Cashing in on Tiananmen

Part 2 - Almost a revolution

by Yvonne Abraham

For six weeks during the spring of 1989, it looked as though the revolution would indeed be televised. The Tiananmen Square demonstrations -- thousands of students rising up against Deng Xiaoping and the tyranny of the Communist Party -- transfixed the world. Reporters had gone to Beijing to cover Gorbachev's visit; instead, they found the makings of a revolution. Cameras provided live, minute-by-minute coverage. The whole world was watching when 100,000 students gathered in the square on April 22, and when students from more than 40 universities marched on Tiananmen five days later. Cameras captured the drama of May 13, when several hundred of the students began a hunger strike, and of the next week, as more and more of them became ill and were carted off to the hospital, ambulance sirens bleating.

The whole world watched Wu'er Kaixi -- the bold, good-looking young education student, weakened by his hunger strike, still wearing his hospital pajamas -- aggressively lecture hardline premier Li Peng between drags of oxygen, and then finally faint from the strain. It watched as the diminutive, frail-looking Chai Ling shouted her baby-voice rallying cries into a megaphone over and over, exhorting her fellow students to maintain their resolve. And it watched when the tanks pushed toward Beijing, only to be stopped outside the city by the masses. And on May 30, when the luminous Goddess of Democracy was installed on the square.

From the world's living rooms, it looked like freedom and democracy were about to come to China. The students were unstoppable. It was a struggle to which any American with a basic understanding of what makes this country great could relate: as portrayed by the media, the students wanted a free press, the right to assembly, and an accountable government. Suddenly, the Chinese, hitherto inhabitants of an inscrutable and sometimes threatening nation, were completely fathomable. In the student movement, American TV audiences saw a reflection of their nation's own glorious past, the birth of democracy caught in a freeze-frame.

But Tiananmen was never quite what it appeared to be.

Sure, reporters found students who could quote a line or two from the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address, but the movement was never a push for American-style democracy, despite students' use of the word. Their aims, insofar as they even articulated them, amounted more to a reform of Communist rule than to a push for constitutional democracy. At the height of the protests, it seemed that all of China was marching arm-in-arm toward democracy. But fully three-quarters of the nation's 1.2 billion people live off the land; they were not about to rise up and charge to polling booths. And the students weren't pushing for universal suffrage anyway.

Nor, indeed, did the demonstrators speak with one voice. There were bitter arguments between student groups on the square over tactics. And there were nasty fights over finances: Chai Ling was kidnapped and briefly held by members of a rival student faction over alleged financial improprieties. An AP reporter took Wu'er Kaixi to dinner at the height of the hunger strike and failed -- as did many others -- to report that for some students, the term "hunger strike" was applied rather loosely. Reporters had apparently decided that to portray the students as less than perfect would diminish the worthiness of their struggle, and would give Deng ammunition to use against them in a propaganda war.

There was also an ahistorical bent to the coverage of 1989, as if this were the first mass movement for political reform in China's history. It was not. In April 1976, for example, thousands of people gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn dead premier Zhou Enlai, and to criticize officials close to Mao -- until police drove them out. In 1978, the Democracy Wall movement began, in which people put up hundreds of posters criticizing the political system. In 1979, the movement was crushed, and Deng had several activists arrested, including the most famous, Wei Jingsheng. Wei, who has been imprisoned for all but six months of the 18 years since then, remains China's most celebrated political prisoner.

But as long as TV audiences were unaware of the fate of those previous reform attempts, it was easier to believe that the students would prevail.

On the night of June 3, 1989, the tanks rolled into Beijing again, and this time the people could not keep them back. Soldiers killed hundreds of people in the streets, forced the students out of the square, and destroyed the Goddess of Democracy. The ultimate symbol of those six weeks came at their very end: on one of the streets leading to the square, a lone worker, a white-shirted nobody, stood motionless before a column of tanks, bringing them to a standstill -- the dauntless individual against the tyranny of the state. This image became the most enduring of the Beijing Spring, and one of the most memorable of the late 20th century.

Part 3 - Coming to America

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham@phx.com.