Bad Elements

Chapter 1 Exile from Tiananmen Square We will never know how many people were killed during that sticky night of June 3 and the early hours of June 4, 1989. A stink of burning vehicles, gunfire, and stale sweat hung heavily on Tiananmen Square; thousands of tired bodies huddled in fear around the Monument to the People's Heroes, with its carved images of earlier rebels: the Taiping, the Boxers, the Communists of course, and also the student demonstrators of May 4, 1919, who saw "Mr. Science" and "Mr. Democracy" as the twin solutions to China's political problems. The huge, rosy face of Chairman Mao stared from the wall of the Forbidden City across three or four dead bodies lying where his outsize shoes would have been had his portrait stretched that far. Tracer bullets and flaming cars lit up the sky in bursts of pale orange. Loudspeakers barked orders to leave the square immediately, or else. Spotlights were switched off and then on again. And over the din of machine-gun fire, breaking glass, stamping army boots, screaming people, wailing sirens, and rumbling APCs, young voices, hoarse from exhaustion, sang the "Internationale," followed by the patriotic hit song of the year, "Descendants of the Dragon": In the ancient East there is a dragon; China is its name. In the ancient East there lives a people, The dragon's heirs every one. Under the claws of this mighty dragon I grew up And its descendant I have become. Like it or not Once and forever, a descendant of the dragon . . . The words, which reduced the remaining students to tears, expressed pride in "Chineseness" as well as a sense of oppression that goes with it. The singer and composer of the song was Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese rock star who had moved to China from Taiwan in 1983, his way of coming "home," of feeling fully Chinese. But the oppression soon got to him. So he became a kind of rock-and-roll mentor of the Tiananmen Movement, his last great hope for a patriotic resolution to China's problems. When the shooting began, some students elected to die rather than retreat, but Hou talked them out of such pointless self-sacrifice, and negotiated with the army so the students could leave the Square alive. Afterward, he was forced to go back to Taiwan, where, disgusted with Chinese politics, he turned his attention to Chinese folk religions instead. By 5 a.m. on June 4, the massacre in Beijing was more or less over, though some people were still shot in the head or chest by snipers from the 27th Army, which had last seen action during the Sino-Vietnamese war, more than ten years earlier. By daybreak the last students had retreated from the square in a single file. The Tiananmen demonstrations for free speech, independent student and workers' unions, and the recognition of the student demonstrators as "patriots" had ended in failure. The government had offered no concessions. Five days after the killings, the paramount leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, praised the army for crushing the plot of "a rebellious clique" bent on establishing "a bour- geois republic entirely dependent on the West." Compared to the famines caused by Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962 (more than 30 million dead) or the regular purges of "rightists," "revisionists," and other "counterrevolutionary elements" during the 1950s and 1960s, the death toll in Beijing was modest. The figured offered by the Chinese government, as well as some foreign journalists, is around three hundred. Other estimates range from twenty-seven hundred to many more. But never before hBuruma, Ian is the author of 'Bad Elements' with ISBN 9780679457688 and ISBN 0679457682.