A Heart for Freedom (16 page)

Back at headquarters, Xiong’s face was red hot and his breathing was heavy. We were all too upset and embarrassed to speak. No one came to our office anymore, while life on campus continued to bustle with noise and energy. Morale was at an all-time low. Already some students had criticized members of the Committee for kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall when they tried to present their petition after Hu Yaobang’s funeral. They said we should never kneel before the Communist Party, never “beg for democracy.” Today, however, Beida students had gone beyond criticism. They had walked out on the Committee. In our discouragement, we said to ourselves,
It’s over
.

Chen Mingyuan, the professor who had embraced the Committee members on the steps, came to our improvised command center shortly after the failed election. He was a poet in his forties, who had twice been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. When Chen was released after the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four, he was hailed as a hero.

“Don’t be discouraged,” he told us. “You are excellent kids. I’ve been through the April Fifth Incident and many other things, and I know how hard it is to organize an event like this. It’s perfectly okay to fail the first time. Don’t worry,” he said. “This is just a small setback on your long journey. Next time you’ll do much better.”

“But I don’t think the students will trust us anymore,” one member of the Committee said.

“Let’s do this,” Chen said. “I’ll give a speech to the students, and then I’ll come back to talk about what to do next.”

Minutes later we heard his voice booming out over the campus, telling everyone how significant it was that Beida students had decided to hold the first democratic election in China in forty years and what changes would come about if our model was adopted throughout the country. His speech was interrupted many times by thunderous applause. Immediately student attitudes began to shift. By nightfall, all kinds of people had begun to show up at the office, many of them students from master’s and doctoral programs, older students who came in response to the criticism that student leaders were too young and inexperienced to run an election. They came to help and offered all kinds of suggestions to improve the movement.

The next day, we held another election—this time in a classroom. Approximately one hundred students, representatives from each department, cast their votes. Candidates once again had the opportunity to address the assembled voters before they cast their ballots. When Feng presented his qualifications, he talked about his involvement in the demonstrations of 1987 and 1988 and his more recent organizational activities. He also noted that the Preparatory Committee had conducted its meetings behind closed doors up to that point and expressed his fear it would become disconnected from the student body. Eventually, he said, with his characteristic dry wit, the student leaders could become the “small handful of people” the government liked to say was manipulating the demonstrations.

The six candidates who received the most votes were elected. Feng was among the winners.

What unexpected surprises awaited me when my victorious husband returned to headquarters at sunset. He looked relaxed and in a good mood. He borrowed some food coupons, telling the boys in the office he wanted to take his wife out to dinner.

“Chai Ling isn’t
just
your wife,” one of the boys replied, teasingly. “She’s also our secretary general. If you want to take her out to dinner, you have to ask our permission.”

“It’s okay,” said another student, who had appeared in the doorway. “Feng can take her to dinner. She’s just been fired.”

I thought he was joking.

“It’s true,” Feng assured me, smiling. “We’re replacing you with Tang Ye. In fact, I insisted on it.”

I was stunned. “What did I do to deserve that?”

“You haven’t done anything,” Feng said. “But you are my wife, and I’m a newly elected member. I can’t have a family member working in the organization. It might be viewed as nepotism. You can be my personal secretary general if you want.”

The boys in the office burst out laughing. They were intrigued to see a husband acting like a big shot and bossing his wife around.

I was not amused. We had weathered this storm together, and after all the hard work I’d done to prepare for his victory, this is how Feng had decided to thank me. I threw my food coupon on the floor and stormed out of the room before bursting into tears.

The last few days now felt like a century. I had worked hard to build an organization that could facilitate meetings, handle public communications, and set up student guards and working schedules. I had skipped meals. I had lost hours of sleep. I never knew where to find Feng, and because I was afraid to go home on dark nights, I slept wherever I could find a spare bed.

I had done all this out of a faithful wife’s devotion to her husband, working quietly behind the scenes to do everything he and his colleagues could not do themselves. I never wanted credit. When students complained about the leaders, I took the heat and asked them if they wanted to help us. I was the one who saw how students walked away after waiting for the leaders to emerge from behind closed doors. I was the one who set up a channel of communication between students and leaders. I did all this to help Feng, so he could come home safe one day and we could get on with our life’s plans.

It seemed Feng took all my contributions for granted, though. He constantly undermined my suggestions, which he called “the little lady’s views.” He was so eager to win the respect and trust of the boys he worked with that he was willing to do so at the expense of the one person who genuinely cared for and loved him.

Outside the dining hall young couples wandered around holding hands after another full day with no classes to attend. The girls looked so relaxed and carefree, and there I was, hungry, lonely, and exhausted. Why couldn’t I have just one day like those girls? Feng was so busy with the movement that in order to be near him, I had to help out and put up with all sorts of insults. Now Feng himself had taken away the one opportunity I had to be near him.

I sat on the steps of the new education building with my head resting against the wall, watching the fading shades of pink and orange in the sky, wondering what color my love had become.

A student I vaguely recognized stopped in front of me. “Aren’t you on the Preparatory Committee?” he said. “You are all so courageous. We really admire you. Keep going. We’ll stand behind you.”

I watched him walk away. If only he could have known how profoundly uplifting his words were. He made me think of all the wonderful people I had met in the past few days—the man who had pressed the sweaty five renminbi note in my hands, the old couple who had given me extra ice cream, and Tang Ye, who had sworn to visit me in prison if Feng and I were arrested. I recalled the night when the police had chased us down Chang’an Avenue and the oath I’d made never to run away again, and I realized I could no longer be a part of the movement merely as Feng’s wife; I had to do it for me. I had to stand up for my own dignity and the dignity of my countrymen. From now on, I would help the movement, not as Feng’s wife, to love him and support him, but as a citizen of China. With renewed determination, I resolved to face all the setbacks and insults and do whatever I could to help the movement.

On the same day that democratic elections gave birth to a new, independent student organization in China, a new, independent woman was born as well.

14

The Dong Luan Verdict

While Beida students gathered at the May Fourth field on campus for our first trial election, Li Peng convened a politburo meeting to discuss the student movement. After Li Ximing (the Communist Party boss of Beijing) and Chen Xitong (the mayor of Beijing) reported on the situation—calling it
dong luan
(turmoil), unprecedented, and “evil winning over good”—the head of the State Education Committee reported to Li Peng what students had said and written in slogans and on protest posters in Beijing, as well as at top universities across the country.

In Li Peng’s eyes, the student protests were “a naked and overt challenge to the Party.” The meeting concluded with Li characterizing the student movement as “a planned and organized turmoil against the Communist Party and socialism.” And he was determined to get Deng Xiaoping to agree.
2

To make his case, Li Peng knew how to present “planned and organized turmoil” to Deng. He selected slogans and grouped them together in a way that made them appear to be anti-Party and antisocialist. Li Peng was like a tattletale with a teacher. “The spear is pointed at you,” he told Deng.

Deng Xiaoping reacted just as Li Peng hoped he would. The old man couldn’t swallow any criticism without a fight. Years of class struggle and the horrible times he had known during the Cultural Revolution had turned Deng into a man who believed he had to get tough with the student demonstrators. In the words of an old Chinese adage, he would “use a sharp knife to cut through knotted hemp.” Though Deng had initially endorsed Zhao Ziyang’s assessment that the students should be handled with persuasion, when he heard Li Peng’s report, he summed it up by saying the Party was facing
turmoil
, and they had the ability to put a stop to it.

Deng was extremely sensitive just then about the situation in Poland, where, in his opinion, the ruling Communist Party was too soft on the Solidarity movement. At Beida, we used the same name,
Solidarity
, for our own organization, which in Deng’s mind was clear evidence of Western bourgeois liberal influence that could not be tolerated. China could not become a second Poland.

Deng concluded, “This is a well-planned plot whose real aim is to reject the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system at the most fundamental level. . . . We are facing a most serious political struggle. . . . We’ve got to be explicit and clear in opposing this turmoil.”
3
His words became the official verdict on the student movement.

After a meeting lasting nearly two hours, Deng Xiaoping gave Li Peng the green light. Li Peng immediately ordered Deng’s words to be printed as a speech and distributed as a central government document to Party officials at all levels across the country. He then called the
People’s Daily
, the Party’s official newspaper, to publish an editorial, which was lifted in large part directly from Deng’s speech.

* * *

Over the next two days, as students boycotted classes and set up organizations, the government moved at top speed. On April 25, government radio announced the verdict nationwide on the seven o’clock evening news. The speech also appeared the next day as an editorial in the
People’s Daily
and headlined all major newspapers in the country.

I remember as if it were yesterday the night we listened to the broadcast of the government’s announcement. As Feng and I were walking back from the dining hall to our command center in Dormitory 28, the campus broadcasting system suddenly crackled. The voice of a familiar anchor from the Central TV station began his reading:

Following the memorial meeting commemorating the death of Hu Yaobang, an extremely small number of people with a hidden agenda continued to take advantage of the young students’ feeling of grief for Comrade Hu Yaobang to spread all kinds of rumors to poison and confuse the people’s minds. . . .

We stood and listened as the announcer continued to mischaracterize and vilify the student protests, saying our purpose was to “sow dissension among the people, to plunge the whole country into chaos, and sabotage the political situation of stability and unity.” But it was what he said next that sent a chill wind down my spine.

This is a planned conspiracy and a
dong luan
[chaos, turmoil, or upheaval]. Its essence is to, once and for all, negate the leadership of the CPC and the socialist system. This is a serious political struggle confronting the whole party and the people of all nationalities throughout the country. . . .

If we are tolerant of this
dong luan
and let it go unchecked, . . . a China with very good prospects and a bright future will become a chaotic and unstable China without any future.

The whole party and the people nationwide should fully understand the seriousness of this struggle [and] unite to take a clear-cut stand to oppose the
dong luan
. . . . Under no circumstances should the establishment of any illegal organizations be allowed.
4

I looked at the young students standing around me. Their faces were serious and tense. The government had called our movement a
dong luan
, a chaos or turmoil—the same verdict the Party had used against the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. No other movement had been labeled
dong luan
; that was a name for disaster. The government also called our student organizations “illegal” and accused us of attempting to overthrow the government and the Party. To any Chinese, no crime deserved a punishment more severe than the crime of “overthrowing the government and the Party.”

As the broadcast continued, the entire campus fell into deathly silence. It was as if all creatures had ceased to breathe and the earth had stopped turning. Shocked disbelief, fear, and anger were the emotions coursing through my system.

A moment later, the sound of smashing glass exploded around me as small glass bottles were thrown from dorm windows and hit the ground. Deng’s given name, Xiaoping, has the same phonetic sound as “small bottle.” In 1976, when Deng returned to power for the third time, people showed support and good wishes by hanging small bottles on trees. This night, however, the students smashed bottles to show their defiance. After they had smashed all their bottles, students banged on tables and crashed pans and buckets together, shouting, screaming, and cursing. Anger roared into the night sky as the campus exploded with the cries of voices laced with the jingling and tinkling of millions of pieces of broken glass.