The Shattered Dream: CHINA /1989 : CHAPTER 7 : A Bright, White, Shining Goddess of Democracy

“There’s no way for us to retreat. To retreat means our downfall.” --President Yang Shangkun

On Thursday, May 25, Li Peng appeared on television for the first time in six days in ceremonies aimed at dramatizing the consolidation of power by the hard-liners. “The Chinese government is stable,” the premier declared as he welcomed three new ambassadors to Beijing.

One of the three envoys was U Tin Aung of Burma, which only the previous summer had brutally repressed a nationwide uprising by a student movement seeking democratic reforms. After the televised ceremonies were over, Li pulled Tin Aung aside for a private chat.

“How did you do it?” Li asked, according to the story the Burmese ambassador later recounted to other diplomats in Beijing.

“You just do it,” Tin Aung replied. “You use whatever force is necessary.”

“In China, we can’t do that,” Li murmured. “We can’t use the People’s Army against the Chinese people.”

The conversation pointed up the difficulties that China’s hard-liners still confronted.

Li and his patrons, Deng Xiaoping and Yang Shangkun, had already won the battle for domination over the Politburo and the party’s top leadership. By force, they also controlled China’s propaganda organs. Most important, they had lined up massive military support.

But they did not yet control the streets of downtown Beijing. They did not have the cooperation, out of allegiance or out of fear, of the Chinese people.

The Chinese were not yet cowed. In countless ways, they demonstrated a quiet ability to resist or subvert the hard-line leadership and martial law.

On state television, newscasters read their reports in mournful tones and with downcast eyes. On the streets, those Chinese who watched or listened to broadcasts sometimes laughed at new pronouncements by the Communist Party’s octogenarian leaders, some of them so feeble that they could be shown on television only in photographs several years old.

Despite the reimposition of censorship, official papers such as the People’s Daily managed to publish subtle messages of subversion. The effort in Hungary to rehabilitate Imre Nagy, who led the unsuccessful revolt against Soviet troops in 1956, received front-page coverage two days in a row. Unflattering references to Chinese emperors--metaphorical allusions to Deng--began to appear.

Even at relatively high levels of the Communist Party, the hard-liners faced problems in imposing their will.

Over the weekend of May 27-28, they summoned provincial and municipal party leaders to Beijing in an apparent effort to convene a plenary session of the 175-member Central Committee. But the hard-liners let the members go home after discovering that they lacked the votes to purge Zhao and his allies from the leadership.

“We all take it for granted Zhao is out of power,” said one Asian diplomat. “But this Central Committee is Zhao’s Central Committee. One has to assume there are people loyal to him. I don’t think it will be as easy as people believe to get rid of him.”

Without any formal action by the Central Committee, the hard-liners were obliged to continue wielding power through a small, unofficial group of seven or eight “old comrades”--the party elders, all in their 80s, all survivors of the Long March and the Chinese civil war. The group included Deng, Yang and several retired or semi-retired party leaders.

They exercised continuing strong influence over both the army and some younger party officials. For example, one of the elders, Deng Yingchao, the widow of Premier Chou En-lai, had advanced the career of Li Peng, whom she and Chou had adopted and raised.

The elders tended to see the battle with the pro-democracy protesters--and, eventually, the intra-party struggle against Zhao--in cataclysmic terms.

“There’s no way for us to retreat,” said Yang Shangkun in a speech in late May. “To retreat means our downfall. To retreat means the downfall of the People’s Republic of China and the restoration of capitalism.”

It would mean, Yang said, a posthumous victory for John Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, the man who hated China’s Communist regime so much that he once refused to shake the hand of Chou En-lai.

Worst of all, from the hard-liners’ point of view, they still did not control Tian An Men Square.

In hindsight, the protesters might have done better to vacate the square during this last week of May. They could have declared victory for their democracy movement and vowed to return someday. By abandoning Tian An Men, they would have forced leaders like Li and Deng to defend their hard-line stance inside the party, where their political position was still shaky. There would have been no street battles and no bloodshed.

Indeed, on Saturday, May 27, some of the most experienced student leaders proposed to do exactly that--to organize a strategic retreat.

“It is very difficult to continue our sit-in,” said Wuer Kaixi at a press conference that day. “As leaders, we have responsibilities for students’ health, and the difficulties are obvious. Hygiene is extremely bad, and the food is insufficient.”

After six weeks of demonstrations, however, the student protest leaders had galvanized forces and enthusiasm among the youth of China that extended far beyond their control.

By the weekend of May 27-28, exhausted Beijing students were returning from the square to their campuses and the beds and showers they had long forsaken. But they were being replaced by fresh recruits--young men and women who had just arrived at the Beijing train station from provincial cities, towns and whistle-stops.

The new young protesters were, if anything, more wide-eyed and innocent than their predecessors from Beijing. Few could discuss in any detail what kind of democracy they wanted for China. They surrounded foreign correspondents, listened to each interview and, afterward, made shy requests for autographs, as though Western reporters were celebrities.

One of the new recruits, a 21-year-old student from the East China port of Qingdao, identified himself by the English name of Morris. During a midnight interview, he stood and hugged his girlfriend in a puppy-love embrace while he explained why he had come to Beijing. “We just can’t get the real news from the papers and radio stations in Qingdao,” he said.

To leaders such as Deng and Yang, both victims of the Cultural Revolution, these new recruits may have resembled, far more than their predecessors, the idealistic, rail-riding Red Guards whom they had been trying to forget for two decades.

Yet there was nothing threatening about the new protesters. To Beijing residents, they were a curiosity. At night, Beijing families went sightseeing at Tian An Men Square, peering into tents and reading signs. There was enough open space in the square now for a Beijing father and his young son to play badminton. At the Great Hall of the People on the square, only three soldiers stood guard. Security was not necessary.

The new arrivals were in no mood to leave Tian An Men. And so the advice of leaders like Wuer Kaixi went unheeded. Many Beijing students went back to their campuses, yet the square remained under a people’s occupation.

On Sunday morning, May 28, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched once again through the streets of the capital, most of them starting from universities in northwestern Beijing. “The goal is that Li Peng step down,” one demonstrator said over a loudspeaker outside the People’s University of China.

Outside the gates of Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party’s leadership compound, protesters put up a poster that said: “Beijing doesn’t need to live at the point of a gun!”

It was something of an anticlimax, just another Beijing demonstration. The world took greater notice that day of a demonstration in ordinarily apolitical Hong Kong, where hundreds of thousands of people--some said 1 million--rallied in support of democracy for China and for the British colony. “First Beijing, then Hong Kong!” chanted the marchers, many of them wearing yellow headbands and armbands.

But the Beijing protesters had not yet exhausted their means of attracting attention for the cause of democracy.

In the early hours of May 30, before a festive crowd of 50,000 to 100,000, they erected their final and most memorable symbol: a white, 30-foot-high “Goddess of Democracy,” roughly modeled on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

The goddess, created from Styrofoam and plaster by Beijing art students, stood on the north end of Tian An Men Square, directly opposite the portrait of Mao Tse-tung. Over the next few days, residents of Beijing flocked to the square to get their pictures taken in front of it.

Nothing could have been better calculated to arouse the ire of the Communist Party leadership. It was a symbol of a rival ideology, a rival political system. “The erection of a so-called statue of a goddess is an insult to our national dignity and mocks our nation’s image,” a Chinese television announcer said.

In the state-controlled news media, the leadership made veiled threats that the goddess should be torn down before June 1. But that deadline passed uneventfully. There were rumors of a possible military move. But at Tian An Men Square, each night brought a new and peaceful--though sometimes odoriferous--dawn.