A Heart for Freedom (21 page)

18

The Great Wave

After the scholars failed to persuade the hunger strikers to leave the Square before Gorbachev’s arrival, most of us lay down on the concrete and drifted off to sleep. Support teams had brought us blankets and coats donated by people who had rallied to our cause, and students from Beijing Medical University circulated among the sleeping students to keep an eye on us in case we needed medical attention.

At four o’clock in the morning, an urgent voice began screaming over the loudspeaker, jarring the sleeping students out of their slumber. It was Wu’er Kaixi, the student leader from Beijing Normal University. He directed the students to move immediately en masse to the eastern side of the Square to leave the central area clear for the arrival of Gorbachev. He said we had to show the government we were true patriots and that we would not contaminate our national image. We were not withdrawing, he declared. We were just moving a little bit to one side.

There was no unified leadership on the Square at that time, and most students weren’t happy to hear this sudden command shouted at them over the loudspeaker without any previous discussions between student representatives. But no one wanted to argue about it at four in the morning on an empty stomach. The students got up, gathered their few belongings, and trudged over to the east side of the Square. My heart sank at the sight. One-third of the hunger strikers were girls, and they looked so small and frail. Like fallen leaves drifting and floating in the darkness, some simply followed along with their eyes closed. Once they reached the new location for the hunger strike, they fell to the ground, and sleep once again consumed them.

During the migration, the student marshals lost their picket lines, and protection for the weak and hungry strikers vanished into quicksand. In our wake, the center of the Square looked awful—newspapers and magazines, empty water bottles and soda cans, food wrappers, hats and scarves, cigarette butts and boxes, and shreds of cloth littered the vast expanse of concrete.

Kaixi’s spontaneous action took a serious toll on his reputation and credibility. He was soon voted out of the leadership. Undeterred, he continued to come in and out of the Square and subsequently made his mark at the forefront of the movement.

When dawn finally arrived on May 15, we awoke to the news that the welcoming ceremony for Gorbachev would take place at the airport. This information hit us like a cannon blast, and many students began to weep. The truth was evident for all to see: The government simply did not care about us. To many, the thought that we might actually die on the Square became a possibility for the first time. I was overwhelmed by the sadness I saw on those young faces.

Now what?
I asked myself repeatedly.
How many more days will we have to continue our hunger strike?

We had been fasting for forty hours. The hoped-for deadline to reach agreement came and went. More than three thousand hunger strikers lay on the Square like defeated and wounded soldiers. Most of the supporting students and residents from the day before had departed. Even Feng had returned to Beida. Now that we had moved to the east side of the Square, the morning commuters on Chang’an Avenue could barely see us. We were overwhelmed by the feeling we had been abandoned and left to die.

If I had a moment of despair, it was only fleeting. The words of the Hunger Strike Manifesto once again rose within me. By then I had committed every word to memory. I knew I had to do something. I felt responsible for these students. The Square was in dire need of a strong leader.

It was at this critical time that Li Lu entered the battlefield and rose up as one of the core leaders at Tiananmen Square. I had first met him two weeks earlier on the Beida campus when he’d come to offer ideas and suggestions. Though he was from Nanjing, he seemed to have important contacts in Beijing. On the day we marched to the Square to launch the hunger strike, Li Lu had found me and offered me a ride on the backseat of his bicycle. He told me how moved he had been by my speech the night before at the Triangle.

Now Li Lu sought me out on the Square. After spending the night collecting salt water for the striking students, he was stunned when he returned to the Square and saw the condition we were in.

“How could this happen?” he shouted. “I was gone for only a few hours.” After quickly assessing the situation, he declared that the hunger strike would die on the vine if we did not create a better organization to protect the lives of the students. “If the government is willing to stand by and watch the lives of these students waste away one by one, then we should take more extreme measures. To gain the support of the people, put pressure on the government, and prevent striking students from dying,” he said, quite matter-of-factly, “we need leaders who will rise up and be willing to burn themselves alive, like that student in the Prague Spring.”

Li Lu talked further about how we should organize the hunger strikers, but when he said “burn himself alive,” I couldn’t hear anything else. I began to weep uncontrollably. In my heightened emotional state—famished, exhausted, exhilarated—anything could set me off. I immediately thought of my aunt’s tragic death by fire and the unending anguish it had caused my father. How would he be able to bear the news that I had set myself on fire? I could not begin to imagine the excruciating pain I would have to endure to burn myself alive, like Joan of Arc at the stake.

“Don’t cry,” Li Lu said. “This is not the time to cry. What other choice do we have?”

I knew he was right. If by dying I could prevent the death of others, then so be it.

I decided Li Lu should take command of the hunger strike. He possessed the strength, determination, presence of mind, and efficiency we needed just then.

“No, no,” he said, when I told him, in no uncertain terms, what he should do. “People don’t know me, but they do know you. Your speech inspired us all. You should be the commander.”

My parents’ lifelong devotion to service reminded me to submit my will to the calling, ready or not. Within half an hour, we had reconnected the broadcasting system, and I spoke to the students on the Square.

“The situation is very bleak,” I said. “A prolonged fight lies ahead. In order to save the lives of our hunger strike students, we must organize.” I volunteered to be the commander of the Hunger Strike Committee and declared that anyone who served on the Committee with me would have to be prepared to die. “If my death can save the lives of everyone else on the Square,” I said, “then I will be the first to walk to death.”

Many students began to cry. Many more applauded. “Fight to the end!” someone shouted, and others took up the cry. More than ten students came forward to volunteer as members of the committee.

As Li Lu and I stood together, surrounded by the newly formed Hunger Strike Committee, the hunger strikers, from more than forty colleges, swore a sacred oath. I was calm, and my voice was clear and strong. My spirits were lifted, and my determination returned. I read the oath slowly and distinctly over the loudspeaker as one thousand voices joined my recitation.

I solemnly swear that in order to promote democracy in the motherland and to bring prosperity to the country, I will go on a hunger strike. I resolve to obey the rules of the hunger strike committee, and will not break my fast until we have achieved our goals.

Through tears and cheers, we set to work. There was much to be done. We had to reestablish a line of protection for the strikers. No one could enter the protected area without a student identification card. We formed a pathway from the center to the edge of the Square so strikers who fainted could be carried out to waiting ambulances. By then, more than eighty students had already fainted.

Li Lu, as my deputy commander, invited two representatives from each college to attend a preliminary meeting. He was sharp, collected, decisive, and totally in charge. He earned immediate respect by leading a productive and efficient meeting while still giving everyone an opportunity to speak. At the end of the meeting, he delivered a quick, precise recap of what everyone had said and assigned each individual a clear task. I could see the students were happy and had found renewed meaning in the hunger strike.

On the third day of our protest, people from all walks of life stood up for us. When a few intellectuals called for a march that day in our support, 30,000 scholars from 230 educational and research institutions in Beijing responded. Students in fourteen provinces protested simultaneously on our behalf. While Gorbachev’s motorcade was stuck in a Beijing traffic jam, trying to duck through the backstreets and alleyways, demonstrators marched on Chang’an Avenue, holding aloft banners of greeting for the Soviet leader—“Welcome Gorbachev, the True Reformer”—and reproof for our Chinese leaders: “Where is China’s Gorbachev?”

* * *

On May 16, more than sixty-five hours into the hunger strike, the Square was alive with the piercing sounds of ambulance sirens, like a knife cutting to the hearts of millions of people. Two hundred students had fainted. But whenever one person went down, ten more stepped up. The number of hunger strikers soon increased to 3,100. More people arrived on the Square to support the hunger strike out of anger at the government’s silence. Throughout the day, demonstrators marched along Chang’an Avenue: workers, farmers, government employees, middle school students—even military cadets, police cadets, secret Christians, and Buddhist monks in their bright orange robes.

In the ensuing two or three days, the number of demonstrators in Beijing swelled into the millions. In the words of Chairman Mao, “Where there is oppression there is opposition.”

Medical students and hospital workers from Beijing helped establish and maintain our “lifeline,” the pathway that ran from the center of the Square out to the edge and was essential for saving students’ lives. Student guards on either side maintained a passage just wide enough to allow an ambulance through. These students stood with their arms locked to form a human chain. Day or night, under the scorching sun or in the chill night air, these human chains never broke down. The student marshals who formed picket lines around the hunger strikers also stood shoulder to shoulder without budging. No one without a student ID ever crashed their line of defense. The unity and determination of the supporting students was the source of my strength.

Despite our good intentions, it seemed Deng Xiaoping’s worst nightmare had come to pass. As he met with Gorbachev inside the Great Hall of the People, the great people of China gathered outside, fasting and protesting. The guest of honor, the real socialist reformer in the eyes of the Chinese people, had to enter the Great Hall through a back door that opened onto a side street because the main entrance facing the Square was blocked by a bubbling pool of red-hot human lava.

When Yan Mingfu came out to the Square for a desperate final plea to the hunger strikers, he had to be escorted by Wang Dan and Wu’er Kaixi, who held him by his arms on either side as they pushed and squeezed their way through the crowd to our broadcast center at the Hunger Strike Committee headquarters. Yan was visibly overwhelmed by the masses of people he saw everywhere he looked. After giving an impassioned speech, imploring us to end the hunger strike and return to our classes, he offered to give himself up as a hostage to prove the good intentions of the Party leadership.

* * *

While Yan Mingfu was making his last attempt to end the hunger strike, Zhao Ziyang met his Waterloo. During a televised discussion with Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhao revealed to the world that Deng Xiaoping was truly the one in charge of China—which was the truth and a seemingly innocuous statement. But somehow it was interpreted, both by Deng’s side and the intellectuals’ side, as a signal to wage war against Deng. That night, before Zhao realized what was happening, Deng called an urgent meeting with Yang Shangkun. By the morning of May 17, when Zhao went to Deng’s home to present a plan to end the student hunger strikes, Deng, Yang, Li Peng, and other leaders were ready for him. They announced a swift decision to impose martial law—which Zhao voted against. Zhao then cited health issues to avoid executing the decision. He was later charged with the crime of splitting the Party and placed under house arrest, where he remained for the last sixteen years of his life.

Though I was unaware at the time of the conflict among the top leaders of China, the competition for leadership on the Square had made an impression on me. By the fourth day of the hunger strike, many organizations had raised their banners and established headquarters on the Square. The Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation, which had originally voted against the hunger strike, now set up shop right next to us on the Square. The hunger strike students held an election, and I was elected commander in chief, with Li Lu and two other students as my deputy commanders.

Some volunteers who were not elected were unhappy about this turn of events. One student, Wang Wen, complained he should have been elected because he was one of the original hunger strikers. I assured him he’d be elected in the next round of voting, but I had no way of knowing his unhappiness would turn into a fierce resentment leading to revenge.

Finally, after seventy-two hours of no food, little sleep, and minute-by-minute tension, my body gave out. I was carried out along the lifeline and sent to the hospital. When I came to, I was in a hospital ward with an intravenous drip attached to my arm. There I spent the night, although I’d left my heart on the Square. Throughout the night, my mind crisscrossed the blurry line between dream and reality. When morning came, I ran out of the ward. A bus carried me and many other students from the hospital back to the Square.

After Yan Mingfu’s visit to the Square, the hunger strike representatives held a vote: to leave or stay. The majority voted to stay. In the evening, a doctor from Beida came to the Square and coached the hunger strikers to drink fluids, including water, sugar water, soda, or even milk. He said Gandhi drank milk to sustain himself through long stretches of fasting. Many of the striking students brazenly rejected his advice and announced the start of a water strike. A school bus from Beida ran nonstop between the campus and the Square, bringing all kinds of supplies, including the only telephone on the Square and a TV set, which we set up in the communication center.