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| May 17th rally in Tiananmen Square |
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April, 1989. Beijing students begin their movement for democracy by holding small demonstrations in the city. Initially, their demands focus largely on greater freedom and autonomy in the educational system. But by the second week of April, it became clear that the students were beginning to stake out a broader vision of their democratic dream.
It crystallized on April 16th, the day after former Communist Party Secretary Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack. Hu, a reformer known for his support for both economic and political liberalization, was greatly admired by the protesting students. Three hundred students carrying wreaths and banners marched into Tiananmen Square proclaiming their respect and admiration for Comrade Hu Yaobang. The students had actually planned to hold a demonstration on May 4th commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the May 4th Movement of 1919, a student-led protest against Japanese imperialism which led to the downfall of the imperial government and the birth of the Chinese Communist Party.
But Hu?s death moved the demonstrations forward, giving the opportunistic students a chance to celebrate those aspects of his political life they identified with. Hu, once a favorite of China?s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, had increasingly been associated with the more moderate, reform wing of the party. In death, Hu became a symbol for the pro-democracy students to rally around, as well as articulate their own demands and grievances.
And so the Beijing Spring began that first night in Tiananmen Square with the arrival by bicycle and subway of 300 brave pioneers. The students stayed in the square for several hours before dispersing voluntarily close to midnight, when the police normally cleared it.
The next night saw thousands of students attend rallies at Beijing and People?s universities before marching to Tiananmen Square. They held banners declaring, ?Long live democracy; down with dictatorship.? Thousands of curious spectators and other students joined them, and the bewildered police could do nothing but protect the demonstrators and hold up traffic at the intersections leading up to Tiananmen.
A cat-and-mouse situation was developing in Beijing. While the reserved police reaction illustrated that the students had caught the government off guard with these early mobilizations, things were not completely one-sided. The factional fight inside the party between the Deng/Li Peng hard-liners and the moderate Zhao Zhang wing was already raging. Neither side had yet defeated the other and consolidated its power. The army?s hands-off policy toward the demonstrators was nothing more than a reflection of this.
On April 18th, the party sent a different signal to the demonstrators. Several thousand students left the square and assembled in front of Zhongnanhai, the headquarters for the party?s Central committee and the residence of its top leaders, calling on government officials to come out and talk with them. A squad of police plunged into the crowd, beating several demonstrators. It was the first of many confrontations to take place at the Zhongnanhai compound.
But the students were emboldened with the overall success of their budding prodemocracy movement. They kept coming to the square every day leading up to Hu Yaobang?s funeral on April 22nd, when a crowd estimated at 150,000 converged on Tiananmen Square.
This was the day when three students leaders knelt on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, the huge governmental complex bordering one side of Tiananmen, begging for a dialogue with the government. They wanted to deliver a petition of grievances to Premier Li Peng, and while they didn't?t get to see him, they did manage to get inside the building and attempt to deliver the document.
For the first time, the demands of the pro-democracy campaign were articulated on paper. The petition called on the party leaders to engage in a dialogue with the students, reveal their salaries and assets as well as their families? assets, rescind the bans on newspapers, enact price controls, and guarantee that there would be no reprisals against student demonstrators. When the government refused to see the students, thereby foiling their attempt to deliver the petition directly to Li Peng, they left the square and returned to their campuses. The word spread, however, that the protests would continue and classes would be boycotted through May 4th.
The students, feeling the momentum building behind them, continued marching on Tiananmen Square, carrying their banners calling for democracy, free speech, and an end to corruption. And as they did, the working people of Beijing began developing a respect and admiration for the moral courage of the demonstrators. Word was getting around about the students? forthright challenge to the party bureaucrats to reveal their worth and end their privileges, and it was striking a responsive chord.
This was convincingly demonstrated on April 27th, when a crowd of nearly 200,000 occupied the square, and they were not all students. Tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, spectators, and curious on-lookers turning into participants, took the square from the People?s Liberation Army soldiers and Beijing?s police.
The size of the April 27th demonstration was significant, given the fact that it took place one day after the publication of a harsh editorial in the People?s Daily, the newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, which declared that the aim of the protests was to ?poison people?s minds, create national turmoil and sabotage the nation?s political stability. This is a planned conspiracy which, in essence, aims at negating the leadership of the Party and the socialist system.?
The bluntness of the tone was an ominous sign, and the theme was one the Deng government would return to in the future. When Stalinists start talking in such terms, bloody army crackdowns are not far off. It was the first indication that the hard-line Deng/Li Peng faction of the Communist Chinese Party was marshalling its forces in order to forcibly end the Tiananmen protests.
But no government editorial in the People?s Daily could deter the students and Beijing?s populace. The prairie fire was spreading. The people?s thirst for democratic rights and their hatred of the rampant bureaucratic privilege was too strong, and they were too encouraged by their early triumphs.
The pro-democracy movement took off, riveting the attention of the entire world. As the students continued boycotting classes and marching into Tiananmen Square, and the citizens of Beijing kept joining them, the Communist Party's authority was being challenged.
During the second week of May, as thousands of students set up camp in the square, many began a hunger strike from their tents. Frustrated by the government?s refusal to hold a dialogue with them, the students felt the radical tactic of a hunger strike would focus world attention on the Deng/Li Peng government and force it to talk with the students about their demands for democracy.
Unfortunately for Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was due to arrive in Beijing on May 15th for a long-awaited meeting with the Chinese leadership. On that day, students and citizens, keenly aware of the political cover Gorbachev?s visit presented to them, poured into Tiananmen. Hundreds of thousands of workers joined the thousands of student hunger strikers amidst a sea of multicolored banners. The scheduled ceremony for the Soviet leader in the square had to be cancelled; it was far too risky to allow Moscow?s architect of glasnost and reform to become the focus of attention for the Tiananmen demonstrators. Much to Deng?s humiliation, they were forced to conduct the ceremony at the airport, before sneaking Gorbachev into the government buildings off Tiananmen Square for his meetings with the leadership.
On May 17th, the crowd in and around the square swelled to one million, presenting more problems for Deng Xiaoping. Any doubts that the students did not have the support of Beijing?s working people in their fight for democratic rights were erased with the huge mobilization in Tiananmen that day. For the first time, blue collar workers marched under their own banners proclaiming solid support for the students. ?Listen to the Students? read one. Another proclaimed: ?They Are Gentle Intellectuals. We Are Rough Workingmen.?
The workers viewed the hunger striking students as the emerging moral conscience of China, and they were proud of them. While the rest of the world watched in amazement, the leadership of the Communist Party was alarmed at this budding worker-student alliance. As scores of hunger strikers began lapsing into unconsciousness, workers serving as marshals cleared narrow paths in the square just wide enough for ambulances to take the casualties out of Tiananmen to receive medical care.
It was this overt participation of workers in the Tiananmen pro-democracy campaign that attracted the attention of this unionist in San Francisco. A former antiwar student myself, I was impressed by the moral courage and daring being shown by Beijing?s students. But as a socialist, I recognized that if the industrial working class in China linked up with the students and threw their weight behind the struggle for democratic rights, the entire character of the Beijing Spring would radically change. The question would be clearly posed: Who rules in China? The working people or a privileged bureaucracy?
The active involvement of workers in the May 17th demonstration suggested a dynamic that both sent shudders up the spines of the Stalinist leadership in Beijing and thrilled revolutionary Marxists the world over?an antibureaucratic rebellion, consciously led by the working class, which would retain the socialist property forms (nationalized industries, state monopoly of foreign trade, and a planned economy) while overthrowing the tyrannical rule of the privilege caste, opening up a new vista of socialist democracy. In other words, the kind of political revolution predicted by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in his classic analysis of Stalinism?The Revolution Betrayed.
I first read Trotsky?s book after discovering the Socialist Workers Party while living in New York City in late 1977. It was the United Mine Workers strike that galvanized me to take my socialist convictions a step further and check out a Marxist organization. As a left wing student activist at Georgetown University, my politics had ranged from working from George McGovern?s presidential campaign in 1972 to expressing sympathies for the Weather Underground, a group of urban guerrilla revolutionaries in the United States who bombed government buildings in the late ?60s and early ?70s. After graduating in 1975, I moved to New York and considered myself a democratic socialist of the Michael Harrington stripe.
But the 1977-78 strike by the mine workers convinced me that Harrington?s brand of reformism had little to offer miners or any other workers in the life and death of the class struggle. I remembered how attracted I was to a New York Times column written by the Socialist Workers Party mayoral candidate during the 1976 campaign. Then in December 1977, I ran into an SWP member hawking the party?s newspaper, the Militant, on a Greenwich Village street. Impressed by its coverage of the coal miners strike, I bought the paper and learned of a public forum on the strike that the Militant was sponsoring the next evening.
The forum speaker was a young party member who gave a fascinating eyewitness account of his visit with striking coal miners in West Virginia. I had a stimulating discussion with several members and before leaving I purchased three books?The History of American Trotskyism and Socialism on Trial, both written by SWP founder James P. Cannon, and Trotsky?s The Revolution Betrayed.
Cannon had been a leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s who was expelled for his pro-Trotsky views. While visiting Canada in 1928, Cannon read Trotsky?s Draft Programme of the Left Opposition, which criticized Stalin?s domestic and foreign policies, especially pertaining to China, where Stalin had disarmed the Chinese Communists and led them right into the bloody hands of Chiang Kai Shek?s Kuomintang. Cannon agreed with Trotsky?s analysis that Stalin was abandoning Lenin?s revolutionary internationalism and succumbing to a more nationalist, conservative, chauvinist foreign policy that was too eager to subordinate the interests of the workers and the world revolution in order to make peace with international capitalism.
Devouring these books over the next few days transformed my entire life. I became a revolutionary Marxist, a strong supporter of the Socialist Workers Party, and a Trotskyist, in that I embraced the revolutionary?s analysis and critique of Stalinism?where it came from and where it was going. Suddenly, socialist politics had a solid historical and scientific basis. Communism made sense, as did Trotsky?s analysis of how the revolution in the Soviet Union had degenerated when the privileged bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, smashed Leninism and seized political power, wielding it through totalitarian terror.
Trotsky?s scholarly analysis in The Revolution Betrayed showed that Stalin?s success in ruthlessly consolidating power while defeating Trotsky?s Left Opposition was not merely a matter of Stalin?s superior capacity for cunning. Stalin?s bureaucracy came to power in the Soviet Union due to the isolation of the young Soviet republic when the international socialist revolution failed to extend to any of the advanced capitalist countries, particularly Germany. It triumphed because of the extreme poverty and backwardness of the country, already devastated by World War I and the 1917-1921 civil war, which had wiped out much of the industrial working class, further shifting the class relationship of forces in favor of the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants, and against the industrial workers.
Thus, the material conditions for a privileged bureaucracy to emerge were ripe in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. Scarcity breeds inequality, Trotsky pointed out, and in the Soviet Union, that led to the counterrevolutionary political triumph of a petty bourgeois caste over the working people of that country.
Trotsky explained, however, that while the ascension to power of this caste represented a political counterrevolution, the social and economic conquests gained through the Bolsheviks? expropriation of the capitalists and landlords remained intact. The Stalinist caste was a parasitic creature, feeding off the workers state, taking the lion?s share of the social surplus product. It was a reactionary political formation that was an obstacle to the development of socialism, because it forcibly blocked the active participation by the workers and farmers of the country. Its politics and perspective were narrow, chauvinist, and nationalist, abandoning Leninism?s internationalism and serving as a transmission belt into the country for imperialism?s values.
Trotsky further explained that the only way the Soviet workers and peasants could advance toward socialism was through a political revolution that overthrew the bureaucracy and established socialist democracy. While his analysis dealt specifically with the Soviet Union, it was applied correctly by the SWP to those nations where capitalism was overturned in the 1940s: the Eastern European Warsaw Bloc countries and China. In these countries, Stalinist-led communist parties had expropriated the capitalists, nationalized the industries, and established planned economies and state monopolies of foreign trade, forming the basis of socialist property relations. But these workers states were born with already bureaucratically deformed leaderships. The Soviet Union began with a healthy, revolutionary, internationalist leadership under Lenin, but saw its revolution degenerate due to the betrayal by the nationalist-chauvinist Stalinists.
There was a major difference, however, between the socialist revolutions in the Warsaw Bloc countries and China, as Socialist Workers Party documents explained. Capitalism in Eastern Europe was overturned after World War II largely from an external force?the Soviet Red Army?not from indigenous mass movements of working people. An exception was Tito?s Yugoslavia, where a mass-based pro-communist Partisan force had fought the Nazis.
In China, however, Mao?s Communist Party led a genuine mass movement that first fought Japanese imperialism in a war of national liberation, and then, under tremendous pressures from the US-led imperialist assault, expropriated the capitalists and landlords, establishing a state which fit Trotsky?s definition of a workers state?with nationalized industries, a planned economy and a state monopoly of foreign trade. This social transformation made possible important gains?expanded medical care that largely eradicated tuberculosis, diphtheria, polio and tetanus; substantial reduction of illiteracy; and a tremendous expansion in public education.
Not only was Mao schooled in Stalin?s version of communism, but when he came to power, his petty bourgeois, peasant-based Communist Party merged with the army apparatus and constituted a bureaucracy that usurped political power from the Chinese workers and peasants in order to consolidate and preserve its privileged status. Efforts to stabilize this regime and harness mass unrest led to a pattern of fierce factional infighting and sharp zigzags in economic policies that have continued to this day.
All of this seemed to make sense to me. Trotsky?s analysis of Stalinism struck me as scholarly and scientific. I read his collection of writings on China, and how the Chinese Trotskyists endured severe repression under Mao?s regime. I was impressed by the SWP?s analysis of the Chinese Revolution and Mao?s leadership, and agreed with its call for a political revolution by that would establish genuine socialist democracy and development.
The SWP?s critique of such disastrous events as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s also rang true. The former was a typically Stalinist, heavy-handed, administrative set of measures imposed on the people from above, consisting of Mao?s ultraleft nonsense that exhorted peasants to build mini steel mills in their backyards. The latter was essentially Mao?s wing of the Communist Party waging a war for political supremacy against the faction led by Deng Xiaoping, who was denounced as a ?capitalist roader.?
Like many other leftist radicals in the ?60s and ?70s, I was attracted to some degree by the Chinese Revolution; something about its clearly pronounced egalitarian character struck a responsive chord. I can still recall how impressed I was by the massive mobilizations in Tiananmen Square after Zhou en Lai?s death in April 1976. These rallies became an outlet for opposition to repression and other policies, and appeared to have the backing of officials loyal to Deng. But the army crushed the protests on April 5, and Deng was removed from his party posts. I remember thinking: ?Wow, if the outpouring was this tremendous for Zhou, imagine its magnitude when Mao dies!?
Obviously, I was not yet following the situation in China very closely, for in truth Mao?s support was declining. When the smoke cleared after his death in September 1976, the pro-Maoist faction known as the Gang of Four, which included his widow, was ousted from power in 1978 by a rightist faction led by Deng Xiaoping, who seemed to have as many political lives as a cat.
By this time I had met the SWP and my Marxist education was well under way. I closely watched the Wall of Democracy campaign in 1978-79, when the government permitted a brief period of dissent and free expression characterized by written tracts posted all over the city?s walls. I also kept up with the later pro-democracy movements of 1982 and 1986-87, which culminated in the fall of Hu Yaobang and the Deng government?s retreat from ?bourgeois liberalization.?
It was true that these manifestations of dissent were spearheaded by students and intellectuals, but my sense was there was also smoldering discontent among the working people in both city and countryside resulting from Deng?s increased reliance on free market mechanisms. This pro-capitalist bent was deepening social inequalities and widening the disparities in income and living standards. The intellectual ferment generated from the pro-democracy movements of 1978, 1982 and 1986-87 found its reflection in the moderate wing of the Chinese Communist Party, which favored political liberalization to accompany the economic liberalization the government was embarking on. Hu Yaobang, whose death sparked the 1989 student protests, was the leader of this moderate faction. After his departure, Zhao Zhang emerged as the new chief of the liberals in the party, and a hero to the students in Tiananmen Square.
1978 was an extremely interesting time to discover the Socialist Workers Party for three historically interrelated reasons. First, the SWP was beginning its ?turn? to basic industry, that is, a concerted effort to plant the overwhelming majority of its members into the industrial unions with the most political and social weight: United Mineworkers, United Autoworkers, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, rail workers in the United Transport Union, International Association of Machinists, Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, and later meatpackers in the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The party leadership decided that the decades-long historical detour away from the labor movement had finally ended; it was time to do what vanguard communist organizations are in business to do?build the party in the most powerful sections of the working class in order to construct a revolutionary Marxist movement in the United States that would lead the workers and farmers to take political power away from the capitalists and establish a workers and farmers government that would abolish capitalism and chart a course toward socialism.
The ?historical detour? had begun in the late 1940s, after the communists were driven out of the labor movement by the witch hunt and the onset of the Cold War. The 1950s were a dismal decade for the SWP (and the other major communist party, the pro-Moscow Communist Party USA, led by Gus Hall), a time of survival and maintaining the revolutionary continuity begun by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Things picked up in the 1960s, beginning with the Cuban Revolution, followed by the civil rights and women?s movements and the anti-Vietnam War movement that was based on the nation?s college campuses. The SWP threw itself into these campaigns and recruited the most revolutionary activists from thing, but little was happening in the labor movement, and that?s where communists ultimately have to be.
But by the mid- and late 1970s, the party?s leadership concluded that major structural changes in the national and international capitalist economy were pushing the working class back into the center stage of world politics. The detour had come to an end. The SWP made the ?turn? to industry, targeting its cadre into the most powerful industrial unions in order to forge a class struggle left wing in the labor movement. The reproletarianization of the party was under way.
The second reason 1978 was an exciting time to discover the SWP was that the party was reevaluating its relationship to both Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. The party shifted away from its previous semi-sectarian stance of calling itself a ?Trotskyist? organization. In doing so, the SWP reknit its revolutionary connection to Lenin?s leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International.
Before this period, the party had slipped into a mentality that viewed everything Trotsky ever said as the gospel, including the years preceding the Russian Revolution. The lynchpin of Trotsky?s theories was his ?Permanent Revolution,? developed as early as 1905, which said that what was on the historical agenda, even for semicolonial countries, was for the industrial working class to lead the poor peasantry in expropriating the capitalists and establishing socialist economies. Trotsky summed it up in a slogan that both called for the type of government the revolution should bring to power and gave the class content and character of the revolution: dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin sharply disagreed with Trotsky?s permanent revolution theory. The Bolshevik leader saw the primary task facing communist workers was to forge an alliance with the peasantry as a whole to smash landlordism and carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution. Lenin summed it up this way: a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Lenin, in some sharp polemics, accused Trotsky of seriously underestimating the role of the peasantry in fighting for and carrying out the socialist revolution.
These were not insignificant differences, but for years the SWP had glossed over them. The party favored Trotsky?s permanent revolution over Lenin?s revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. The SWP gave undue influence to the ?organizational? differences between the two leaders before July 1917 when Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party?the fact that Trotsky had failed before that time to recognize the need for a disciplined, centralized, combat party of vanguard workers to lead the workers and peasants to socialist revolution. But this organizational clash was in truth a reflection of more substantive, political differences between the two revolutionists.
By 1978, the SWP had made an honest reassessment of these matters and concluded that it was Lenin who had been more on the mark politically before 1917. Trotsky?s greatest contribution to the communist movement, the party concluded, came after he finally joined the Bolsheviks in July 1917: his leadership in the October insurrection; his role in building and commanding the Red Army to victory over the Whites in the civil war; his political leadership in the Communist International; and last but probably most crucial?Trotsky?s analysis of and fight against Stalinism, his titanic battle against all odds to preserve Leninism and restore the Communist Party to internationalism and socialist democracy, which culminated in his founding of the Fourth International in 1938.
Quite an impressive record. But still, it was Leon Trotsky who called himself a Leninist, and by 1978, the Socialist Workers Party was calling itself Leninist as well.
The third reason why 1978 was a fascinating time to learn about the SWP concerned its rediscovery of the Cuban Revolution. The party had correctly recognized in 1960 that for the first time since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a socialist revolution was led by a non-Stalinist party, by a genuinely revolutionary leadership. The party embraced the Cubans as fellow revolutionaries and threw itself into solidarity organizations defending the Cuban Revolution, most notably the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
But over the years the SWP lost sight of developments in Cuba, and by the mid-70s had to rediscover Cuba and reorient to the Cuban Revolution. The party did a splendid job in doing so, recognizing that the Castro leadership had matured into a genuinely communist, internationalist leadership, one that was vastly different from the Stalinist bureaucrats in Moscow and Beijing. Fidel was the true leader of the communist movement internationally, not Gorbachev or Deng. Because the Soviet, Eastern European and Chinese Stalinists were turning increasingly to capitalist methods in order to shore up their privileged, bureaucratic misrule. Fidel and the Cubans, however, had begun a process of rectification, and in so doing rediscovered Che Guevera and their communist roots.
As an active supporter of the Socialist Workers Party from 1978-1985, I was privileged to be part of the 1978 anti-apartheid movement taking place on college campuses; an activist against US intervention in Central America to defending the Cuban, Grenadian and Nicaraguan revolutions; an antinuclear activist who marched for abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, walked the Greyhound picket lines at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in 1983, and built solidarity for the PATCO strikers (air traffic controllers).
My association with the party gave me the chance to meet Sandinistas at the 1979 SWP National Convention in Oberlin, Ohio, be part of the defense team for Bernadette Devlin when she visited New York in 1981, and witness Daniel Ortega give his address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1984.
In 1985 I moved to San Francisco and continued to function politically as an SWP supporter, which included marching with striking Watsonville cannery workers in 1986 and defending the party?s bookstores against right wing Vietnamese thugs in San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco in 1985. My support of the SWP had not diminished an iota over the years. I liked how it embraced Malcom X, and was impressed with how it threw itself into supporting the 1979 revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada. Above all, I admired the SWP for its unyielding solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, and how it considered Fidel?s Communist Party a sister party in the new communist international emerging from the class struggle.
In February 1989, right about the time when Beijing?s students began organizing themselves, my coworkers at Bancroft-Whitney, a legal publishing firm in San Francisco, elected District 65, United Auto Workers to be our collective bargaining agent. An outspoken, open communist and partisan of the Militant newspaper became a central leader in the union organizing campaign at Bancroft-Whitney and got elected shop steward.
I wasn?t the only communist operating in a leadership role in a union fight. In a far more politically important labor struggle, the Machinists at Eastern Airlines went on strike March 4th, 1989, and before long, SWP members were playing vital roles on rank and file strike committees. Important changes were going on in the world; historic fights were taking place. The Cubans and Angolans had decisively defeated the South Africans at Cuito Cuanavale, delivering a powerful blow against apartheid in southern Africa, already teetering from the pressure of the African National Congress-led liberation movement.
Meanwhile, in April 1989, Beijing's students decided to take matters into their own hands. If no one else was going to step forward and do anything, they were willing to put their bodies on the line and challenge the government to end the corruption and privilege and grant democratic rights to the people. And when thousands of students started a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square on May 13th, by May 17th, Beijing?s working people were right there with them, over a million strong.
May 18th saw another huge mobilization in the square, as hunger strikers continued to fail, and marshals parted the crowd into slim lanes for ambulances to come and go. A lot happened the next day. Zhao Zhang made his sad visit to the students in the square.
?It?s too late, I come too late,? he told them with tears in his eyes. For he had already lost the battle against the Deng/Li Peng hardliners. Deng was well on his way toward marshalling the army units needed to clear Tiananmen Square.
Li Peng also showed up in the square, but he didn?t have much to say and left early. Later, the Prime Minister met with several student leaders who had joined the hunger strike, including the charismatic Wuer Xaxi in the Great Hall of the People, right next to the square. Wuer, still in his pajamas and very weak, interrupted Li Peng: ?We don?t have to listen to you, Prime Minister Li; you didn?t invite us here. We invited you. And we do not want to only talk about the hunger strike. We want to get down to the main point.
?You are so old, and you can be our teacher and master. Master Li, the government must acknowledge us as a patriotic movement.? Then Wuer, always with the flair for the democratic, fainted right then and there in the Great Hall of the People. Wuer?s courage was a reflection of the courage of an entire generation of young Chinese, many of whom were assembled in Tiananmen across from the Great Hall.
That same day, May 19th, President Yang Shangkun, a hardliner closely allied with Deng Xaioping, called in the army and declared martial law. The problem for Deng was that although Zhao and the moderates had been defeated internally, things hadn?t been definitively communicated to all the army units. There was still a residue of factionalism in the army commanders, and Zhao?s conciliatory stance toward the demonstrators and opposition to the use of force to clear them from the square still had support. By the time the army arrived in Beijing, millions of people flooded the streets and blocked it from advancing toward Tiananmen. The people, at least for the time being, had won. But Deng only needed a little more time.
I was watching all of this from San Francisco with a great deal of fascination. Instinctively I was identifying with the Chinese students and bursting with solidarity and admiration for their sheer moral courage, innocence and humanity. Every night sat glued to the TV, watching the moving footage from Tiananmen Square on CNN and the major networks?news broadcasts. I remember the night I saw Dan Rather?s confrontation with governmental authorities while on the air. The city was rife with tension, martial law had been declared, and the government was threatening to pull the plug on foreign TV cameras. Rather, never one to shirk from a confrontation, did a lot of grandstanding in his defiance of the government technicians before they cut off CBS. For some strange reason, I felt a special affinity for Rather that night; some kind of journalistic solidarity with someone in danger, no doubt.
Then I really got excited upon hearing the announcement on May 20th that a Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation tent had been set up in the square. So now the workers were getting into the act in an organized way, taking advantage of the political space opened up by the mass movement occurring in Beijing. If the organization grew, and the workers assumed more of a leadership role in the pro-democracy movement, a new chapter in the political revolution could be on the agenda in China.
On May 23rd, I received a phone call from Beijing. An old college friend had been doing business there with the government for several months, trying to market American videos and arrange to distribute Chinese films in the States. But he was alone, and with the city on the verge of exploding, he was having a hard time there. He had a freelance assignment with the San Francisco Examiner that he could use some assistance with. If he made all the arrangements, could I catch the earliest flight to Beijing to join him?
Without hesitating I accepted. Three days later, armed with a visa and cassette tape recorder, I arrived at San Francisco International Airport for a 1:30 pm flight to Beijing. Not that I needed any reminder of the danger I was flying into, but before I even checked my bags there was a disturbing harbinger of things to come. I instructed my Super Shuttle driver to ask an airport attendant where Air China, the People?s Republic of China?s airline, was located. He directed me instead to Taiwan?s China Airlines, where a man who obviously worked for the airline greeted me with a cheerful ?Going to Taiwan??
?No, no, Beijing. The People?s Republic is my destination,? I quickly replied.
His eyes widened in horror.
?Oh, Beijing? Oh no!? he managed. ?Over there, over there,? he said hurriedly, pointing to an area several airlines away from his own. I smiled to the man and apologized for the confusion. I felt the eyes of the entire crowd of Taiwanese left standing in amazement. I made my way to the Air China check-in line, and after a lengthy wait, hoisted my bags on the conveyor belt.
?Aren?t you going to the wrong China?? asked the ticket clerk curiously.
?No, I?m going to Beijing,? I answered firmly. On the surface it must have seemed a little crazy for an American to be traveling to Beijing on May 26th, 1989. It had been less than a week since the Chinese government had declared martial law and attempted to send army units into Beijing to end the students? occupation of Tiananmen Square. While the troops had been blocked for the time being by massive mobilizations of students, workers, and farmers, the situation was still extremely tense, as the Communist Party leadership under Deng and Li Peng were attempting to reconsolidate their power.
Though fully conscious of the possible danger ahead, there was no doubt in my mind as to the correctness of my decision to go to Beijing. I was going as an observer as well as a supporter of the students and their struggle for democratic rights. It was a big story and I wanted to see it first-hand and tell the truth about it. I felt a little like Warren Beatty in ?Reds,? when he portrayed American journalist John Reed, who felt compelled to travel to Petrograd in October of 1917 to witness the unfolding Bolshevik Revolution. For a political activist and socialist, there was really no place else to be in May 1989 than Beijing, China to join the mass movement in Tiananmen Square.
The flight from San Francisco to Beijing lasted over 15 hours, including a stop in Shanghai, another center of the pro-democracy campaign. Most of the passengers were Asian, but there was a smattering of Americans on board as well. I talked to one guy while sitting in the Shanghai Airport during the layover. His name was Fred and he seemed friendly enough, saying he hailed from Seattle and was looking to open a travel bureau in Beijing. This struck me as a rather strange time to be opening a travel bureau in Beijing, so I was somewhat suspicious, and even more so when he kept interrogating me on why I was headed for China.
Aside from the fairly significant presence of soldiers at Shanghai Airport, nothing appeared particularly unusual there. After almost an hour we were back in the air for the last leg of the long journey. An hour later, the Air China jet landed at Beijing Airport, and as soon as I was off the plane it was clear I had arrived in a place where history was being made. The airport was bustling with chaos and tension. It seemed as if everyone was either trying to leave or frantically attempting to claim their bags.
Luckily, my friend in Beijing had sent a taxi driver to pick me up and drive me to the hotel. I guess I wasn?t difficult to locate the long-haired American who looked a trifle disoriented in the midst of the madness, and before long we were in his cab and embarking on the half hour ride into the capital city of China. The Beijing night was very warm and still, and the main road was long, dark and flanked by rows of thick trees.
Occasionally we passed a bicylist, but other than that there were no visible signs of activity along the road. Suddenly the cab was being slowed down by a roadblock up ahead; but it was a roadblock manned by students, and they waved us by. Before reaching Beijing, we passed two more such roadblocks. Despite all the government?s talk of martial law, this was a city where it was not yet enforced. The people seemed in control, and the students were at the helm.
As we approached Tiananmen Square, we noticed many groups of youthful demonstrators huddled together in intense meetings. My first impressions of the square that night are somewhat hazy; I was exhausted from the long flight and the first time you see something you?re not always focused. I remember it was a big square but I was mesmerized by the red and yellow banners from the hundreds of colleges and universities and the many tents in the square. It was one o?clock in the morning and there were many thousands of students camped in Tiananmen Square. We drove by pretty quickly, but it was a stirring, sobering sight. I had arrived smack in the middle of a great country?s history being made.
Across the wide avenue from the square, I saw for the first time the large portrait of Chairman Mao on the gate at the entrance to the Forbidden City, which the government had recently closed in reaction to the demonstrations. It was a bizarre, almost eerie scene, one that would captivate me during my stay in Beijing. It was the same portrait that had been defaced a week earlier by unknown vandals. The students, suspecting it was the work of government provocateurs, denounced the defacement and cooperated with the authorities in the arrests of three men.
Minutes later we passed Zhongnanhai compound, the Communist Party?s headquarters and residence for its top leaders, and the sight of another strange image which reflected the continuing standoff between the government and the students in the nation?s capital. A small contingent of soldiers, four of them sitting yoga-like, were guarding the entrance to the building, while hundreds of students and citizens held vigil in front of the compound. They were raising banners, shouting slogans, or just staring at the stoic soldiers.
I somehow learned from the taxi driver that the students had called another demonstration in the square for the next day, Sunday, May 28th. Though I had left San Francisco on Friday afternoon, my first full day in Beijing would not be until Sunday. Less than a mile from Tiananmen the cab pulled up in front of the Minzu Hotel, a large, fairly nice establishment known to be frequented by journalists and Richard Nixon. I thanked the driver, went up to my room on the 20th floor, and called my associate in Beijing. He said that he?d arranged for me to meet Bai Zhao, a Beijing University professor active in the pro-democracy movement, the following day, and that two of his students would pick me up at the hotel at nine a.m.
As I lay in bed, the images of Tiananmen Square were running through my head: the students, banners, tents, Mao?s portrait, and the bizarre scene at Zhongnanhai. I listened for sounds in the Beijing night air that would reveal the political uprising taking place. But it was a quiet summer night, and eventually I drifted off to sleep.
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