June 3
Someone was knocking lightly but persistently on my hotel room door.
It turned out to be Jenny Clayton, the producer from BBC Panorama.
“Good morning, Phi-lip. How are you today?”
Even in the worst of times, she had a flair for a kind of forced cheerfulness, a British bonhomie.
“Ah, okay, I guess.”
“Here, I’ve got your assignment!”
“You didn’t hear about last night?” I was still wondering how she could be in such a chipper mood.
“We heard all about it in the office,” she said crisply, handing me a sheet of paper, a copy of a fax marked with the letterhead of the Palace Hotel where the BBC crew and producers were holed up in the best luxury Beijing could offer. “Can you take the crew out and get these shots for me today?”
I looked at the shot list with amused disbelief.
BUSY MARKET SCENES, LUXURY CARS, PEOPLE SHOPPING, NEWSPAPER BULLETIN BOARDS, HIGH-RISE HOTELS, BARS, COFFEE SHOPS, BICYCLE PARKING LOT
There might have been a revolution erupting on the streets below, there might have been a volcano erupting on Tiananmen Square, but from the comfortable cocoon of the BBC’s Beijing bureau, a shot list stamped and approved in distant London was more real. It had more immediacy, weight and import.
Jenny Clayton, whose company I had enjoyed so much when we recorded the joyful sights and sounds of the high tide of the movement was beginning to sound out of it, inexplicably foreign to me.
“The markets and the bicycle parking lot are most important,” she said. “You absolutely must get those!”
If I was disappointed with the absurdly narrow scope of the assignment, I myself was partly to blame. Many of the items on the list were ideas I had submitted over a week ago—which seemed like an eternity given recent events—coming back to us on the rebound a few days late after getting paper approval from London. Rather than argue, I said I’d see what I could do, figuring we could get some of the generic shots for the script while covering the larger story of Beijing on the brink of disaster.
As soon as I got outside with the crew, I pocketed the shot list and instead asked the cameraman to shoot some newly hung banners, put up not by the students but the government. Bad news was not only dominating the air- waves, it was being draped down the facade of the hotel. The long banner about democracy and freedom was gone, replaced by equally long vertical banners that read like excerpts from Li Peng’s martial law speech.
FIRMLY SUPPORT THE FOUR CARDINAL PRINCIPLES!
RESOLUTELY SUPPORT THE COMMUNIST PARTY!
It was almost impossible to find a taxi, another sign of the controls being imposed. Normally I would have chosen to go to the square by foot, but the camera gear was heavy and the crew wanted a car. In desperation I chatted up a scruffy-looking entrepreneur and agreed to rent his car sight unseen. The fact that it was an illegal gypsy cab was not an issue; being captive to a state employee driving a state-owned vehicle at a time like this would involve a certain kind of risk as well. We heard that a journalist had just been kicked out of China because of conversations secretly taped in a car by a driver in cahoots with the authorities.
The gypsy cab, however liberating in principle, turned out to be a bomb on wheels, stinking of exhaust and much smaller than anything we had used before. The rusty shell of a vehicle was just big enough for the lot of us if we boarded in just the right order and held our breath. The most troubling feature of our ride was the broken back door, of the sort that could only be opened from the outside. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the driver, he seemed dependable enough in a slightly unsavory sort of way, but being locked inside could be dangerous in an emergency.
When I complained about the faulty door, the spunky driver demonstrated with great verve how quickly he could hop out of the car, run all the way around back, and pop open the door within seconds. We decided a bad car was better than no car and maybe even better than a good one. As the driver negotiated a path through a thicket of bicycles and an obstacle course of people on foot, the advantages of the junky car became obvious. The beat-up wreck on wheels was so unlike the fancy government-owned vehicles usually assigned to journalists that it permitted us to venture down back alleys or even into tense situations without attracting undue attention.
After two hours of random explorations and fitful filming, getting snippets for the shot list as well as trying to record in some demonstrable fashion the precipitous decline in public spirit, as exemplified by our being chased away by guards, police, and indignant townspeople, we found ourselves relying on the driver to keep us both safe while hovering as close to trouble as possible.
We had been physically prevented from filming in front of the flagship Kentucky Fried Chicken at Qianmen, not that it mattered much. It had been my flippant suggestion to show the contrast of newly-posted martial law edicts with fast-food slogans. Unlike assigned drivers, often gossips and tattletales, our driver refused to answer police questions or identify us; he even went as far as urging us to make a quick run for it when cornered by some hostile cops. He was a real trouper and had the makings of a natural journalist.
Although the extreme tensions of the previous night had largely dissipated with daylight, the square was getting dicey, difficult to approach on wheels.
What a difference a day could make. Only yesterday morning I had been back at the tent again, almost feeling like a regular, hanging out with Chai Ling in her tent headquarters, chatting and observing as she played the role of queen bee, running the business of the square. I had never seen her more breezy and confident. She was wearing a bright green and white striped shirt and short khaki shorts and seemed to enjoy basking in her newfound media limelight.
Dozens of reporters and photographers watched her, and I found it no trouble at all to interview her again, though her answers this time seemed rote and scripted, in accordance with an unduly optimistic party line. About the only negative note she introduced was to say that it would take at least seventy years to introduce democracy to China. While chatting with her I was introduced to Hong Kong TV personality Johnny Shum and a gaggle of other Hong Kong supporters, who knew about the May 28 interview from rough transcriptions and written reports Patricia and I had offered the Hong Kong press. Impresario Johnny Shum and company had just flown into Beijing bearing financial gifts reaped from the Happy Valley fundraising concert.
Hou Dejian had played at that Hong Kong concert, a personal turning point that had led him to getting involved upon his return home to Beijing. I wondered about him now. He was at the monument, on a hunger strike of his own, along with Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo, and Gao Xin. I could readily identify with all of them, not just because I had met them all at one time or another. We were all in our early thirties, caught at that tempestuous age when the caution and circumspection that comes with maturity can still be overridden by the lingering enthusiasm of youth.
Suddenly we hit a chaotic intersection with a jolt. Our way forward was blocked by pedestrians milling about angrily on West Chang’an Boulevard by Liubukou, not far from the guarded entrance to the leadership compound at Zhongnanhai.
The wide street was free of traffic but choked up with the carcasses of three smashed buses and shards of broken brick and glass. We stepped out of the car cautiously, not sure the bricks had stopped flying. The tension in the air was almost visible, like heat hovering over a hot road.
The buses reminded me of beetle carcasses, stripped of meat by an army of ants. The interiors had been picked clean by the mob; upholstered seats ripped apart, metal bars bent out of shape. This was no ordinary case of looting, but an expression of hatred to the fingertips, hatred to the bone. Why the anger, the sacking of a bus? I asked around and was told the story of the Trojan horse. The bus had been full of lethal weapons, ammunition, and other military supplies.
“Guns!” one of the vigilantes explained. “Military issue! There were also hand grenades on the bus.”
But why were the seats pulled apart, the windows smashed?
“The army tried to trick the people,” another man cried out.
“They tried to make it look like we had the weapons! It was a trap. They are looking for an excuse. It is they who are criminals, not us!”
A student brought me over to see the evidence. Rifles, machine guns, tear gas cylinders, daggers, and grenades were piled on top of the bus for all to see, but wisely placed out of reach. There was a twin danger: a distraught demonstrator might be tempted to grab a weapon and turn it on his tormentors or the conscientious men guarding the weapons might be accused of collecting them with violent intent; either way creating an excuse for crackdown in a country where gun laws were so strict that mere possession of the same could bring on a violent military response.
It had all been so sporting up until now, a battle of wits, a battle of wills.
A battle of empty hands, empty stomachs, incantatory voices, and tired feet. The introduction of military hardware changed the game entirely. It made a mockery of a month of nonviolent struggle. Who was funneling in the weapons? Were they a pretext for a pretext to crack down?
“The bus and the weapons are part of a conspiracy to smuggle in troops and weapons to attack Tiananmen,” explained a young man in a white shirt.
“But what happened to the soldiers on the bus?”
“Those cowards, they ran into the gate of Zhongnanhai. They ran away, they are afraid of the will of the people,” he said, choking up with anger. “They are afraid . . . ”
Although I did not disagree with his words, the strident and unforgiving tone of his voice unnerved me.
“If they didn’t run away,” added another self-appointed spokesman, “they would face the justice of the masses.”
“Justice of the masses,” echoed another man approvingly.
Mass justice, vigilante justice, just what did that consist of? By now I was worried that our BBC crew might become embroiled in a misdirected mass action for some perceived slight, so I erred on the side of caution, quietly asking permission to take some pictures on the bus. Permission granted. While Ingo and Mark recorded the scene, I studied the tense, shiftless ring of bodies lining the intersection between the broad boulevard and the side road that led to the music hall. There were angry scowls, twitching limbs, and nervous facial tics, and palpable worry in people’s eyes. It was spooky and made me want to leave.
While the film crew did their job, I jotted down some of the anti-government slogans and graffiti on the roadside walls.
DON’T BETRAY THE PEOPLE!
NEVER TRUST THE MOTHERFUCKING GOVERNMENT!
IS THE PEOPLE’S ARMY AFRAID OF THE PEOPLE?
Thousands of people stood around shiftily, but their faces lacked the reassuring neutrality of the idle loafers one normally encounters in China. There wasn’t much to do, but there was much to think about. Things were way past the point where people wanted to practice English or know where we were from. A number of the young men near the bus leered at us, dumb with rage and fear perhaps, nerves frayed by caustic thoughts. Conversation, even when on the same side of the barricade, was difficult. Loquacious small talk, the lubricant of Beijing street life, had all but dried up. What was happening to the marchers, once so resilient, so peaceful, so optimistic for so many weeks? Were these the same people? If so, were they not fast approaching a psychological breaking point? It pained me to look at them; there was venom in their eyes.
Chai Ling had given a clue as to the true nature of the movement in its current decayed state; it was about blood, but with a twist. Both sides taunted and provoked, intimidated and humiliated, hoping the other side would attack first. Once the blood started to flow, all sorts of unreasonable actions could be justified. Once the blood started to flow, an upsurge in sympathy would accrue to those most effectively portrayed as victims of the violence.
That’s what made the hunger strike so effective. If one side could lay a convincing claim to victimhood, the other side started to look like the victimiser. Maybe that was why the government was recklessly sending in probes, discarding weapons in plain sight: it was trying to win the psychological war by setting up a pretext. If the people attacked the soldiers, if the generally respected and legendarily heroic PLA themselves could be construed as victims, the polarity of sympathy could be flipped, with the students and their ilk seen in a negative way, not as lambs being led to slaughter, but as wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The mounting war of nerves, with each side trying to make the other side look like the predator, brought to mind the haunting lyrics of Chyi Chin: “the northern wolf, cold fangs bared, dust and wind blowing, ready to strike.”
The weather was an irritant in its own right. It was hot and muggy, and yet dark for midday. What sun there was, was filtered through a thick haze. The air was stiflingly still. We took our establishing shots, asked a few more questions, and beat a quick exit, and not a second too soon. It occurred to me that in a moment of mass panic, our gear could be mistaken for weaponry. Once we broke ranks with the raw, barely contained crowd, a number of unfriendly comments were hurled in our direction, as if we were abandoning them or somehow colluding with the government.
Even with our heads bent low, we might inadvertently become targets for the pent-up anger around us. The driver sensed this, and got in the habit of patiently and deferentially fielding questions from those around us, even those who banged on the car demanding to know who was inside. The driver knew what to say and when to say it. He had uttered not a word the time we were cornered by the police, but was quick to mediate when we got caught up in civilian disputes, such as happened in a backstreet hutong near Qianmen when a posse of indignant residents prevented us from filming.
The atmosphere was so edgy, I started to fear the undisciplined crowd more than the highly-restrained soldiers. There were more than a few people looking to vent their anger on anyone, anything. Mercifully, the driver’s gift of gab helped keep things on an even keel and served to deflect those who might otherwise see us as a convenient target.
The rusty jalopy, loaded down with our oversized Western bodies and heavy gear, lurched and sputtered along the agitated, littered streets in the direction of the Great Hall of the People. Before we had a chance to establish where we were going, the driver pulled over to the curb and opened the door for us.
“Take pictures here,” he instructed matter-of-factly, as if he had suddenly become our producer, and in a way he had. “I will wait for you in the car.”
We went along with the driver’s suggestion, taking some of the gear with us, but we didn’t even bother to set things up. Nothing of importance seemed to be happening; maybe that was the point, a chance to rest in the shade. The Great Hall of the People towered to the east over the tiled rooftops of low-rise brick dwellings.
Back alley residents moped around listlessly. There were the usual drifters and loafers, but the habitual stares were glazed over a bit. A brick wall blocked our view of the nearest intersection, but we weren’t looking for es- cape routes. It was calm, perhaps a bit too calm given the bulging eyes and absence of earthy voices, but calm enough for our attention to revert back to things BBC, talking about our recent trip to the countryside, to look for non- existent signs of unrest there, and other excursions I had been on since getting rehired by the Beeb on May 29. I distributed popsicles to the thirsty crew as we shuffled slowly in the direction of the Great Hall.
We were sufficiently inattentive to the oddly muffled crowd dynamics to get us on the topic of what to do for lunch. But when we turned the corner, all conversation ceased mid-sentence.
Before us a thousand soldiers in full battle dress occupied the street. They had staked out a bit of strategic high ground, lined up in formation on the street behind the Great Hall, arranged in long rows, some sitting, some standing. Whoa! Where did they come from? How did they get past all those people on Tiananmen? Had the square been breached?
Then I recalled the Beijing whispers, long predating this crisis. There were said to be secret underground tunnels all around Tiananmen leading to and from the Great Hall, Zhongnanhai, and other government power centers.
It was as if they just popped in out of nowhere. The uniformed military men, well over a thousand strong, were in crisp formation, unlike the ragtag army units we had seen the night before. Though surrounded by civilians pleading for peace, the men looked beyond persuasion, quietly fired up, ready to kill. If the soldiers in white T-shirts and green pants who jogged into town last night could be characterized as slightly unfriendly, then the fully equipped soldiers today were outright hostile. The only saving grace was their utter immobility, like an army unearthed from a century’s sleep.
To see a battalion of People’s Liberation Army soldiers facing down a mass of unarmed protesters on the back steps of the Great Hall of the People was incongruous and unsettling. The tough men were organized in units, some helmeted, some carrying backpacks, others carrying field radios with thick black antennae sticking up into the air. Their self-restraint and inaction encouraged us to move around for a closer look. I helped the crew get set up on the wide marble steps of the back door to the Great Hall. The stately solidity of the building somehow stiffened our resolve; after getting our establishing shot we approached the ring of soldiers for close-ups. We inched in on the soldiers, careful to look for an escape path in case something unto- ward happened.
In front of us a tense negotiation was in progress as members of the neighborhood and student negotiators pleaded with the men in green. The discussion appeared to bear no fruit; argument seemed futile, but at least it was still possible to talk. The soldiers, however, were clearly under some kind of discipline that made them impervious to the naïve charm of fellow citizens begging for peace.
The situation could get out of hand all too quickly. I scanned the ceremonial cityscape for possible escape routes and hiding places. Would it be safer to go back to the steps of the Great Hall or dive into some courtyard? Would the thick walls of the public bathroom over there provide cover? Would the soldiers use tear gas or clubs? What about guns?
The troops deployed today were the real deal. This was the sort of iron-fisted response to political protest that I feared most when I joined Bright and Jenny as they stepped through the gates of the university out onto the streets of Beijing on May 4. We broke the law against demonstrations and nothing happened. Students took to the streets day after day and nothing happened. Students took over the square and nothing happened. Soon the numbers swelled to a million, student leaders talked of overthrowing the government, and nothing happened.
No crackdown, no nothing. The blossoming of the Tiananmen movement was as much the result of inaction as action. It was widely believed that the government, at least part of it, supported the students. China was going through some sort of paradigm upheaval, bigger than any of the parties involved, and yet to date it had been a mercifully peaceful transformation. The natural outcome might well be political reform that allowed for more personal freedom and open discussion. Or so it seemed.
The army units now entering Beijing by stealth were game changers. In a matter of days, the government’s alleged patience took on a more sinister air. The unwillingness to crack down the day martial law was declared did not mean there was tacit support for the students, nor did it reveal a compassionate desire for reconciliation; it was just a logistical logjam. It had taken two weeks to move the army into place, and now that the troops were finally face-to-face with the protesters, things were a lot less ambiguous than before.
I went back to our arranged meeting spot and looked for the driver to discuss a plan of action in case all hell broke loose, but the driver and the old jalopy were gone. What a time to abandon us! I paced up and down the street where he had told us to wait for him, furious at his betrayal.
“Are you all right?” asked a man who had been watching me, my consternation clearly visible.
“What?”
“Are you lost?”
“No, I’m looking for someone.”
“The driver? Perhaps he has gone.”
I had trusted him. Mistakenly.
“It is not safe here, but you will be okay if you walk in that direction,” the man said, pointing south.
“But I have to find the car, our stuff is in it!”
“What can I do to help?”
The stranger surely meant well. Then again, how could one know for sure?
Judging the trustworthiness of strangers was, even in the best of times, an inexact science, but at a time like this it could be the difference between escape and entrapment.
I thanked the man for his advice and retreated to the wall near the inter- section to commiserate with the crew. Being penned between maze-like hutong and the back of the Great Hall with thousands of soldiers blocking traffic made for claustrophobic feelings. Some of the gear was gone but we were unharmed and the soldiers, for the moment at least, seemed content to leave us alone.
Perhaps we could hoof it back to the hotel, if we could only squeeze by the south flank of the Great Hall, cut across the square, skirt past the Public Security compound and work our way north to Wangfujing.
The crew wanted to bail, but just as soon as we commenced our round- about retreat, there was a surprise.
Our driver was back! He ran up to us, waving to get our attention, huffing and puffing out of breath. “Sorry, friends, I was busy.”
“Where’d you go? We were looking all over . . . ”
“I took an injured man to the hospital,” he said, wiping his sweaty fore-head with his sleeve.
“What? The hospital?” I was almost going to shout “but you’re working for the BBC!” when I realized that I could hardly fault him for an impulsive act of compassion. “What do you mean, hospital? What happened?”
“A man was beaten by a soldier, he was bleeding all over. The hospital is far, all the way over by Chongwenmen,” he said breathlessly. “Sorry. It took so long.”
“No, forget it. I guess what you did is more important.”
“Thank you for understanding,” he said, shaking my hand, nodding to the others. “You are true friends of the people.”
Touched by his concern for others, but not in a comparably altruistic mood ourselves, we decided to return to the hotel with our gear while we could. On the way, the driver suggested we stop by the hospital to take a look. He suggested we try to film some of the people who had been wounded and we quickly agreed. The broken-doored jalopy offered scant comfort but it did give us a low profile as we meandered through streets that were increasingly falling under martial law control. Getting out of the car quickly was no longer the issue. The streets were menacing. The driver veered south, edging his way around the square, patiently snaked around clusters of people left and right, and finally made it to Chongwenmen Intersection via a series of back alleys.
The driver pulled up to the emergency room entrance of the hospital. A middle-aged woman with bobbed hair wearing a white smock shook her head no, dismayed at the sight of a car full of foreigners with cameras, emphatically shooing us away. Wang Li and I got out with the help of the driver and approached the prim-looking lady.
“Ni hao! Women shi yingguo dianshitai laide. We’re from BBC television, we’d like to talk to some of the patients who were injured today . . . ”
“You are here in violation of martial law!” she railed loudly. She then par- roted word by word a few lines from the martial law regulations. Unmoved by her reasoning, we repeated our request.
“We won’t take any pictures, we just want to find out what happened and talk to anyone injured in the fighting.”
“As I said,” she rejoined, raising her metallic voice an octave, “You are in violation of martial law!”
Wang Li asked me to slip him my little camera; his plan was to slip into the hospital unnoticed while I distracted the woman. She was sounding more and more like a Communist Party tape loop, especially when she repeated her martial law statement for the third time.
“Would you like to say that to the camera?”
By now Ingo had the camera rolling and he was coming our way.
“Get that camera out of here!” she screamed.
The officious lady ran after Ingo and Mark, allowing me to slip inside.
Wang Li waved me into a sickroom. One man, heavily bandaged, said he was struck by the military police outside Zhongnanhai. There were several other patients recently wounded. I ran out to see if we could somehow get Ingo in with the camera. This time the woman in charge planted her body between me and the entrance.
“As I said, you are in violation,” she sputtered. “If you don’t leave immediately I will, I will . . . ”
I tried to win the support of a small circle of onlookers hoping to swing things in our favor, a technique that had worked well when we were of one mind with the masses.
“Just admit it,” I said to her, keeping an eye on the noncommittal eyes around us, “You’re only saying that because you have to, right? In your heart you side with the people, don’t you?”
“Get out of here!” she screamed, raising her arm as if to hit me.
What could we do? She may have been a broken record, but this was her workplace. My bid to win lateral support failed badly. No one budged an inch. I backed away from the enforcer and told the crew to pack it up.
A familiar-looking young man with a wispy beard came forward. He was wearing a loose-fitting mint-green cotton top that looked like hospital garb, and I would have taken him for a patient wandering the halls were it not for the stenciled words “1989 Democratic Tide” and telltale autographs scribbled across his shirt.
He was a student and he had been watching us in silence. Just at the moment when we gave in and started to pack up, he came over to me to talk.
“That woman is unreasonable. She should have let you in.”
“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said. It was a relief to find someone willing to take my side when I had been arguing, rather rudely, with another Chinese.
“Sometimes I wonder if I should even bother.”
“I heard you,” the young man added. “You have the right to say what you said.”
Even though you’re a foreigner, he might have added.
The young man’s sun-scorched, high-cheeked face reminded me of some- one. Where had I seen him before? Apparently he had a similar sense of déjà vu.
“Aren’t you with ABC?” he asked me.
“No, BBC, England, though I am from America.”
It struck me as uncanny that he should ask about ABC. The police had closed down ABC and inspected the office after a copy of the May 28 tape was intercepted at the airport. I had to assume they were looking for me since they were somehow tipped off about the interview I did with Chai Ling.
“My name is Meng, I am a student from the Central Academy of Drama,” he said. “You look familiar.”
“Why did you ask if I was from ABC?”
“Oh, because during the water strike I was interviewed by ABC News.”
The water strike. It finally dawned on me where I had seen him before, and he me.
“Phil, let’s get out of here!” yelled Ingo.
The crew was packed up and waiting impatiently.
I wanted to talk more to this winsome kindred spirit, but the crew couldn’t wait.
“Hey, do you need a ride anywhere? Why don’t you come with us?”
“Okay, just a minute . . . ”
He stepped aside to speak quietly with some student friends who were holding vigil at the entrance of the hospital.
Meng, though a large-boned man, was skeleton-thin after the hunger strike. Even so, he could barely fit into the van. I sat in the back so I could talk to him, giving up the navigator’s seat to the grateful Ingo, who had the build of a rugby player.
“You were in the water strike, right?” I said to Meng, who was squeezed between me and Wang Li.
“Remember the day I was there, when the student guards let me in but not the correspondent? He’s still mad about it!”
It was immediately obvious that my roommate was not happy about the latest addition to our crew, as if two activists in tight quarters was one two many. Wang Li, after striking out with Chai Ling and the radical crowd, had focused on BBC, trying to perfect his role as media intermediary. He emphasized his links to the British crew by refusing to speak Chinese with his fellow citizens, using his shaky English instead to make a point. The urbane Meng, for his part, indicated no interest in chatting with the rough-hewn provincial either.
Instead he talked quietly to me about how students were monitoring news by posting teams at the entrance to major hospitals, fully expecting the government to lie and cover up in the event of casualties.
On the way back to the hotel Wang Li did something that crystallized my growing doubts about him. While practicing English with Mark, he alone in the thirsty crew sipped on a can of Coke that he had taken from the minibar in my room. After sucking it down to the last drop, he nonchalantly flipped the can out of the car window as we buzzed along Dongdan Road. The red can bounced a few times in the middle of the road, nearly hitting a cyclist.
“What did you do that for?” I asked in disbelief.
“Someone will pick it up,” he said callously.
Wang Li. That’s what he called himself anyway. A name as common as
John Smith or John Doe. Was the other name he once whispered in my ear his real name or another nickname? Who was the real Wang Li? A student activist? Was he a student at all? An entrepreneur? An opportunist? Who, if anyone, did he work for?
The dusty jalopy jerked to a halt in front of the posh Palace Hotel, where uniformed doormen tried in vain to open the rusty back door, but only the driver knew the trick to that. I thanked the conscientious driver for his extraordinary help and paid him twice what he asked for.
Meng took one look at the fancy lobby of the PLA-owned luxury hotel and told me he didn’t want to go in. I wanted to talk more to the idealistic activist, if I could only get Wang Li off my back for a few hours.
“Hey! You guys having dinner now?” I called out to the crew. “Haven’t had a thing to eat all day . . . ” the cameraman answered.
“Could you guys spot Wang Li a meal?”
“Sure. Hey, matey, you not going to eat with us?”
“Not yet. See you later,” I said.
Meng and I walked west towards Wangfujing, comparing notes on the day. Tear gas had been used at Liubukou. Police were swinging clubs. One of the first victims was a girl who had her leg broken.
When we moved on to other topics, Meng had a few choice things to say about Wang Li, whom he suspected of being with the secret police. A con artist I could believe, but not a cop. Such things were possible, but I wasn’t willing to believe it.
Still, the contrast between the two of them was evident enough. Meng’s unvarnished political idealism reminded me of my mood when I marched in early May. Wang Li’s desire to master the media, to take in stride the punishments and rewards that went with it, echoed my more recent activities as a stringer for the BBC and ABC.
Wang Li, not unlike myself, found comfort in fancy hotels, whereas Meng wouldn’t even step inside the Palace Hotel, and I had a hard time coaxing him inside the Beijing Hotel for a quick meal. He insisted on ordering nothing, then settled for the cheapest thing on what to him was a sorely over- priced menu. He seemed like he couldn’t wait to get back outside.
After a bowl of noodles in the hotel dining hall, where we ran into Eric and Fred relaxing on a well-earned but ill-timed night off, and then Louise, who was talking with Harrison Salisbury at another table, Meng and I went back outside for a stroll along Chang’an Boulevard, taking measure of the dissipated crowd, trying to see for ourselves where the soldiers were in relation to the square.
A column of soldiers burst out of the shadows near the construction site at the western extremity of the hotel and started running along the sidewalk. They ran in formation, maintaining a disciplined single file until their path was blocked by a gang of indignant civilians. Some of the onlookers booed or jeered, others even shoved and harassed the unarmed soldiers. Activists wearing headbands, most probably students, could be seen pleading with both the civilians and the soldiers for patience and conciliation.
We ran closer to get a better look. The soldiers had been stopped in their tracks by a handful of protesters, which suggested not so much the indomitable strength of people power but rather a reluctance to clash with civilians. Were the soldiers divided in their sympathies? Afraid? Or were they under instructions not to clash, not for now? What was their plan and where were they headed? Were they slyly inviting trouble, hoping to create an incident, a pretext for further action?
People argued among themselves at emotional high pitch. There was a marked division of voices; some spewed abuse at the soldiers, others pleaded for nonviolence and negotiation. A single file of older men in uniform cautiously edged their way along the metal fence that surrounded the western perimeter of the hotel. They were eventually cornered and pressed up against the fence, jostled by the unfriendly bystanders until they dispersed.
The soldiers gathered closest to us looked physically fit and wore trim crew cuts, but some of them had gray hair and appeared close to middle age. Were they officers? Unlike the relaxed, unafraid gait I associated with men of power in uniform in China, these men looked stiff, unsure of themselves, and tense. I snapped a few photos and we tried to talk to some of the soldiers, but they blankly refused to respond to any of our questions. They avoided eye contact, as if looking into the faces of the people they were being ordered to put down would weaken their will. Were they waiting in the wings, poised to smash the protest and retake the square?
Despite the stern countenances, the soldiers we ran into were restrained, almost to a fault. The same curious reticence had been noted in the case of the troops we had seen by the Great Hall and the troops that jogged in from Tongxian the night before. As far as I could observe, the PLA had not yet been willing to breach, let alone smash and ride over, the patently flimsy barricades scattered around the entrances to the square. The only serious barrier keeping the troops from the sacral ground of Tiananmen Square was human flesh; the fear of confronting fellow citizens.
For the unwanted but otherwise unobjectionable military men, the only way to get downtown without mowing down barriers was the same way as everyone else, on foot. Given the fact that the soldiers were unarmed and apparently ambivalent about doing their job as soldiers, they did not enjoy a clear advantage over the adrenaline-spiked protesters. One might even say the soldiers were at risk, depending on how effectively the crowd controlled itself.
While Meng and I mused over such things, the column of army men that had slithered through the protest crowd just moments ago had broken rank and melted away into the shadows, exiting the boulevard along a side street running north.
In addition to the new troop arrivals that we had just encountered, the troop concentrations we knew about included the many hundreds packed on the street behind the Great Hall of the People. If rumors Meng had heard were to be believed, there were troops hiding in secret near the Great Hall in subterranean tunnels and perhaps on the other side of the Zhongnanhai wall where he had fasted.
We knew that strategic areas adjoining Tiananmen Square, such as the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the Forbidden City, Worker’s Park and Sun Yatsen Park, had been declared off-limits according to martial law declarations. Was that a crowd control measure or were troops being stealthily amassed in those normally public places? Why had the troops posted behind the Great Hall not yet made a move on the square? Was there still serious division in the politburo on how to proceed? How many troops armed with clubs and tear gas would it take to disperse a protest that was collapsing in on itself out of sheer exhaustion?
We found it increasingly hard to move about and monitor political developments on the street over the heads of overly excited civilians in an increasingly short-tempered crowd. The power of the PLA as an institution and the instinctive fear of authority in this authoritarian state was so strong that the mere appearance of men partially in uniform, even unarmed, and as well-behaved as the most recent dispatch of soldiers appeared to have been, was inciting and incendiary.
Then the soldiers disappeared. The only thing worse than seeing so many soldiers so close to the square was suddenly not seeing them at all, but knowing they were there.