Bullets and Opium

Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre

Liao Yiwu

• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781982126667
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A " memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square" ( The New York Review of Books ) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and "one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time" (Philip Gourevitch). Much has been written about the Tiananmen Square protests, but very little exists in the words of those who were actually there.For over seven years, Liao Yiwu—a master of contemporary Chinese literature, imprisoned and persecuted as a counter-revolutionary until he fled the country in 2011—secretly interviewed survivors of the devastating 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Tortured, imprisoned, and forced into silence and the margins of Chinese society for thirty years, their harrowing and unforgettable stories are now finally revealed in this "indispensable historical document" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

PART I:

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BEIJING

The Performance Artist

On the afternoon of May 23, 1989, at home in Sichuan a thousand miles away, I saw a live broadcast from Beijing showing the “Three Brave Men from Hunan”—Yu Zhijian, Yu Dongyue, and Lu Decheng—who had thrown rotten eggs at the portrait of the dictator Mao Zedong hanging from the Tiananmen gate tower. Officials called them the “Three Thugs from Hunan.”

Their protest came just over three months after the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition, the most complete exhibit of Chinese performance art ever shown. Among the exhibits were people shooting at a telephone booth, a living person incubating a chicken egg, mourners dressed in white funeral garments, and people distributing condoms to passersby. The performance artists constantly clashed with the police—getting beat up, dragged away from the scene, and detained. A few exhibits were closed down, too. Among progressive young people, it aroused wild enthusiasm, launching performance art in China and adding to the revolutionary mood in the streets.

The smashing of Mao’s portrait by the Three Brave Men from Hunan must have been the most outstanding piece of performance art since the Chinese Communist regime was established in 1949.

A friend asked me if I would be interested in interviewing the ringleader of the Three Brave Men, Yu Zhijian, since Yu Dongyue had lost his mind and Lu Decheng had fled. Yu Zhijian himself was under house arrest for writing a “reactionary article” and publishing it online. Taking every precaution, I traveled to the city of Changsha, and we arranged to meet one night when he would be able to slip away from his captors.

When we finally found each other, Yu looked like an old Shanghai gentleman down on his luck. He was half a head taller than I was, with a head of shiny hair. Before we even had a chance to shake hands, we quickly got into the same cab speeding down ramrod-straight May First Avenue toward the city center, crossing the Xiang River by bridge, and passing Orange Isle in the middle of the river. The car stopped after we went over the bridge. We went behind the Fenglin Hotel and found a divey, rancid teahouse. We had to shout for a long time before two disheveled-looking waitresses came out and allowed us to pay 80 yuan for a private room and a pot of tea. The women had us wait for a moment and then opened a dark curtain, waking up the three other women workers sleeping there and making them put away their makeshift bed. They put out the tea tables and chairs and began boiling some water for tea.

We closed the door so tight that there wasn’t even any space for air. We were both ashen-faced from sleeplessness. Yu smoked one cigarette after another, his already small eyes narrowing as he squinted. He joked that all we needed in order to look like bandits were two knives.

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Yu Zhijian: I’ve been under house arrest for a number of months. The police have been watching me in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. But even tigers take naps, so at five a.m. today, before dawn, I took advantage of an opportunity and hurried to the train station. I took the train from Liuyang to Changsha. When I got off, I went in circles for a while. Once I knew I wasn’t being followed, I could relax.

You look like you couldn’t care in the least. You are an artist.

Thanks for your flattery. But playing hide-and-seek with the police is instinctive in a liberal. It has nothing to do with being an artist.

In 1989, Lu Decheng, Yu Dongyue, and I were all poor and none of us had ever been to Beijing before. How could we ever make revolution? We took out all our wages and counted them up, but it still wasn’t enough. The night before we left, I went to visit a classmate who made a living as a self-employed businessman selling electrical appliances. He made a generous contribution to the revolution, lending me 1,000 yuan, which would be worth twenty times as much today.

A train ticket from Changsha to Beijing only cost several dozen yuan. When the driver on the bus from Liuyang to Changsha heard that we were going to Beijing to support democracy, he gave us free bus tickets. When we got to Changsha at dawn, we went straight to May First Avenue and the provincial government buildings to find out what was going on. The Hunan student movement was spreading like wildfire. The intersections were full of students and city people marching. We couldn’t help but get very excited. I had long legs, so I ran to the market to buy brushes, ink, and cloth. Yu Dongyue immediately started to dash off a banner. He wrote in giant characters: “Let’s March to Beijing,” “Down with Deng Xiaoping! Support Zhao Ziyang!” At the bottom of the banners he wrote, “Hunan Petition Team.”

We occupied the square in front of the Changsha train station, put up our banners, and took turns speaking. The speeches were about the most popular topics of this movement: fighting corruption, stopping official profiteering, changing the political system, amending the constitution, and opposing the system of one-party dictatorship. Yu Dongyue had one of those scarce high-quality Japanese-made cameras, which he used for interviews as a journalist for the Liuyang Daily, so he was in charge of documenting it all in photos. I never thought the photographic masterpieces he so painstakingly made would end up being used against him in court as evidence of his counterrevolutionary propaganda and crimes of incitement.

The crowd in the square by the station was huge. Though I was just an average rural elementary school teacher and it was my very first time doing what the authorities later called “counterrevolutionary incitement” in front of a big crowd, I spoke very well and was very effective. Everybody got excited and started throwing money into our collection box. Some threw in dimes, some 2-yuan bills, and some even the new 10-yuan bill. I was very moved. That was the biggest bill then; they weren’t making 100-yuan bills yet. I remember to this day a man stuffing two whole handfuls of bills into our collection box. We stirred things up for just a few hours and the box was full; we had collected over 3,000 yuan. Some Hunan students, forty or fifty people, joined our petition group on the spot. They all wanted to go to Beijing to support the student movement.

Tickets in hand, we poured onto the train, which was crammed with patriots pressing against each other in the crowded passageway. When the conductor who came to check our tickets heard that we were a Hunan petition group going to support the movement in Beijing, he called for the train crew captain, who told us he completely and totally supported us and wanted to put us into the lounge car usually reserved for railway personnel.

The next day we arrived at the station in Beijing. As soon as we got off the train, we attracted a lot of attention when we raised our banner, which was half as long as a railway car. Our group marched together yelling slogans as we walked toward Tiananmen. When I stole a look behind us after a while, I saw that coming up behind us was a crowd of hundreds, mostly students from various places who had just gotten off the train but couldn’t find their own groups. Strength in numbers took our enthusiasm to new heights. We shouted slogans like “Return Hu Yaobang to us! Down with Deng Xiaoping! Support Zhao Ziyang! We want freedom, we want democracy, we want human rights, the Chinese people want to stand up.” Our yells were louder and came faster and more furious than the drumbeats in country operas, drawing even more of a crowd. About forty or fifty minutes later we saw the famous Tiananmen gate tower, which before we had seen only in newspapers.

We were just about to plunge into the boundless sea of people, when a person who seemed to be a student leader asked us where we were from. We answered in unison: “We are the Hunan Petition Group and we have come to support the student movement.” “Very good,” he said several times, but added: “Your slogans are somewhat inappropriate and too extreme. People on the square are not just shouting whatever comes to mind.”

Over the next two days, the Hunan University students who had come with us gradually dispersed to their own groups and organizations, so the so-called Hunan Petition Team gradually dissolved. All that remained were the three of us: Yu Dongyue, Lu Decheng, and myself, the core members who didn’t belong anywhere else, exposing the true nature of our isolation.

We got to Beijing on May 18 and landed in trouble on May 23. We had five or six days of excitement in all. We participated in some student and citizen marches and made some speeches calling for the end of one-party dictatorship and for complete Westernization. We hardly slept those days. At night, when we were simply too tired, we would find an underground passageway or a street corner, put down some plastic sheeting, wrap ourselves in military jackets, and doze off. I remember one morning when I woke up there was a female university student lying on top of me. It was a very romantic scene.

Three things stood out for me. The first was an extra-large banner hung on the Great Hall of the People proclaiming the “Emergency Meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.” It made people fantasize that the democratic utopia was about to appear before our very eyes.

The second was that many military helicopters were flying over Tiananmen. Sometimes they flew very low, nearly brushing the top of the gate tower. They were always dropping propaganda leaflets addressed to the “hoodwinked masses” and calling on us to surrender. All kinds of plausible but false rumors spread across the square, making people nervous.

The third thing that made a deep impression on me was the speeches of student leaders like Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, and Chai Ling. Nonsense like “Maintain order as strictly as possible on the square.” Nonsense such as “City people and workers, return to work as normal.” Chai Ling even talked like she was an entertainer, saying things like “Thank you, thank you everyone for your support!” It was as if the university students were God’s chosen ones, as if they were the only ones with the right to be true patriots. Other social forces, they apparently thought, were just clueless idiots stirring up trouble. Well, fuck that. If it weren’t for everybody’s support—if it all depended upon the students—could it have lasted that long? The Communist Party would have long since put an end to them. At the time I was disgusted by what they said. The martial law troops were already in the Beijing suburbs. What good would all the internal strife, bickering, panic, and standoffs within the student leadership do? What use was it pretending to be calm? Were all those fully armed troops vegetarians? What would happen if they started shooting?

How could such a broad-based democracy movement supported by tens of millions of people be handled smoothly by a few little kids? Bloodshed was looming before our eyes and they were still obsessed with all their empty talk. People like us, grassroots, from the provinces, couldn’t join the conversation. We tried several times to get past the guards so that we could talk with the student leaders. Every time the students disciplinary patrol saw what a mess I was, they absolutely refused to let us enter the Tiananmen Square command post, much less see the leaders of the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students. Things weren’t going well, so what could we do? We left a written recommendation and tried to persuade the student disciplinary patrol to pass it on at least as a “document for reference.”

First, we recommended that the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students proclaim, in the name of all the Chinese people, that the Chinese Communist government was an illegal government. Second, we called for a general strike of all workers in Beijing and the entire country, as well as a strike by all shopkeepers. Third, there was something about a disciplinary patrol of workers and students; I can’t remember it exactly right now. We never heard a word about any of it. Things were chaotic; maybe our suggestions were never passed on at all.

You didn’t agree with them and you couldn’t work with them. You could have just dusted yourselves off and left.

We couldn’t do that. We had come such a long way to Beijing. We had to take responsibility for what was happening. Yu Dongyue was depressed, inconsolable. He suggested that we self-immolate together. We planned many different ways of doing it, like going up on the Jinshui Bridge, dousing ourselves with gasoline, and lighting ourselves up, which would have made quite an impression. But what would we achieve? Should we publish a “Self-Immolation Declaration” beforehand? Who should we send to tell the whole country that we had given our lives for democracy, for freedom, to resist tyranny, and to wake everyone up? The situation was desperate. If we didn’t do it properly, people wouldn’t understand why we had done it, and the regime might even use our deaths to slander the democracy movement.

There was just no point. I made an alternate proposal to attack the famous portrait of Mao Zedong on the Tiananmen gate tower, symbolically declaring an end to Communist tyranny. Yu Dongyue and Lu Decheng agreed right away. From midnight until dawn on May 22, we discussed our plan. We thought of climbing up onto the tower and taking down Mao’s portrait. It didn’t look like we would have to climb very far, but when we saw how well guarded it was, the climb up the wall looked harder than climbing up to heaven. The next morning, all red-eyed from lack of sleep and looking like feverish patients, we racked our brains and managed to get a ladder and carry it to the doorway under Mao’s portrait. Even with a ladder the height of several men, we still couldn’t reach that damn tyrant, already dead for many years, who had stomped all over us while he was alive!

We took turns studying the situation from below, examining the area around the gate. Finally we saw that the nails that held the Mao portrait to the gate were as thick as my arm. That meant that even if we got a high-enough ladder and risked being cut to smithereens, we still might not be able to knock the emperor off his horse.

Didn’t anyone notice you?

Nobody paid any attention to anyone else. Very often the center of a movement is like the eye of a hurricane. People are relaxed, marginalized, and isolated. Naturally, people who are at the center of world attention are a different matter.

So that’s when you thought of treating the tyrant to some rotten eggs? At that time I was still at home in my Sichuan mountain town of Fuling watching the live television broadcast. So I witnessed your brave act, and I was shocked. I remember the voice of the announcer at the scene, the white-haired Chen Duo of the Central People’s Broadcasting Station, trembling with anger.

When we realized we wouldn’t be able to take down Old Mao, we had to go to plan C. We went to the department store in Wangfujing and bought twenty eggs. At first we thought we’d just eyeball the distance and throw the eggs right at Mao’s portrait. But then we thought about how the color of those eggs wouldn’t be dark enough or make a very visible splatter. Fortunately, Yu Dongyue likes painting. He said that it would work if we bought some oil paints, mixed the colors to a dark gray, and filled the eggs with that.

Preparations took a long time, and we were quite serious about it. We bought some calligraphy paper, brushes, black ink, oil paint, paint thinner, and glue, and then rushed to the post office to mail our last words to our families back home. I forget what I wrote. I seem to have quoted a lot of Byron’s poems. Lu Decheng put a lot of thought into his. He was full of emotions. He was an only child. I heard later that his parents fainted on the spot when they saw the live broadcast. I still remember some of the things that Yu Dongyue wrote. He had five sworn blood brothers back in Liuyang, so he bent over and wrote letter after letter. Something about how we should learn from Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills and the famous line about how “the wind howls across the cold Yi River water; the warriors are gone, never to return.” A poet, he wrote lots of stuff like that, with soaring elegance.

I still remember this bit of doggerel he created. “There are a thousand reasons why you walk on this side of the street. There are a thousand and one reasons why you cross the street and walk over to the other side of the street!”

The impulse to cross a line. Of course, you did cross to the other side.

After finishing up our wills, we were hungry. We took those twenty eggs to cook at a small food stand by the north side of the Jinshui Bridge. In a flat wok we spread a thin layer of flour batter, beat in the eggs, and sprinkled some chopped green onion. That day we stuffed ourselves with too many of those thin jianbing pancakes that are a specialty of northern China. For a while the bright golden-yellow pancakes smelled great and were tasty. We had never had them before in Hunan. After eating too many of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Prologue: “All You Want Is Money! All I Want Is Revolution!”
• Part I: Beijing
• Part II: Sichuan
• Afterword: The Last Moments of Liu Xiaobo
• Appendix One: A Guide to What Really Happened
• Appendix Two: List of 202 People Killed in the Massacre
• Appendix Three: List of 49 People Wounded or Disabled in the Massacre
• About the Author
• Copyright