As a child in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, I dreamed of being a painter. My art teacher warned me that paintings could land a person behind bars, especially portraits, and advised me to stick to anodyne landscapes. In my 20s, after Mao died in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping rose to power, I moved to Beijing. The country was opening up at last. During the day, I took photographs for a state-run magazine; in the evenings I painted sombre impressionist visions of deserted streets, which I hung on the walls and ceiling of my one-room shack.
Dissident scholars and writers would gather at my home to drink beer and discuss the latest translations of Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges or Claude Simon. We relished the small freedoms granted to us, but wanted more. We read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and longed for the day when we too could sing out of our windows in despair. All we could do to vent our frustration was sneak outside under the cover of darkness and hurl our empty beer bottles against a metal rubbish bin.
In 1983, during one of the regular conservative clampdowns, my paintings were condemned as “spiritual pollution” and I was detained by the police. On my release, the officer who walked me to the gates muttered: “Don’t look so smug. If we want, we can make you slowly disappear.” Back in my shack, I discovered that in my absence the police had torn the canvases from my walls and ripped them to pieces. I decided then never to paint again. I resigned from my job and for three years travelled the country, living hand to mouth. I refused to allow a political party to tell me how to live, when to die, or what to believe.
On my return to Beijing, I wrote a novel inspired by my travels. With words, I could create not just a portrait of a person, but an entire people; describe not just a nation’s deserts and mountains, but its interior landscape as well. Before it was published, the police once more came knocking on my door. With the help of friends, I escaped to Hong Kong.
Days later, the reform-minded Communist party leader Hu Yaobang was ousted for supporting free expression. The conservative hardliners were back in control. My novel was published and immediately condemned by the government as a work of “bourgeois liberalism”. All copies were confiscated and pulped, and a lifetime ban was placed on my work. Friends advised me to stay in Hong Kong to avoid arrest. I went to live on Lamma Island and wrote two more books.
Then on 15 April 1989, Hu died. On a television in my local bookshop, I saw footage of earnest students in Beijing mourning his death and marching to Tiananmen Square, calling for the reinstatement of his liberal policies and an end to corruption and censorship. Their colourful advance through the grey streets seemed at once miraculous and inexorable. Perhaps this was the impossible moment we had been waiting for, when the Chinese people might finally seize control of their own fate. I took a boat to Kowloon and boarded the next train to the capital.
Students had now occupied Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the nation, demanding open dialogue with the government. For five weeks I camped out with them in bedraggled tents. I watched them dance to Bob Dylan and Cui Jian; discuss Milton and Thomas Paine; read to each other Article 35 of the Chinese constitution, which guarantees, on paper at least, freedom of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and demonstration. When the government branded the peaceful movement “turmoil”, residents came out in solidarity, filling Tiananmen and other public squares all around the country. What began as a student protest for freedom became a nationwide awakening.
One morning in mid-May, I climbed the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square to take a photograph of the crowd below. The packed multitude extending in all directions was such an overwhelming sight at first, my eyes blurred, and all I could see was a haze of white, pink and blue, wavering like water lilies on a vast lake. Then, as my vision cleared, a million individual faces emerged, each unique and singular, each beaming with the thrill of newfound freedom. I had seen elated crowds before – hordes in khaki Mao suits waving little red books – but their faces had been rigid with blind worship and fear. These smiles in the square were entirely different: they glowed with unshackled joy.
Another morning, when the government’s stubborn intransigence had driven the students to launch a mass hunger strike, I crawled out from my tent at dawn. In the low, slanting sunlight, everything looked golden. I saw my elderly neighbour unloading bottles of water from her tricycle cart to donate to the fasting students; volunteers sweeping the ground; nurses in white coats rushing back and forth. As far as I could see, human bodies were peacefully coming and going, animated by a common purpose. And I was overcome again, this time with a feeling so profound I can barely put it into words. If I believed in a god, I would call it a religious experience. All I can say is for a few moments, in that golden light, I felt veneration for my fellow man, for the fragile bodies of flesh and blood, with their flaws, hopes and idiosyncrasies, and for the compassion that coursed through each one of them, and that elevated each one of their souls.
Then a cloud covered the sun and I remembered that at each corner of the city, just a few kilometres away, army troops were stationed, waiting for their orders to strike.
Denied knowledge of their own history, the protesters didn’t realise that in China every mass movement ends in a bloodbath. With no experience of running political campaigns, the student leaders became embroiled in petty power struggles. But to my ears, their noisy coups and countercoups and endless heated discussions were the beautiful but tortured sounds of a nation freeing itself from chains.
A week after the government declared martial law, my brother sprinted across a road in my hometown of Qingdao, a bag of shopping in each hand, and ran into a washing line, fell and cracked his head. That night he sank into a coma and was rushed to hospital, and I left Beijing to be by his side. So, I wasn’t in Tiananmen Square in the early hours of 4 June when Deng sent 200,000 troops armed with bayonets, machine guns and tanks to crush the unarmed protesters. If I had, I too might have been one of the many hundreds or thousands who tragically lost their lives.
As my brother sank deeper into his coma, China was forced into a coma of its own. No sooner had the government washed the corpses and blood from the streets than it began to whitewash the truth, calling the peaceful protests a “counter-revolutionary riot”; the brutal massacre a mere “incident”. It claimed only 300 people, mostly soldiers, had been killed, and insisted no civilians died on the square itself, as if where they died made any difference. The “Tiananmen Square Massacre” has always been shorthand for slaughters committed throughout the city.
Round the clock, the television in my brother’s ward showed photographs of the 21 student leaders on the government’s most wanted list. Seven managed to escape abroad, but the rest were tracked down or turned in by their relatives. Every citizen was forced to write a self-criticism and accept the party’s claim that the brutal crackdown had been necessary for stability and economic growth. Then silence. No one could mention the massacre again. As Deng encouraged people to get rich and forget the past, my brother seemed to be the only free person left in the country. Although his body was inert, his mind was free to travel back in time and reflect on what had happened.
When I returned to my Beijing shack the following January, the old lady who had donated bottles of water to the fasting students told me with a blank face to report my arrival to the police. Another neighbour who crossed me on the street said he’d opened a private crematorium, chuckling to himself, “The dead are making me rich! They’re much nicer than the living!” We were all victims of the massacre, whether we survived 4 June or not. Fear and avarice were crushing morality as firmly as the tanks had crushed idealism and hope.
By the first anniversary, communism had crumbled in eastern Europe thanks in part to popular protests inspired by Tiananmen, but Beijing was unchanged. The party had not forgotten the past, though: it closed the square for “renovation” and rounded up hundreds of dissidents to ensure no one would openly commemorate the day. By the 10th anniversary, China’s communist regime seemed stronger than ever, achieving miraculous economic growth with a perverse combination of crony capitalism and Leninist repression. But the tyrants still knew they had blood on their hands, and quaked with fear. So, on 4 June 1999, while candlelit vigils were held in Hong Kong and San Francisco, in Beijing the square was yet again “under renovation”, students were told to stay indoors and dissidents were put back in jail.
As my brother regained partial consciousness, I began to write Beijing Coma, hoping it might help retrieve Tiananmen from oblivion. It is 10 years now since it was first published. Like my other books, there is no chance of it appearing in China. When the original Chinese version came out in Hong Kong, I myself was barred from returning to the mainland. So the party has succeeded in making me “slowly disappear”. No country has forced more artists, writers and activists into exile than China, or jailed so many in its own land. Thanks to the Great Firewall and an army of internet censors, the Chinese people remain exiled from their past. In Beijing, intellectuals such as Zhou Duo and Hu Jia are still closely monitored every 4 June, as are activists such as Ding Zilin, founder of Tiananmen Mothers, who courageously fights for a full accounting of the massacre and the right to mourn its victims in public. The Nobel Peace Prize laureateLiu Xiaobo, a figurehead of the 1989 democracy movement, died in custody two years ago, his last wish to end his days in a free country denied.
The wounds inflicted by the massacre have grown deeper with every year. The crackdown lies at the heart of all that ails the country. Its corrosive and enduring message is: the party, national glory and GDP are more important than human life. Deng got away with the killings in 1989, and President Xi Jinping is getting away with worse political repression today. He oversees a hi-tech totalitarian economic superpower that poses a grave threat to democracies around the world. But the west is not an innocent victim of China’s rise. Within months of the Tiananmen massacre, world leaders were rushing back to Beijing to do deals, claiming that collaboration would help bring about change. It’s clear now what a catastrophic miscalculation this was, but they continue to appease China’s autocrats for their own countries’ economic gain. As the terror of Tiananmen is being re-enacted in the gulags of Tibet and Xinjiang, western leaders shake hands with President Xi and look the other way.
But in this 30th anniversary year, the Tiananmen uprising is still a source of hope. It is one of the most significant moments of the 20th century. Like Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, it became a global symbol of resistance that continues to inspire peaceful struggles for democracy. Although the uprising is still taboo in China, everyone who was there on the square remembers. At the end of Beijing Coma, the protagonist Dai Wei recalls returning to the place where, a few hours before, his friend had been mown down by a tank.
He remembers seeing her flattened corpse in the distance and noticing that: “As if refusing to be crushed, the flesh and bones had risen a fraction from the tarmac.” That sentence might be overlooked by a reader, but it is the most important one in the book. The small rise of the flattened flesh represents the power of the human spirit to resist forgetting and death.
Tiananmen Square today is a sterile plaza, monitored by soldiers, secret police and thousands of facial recognition cameras. Just walk across it right now, lift your arm in the air and spread your fingers in the V-for-victory sign, and within seconds you’ll be knocked to the ground and dragged away for interrogation. But memories cannot be silenced for ever. Beneath the bluster, the tyrants still quake with fear, and one day they will fall. Mao’s huge portrait and embalmed corpse will be removed, the wavering multitudes will return and the square will once more become the beating heart of the nation, filled with cries for freedom and truth. This is not a naive, facile hope. It is the only ending I can bear to conceive.