearing the ominous white headbands. Then I saw a familiar face among the hard-core strikers.

Lily! What was she doing with the radical contingent?

My gut reaction was that Lily, a simple honest soul from a small farming village, an appreciative young woman who didn’t hide her thrill to be attending a university in the national capital, was caving in to peer pressure. Bright and Jenny had the self-esteem and instincts of self-preservation to avoid the trap of something like a hunger strike, but Lily? I approached her stealthily, aware that she was surrounded by strike organizers. When she spotted me she couldn't suppress a cordial smile, but watchful stares from her peers signaled that she ought to assume a less communicative, more appropriately solemn demeanor. She wasn’t free to be the Lily, the delightful woman of an impoverished province who I liked and knew. She was now an anonymous comrade, a patriotic hunger striker.

We talked briefly, but the conversation was limited to platitudes. She had never been particularly articulate about politics to begin with, and my presence, a foreign male hanging out with a TV crew of unknown provenance made her extremely self-conscious. I made reference to people and places we both enjoyed, hoping to jump-start a conversation, but she had lost her normal playfulness and sense of humor. When I pressed her as to why she was going on a hunger strike, she gave me the same pat answers as everybody else.

"We want open dialogue with the government."

"Oh, come on, what do you really want?"

"Hmm, I'm not sure, but. . ."

One of Lily's head-banded comrades intervened silently, poking his head into our conversation with the precision of a directional mike. I gave him an exasperated look, hoping to continue a bit longer.

"What were you saying?" I pressed for an answer.

"We want a reversal of the April twenty-sixth verdict!"

I had to wonder if she was fearful or if she already felt the effects of fasting since breakfast. Most Chinese students I knew couldn’t even skip a meal without feeling ill effects, already her lips were parched and dry. I really felt bad for her and tried to “reach” her but couldn’t get through.

There was some kind of indoctrination going on, but that’s not to say there was a mastermind or the process was coercive in any way. Rather, for students such as her who had endured years of rote-learning, and considered it a privilege to be in the city, there was readiness to take cues from the environment and allow a kind of auto-indoctrination to kick in. In the end, all I could do was wish her luck as she went back to her group and I went back to mine.


A short while later there were excited shouts.

"Beida is here!"

"Political Science and Law is here!"

"Shida! Get ready for the march," a cheerleader shouted. "Assemble into your groups!"

The hunger strikers and supporters from other schools came pouring onto campus. Once again a mass of students converged on the sports ground. Once again the dusty basketball court was transformed into a sea of enthusiastic young people waving red flags to the singsong rhythm of rote slogans, redundant chants and crackling voices on megaphones. Beida, Qinghua, Political Science and Law and People's University contingents gathered and joined forces to map out a joint strategy.


The final march to the Square was about to begin.

May 10, 1989: Demonstration of Ten Thousand Bicycles

This piece is excerpted from Philip J. Cunningham’s manuscript of his forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

By Philip J. Cunningham

For a few days there it seemed that the successful student march of May 4 would be the last of the big demos and soon everyone would be back on campus attending classes again. Railing against this rather pleasant and natural inclination, strident wall posters at Shida and Beida called for continuing the student strike. One of the more florid campus wall posters that I managed to snap a photo of was a florid eulogy to the Great Hall of the People as a symbol of representative rule. The dark message, written on May 5, 1989 was at odds with the general euphoria in the wake of the May 4 March, for it predicted an outcome with blood flowing down Chang’an Boulevard. Brushed in ink on a large sheet of paper, written with such literary flourish that I needed help to decipher it, the poem was signed by an anonymous author who went by the name, “The Wild One.”

“*Drawing blood on Chang’an Jie until the dawn dawns red, smashing to bits the bona fide dream of the people*.”

On the morning of May 10, the student-rigged loudspeakers at the center of the Beijing University campus started crackling with a call to action. A Beida physics student explained they were calling on other schools to join Beida students in a new form of protest with Chinese characteristics: the bicycle demonstration!

We sat on our bikes under a tree near the front gate of Beida to observe the hatching of this new and unusual type of protest. The "marchers" rolled in from all directions, mostly walking their bicycles due to the utter congestion. Like earlier protests, which used patriotic anthems as a cover for covert political action, the demo on wheels could hide in plain sight in a city of a million tinkling bicycles.

The tree-lined road leading to the main gate on campus was by now attracting black bicycles like crows, watching and waiting for a sign to take flight en masse.

The long-legged Chen Li shifted restlessly on her bicycle as her mind wrestled with indecision. It seemed that she had almost made up her mind to join the demonstration when some annoying static over the student broadcast system brought to mind another problem.

Just who were the so-called student leaders? They hadn’t been voted into office. They had just sort of seized the initiative. Chen Li bristled at the idea of taking the lead from such presumptuous peers, wondering instead what her teachers would counsel. The problem with the student movement, it seemed to her, was that it was run by students.

It was one o'clock, at least a thousand bicycles were amassed on the tree-lined road leading to South Gate, but there was no discernible movement in a forward direction. Then a few minutes after the hour, a sudden crescendo of tinkling bicycle bells alerted us that the pent-up energy of the waiting cyclists was about to be unleashed. To the background of jangling rings, screeching brakes, flopping pedals and soft thud of rubber tires bumping into the spokes of other bicycle wheels, the demonstration creakily commenced.

Beida professors, some of whom lived in apartments near South Gate, were on the scene, talking to students and in some cases actively cheering them on, much to Chen Li’s delight. But most of the older campus residents kept their distance. Whether it was the wisdom of age or bitter memories of the Cultural Revolution not yet faded, many of them watched wistfully from the windows and balconies of the ramshackle teacher's dormitories.

All at once, the mass of a million spokes and wheels, greasy chains and kickstands heaved into motion again. Enmeshed in a traffic jam at the starting gate, the metallic parade of creaking, entangled bicycles slowly lurched forward, balanced and propelled by feet, more often on the ground than on pedal. Because it took just a few wobbly bicycles to block a narrow path, the campus gate became a bottleneck, slowing egress even though the security guards did nothing to stop the flow.

Once we rolled off campus and hit the lightly-trafficked streets of Haidian district, the mass of bicycles speeded up in concert, a forward movement that felt truly liberating. All demonstrators, from flag bearers to group leaders, were on mount, so when we finally hit open road, it was possible to race en masse at a flag-whipping speed.

The plan as we understood it was to go around Beijing following the perimeter of the circuitous ring road, to breach Tiananmen Square and then to stage a protest at the People’s Daily compound on Chaoyang Road, but first we had to join forces with allies from other campuses.

"It's a 40-kilometer circle," I heard someone say, "When we get downtown, just follow the old city wall of Beijing."

Chen Li was well aware of the iconic importance of the route, but she was no hot-headed activist. Unlike some late-joiners who pedaled with double the enthusiasm, she continued to show hesitation and review her options at each main juncture along the way. Twice we pulled out from the convoy at her insistence when it looked like there might be trouble from the police. I appreciated her caution, I was a bit worried myself. But what impressed me more was that she did not fall into lockstep behind the bossy “student leaders” up front who were by now commanding the metaphorical ten thousand troops. The only thing more surprising than the speed with which a handful of rash students took control was the willingness of so many intelligent individuals to become followers.

True, the march would not have taken wing if everyone adopted the cautious wait-and-see attitude the two of us did. And some of the students leaders at Beida, Wang Dan in particular, were considered to be thoughtful and reasonable, but the rapidity with which Chinese students fell into line and accepted group think troubled me nonetheless.

But as we cruised breezily down the car-free streets, meeting up with other wheeled university contingents, a kind of ragtag mass euphoria built with each addition to the ranks.

…


When at last we got close to Chang’an Boulevard, the turn to Tiananmen was blocked by police. Word had it that the police had been firm but not unfriendly, and we saw no fighting or confrontation. The traffic police were just doing their job, cordoning off the section of Chang'an Boulevard that ran past the leadership headquarters at Zhongnanhai on the way to Tiananmen. If the men in uniform had been sticklers about not allowing a left turn towards the Square, they showed little concern for what we demonstrators might do elsewhere. That was someone else's responsibility.

Beijing's grid-like layout of large east/west avenues criss-crossed by north/south roads made it nearly impossible to lose one's bearings. It became immediately obvious when we turned south after a feint to the west that we were still headed for Tiananmen after all, only in a roundabout way.

The snakelike chain of cycles doubled back to head for our unspoken destination. Successfully overcoming the police roadblock doubled the good spirits; the collective mood was ecstatic and electric. The indirect route to the Square offered no obstacle to our forward motion. It was hard to believe that the traffic police were so dim-witted as to fall for the ruse, it seems more likely they were following orders to the letter without enthusiasm. Once they had stopped us from turning east onto Chang'an Boulevard, they didn’t seem to care where we went. It was as if they put up a perfunctory show of opposition to the march, not in real opposition, but so as not to get in trouble for not doing their job. Bureaucracy at its best!

When we got to broad Qianmen Avenue we veered east, making a nosedive to Tiananmen, as inexorably as if pulled by gravity. It was here, as the rows of onlookers thickened, as the cyclists pedaled harder, that Chen Li heard a variation of *laowai paobu* that she was kind enough to share with me. What were people saying at the sight of me today? *Laowai qi zixingche! * --Whitey rides the bike!

As we picked up speed, spirits soared. The flying wedge leading the pack thinned out to about five bicycles abreast, stretching the malleable procession in length. It was a race to beat the police to the Square, or so it felt as we hit our clunky bike pedals at an accelerating clip. This kinetic frenzy got the adrenaline going, there was no stopping our unauthorized procession now. Whatever residual indecisiveness my companion might have had was largely overcome by the inspiring sight of fellow cyclists boldly careening forward. Butterflies in the stomach took flight as we made the final invigorating plunge towards the Square.

As the bicycle procession reached the southwestern outskirts of the Tiananmen area, I couldn't imagine pulling out, even if there were police waiting. I didn't want to miss the thrill of streaming across the symbolic plaza in this swift, fluid convoy of thousands, holding aloft fluttering flags, wheeling it for free speech.

The mad dash across Tiananmen Square was the high point, a defiant burst of energy propelled us clear across the forbidden ground in a giant, diagonal slash. There were pockets of urban well-wishers and curious rural tourists who out of friendly support, or fear of speeding bicycles, stepped back from the bicycle course to form a line of observers on both sides. We sped along like chessboard knights across the graph-like matrix of the Square, starting in the lower left hand corner going two steps north, one step east, then one step north and two steps east, finally exiting on the upper right hand side.

The vivid pathway cut by us cyclists swooshing across the Square was volatile and transient; it lasted only as long as the last bicycle in the procession. Banners strapped to bicycles and some huge red flags were held high in the air, balanced deftly by skilled cyclists. The way the flags whipped in the wind created an air of excitement. The red headbands, representing blood, rebellion and speed, were perfect for the course. How else could we identify our cyclists in a city of several million bicycles?

From the vantage point of a gliding bicycle, it was a magnificent scene. Before us and behind us, red flags and school banners lashed the air and unfurled in the jet stream of rushing cycles. This gave the illusion that flags and banners, some strapped to bicycles, others held aloft by skilled cyclists, were flying above the crowd under their own power, like the magical brooms of the sorcerer's apprentice.

As the vanguard zig-zagged in search of openings through the crowd ahead of us, I suddenly had to wonder. Where did all the spectators come from, anyway? At least some of the onlookers appeared to be supporters because they lined up, deliberately holding up traffic it seemed, to create a protective corridor for the demonstrators to slip through. By the time we reached the northeast quadrant of the Square, the banks of spectators were four or five deep on each side, shouting in unison and clapping in support.

The mood was defiant but confident, not only because the police had backed off, but because there was a sense of safety due to the tacit support of townspeople and the growing camaraderie of fellow cyclists. Thanks to the exhilarating movement across the square, all my doubts, and I think those of Chen Li, about whether or not one should get involved in such an event vanished. I, for one, was exactly where I wanted to be.

The speedy rivulet of bicycles got dammed up at Nanchizi intersection just beyond the Square, while the vanguard of group facilitators dealt with some obstruction and conferred on which way to go. Tires bumped against tires, and the mobile procession slowed, scrunched up into a immobile mass of protesters, some dismounting, others resting with feet on the ground for balance. Then the signal to continue reached us and was duly passed along, one voice at a time until what seemed like a million shiny spokes were soon creaking back in motion, revolving down Chang'an Boulevard, transporting the saddled riders to the diplomatic section of town.

And that’s when we realized we weren’t alone.

“Look, over there! Foreign journalists!”

As we rolled past the Beijing Hotel we could see foreign film crews scrambling to set up their cameras to capture this unusual and uniquely Chinese demonstration on film. Unlike the well-documented marches of April 27 and May 4, it seemed as if the foreign press had been caught unprepared by this one. But that was a relief in a way, for cameras have an unnatural effect on people on both sides of the lens. As the brusque men with big cameras scrambled up their ladders, taking aim at us, I could sense a kind of shy pride laced with a touch of humiliation. We were targets being hunted by big roving lenses, reduced to a kind of native wildlife.

It was hard to determine if being on TV was good news or bad news. Had the press been tipped off by the government about an imminent crackdown, or had they been tipped off by the students about the illegal rally?

We kept our eyes on the road, generally ignoring the cameras and sped along on our way. I heard student cyclists complain that a bunch of journalists had shown up the other day at the last minute, when it looked like the police might stage a crackdown, and had they left just as quickly when the crisis passed. To see newsmen arrive on the scene was a bit like sighting vultures; they were just doing their job, of course, but their appearance was often a sign of trouble.

So what was I to make of BBC’s offer of a few days freelance work--interpreting, taking news crews around Beijing— in preparation for the Gorbachev visit a few days hence? I had no press accreditation, so it was a strictly off the books arrangement, a few days work at the local hire rate. I had to wonder if running around with the foreign media was a worthwhile opportunity or mere opportunistic voyeurism, a professional way of looking for trouble.

1989: A Lively Dinner in a Quiet Week

(from the 1989 journal of Philip J Cunningham)

May 7, 1989 
The Yang’s spare living room was transformed into a vibrant cultural salon, with Gladys and Xianyi taking their habitual places in twin armchairs, bringing to mind a kindly old king and queen holding court. The rest of us, lined up on a long couch against the opposite wall behaved like loyal subjects, beaming with respect and admiration. 

The Yangs had been through unimaginably hard times, including solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution, but remained true to one another through thick and thin, emerging with a rare degree of contentment, humility and self-knowledge. They did their best to make light of their significant literary accomplishments, and though rocked by cruel vicissitudes of fate, they could joke and tease one another about it, perhaps a secret to their health and the enduring affection they held not just for one another but the country they had chosen to call home. 

"The first time I met Mao..." Mr. Yang, said with a clipped British inflection, sounding rather like a seasoned raconteur who needed no prompting to start telling an oft-repeated tale, "the Chairman asked me if it was really possible to translate Chinese into English. He was really puzzled by that. Mao had a good mind, but he was not skilled at foreign languages..." 

"Xian-yi," Gladys interrupted. "Why are you speaking in English again? Everyone here understands Chinese!" Gladys scowled at him like a mother trying to discipline a wayward son. 

Mr. Yang gave her a mock angry glance and continued on in his nearly perfect, academic English. "Can you believe I met this woman 40 years ago at Cambridge and we are still together?" Mr. Yang made a face at her and poured himself another drink.

"That's enough, Xianyi," Gladys reprimanded. "Didn't I tell you, Philip, you shouldn't have brought the whiskey? Once he starts drinking there's no stopping him." Gladys turned to her husband and added, "You stubborn old man." 

"You like me because I'm so good looking, isn't it?" Mr. Yang retorted with a wry smile, and turned to me again. "When you make a movie about me you must let me play the leading role, otherwise…I'll have nothing to do with it." "Can you play guitar?" I asked, picking up on the teasing mood. "How would you like to be in CHINABEAT?" All of a sudden I realized I was talking in the same wise-guy kind of way that was good for getting a rise out of my own grandfather. With some people the best defense is a good offense. 

"When do we start filming?" he asked. “Did you see the lights and cameras here before? I'm a star already!" Mr. Yang then leaned over the armrest, issuing loudly whispered instructions to his wife. "Give Philip some whiskey!" 

"You know Philip doesn't want to drink, Xianyi." 

"What do you mean he doesn't want to drink?" 

"Leave him alone, you drunken old man." Yang reminded me of my maternal grandfather, an Irish rebel in his youth, who eventually became more stridently “American” than native-born Americans like myself. I turned to the Chinese gentleman who reminded me much of a certain Matthew Hayes of County Wexford to bring up a question about a hot political topic that had been conspicuously ignored up until now, fully expecting to get hit with a barrage of criticism of the sort I got from my grandfather when I told him I had marched in protests against US imperialism. 

"Yang Xiansheng, so, like, what did you think about the May 4th demonstration?" 

"What do you think about it?" He handed the hot potato question back to me without revealing his own feelings. I took his evasive answer to mean that he, a veteran and a victim of earlier idealism-tinged mass movements, wanted no truck with the student protesters. 

"Well, I participated in the May fourth march to Tiananmen..." I said, with a mixture of trepidation and willful defiance. 

"Good for you, that's the spirit!" Mr. Yang smiled, nodding with approval. I could not believe my ears. The courtly and ceremonious Mr. Yang not only saw the demonstration in a positive light, but seemed to endorse the idea that it was perfectly reasonable for someone like me, an American, a laowai, to march with the Chinese students. Soon everyone in the room was talking about the student unrest, the Yangs, in particular, speaking out with undisguised enthusiasm. 

"China needs more friends like that," Gladys added. 

"This has got all the political analysts at the embassy going crazy,” said Australian diplomat Richard Rigby, who arrived for after-dinner drinks with his wife Taifang. “It's getting harder
and harder to keep up with all the changes..." 

"China is changing so fast," the apolitical Cheng Lin offered, taking the safe ground of stating the
obvious. 

"I support the students,” lamented Hou Dejian, who seemed simultaneously fascinated and pained by the topic. “But I feel too old." Hou, like me was thirty-something, and it made me wonder if age as much as nationality was a barrier that should give one pause before getting involved street protests. 

"You all seem young to me," Mr. Yang injected, offering the reassuring perspective of age and experience. 

"Today's young people are very patriotic,” Gladys reiterated with conviction. “What they are doing is good for the country!"

The New May Fourth Spirit

China Beat has been running excerpts from Philip J Cunningham's forthcoming memoir, Tiananmen Moon; Inside the Chinese Student Uprising in 1989, which will be published in May by Rowman & Littlefield. This excerpt addresses the events of May 4, 1989. Readers can also read the first, second, and third in this series at China Beat or read more at Cunningham's website.

By Philip J Cunningham

The sun is rising. At Beijing Normal University, red flags flutter and unfurl in the early morning breeze above the sports ground. Thousands of students mill about, excitedly falling into groups and lining up to take to the streets and march to Tiananmen Square.

The great May Fourth demonstration is underway despite stern warnings in the press and strict police orders not to take the protest to the streets. That's the real May Fourth Spirit! Defiance in the face of danger! Knock down the old, make way for the new! Challenge authority!

The early morning air is refreshingly cool with only the faintest trace of coal dust now that the long winter is over. Animated, nervous, smiling faces bask in the honey-colored glow of a brilliant morning sun. Even the birds, rare as they are in Beijing, add to the defiant chorus!

Seize the hour! Seize the day! Wake up! China, Wake up!

The atmosphere is electric; but the movement of rebel forces gentle, cooperative and fluidly choreographed.

Large red banners with bright yellow characters of the kind used in school sports meets announce group affiliations such as History Department, Educational Psychology, Arts Choral Group, but it is the national flag of China that takes the place of honor in the student color guard.

Self-appointed student leaders run around the thickening assembly of students with battery-operated megaphones trying to get others to listen, trying to instill order and decorum.

"Please remember discipline!" one voice shouts. "Find your department, look for the banners!"

"Stay with your group!" another one screeches, as static and feedback from the megaphones start to obscure the message.

"Remember to stay with people you know!"

"Song sheets are available from the Arts Choral Group."

Cloth headbands are passed around. Student scribes dash off calligraphy calling for dialogue on sheets of plain cloth and cardboard using ink brushes and felt-tip pens.

Already the air is humming with music. In the middle of the gathering, two accordion players are bellowing and bouncing, rehearsing some morale-boosting numbers for the day's march. There are not enough mimeographed song sheets to go around so marchers scribble down lyrics in their notebooks, copying them off handout sheets and public blackboards. No cribbing is needed for the Internationale, as everyone knows the anthem inside out.

Why sing a song embraced by the establishment? The idea is brilliant in a way. If you sing it enough, you own it. The communist-indoctrinated youth of Beijing are waving the red flag to beat the red flag, employing iconic rhetoric of rebellion to remake China in their own image.

"DO WE HAVE TO WAIT ANOTHER 70 YEARS?"

There it is again. The students are willfully making parallels between their situation and the progenitor of all student demonstrations. The social and creative explosion that followed the May Fourth demonstration at Tiananmen Gate in 1919 led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Once the party took power, it enshrined the 1919 student demonstration as an icon of Chinese communism.

The mood is light, cheerful; the air full of familiar shouts, earthy Beijing greetings and boisterous sing-alongs. There's a kind of safety in numbers, at least psychological safety. If many people are doing something, and don't start to panic, the risk that an individual will be singled out for punishment decreases. Non-participation involves a risk too, the risk of being left on the wrong side of history. Conditioned by decades of campaigns and crackdowns, Chinese understandably look to those around them for clues on how to behave. It's not so much follow the leader as follow other followers.

Standing in the swirling, excited pack of protesters, I am hit with a pang of self-consciousness. Not because I am over six-foot tall, a 190-pound blond man in a sea of black hair and thin physiques; this is a political rally in a country where foreigners live in separate buildings, eat in different restaurants and shop in different stores using different money from local people. Everywhere I go, thousands of curious and sometimes resentful eyes observe my every move. Any lapse of judgment on my part will be magnified many times over because of the stigma of difference.

I am not the only one hit with this sense of not belonging. Beside me stands Lao Ni, who had seen enough excitement for one day. He had seen enough to tell his friends in Taiwan, he was getting ready to leave.

Bright and Jenny find me by the side of the road watching parade ranks being organized by departmental affiliation.

"Jin Peili! Are you going to join us or just watch?" Bright asks provocatively.

"I don't know," I answer, trying to imagine myself as others saw me. "I mean, I'm a wai-guo-ren."

"Are you afraid?" Jenny teases, eyebrows arching in disbelief.

"No, not really."

"Then take a stand with us!" Bright is insistent, bordering on seductive.

Without another word she takes me by the arm and leads me past a throng of people into the middle of the arts choral group. Just then there is a ripple of excited whispers whipping across the staging ground. Word has just come in that the student marchers from other colleges have reached Beitaiping Zhuang intersection just north of campus and that it is time to fall into formation behind departmental flags to break out of the gated, guarded campus. "Jin Peili is marching with us,” Bright says, assigning me a cohort to march with.

Somehow being placed in the middle of the music section is reassuring.

"Arise, you enslaved people!" cry out a dozen voices in Arts Choral Group, "Do not say we have nothing. We shall be the masters of the world. This is the final struggle. . ."

The Internationale is effective in jump-starting the march. It is sung with such repetition that it is soon one of those tunes that you can't get it out of your head.

Doubts mount as we are forced to take a roundabout path to find a way past the padlocked bars of the southeast campus gate. The student vanguard discovers a passable exit through the narrow doorway adjacent to the vestibule manned by campus security. A row of policemen is visible just outside the bars of the gate, but we outnumber them by the hundreds, if not thousands.

Guards or no guards, there is no stopping the rush off campus once the first few students squeeze through. We break ranks, forcefully propelled forward through the passageway to face the unknown. Like grains of sand slipping down the thin neck of an hourglass, dropping past a point of no return.

As we emerge on the street, two campus security agents plead with some flustered students to immediately return to campus. The narrowness of the makeshift exit had forced everyone to go more or less single file, causing each marcher to step out alone, momentarily isolated from the group and vulnerable. The procession quickly reassembles into departmental groups aided by the waving of banners and shouts of student facilitators. Cars and buses on the wide thoroughfare outside the school gate are slowed and then halted as the road is inundated by wave after wave of protesters pouring off campus. Traffic on the wide avenue comes to a complete halt.

A long line of police watch intently from the far side of the road. They are ridiculously outnumbered and make no serious attempt to stop the onrush. Immobilized automobiles get swallowed up, lapped by bodies on all sides, like listing ships in a turbulent sea. From the north comes a spirited procession of students from other schools, and in no time students fill the road as far as the eye can see.

Bright banners for Beijing University, Qinghua University, and Political Science and Law University are hoisted above the heads of the crowd on bamboo poles, flapping in the wind, cracking like whips. As the assembly of students flows tentatively south towards Tiananmen Square, the police back off and let the human mass proceed towards the city center. Are the police in shock and intimidated by the stupendous size of the crowd or silently supportive, won over by the contagious, ebullient spirit of the young protesters? Either way, they do nothing but watch.

Pedestrians start gawking too, cyclists sit on their bikes, unable to cruise forward, curious about the disturbance. Most of the inconvenienced commuters stare in dumbfounded silence, though a few shout words of support and clap at the ragtag student army marching down the street. Passengers stranded on stalled buses peer out their rectangular windows, surveying the scene.

The police ignore the law-breaking students, but the students do not ignore the police. Instead some fast-thinking students try to win the day with cheerful improvisation and song.

"The people love the People's Police!"
"The People's Police love the people!"

Three policemen climb onto the roof of a stalled bus to better survey the unstoppable horde. They exhibit neither amusement nor anger. Some uniformed officers remove their hats, as if off duty, others stand stiffly at attention. Are they mesmerized by the irrepressible optimism of the marchers or just waiting for orders? We stream confidently past several lines of police, as the rhythmic drone of accordions cue a series of crisp rhyming chants. Word quickly reaches us that police blockades erected a short distance down the road have been penetrated by the vanguard of flag-waving marchers, so spirits mount and the student parade picks up speed. The demonstration flows southward on Xinwai Road, coursing past nondescript walled compounds containing military hospitals, factories and apartment blocks.

As we approach Xiaoxitian, near the China Film building, a few hardy members of the international press corps are in evidence on the side of the road. Ensconced inside a Chinese crowd in motion I return the gaze of people who look more or less like me as they attempt to capture images of something that might turn out to be a newsworthy event. Caucasian men hastily clamber up ladders and balance heavy cameras on broad shoulders to take aim and record the progress of an unauthorized May Fourth protest that already has a whiff of history about it. Seeing an opportunity, perhaps even protection in the regard of unblinking black lenses, the arts choral group enthusiastically plunges into song.

"Everyone unite! The Internationale shall certainly be realized..."

The marchers around me ham it up, they strut and swing and cry their hearts out, happy to have been observed, at once defiant, but eager for validation.

We surge southwards like a river swollen with rain, seeking Tiananmen. Crossing Second Ring Road, one of Beijing's key arteries, brings east-west traffic to a halt, leaving taxis and busses stranded and abandoned. Meanwhile, construction workers halt their heavy lifting to line the streets, some of them waving and shouting rowdily. As if on cue, the Arts Choral Group accordion players change tack, “The red sun shall shine all over the globe,” fading out on the line, “The Internationale shall definitely be realized,” to launch a new tune. When I hear the lyrics I know why. It is proletarian agit-prop outreach time.

"Peasants, workers, soldiers, unite together!"

The gaggle explodes in celebration upon hearing the call for solidarity. The rhetoric is not new, but hearing it in this context is.

A strange excitement lifts me. This is the China I have long imagined but never known, the China synonymous with revolution and rebellion that I've read about in history and literature. The energy is inclusive and all encompassing. Can a peaceful people's uprising be in the making?

As the procession moves south along the narrow tree-lined shopping street leading to Xidan, the choral group starts chanting a ditty to the melody to Frere Jacques, slyly co-opting a Young Pioneer anthem.

Dadao guandao! Fandui fubai!
Women yaoqiu minzhu! Women yaoqiu ziyou!
Xiang qian jin! Xiang qian jin!

Down with corruption! Down with nepotism!
We seek democracy! We seek freedom!
March forward! March forward!

The mood of the moment is more fun-loving than militant but political implications of the word dadao, that is to say "down with," are ominous. The mood can't be forever light-hearted and uplifting but need it be mean and outright destructive?

Somewhere along the road to Tiananmen the illegal rag-tag May Fourth demonstration turns into an unsanctioned but broadly tolerated peace march. The implicit militancy of the demonstration at the outset, understandable given a system of government in which a police action was not only possible but likely, was softened by the non-action of the police and the positive response of bystanders along the way. Had there been serious scuffles, arrests or violence between police and marchers or even just conflict between inconvenienced motorists and marchers, the Tiananmen-bound procession would have been forced to choose between conflict and surrender. Instead there was virtually no resistance, which permitted marchers to relax and reach out in a way that reflected how others were responding to them.

By the time we reach Chang’an Boulevard, the numbers are swelling beyond count. Everywhere well-wishers come out of their homes, offices and shops to wave and show support. Police blockades at critical junctions are relaxed as the good-natured vanguard of students wearing sun visors, carrying the sweaters and jackets no longer needed in the midday sun, cheerfully beg cooperation.

A jolt of energy surges through the rapidly moving procession, now numbering ten thousand or more as we reach the northern extremity of the Great Hall of the People and our forbidden destination comes into full view. The protesters around me are sweaty and sunburned, some losing their voices, others already limping from walking miles without a break, but even those unsteady of foot have a bounce in their step, the proud young rebels homing in on the legendary destination that is stage center in Chinese politics.

The crowd picks up speed, those of us near the front of the procession feel an exhilaration as the parade pours onto the vast emptiness of Tiananmen Square, finally coming to rest near the Martyr's Memorial. My group settles in the shadow of Sun Yatsen's portrait, a wood-framed monolith temporarily erected for the national holiday. As thousands join us in due time from universities situated even further away, the throng thickens, and we are surrounded by student contingents on all sides. Yet even now, the vast breadth of the Square dwarfs the growing congregation.

I was supposed to meet Cui Jian and Liu Yuan for lunch today, now I’m in the middle of a crowd in the middle of Tiananmen Square, participating in a demonstration I had merely planned to take a look at.

The rock singer was a musical rebel and effectively expressed his angst in song, but in conversation I rarely found him to be political. If anything, he was cautious, plodding and methodical in his rebelliousness. He sang songs exactly the way he liked to, which ruffled lots of official feathers the wrong way, but he had no desire to push things to the point that he become a persona non grata or forced into exile. So he paid the dues of living in the People’s Republic, including taxes, payment of which was extracted as a corollary of his fame.

Daily life in the People's Republic has been excellent preparation for the practical and dramatic demands of staging political theatre at Tiananmen. It was the art of skirting the edge without crossing the line. It was rebelling within the orthodox vocabulary of rebellion. On what grounds could the May Fourth inspired Communist Party object to a May Fourth march of students waving red banners and singing communist anthems?

Already townspeople were swarming towards the protest, and they too knew how to play they ambiguity game. If questioned they could say they were watching out of curiosity, not in solidarity.

Meanwhile, the police are melting away, which lessens the likelihood of conflict and actually enhances the sense of order. The crowd can do without police because it self-polices. Everyone is under pressure to stay with his own group, remaining under the watchful eyes of peers. There are no explicit rules but there is much order -- order born of years of communal life in a communal society. One instinctively knows how to take turns using the facilities in the family’s cramped apartment, to share a single desk with six roommates in a dorm room, to fall into order and march and sing in state-sponsored youth fests. Functioning in a crowd, cooperating and putting on a show are nothing new to these young communists. This demonstration, though illegal, is being guided by well-honed instincts, it reflects not so much rebellion as an intense expression of everyday values.

The banners around me were both provocative and orthodox, lifted from slogans uttered in generations past.

FREEDOM
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE!
DEMOCRACY AND SCIENCE
UNDER THE SKY, ALL FOR THE PEOPLE

Tiananmen Square! As a protest of uncertain duration begins on the monumental chessboard carved out in the heart of the arid, mountain-ringed plain of Beijing, no one knows for sure where things are going or what will happen next, but the location is deliberate. Tiananmen is the ceremonial stage for a nation of a billion. Nowhere in Beijing does the sky seem wider and grander than over Tiananmen, the sky gate; the place where the sky meets the ground. Scorching hot in the sun, magical in the moonlight, lyrical lookout on the cosmos, celestial yet grounded. Open to the heavens, a conduit of the elements, Tiananmen is the place, if such a place exists, where the mandate of heaven resides; not just a place to celebrate history, but a place to make it, inspired by precedent.

Digital Traces of 1989

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, on April 23, the second, by Jonathan Unger, on April 26. This is the third piece.

Yang Guobin is an Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College.  He has written essays on many subjects, including the students protests of 1989, and is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, which will be published in June by Columbia University Press.

Media played an important role in the mobilization of Chinese protesters in 1989. Twenty years afterwards, the protest movement is still linked to media, except that it is now the new media. The Internet has become a reservoir of the history and memories of that fateful year.

The most comprehensive English-language material on the Internet is perhaps the web site The Gate of Heavenly Peace run by the Long Bow Group. Because it is already well known to readers of China Beat, I will mention two other sources.

One is CND’s “Virtual Museum of China '89.” CND has a large “Virtual Museum of the ‘Cultural Revolution,” which I often use. Its “Virtual Museum of China '89” is smaller in scale, but nonetheless contains many valuable resources. The archives of the “Virtual Museum of China '89”consist of “Images,” “Sounds,” “Writings” and other documents related to the protest movement. The “Writings” section contains, among other things, a diary by a student in Tsinghua University, two novels, ten special issues about the movement published in English from 1989 through 1999, and many special supplements published in Chinese from 1992 through 1999. The diary had many touching details. For example, the entry for May 20, 1989, the first day of martial law, begins with the following words (in my hasty and awkward translation):

The morning sun lit the Square once again. Nothing happened. No troops were in view. Then there came news from all quarters that this morning, at the main crossroads in the suburbs, local residents spontaneously hit the streets, formed human walls, and blocked the troops from entering the city! I was surprised and extremely moved to hear this news. Who would have thought that Beijing’s residents could do such brave things! Beijing residents were just great!...Because the hunger strike had ended, the medical personnel sent to the Square by the Red Cross began to withdraw today. The two young girls who worked as nurses in our broadcast station were leaving  too. They were reluctant to go and asked us to sign our names on their white uniforms and hats, saying that they didn’t know when we could ever meet again.

The other source is a photo exhibit I found here. The photographer was Kiang Hei. I communicated with him a couple of years ago but have since lost touch with him and haven’t been able to find out the circumstances under which he took these pictures. But the pictures are soul-stirring. For anyone who was there on the scene, they would instantly bring back the sounds and silences and the joys and desolateness of the time. Who was the woman in this picture? What was she saying to the young man facing her, with others in the background listening attentively? The characters written on the yellow paper mean “Children are the future of our country’s democratic movement.” The children of 1989 have grown up. Are they living up to these expectations? The bulletin boards shown in the photograph here look like those in the famous sanjiaodi (Triangle) area in Beida. I passed that area whenever I visited Beida. Eventually, as China forged ahead with its market transformation, the same bulletin boards became plastered all year round with advertisements of TOEFL and GRE preparation classes. Then in 2007, these stands, so closely tied to Beida’s political history, were demolished.

These are not the only traces of 1989 in cyberspace. But they are particularly unforgettable.

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.