China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

8. After the Deluge

138 8 After the Deluge Systematic repression of political dissidents continued throughout June and July 1989, and I returned to China at the end of August at the request of John Hawkins, UCLA’s dean of international studies. The repression had raised concerns about the future viability of the university’s educational and research exchanges with China, and Dean Hawkins asked me to undertake a firsthand assessment of the situation there and make a recommendation to the UCLA administration. Many leading American educational, research, and administrative institutions, including the Fulbright Scholars Program, the Rand Corporation, the University of Wisconsin , and the City of New York, among others, had elected to break off all relations with China after the Tiananmen debacle. What should we do? I spent ten days in China between August 24 and September 4, dividing my time evenly between Beijing and Shanghai. In Beijing especially, the situation in the late summer of 1989 remained extremely tense. Tiananmen Square was closed to pedestrian traffic. Soldiers armed with AK-47s, stationed in pairs, patrolled the perimeter of the square as well as major intersections and bridges throughout the city, and armed guards were posted at the entrances to Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Social Science, among other sites of erstwhile political activism. When I tried to take pictures of soldiers patrolling Tiananmen Square (from a slowmoving bicycle on the perimeter), a soldier confronted me and ordered me to expose the film in my camera. I complied meekly, as he seemed in no mood to bargain. Chinese friends later told me that sporadic outbursts of violence by angry citizens against PLA martial law troops had continued after the deluge 139 throughout the summer, including occasional sniper attacks and at least one attempt by a Beijing resident to kill troops by offering them poisoned drinking water. In Beijing, post-Tiananmen stress disorder was everywhere in evidence. The atmosphere of heightened political intimidation and surveillance was palpable. One telltale symptom of the disorder was that my friends and acquaintances were unwilling to speak candidly indoors or on the telephone , for fear their conversations would be reported to the authorities. We talked outdoors only, on the street, in public parks, or riding in private cars. When meetings did take place indoors, conversation tended to be strained and oblique, punctuated by darting glances, nervous body language , and carefully chosen euphemisms. On two occasions, when scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Science discussed with me the highly sensitive subject of civilian deaths in Beijing on the night and early morning of June 3–4, their comments were sanitized and couched in a critique of exaggerated Western media reports of mass slaughter. Such were the Orwellian effects of post-Tiananmen stress disorder that only through such dissembled circumlocution could controversial political topics be broached. Although my friends were under extreme pressure to toe the Party line—which held that the Tiananmen bloodshed had been provoked by violent nonstudent “hooligans” hell-bent on causing trouble, and that the ferocity of the government’s armed response had been blown out of proportion by the Western media—few made any effort to persuade me of the government’s righteousness. Instead they pleaded for their American friends not to forsake them in their hour of greatest need. Cutting off exchanges between U.S. and Chinese scientists, scholars, and students would, they argued, benefit only China’s anti-Western hard-liners. The people who would suffer most would be liberal reformers and progressive intellectuals, people like themselves. It was a poignant, heartfelt message, and one that I would hear again and again in the days to come. From two acquaintances who worked for the National People’s Congress in Beijing I learned of a developing campaign to defame Zhao Ziyang. Zhao had been peremptorily dismissed from his post as CCP general secretary on May 19, the day martial law was declared in Beijing. He now stood accused of the serious offense of “splitting the Party” because of the excessive tolerance he showed toward student demonstrators and his indiscreet revelation to Mikhail Gorbachev that Deng was still China’s supreme 140 after the deluge political decision maker. Ironically, the charge of being soft on student protest was the same charge that had got Hu Yaobang, Zhao’s immediate predecessor as general secretary, fired from the same job in 1987. CCP conservatives now made the case that it was...