by Gregory Lee

I want to tell the world that the Chinese army killed the Chinese people. I hope the Chinese people’s blood was not shed for nothing. I hope the Goddess of Democracy will stand again in Tiananmen Square.
—Duo Duo, London, June 1989

I got it wrong. We got it wrong. People with huge reputations got it wrong, and those still hoping to acquire one got it wrong. There was much muffled embarrassment when in mid-1989 a flurry of books, whose publication was planned to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China appeared in London’s bookshops. Most of them concluded that on the whole Deng Xiaoping had got his post-Mao reform agenda just about right. But then there was 4th June 1989. So then, he hadn’t got it right, and so we hadn’t either.

I shouldn’t want this essay to be understood as an “I-me-me-my” account of the Tiananmen Massacre. But at the same time I don’t want simply to reiterate what I have said elsewhere. So, yes, this is a sort of micro-history, and it is in large part a biographical micro-history, with all the risks of tumbling into the bathos that such an approach entails.

I was not in China to “witness” the immediate events leading up to the 4th June massacre at Tiananmen. I was in England. But by happenstance, in terms of what was happening in China, and not just in Beijing, I was one of the two best informed people in the country. Let me explain.

In the late 1980s, I was a struggling would-be academic. I was already in Beijing in 1979, and so saw Democracy Wall and its demise first hand. I then spent much of the 1980s in China, first studying at Peking University, then doing research for my doctorate, and then finally after a post-doc at Liu Zaifu’s Institute of Literature working on Chinese language textbooks at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. It was the 1980s, and after “winning” a war in the South Atlantic, selling Hong Kong up the Pearl River, and grinding down Britain’s miners, Mrs Thatcher and her policies were triumphant and seemingly unstoppable—as were her cuts in the provision of university education. There were few, indeed, no new academic jobs being created. After my post-doctoral fellowship expired at the end of 1985, I looked for a way to stay on in China. I was increasingly invested in contemporary Chinese literature and wanted to learn more about the literary and artistic community in Beijing. The scene was vibrant.

So I took a job in a new unit set up to meet the increasing demand for Chinese-as-a-foreign-language teaching materials. That way, I figured, I wouldn’t have to edit or polish official literary texts I didn’t care for. My wife and I were given accommodation “at the back of the shop,” in the FLP compound itself. At the time most foreigners lived in specially designated foreigners’ residential hotels, but there were five or six of us employed by the Press living in its modest accommodation block. Its most illustrious occupants were the famed Gladys and Hsien-yi Yang, veteran translators with tragic tales of the Cultural Revolution to tell. Conditions were basic: hot running water was supplied three times a week for around an hour. Wash your hair or wash your clothes? But there were compensations. Security was lax. Unlike at the hotels, Chinese friends didn’t have to sign in and out, and our Chinese poet and artist friends could come and go as they pleased through an unlocked back-gate. The poets Bei Dao and Duo Duo, and the painter Shao Fei were frequent visitors; Bei Dao would remain a friend for life. We lived there from late 1985 to the Spring of 1987. There was also a fortuitous encounter that would serve me well a few years later. The old Shanghai modernist writer Shi Zhecun, whom we knew well, told American modern literature specialist, Leo Lee to look me up when he passed through Beijing. He did, and that acquaintance would result later in my moving to Chicago.

But in 1987, there came rumours of jobs opening up in the UK! They were called “new blood” positions—all the old blood having been presumably sucked away by Vampire Thatcher. My PhD advisor told me it looked like my “boat had come in.” But after several near job offers—the kind where people tell you it’s in the bag but then you discover there was a hole in the bag—I had to fall back on a poorly paid temporary position at my old college, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). I nevertheless taught all the final-year literature courses and was able for the first time to put contemporary Chinese poets Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Gu Cheng on the University of London syllabus. And then, in mid 1988, even that came to an end.

An old SOAS friend, a left-wing South African, was in a similar predicament and had taken a job at the BBC. He suggested I join him. He worked for what was known as BBC Monitoring, which was basically a news-gathering operation under the umbrella of the BBC World Service. The British had an agreement with the Americans: they would monitor half the planet’s radio, TV, and press, and the British would monitor the other half via their listening station just outside London and their satellite station in Kenya (at one point someone was even stationed on a small motor launch in the Adriatic Sea listening for signs of Yugoslavia’s break-up). The BBC listened to the Soviet Union and its satellites, the Middle East, and Africa. The CIA, through its Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), listened to Asia with stations in Japan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, supplying the BBC with transcripts. 

So I took a written test, then had an interview. I was lucky to have had some journalistic experience. I’d worked as a stringer for TIME in Beijing thanks to my former dorm-mate Jaime FlorCruz. He knew times were hard for me and gave me whatever work he could. On the strength of that I got the BBC job. 

Two of us on the China Desk, myself and an older colleague. We covered a seven-day week between us; I worked Saturdays and he worked Sundays. George had been a senior Russian-language monitor. He’d had a heart attack. It was 1988, all the action was happening in Gorbachev’s USSR. He’d been given the China desk because it was seen as a quiet backwater with less stress! And thus it came to be that in 1988-1989, George and I were the two best-informed people in the UK when it came to news from China.

Every morning we’d get the American transcripts, analyse them, decide what was to be spiked, what to be summarised and what to be published in full. We had to have it all put to bed by midday. The fruit of our labour would be in Whitehall and Downing Street in the early afternoon.

We got news coming in not just from Beijing but also from the provinces: radio, TV, and local press. At the height of the 1989 student protests we’d receive frequent telephone calls from the BBC’s Beijing correspondent wanting to know what was happening in the rest of China. We’d tell him, and he’d broadcast it.

But I also got to write my own pieces. In “BBC-Speak” they were called “Topical Talks,” a designation that had doubtless not changed since George Orwell broadcast for the Beeb during World War II. They could be quite long: 3, 5, 7 minutes. I always wrote them to facilitate editors having to cut them down from 7 to 3 minutes, for instance. They’d be broadcast in English or translated into other languages and then broadcast on BBC World’s various language services, such as Arabic, Russian, Spanish and, of course, Chinese. 

The talks were transmitted to the BBC by teleprinter. We tend to forget that the 1989 events took place before the dawn of the Internet and the telecommunications revolution. There were no mobile telephone networks, no instant messaging, no e-mails. The 1989 would-be revolution was at best a “fax revolution,” for while there were few domestic phone lines, many government offices and businesses were equipped with fax machines. 

■

The year 1989 was meant to be a year of taking stock: 40 years since the founding of the People’s Republic, 70 since the May 4th protests against the ignominious Versailles Peace Treaty—protests which also ended with brutal suppression on Tiananmen Square—and 10 years since the “demolition” of Democracy Wall and the arrest of pro-democracy activist Wei Jingsheng. At the beginning of 1989 the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi in his open letter to Deng Xiaoping had highlighted the significance of these anniversaries and called for clemency and the early release of Wei.

In 1989, expectation was in the air. But no-one expected the sudden death of disgraced, liberal-minded former Premier Hu Yaobang. It was represented by reformers as a re-run of 1976 when Zhou Enlai’s death prompted protestors onto the streets. It would prove to be a spark igniting the 1989 protests.

There were two further anniversaries in 1989. One that would be ignored was the 10th March 1959, the Tibetan Uprising and the invasion of Tibet by the PLA. Protests had been ongoing since September 1987, but were brutally put down within days of the anniversary in March 1989. The New China News Agency reports that I analysed at the BBC said the situation was fine, which meant it wasn’t. And yet this clue to the government’s ability to resort to lethal suppression of protest was ignored by pundits and ordinary citizens alike. In Xinjiang, too, taking advantage of the province’s isolation, Uighur protests were bloodily put down in the month of May. Another warning sign that went unheeded. Perhaps, after all, these were mere troublesome fringe elements? And the Communist Party would never treat its own in such a fashion, would it? All of which is reminiscent of the admonition in Pastor Martin Niemöller’s post World War II “Confession”:”First they came for the Jews…”

The other major 1989 event due to be celebrated, especially in China, was the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Two hundred years since the outbreak of the mother of all revolutions. China was to have been officially represented on the Champs Elysées in the Bastille Day parade. Instead, on 14th July 1989, black-clad Chinese students, now officially refugees, observed by a crowd of 800,000, pushed bicycles down the avenue in silent homage to their compatriots who had perished together with their ideals, a month before on the Square.

■

I have very little more to say about the events at Tiananmen Square in early June, 1989. What can be added to the rivers of words and images that have already streamed across our screens in the thirty intervening years? All I can see is that I now see the massacre as an almost inevitable culmination of a decade of Deng Xiaoping’s rule, of a dictatorial rule that would ultimately brook no opposition: The cataclysmic apogee of a decade filled with much promise and many reverses. And yet, it was a decade full of hope, and—despite the lucidity of the generation of former Red Guards who’d witnessed the reality, the misery of China’s rural world—of blind belief. Of that decade I have already written at length, at book-length. All I can do now is to write in this more personal, immediate manner of that part of the back-story to which I was privy. Of how the destruction and distress that was “Tiananmen” was lived by some of its agents, its victims, the “witnesses” I knew. They are almost exclusively poets and painters: Bei Dao and Shao Fei. And Gu Cheng who was always a troubled soul, but whose isolation in New Zealand, post-Tiananmen, only exacerbated the folie that was at the source of his poetic power, but also of his murderous acts.

Duo Duo’s story is the most extraordinary of all, larger than life, like the man himself. He witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre, saw it, incredulous as people fell around him. Blanks, plastic bullets? No, the People’s Army were shooting live ammunition and people were dying. 

I spent many days with him in the weeks following 4 June. The conduct, the murderous behaviour of the PLA had shocked him to the very core. Despite a cynicism and a disbelief borne of his experience of a Cultural Revolution that revealed to his generation the poverty not only of the peasants but of official ideology, he was stunned by his new understanding. He witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre at first hand, and one day later was in London to bear witness.

I had known of Duo Duo, had read and was astounded by his poetry, long before I finally met him on New Year’s Eve. My wife had met him at a party while I’d been stringing in Shanghai and Suzhou; I’d been assisting a TIME photographer shooting pictures for the issue of TIME that would celebrate Deng’s second appearance on the magazine’s cover as Man of the Year. America couldn’t get enough of him. 

Duo Duo came to my flat in the evening with the young would-be poet Bei Ling, later a self-declared (but still would-be) artist. They stayed until around 5 a.m., the time the first buses started running.

My relationship with Duo Duo was tempestuous. I think most of his relationships with people were difficult. He was angry, frustrated, had a mind-numbing day job with a round-trip four-hour bicycle commute. But I am making excuses for him. I found his poetry remarkable. We grew close. We’d walk in the parks and talk about life and poetry, though never about his poetry. Not directly. And yet I found his poetry deeply meaningful, magical at times, and wondered where his imaged expressiveness could possibly come from. 

Duo Duo was less well-known than Bei Dao and Gu Cheng, who’d been “discovered” early on by international sinologists. Duo Duo had had no links to the Today magazine, run by Bei Dao and Chen Maiping during the 1978-1979 Democracy Wall moment. But they all knew one another. The Today poet and editor Mang Ke was a former high-school classmate of Duo Duo. In the summer of 1986, later declared the “poetry craze year,” we spent time together in the seaside town of Qingdao (that’s Tsing-tao, where the beer comes from). It was also the summer we sat up into the early hours watching Maradona put two goals past the England goalkeeper, the luckless Peter Shilton, in the Mexico World Cup; although TV sets were no longer rare, mine was a colour TV.

In early 1988, Duo Duo and I had a falling out. It had been brewing for some time. He’d written a poem about my wife and me as a pair of egotistical, pecking, birds. Things went sour. There were pressing reasons to return to Europe, but this rupture with Duo Duo brought it forward.

Despite the efforts of Bei Dao, forever the diplomat seeking reconciliation, Duo Duo and I would not speak again until he stepped off the plane in London the day after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. 

Duo Duo had been invited to read his poems at the British Museum. A few months before, I was approached by John Cayley who ran a small poetry press and was a translator of pre-modern Chinese poetry. Would  I be interested in putting out a small volume of Duo Duo’s poetry? He would translate half the poems and I the other. I was a little uneasy about sharing the task, and wondered how that would work out, but it was his press after all. I agreed, and communication with Duo Duo was re-established.

By early June the operation at the BBC had become mammoth; in the weeks before and afterward the volume of information we had to process, the demands for our “product,” had become almost unmanageable. There were now three, maybe four, of us working on the China Desk. I was also writing “Topical Talks” and doing interviews on BBC radio. If you were a China-related journalist, these were busy times.

When the shooting started I was as stunned as the next person. I watched on an old Soviet-made post-card size portable black and white TV a colleague had loaned me. The following weeks were intense; many people did not believe that the killing of hundreds, thousands—there were no definite figures, there never would be—in Beijing marked the end of the power struggle. There was confusion, there were rebel radio stations still transmitting two weeks later, there was talk of resistance and civil war. But it was not to be. It was mere wishful thinking. Deng Xiaoping before ordering the clearing of the square had protected his back, he had assurances from his old army stalwarts. The world’s gaze was on Tiananmen Square. In late May the world’s Televisions were in Beijing to cover the state visit of Mikhail Gorbachev—acclaimed like a hero by the students for his liberal policies of glasnost. But this gave a skewed impression of how things were. In addition to students, government employees, workers, and eventually peasants started turning up on the streets—and not just in Beijing. Unrest was rife throughout China. But the symbolic centrepiece in our imagination remains that square and the highly visible juxtaposition of Mao’s portrait hung over the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the pure white, provocative Goddess of Democracy the art students had conjured up.

At work we were all in shock, but the adrenaline pumped up by having to deal with the deluge of requests for information kept us going. There was simply no time to think about the horror that had just happened. Students and trade unionists were being hunted down all over China. The Chinese authorities themselves gave massive press coverage to the crackdown, to the suppression of what they now termed a country-revolutionary rebellion. It all had to be made sense of.

I also had to juggle my day job with looking out for Duo Duo. He would arrive at London Heathrow on the very last plane out of Beijing. He had his ticket, his passport. His friends prevailed upon him to go and tell the world what he’d seen. Miraculously the road out to Beijing airport was open. The airport staff like the majority of Beijing’s population were on the side of the protestors, not the army. Midst the confusion and the uncertainty, he was able to board his flight. He was out. But we didn’t know he was out.

For weeks, if not months, I’d had the details of Duo Duo’s schedule, the time of arrival of his British Airways direct flight from Beijing. I went to the airport on the off chance. I didn’t believe he’d be on that plane.

Then I saw him come through the arrivals gate preceded by the China-hand Jonathan Mirsky who immediately began talking to waiting journalists. As one of them approached Duo Duo I took him aside: “Beware. These people are journalists. If you talk now, you understand what it implies. You can’t go back.”

“I know,” he said. “But I have to.” He felt a citizen’s obligation to share what he’d seen. Over the next few days, he gave a series of interviews. The very night of his arrival I accompanied him to the BBC studios, I interpreted for him, filled in the background. The following day there was another radio interview for a current affairs programme. He told me he wanted to say something directly in English. But his English was non-existent. We wrote something down, and I translated it. I coached him to say it, and it was recorded. This is what he said:

I want to tell the world that the Chinese army killed the Chinese people. I hope the Chinese people’s blood was not shed for nothing. I hope the Goddess of Democracy will stand again in Tiananmen Square.

Nowadays what we call a media “buzz” lasts perhaps a couple of days. Back then it could last a week or so. The buzz around “Tiananmen” lasted around ten days. Duo Duo’s story would gradually fade away. The publishers Bloomsbury understood the buzz and how important it was to move quickly. They wanted to publish Duo Duo’s poems. The small press edition I had worked on was now relegated. But they wanted a thicker book with more poems—and in the space of a week. Above all else, they had to seize the “Tiananmen” moment. But poetry and commerce have never been a happy match. There was a fight with them over the title. They wanted something like “The Poet of Tiananmen.” It was indecent. They threatened to pull out. We held firm. The title became Looking Out From Death; the title came from one of the poems. We let them have “Tiananmen,” as a historical milestone, in the subtitle: “From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.”

It is, of course, impossible to translate poetry well under such pressure. When I translate a poem these days, the whole process can take months, even years. I do a couple of drafts and then put them away in a drawer to simmer. There are always revisions. There is never perfection. I am still revising translations of poems I first translated 40 years ago. And here we had to conjure up another thirty to forty poems. Moreover, there were two hands and necessarily two different styles. But we felt we had an obligation. Most of all to Duo Duo. 

There were necessarily errors and infelicities in the translations, but at least they were all readable; could be read aloud. Later there would be academic criticisms, and envy. The book sold well, over 4,000 copies, more than the print-run of a volume of Seamus Heaney’s poems at the time. By poetry standards, it was a big success. But we didn’t “cash in” on it, as some suspected. Both Cayley and I handed over our translator’s fees to Duo Duo; it was something like £3,000 from each of us. After all, Duo Duo was now a penniless refugee.

By the autumn of 1989, Duo Duo was teaching Chinese conversation at SOAS, and living in a room in a well-wisher’s house in a south London suburb. I recall, he’d been banned from using the phone, the owners had put a lock on it. You could never really feel pity for Duo Duo—there is too much pride and self-assurance there—but I did feel sorry for him. Duo Duo was not made for foreign exile. He was no cosmopolitan writer. And yet his first trip abroad had turned into just that, exile. And now the buzz had died down, and he was a refugee like any other. But not quite. He still had his poetry.

He started trying to learn English, but for a long time remained dependent on interpreters and translators. He belonged to a generation that had learned a little Russian at school, before being caught up in the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, when school was out for good.

We were invited down to Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan, a sedate residential sixth-form college that Prince Charles had attended. But those first few poetry readings with Duo Duo were not easy. He had no desire to communicate with the audience. It was as though he threw his poems at them. And then refused to answer questions. Over the years he learnt to take his time. His poems after all are eminently performable. But at the beginning it felt like he thought he was casting pearls before the swine. He was angry. Emotions were complex. There was homesickness shot through with guilt at being out of China, at having somehow escaped a common fate, and the ruthless crackdown that followed the “clearing” of Tiananmen Square. I felt it too in Bei Dao, who was responsible for launching a 33 signatory petition calling for the release of Wei Jingsheng around the same time as Fang Lizhi’s open letter to Deng Xiaoping in February 1989. The controversial petition signed by writers and intellectuals would later be seen as having contributed to stirring up the students. Of course, Bei Dao was to blame for nothing, but it was nevertheless laid before his door.

The gig at Atlantic College at least got us down to Wales. Duo Duo had agreed to go because he was promised a side-trip to Dylan Thomas’s grave. The day after the poetry reading we drove to Laugharne. As it happened, it was 16 October 1987, the day of the Great Storm. Thrashed by wind and rain, Duo Duo stood there transfixed before Dylan Thomas’s tombstone. In later years, I would see him that way again in other graveyards. He liked visiting cemeteries. It was as though he was communing with the dead.

I’d been commissioned by the BBC to make a one-hour radio documentary to be broadcast on 4th June 1990. The programme was to look at the impact of June 4th on writers now in exile. The producer was an old acquaintance; I’d taught him Chinese at night-class years before. He came along on the trip to Laugharne and we recorded Duo Duo’s reaction to being at Dylan Thomas’s graveside. The recording was unusable because of the sound of the wind. But the storm was perhaps a suitable setting for an encounter between two such tempestuous lyricists.

Around the same time, Duo Duo recorded an interview for Shu Kei’s “Tiananmen” documentary, Sunless Days. In it Duo Duo recounts what he experienced at Tiananmen Square. Every year, when I teach the 1980s to my students, I always end the course with this clip of Duo Duo talking about the events of the night of 3rd-4th June. Tears well up in my eyes—as they do now, as I write these words. I wonder if they notice?

In 1990, I spent much of my spare time working on the radio documentary that would eventually be entitled “The Urgent Knocking” (a phrase from one of Duo Duo’s poems) and subtitled: “New Chinese Writing and the Movement for Democracy.” I’d record interviews with writers, academics, and exiled students from “Tiananmen Square.” I did this mainly in London, but also in Chicago, where there was a significant group of exiled writers and intellectuals. In May I was allowed a detachment to BBC Radio at Broadcasting House. Part of the deal was that I should travel to Hong Kong, mainland China, and to Stockholm, where Bei Dao was planning a revival of the famed Democracy Wall-era magazine Today.

I was supposed to make the trip with my producer, Julian May, but the Consul who interviewed us at the Swiss Cottage consulate made it politely clear that as BBC-accredited journalists there was no way we’d be given visas to visit China so close to the 4th June anniversary. 

I don’t recall whether I volunteered, or whether it was suggested to me, but the idea was hatched that I should go to China on my own, as an academic simply catching up with old friends. By this time I’d been offered a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago, and knew that I’d be leaving the BBC in the summer. So it was a sort of half-truth.

I was kitted out by the BBC technicians with a standard recording machine for Hong Kong and Stockholm, and a pink and pistachio- green machine that looked like an ordinary cassette player, but which was in fact a tape recorder. I had tapes that looked like commercial cassettes which, apart from the first few minutes of pop music, were blank and recordable. Looking back it may seem unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger, but I had reason to be a little uneasy. I’d been called in to see a Deputy Director of Radio, a charming young man who was obviously a product of public school and Oxbridge. As he smilingly handed me a wad of traveller’s cheques, he told me: “Don’t get caught. If you do, we don’t know you.”

In Hong Kong I met people in a fervour of activity even 11 months after 4th June. They didn’t seem to have stopped: writing, teaching, talking. They’d even set up a “Tiananmen University.” I met the local academic and poet Ya Si (P.K. Leung) who later would become a friend and colleague. My imperative was to get to Beijing. But before I did, I had one last chore to do in Hong Kong. Duo Duo had asked me to take some prescription heart medication to his mother in Beijing. Of course there was no prescription, but I easily obtained the drug from a side-street pharmacy in Kowloon.

I wanted to see two people in Beijing in particular: the first was Shao Fei, the painter and originally a member of the late 1970s, early 1980s Stars group, then married to Bei Dao. In telling the stories of these encounters I feel like I’m skirting the boundaries of decency, but such micro-histories are the stuff that the wider impact of 4th June 1989 are made of; there is no great “national tragedy” that is not a sum of the multiple derailments of individual lives. 

When the Massacre took place, Bei Dao was not in China; he watched it all unfurl on a TV in a California hotel room. Shao Fei and their daughter, however, were still in Beijing. The plan was that they’d join Bei Dao in Scandinavia where he’d sought refuge, but they were unable to secure the necessary exit papers.

I went to see Shao Fei in the apartment attached to the official artists’ studios, where’d we’d spent many a memorable evening. Now she was alone. Her daughter Tian Tian was with her grandparents. She said she had a pressing appointment. She was nervous. It still wasn’t good to be seen with a foreigner. I wasn’t keen on a protracted meeting either. I didn’t want to get her into any further trouble. We set out for the bus stop and she started to talk. She told me how she’d pulled all the strings she could, had crawled to all the vice-ministers and high officials she could gain access to in an attempt to get the evasive exit visas. Every time she did this, she’d make them a gift of one of her paintings; she was a renowned artist, they were quite valuable. But she intimated that to her the cost was more than the monetary value, that with each painting she gave away to these men, she felt she was belittling, sullying her work.

I’d known Shao Fei for some time. We’d hung out together in Beijing. My wife and I had gone on outings with her. Once when Bei Dao was out of town we went swimming together in the pool of an I.M. Pei-designed Western Hills hotel. But mostly the four of us spent time together indoors. We celebrated Bei Dao’s birthday at our flat; Duo Duo was there too. Later, in 1988, we spent time together in England, when Bei Dao had a visiting position at Durham University and Shao Fei mounted an exhibition in a Liverpool gallery. But Shao Fei hadn’t been too enthusiastic about being in England. It was always clear that she’d prefer to be at home in Beijing. Yet in retrospect these were all happy, memorable moments, moments that were never to return. Now, it was all gone. Everyone scattered. Just the memories and snapshots to remind us we’d ever done these things.

Before catching the bus, she pushed a brown-paper package into my hands—a simple track-suit for Bei Dao. Perhaps it was all she could get her hands on at such short notice. Then, as she skipped onto the bus, she asked me to give Bei Dao a message. “Tell him I’m done with giving away my paintings. I’m not doing it any longer.”

The second person I wanted to see in Beijing was the poet Mang Ke, co-editor of the celebrated Today. One of the few major poets of Bei Dao’s generation remaining in China, he would be a notable absentee from the literary magazine’s revival meeting in Stockholm a few days later. 

To get to see Mang Ke I went through an old acquaintance, Huang, the husband of a former foreign student I’d known at Peking University. Not only did he know Mang Ke but—and it was still very rare in  those days—he had a car. As a foreigner, I couldn’t just walk into the apartment block of a known dissident poet in broad daylight. Huang arranged to pick me up in front of my hotel on Beijing’s main drag, the Boulevard of Eternal Peace, which led to Tiananmen Square. The meeting was set for the early hours of the morning. The car ride itself was traumatic. Even 11 months after the tanks had rolled down this road to crush the protests, the tarmac was still embossed with their tread-marks. We bumped along over the bevelled surface and then turned off into the less well-lit streets south of the Square. Mang Ke lived in a public housing apartment like most Beijingers then. It was a modest, small apartment, made even smaller by the presence of piled-up cardboard boxes. What was in them?, I asked. The boxes were full of his undistributed poetry book. He took one out, signed it, and gave it to me. 

The book had been due to come out in the month of May 1989. But the publishing house had taken fright. They’d called to say they were going to pulp the entire print run. So, he’d hired a tricycle and gone and brought them back. They were piled high from floor to ceiling. It was a very graphic representation of the constraints writers lived under after 4 June. 

I understood he didn’t want to be interviewed on tape. It would be too dangerous to be heard talking in a programme to be broadcast by the BBC on 4th June 1990. But he said he’d read me a poem we could broadcast. He said he didn’t have a poem about June, but he did have one entitled April, or fourth month in Chinese, the cruellest month, as T.S. Eliot called it, the month of the Qing Ming festival of the departed, the month whose Chinese name rhymes with ‘death.’ I got out my little pistachio-green and pink machine and recorded Mang Ke reading “April”:

This is April
April is like other months
It makes people reminisce, makes people suddenly think of things
Of yesterday, of far away
Or think of winter snowfall

Of course, now long since turned to tears
Or to a flight of doves
Flown who knows where
April, it makes you think of people
Think of those either living
Or already dead
Think of those who are perhaps happy
Of those who are perhaps doomed to tragedy
Think of men and women…

This is April
April is like other months
But it forces you to recall things past
Forces you to dive again into the depths of memory
—That place where the dead are buried
I think that even if you were a standing slab of stone
You would sob

I’d translated that poem for a Penguin Four Contemporary Chinese Poets volume. I discussed it with Mang Ke that night in his cramped flat and he’d gladly given the project his blessing. The other three poets were to be Duo Duo, Gu Cheng, and Bei Dao. But later that year, the then translator of Bei Dao’s poems refused permissions, and the book never happened. Poor Mang Ke really did not have much luck when it came to seeing his poetry published.

Before I left Beijing, I tried one last time to contact Duo Duo’s family. I’d been phoning for three days. The first day, the phone was answered but then the receiver was put down when I started to explain that I wanted to deliver the medicine I’d bought in Hong Kong. Eventually, the phone just rang and rang. I asked someone to post the little package for me. It would be months later that Duo Duo would discover that it was precisely on the day I arrived in Beijing that his mother had passed away.

I was heading back to Hong Kong, but first wanted to see Shi Zhecun in Shanghai. The eighty-five-year-old modernist writer had survived the Cultural Revolution, and the dunce’s cap he’d been forced to wear; he’d survived cancer. All that only to witness 4 June. He told me he hadn’t been surprised. He expected nothing better from the Chinese Communist Party, he said. 

The evening I arrived in Shanghai, I headed to the Bund where as usual hundreds if not thousands of people were milling about on a balmy Spring evening. I was approached by two young men who started to speak English. I switched to Chinese. It was a stupid thing to do: I should have pretended to be a simple monoglot, a British tourist. What was I doing in Shanghai? Where was I staying? For how long? They were polite but pushy. The next morning as I exited the Peace Hotel, formerly the Cathay, they were there again. Are you busy? We’d like to take you for tea. They found a cab and we drove off to a Western-style café which served Western-style cakes. What was my business in Shanghai? What was my occupation? Where did I work? 

Just seeing the sights, I said. I was a sinologist. I was about to take up a job in Chicago. I’d been to visit former colleagues at the Beijing Foreign Languages Press—I had. They seemed satisfied. Eventually they stood up, and went off, leaving me to pay the bill. Being “asked to have tea” in mainland China is a euphemism for being interviewed by the secret police. It was time to leave. I flew back to Hong Kong, and then on to Stockholm to find Bei Dao and the others.

Two days after leaving Shanghai I was in Stockholm. In an attic hotel-room I sat together with Bei Dao and the literary critic Li Tuo. Li Tuo was in one corner, I in the other, Bei Dao sitting before us on the bed. Between us on a coffee table was a bottle of Glenfiddich I’d bought at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport. I delivered Shao Fei’s message. It was horrific. Bei Dao sat huddled into himself on the bed broke into tears and wept unconsolably. He wouldn’t be seeing his wife and child any time soon. He was all alone with his sorrow and his guilt. These were unpleasant times.

The next day Bei Dao read his poems on an open-air stage in Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården. He tried to be brave. There were meetings and lunches. Plans for re-launching Today to be discussed. People were counting on him. But he was a deeply saddened man. In addition to his family problems, he was constantly being sniped at. There was much envy. He was living under a cloud. He felt responsible. To add to his post 4 June blues, in the autumn of 1989 he was tipped as a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. Journalists were camped out in his living room waiting for the news. The prize went to the Spanish novelist Camilo José Cela. Hardly a spectacular awardee, but a safe one.

There were others having to bear the pain of separation, the guilt of being safely out of China. At the Today meetings in a Stockholm hotel, two young authors had just arrived. Liu Suola, a writer who was also known for her singing, and Xu Xing, a novelist in his mid-thirties. He in particular seemed traumatised. He’d spent the best part of a year getting out of China. He seemed terribly nervous, and evidently hadn’t recovered from his ordeal. I wondered if he ever would, and now, even though he is back in China, I still wonder whether he ever did.

Gao Xingjian had left China in 1987. He seemed much more at ease than the others. He’d settled in Paris where he made a good living selling his paintings. He had fluent French. Born in 1940, he belonged to the generation before Bei Dao, and had graduated from university before the Cultural Revolution. But no one 11 months after 4 June 1989 imagined that in ten years he would be the one to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

The renaissance of the Today magazine may be seen as an act of defiance; of literary defiance, yes, but given the nature of the Chinese state, also an act of political defiance. Bei Dao takes great pains to stress that his poetry is not political, and so does Duo Duo. But their very lack of politicalness has always made their work stand out in a landscape where political compromise is often a question of simple survival. And then in that year of 1989, both had been involved in politics as citizens, if not as poets. First Bei Dao with his petition calling for the release of the imprisoned dissident Wei Jingsheng. And then Duo Duo, whose very presence at the Square and subsequent denunciation of the regime, despite everything he’d done to stay away from politics, put him in the political limelight.

After Stockholm, I went back to London to work on the programme. I’d been in a strange mood. As though teleported from the grey misery of post 4 June China to the insouciant lightness of Swedish daily life, I was tetchy and resentful of the Swedes’ everyday normality. How could two such different societies co-exist on the same planet at the same time: one steeped in misery and dictatorship, and the other floating on a cloud of self-contented plenty, and taking liberty for granted? The contrast was just too stark. Looking back, I was unfair. I owe the Swedes an apology.

I’d spent a year thinking and talking about “Tiananmen.” A year meeting and recording writers, victims, activists, pundits. And then the programme was made. One hundred hours of recordings to be cut down and written into a coherent one-hour documentary. The programme was broadcast at 7 p.m. on 4th June 1990. 

That summer I left the BBC and moved to Chicago. It was like being part of a roadshow that shifted continents. Beijing, Stockholm, Chicago through 1989 to 1991 was like a continuum. Leo Lee, my predecessor at the University of Chicago, had arranged for a number of scholars and critics to spend a year there. Li Tuo and his then wife, filmmaker Zhuang Nianxin, director of Good Morning, Beijing, lived in the apartment block next to mine. Also in Chicago was Liu Zaifu whose research institute I’d been attached to in 1985, and who’d done his best to mediate between the government and the protesting students in May 1989. For having done so he was accused of being a prime instigator of “counter-revolutionary rebellion,” as the authorities dubbed the 1989 protests, and was labelled a “black hand.” Duo Duo was now living in Toronto and was an early visitor to Chicago, and Chen Maiping and Bei Dao were frequent visitors that first year.

Memories of ’89 didn’t fade, but people’s interest did. I organised memorial poetry readings every year. In 1991, there were perhaps a hundred or so people who came. In 1992, maybe 50. On the 5th anniversary there were barely enough people to sparsely fill a small classroom. By then, Deng Xiaoping had re-launched his capitalist reforms and people had donned their blinkers and hurled themselves into the productivist and consumerist frenzy that helped to blot out memory.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever once stopped to digest the horror of what had happened in June 1989. I don’t think I have even now, which is perhaps why writing this essay has been painful and also why it is full of wending digressions. In the thirty years that have passed, I’ve had to deal with death at close range, even with violent death. But to this day it is the uncalled-for brutality of the suppression of the protests that makes me weep. The vindictive retaliation that continued way beyond the month of June and way beyond China’s borders still fills me with indignation. It has never stopped. 

Some in the West reacted with a familiar sinological disappointment and disgust with their object of study. Soon it was not the authorities, but “the Chinese” as a whole who were to blame. It was much cosier to admire Taiwan (which was indeed becoming admirable) or to adulate Tibet (whose people, unlike the Dalai Lama himself, had suffered greatly). It was a resentment I’d seen from many a soured, former Western Maoist. But I hadn’t been a Maoist, and the Chinese people I knew, and had known since childhood, were flesh and blood, not objects of study. My grandfather, Bei Dao, Shao Fei, Duo Duo, these were “the Chinese” for me.

If you were to ask me what has marked my life, without hesitation, whether for better or for worse, I’d say: China. And then I’d say: “Tiananmen.” It’s run through the last thirty years of my life, in particular my professional life, like a stain, an indelible, leaching stain. Whether I’m in China, whether I’m in a classroom in France. It’s always there. I try to keep it at bay, but it’s always there.  Inexpungeable. 

I realise now what I wept for today while writing this piece. I wept for the dead and disappeared and their parents still with no answers. I wept also for the broken, interrupted lives of my friends. But I wept too over what China might have been, and what it became on that fateful day.

■

Epilogue

That should have been the last word, but since I am a teacher by trade, I always try to understand what we have learned. Have we indeed learned anything? Are we any more wary of dictatorship? I don’t believe so. China itself is as tough and dictatorial a regime as it was immediately after “Tiananmen.” And everywhere totalitarian regimes proliferate today as they did before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And we tolerate them more than we ever did. Their excesses are ignored, or under-reported. Despite our instant access to whatever is happening in the world, through miniaturised technology, web cameras, mobile phone videos, the crushing of dissent and protest goes largely unremarked by mainstream media. 

And what we are faced with now, thirty years later, are a plethora of low-visibility Tiananmens. In 2018, Amnesty International reported the deaths of 300 university students killed by the Nicaraguan regime. But such constant sorrow is much less “sexy” than the OK Corall stand-offs in oil-rich Venezuela, at the moment of writing a more central concern to the USA. 

Likewise, while the vexed question of Uighur human rights in Xinjiang might be a useful tool in the US propaganda war against the Chinese authorities, which government on earth would risk the ire of the Chinese state by imposing sanctions on China in support of the Uighurs? The callous treatment of the Uighurs by the Chinese authorities is similar to the cold, brutal methods used by the party-state to clamp down on the students and ordinary Beijing citizens alike in June 1989. But there is a difference: the Uighurs are currently victims of a prolonged, “slow-bleed” “Tiananmen” whose ultimate aim is to break their spirit.

■

[M]ost people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly blind faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are a sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale; everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion. No one will rectify wrongs; all wrongs will be forgotten.
—Milan Kundera, The Joke

I don’t believe death has no retribution
—Bei Dao, “The Answer”

Gregory Lee is an academic, writer and broadcaster who has lived and worked in the UK, the United States, China and Hong Kong. Since 1990 he has taught at the University of Lyon in France where he is Professor of Chinese and Transcultural Studies, and Director of the Institute of Transtextual and Transcultural Studies. His most recent book is China Imagined: From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power (London, Hurst 2018). He studied and worked in China between 1979 and 1987, in 1988-1990 he was a journalist and China analyst for the BBC World Service.