Let Freedom Ring in China

We must count the three weeks of nonviolence in Tian An Men Square as a triumph in the evolution of human society. The students set a record--organizing their large numbers into a community, claiming that square as “a holy land for democracy” and living in it as free men and women for three weeks. A new, hopeful generation tested whether peaceful means--reasoning, singing, “parading,” fasting, the posting of “big words”--could accomplish a good, peaceful end: transforming China into a country to live in freely.

The students’ ideas of freedom burgeoned from the conditions of their daily lives. They live six, eight, 10 to a room; they are outdoors studying at daybreak for light to read by; they do not have enough electricity and food. In another, “segregated” part of the dormitory, foreign students on larger stipends live two to a room, and will leave soon for the outside world.

Chinese students have abided by the tradition that one must make sacrifices for the family and also for guests and for the greater good. They agree to major in fields of study which the elders deem indispensable to society. (I met graduate students in English who have to write their thesis on some seemingly irrelevant author such as Thackeray or one of the Sitwells.) They have to look forward to being assigned a job at graduation and sent to a part of the country that needs their skills. By law, they cannot marry until their mid-20s, and then spouses are separated by work assignments.

There are many short stories about idealistic doctors, women who sacrifice everything--family life, money, health, status--to toil as the lowliest workers in the hospital’s hierarchy. I hear the young people’s longings for freedom in the rumors that they can’t help repeating. There’s one about a swimmer who was picked out of her cradle by Olympic scouts, taken from her family and trained like the opera stars of old. “She was lucky enough to get into an accident that ruined her swimming career,” they say to one another. “She’s free to do something else with her life.”

Families make large sacrifices, such as aborting female fetuses and forgoing sons for the sake of population control. And on top of the life or death hardships, many small deprivations cumulate. After the Cultural Revolution, no sooner were pet birds and kung fu allowed back in the parks and streets, but pet dogs and cats were banned from the cities. I saw a bicycle tip over and a puppy jump out of the basket; the crowd laughed, watching its owner try to catch his dog before he himself got caught by a policeman. That dog was like a farmer from the countryside trying to sneak into Beijing without a permit. I knew that a new friend trusted me when she told me that she had two pet cats hidden in her apartment. Most people follow rules that are good for them. On No Smoking Day, I saw only one man--a rebellious type with a mustache--light up.

‘Crisis of Belief’

Five years ago, I was among a group of American writers invited to Canton University. Our meetings with students were canceled because “no one will take responsibility for you.” A British teacher invited us to her apartment, where half a dozen students came two nights in a row. They confessed to a “crisis of belief”; they spoke ashamedly, as though the loss of trust in the government were their own shortcoming. The specific freedom they spoke about most was the freedom to make friends. Because of “rumormongering,” a boy and a girl cannot become friends; nobody can trust anybody else.

They admitted to having read “Love Must Not Be Forgotten” by Zhang Jie. It is a controversial story about undeclared love. Though Canton University (or perhaps the Communist Party of Canton, according to rumor) had canceled Allen Ginsberg’s public reading, his reputation and his poetry fascinated people. He was asked to stay another six weeks teaching at various schools. His students were daring to consider sexual freedom and whether the freedom to speak wildly and to love openly “spiritually polluted” this veteran of bohemianism--and themselves for listening.

I did not want to think that all the many regulations, for which I could very well see the justifications, added up to a society that let no part of anybody’s life alone. The last straw was the schools and hotels putting on disco dances and authorities trying to control them. Why do they have to regulate this frivolous activity, too? On another trip in the spring of last year, our group of Americans tried to get into a dance, but was turned away at the door. The officials asked us to come back the next night to the foreigners’ dance. My son said that without our group, he and I, looking as Chinese as the next person, could have gotten in. But we would have had to unknot and unwind red tape and know the right people.

Even professionals from the West who are temporarily working in China are supposed to “socialize with one’s own work unit.” To take an outsider to a party, one has to make applications and get permits. At the foreigners’ dance, we watched as Chinese students were turned away. Then, a few weeks after we got home, Beijing students rioted against African students, who brought to a dance townies, or, according to rumors, prostitutes.

Question of Character

During the past year, the students changed character. Perhaps some of the very students who went on the racist rampage changed their ways, defining higher principles and how to act on them. At a dozen colleges throughout the United States, Chinese students asked me, “What is the essential Chinese character? What is essentially Chinese? What is the essence of being Chinese?” One young man said that deep inside, he felt a Chinese to be somehow weak. As a motherly woman who has Confucian responsibilities, I told him that forbearance and endurance are strengths; the willingness to make sacrifices is a strength. To have the imagination and practicality to try the craziest social experiments is a strength.

Twice I listened to young women wondering whether the Chinese language has a word like the English word privacy. To carry out the one-child policy, there are charts on walls listing every woman in the village and the dates of her periods and her use of birth control. In the cities, waiting lists for housing are years long, and young couples and their one child share a one-room apartment with parents and grandparents. These women were searching for a word to help legitimize their self-interest. The only term they came up with was a legalistic one, “right to privacy.”

A survey says that 76% of the 40,000 Chinese students in the United States, most of them graduate students, want to stay. I questioned some of them about brain-draining China. A smart freshman answered, “If I leave here, I’d be draining the American brain.” Like many others, she asked me about the ‘60s in America. (That period in China was the start of the Cultural Revolution.) Wasn’t it a time when people passively sat like Thoreau at Walden Pond? I told her that not so much “Walden” but “Civil Disobedience” had been our field guide.

As if my counseling had political effect, days later--ideas change, grow and spread in moments--I saw on TV among the walkie-talkies, floppy disks and fax paper being packed for the protesters at Tian An Men Square a two-inch-thick Xeroxed volume with the title “Manual for Nonviolent Action.” Orville Schell, who just returned from China, reports that students discussed with him Martin Luther King Jr. on civil rights and Satyagraha. I loved hearing “We Shall Overcome” again, sung by the students in Hong Kong. Later in San Francisco at memorial services for “the martyrs for democracy,” we sang “We Shall Overcome” with a new verse, “China Will Be Free.”

‘Culture Bound’

I was in Boston when the students there heard that the ones in China declared that they would fast and sit-in and “parade” and give out flowers until June 20, the date the People’s Congress met. Some graduate students in anthropology on their way to hear Liu Binyan, dissident journalist and author of “Man or Monster,” wondered about freedoms being “culture bound.”

Marx and Lenin were Europeans, yet China’s communism is its own. Freedom is a universal human want that takes forms peculiar to nations. A free press in China would simply and practically allow the people to tell the bureaucratic leaders about their hardships and to give suggestions for improvement. The government ought to have set up hot lines earlier, and for a better purpose than citizens informing on one another.

An important meaning of the Communist Revolution was women’s liberation--unbinding feet, ending slavery, the right to choose one’s husband. Just so, free speech will be a Chinese freedom--the freedom to make friends, the freedom to declare love, the freedom to dance with whomever you please. “Democracy” is shorthand for freedoms that are specific and heart-deep.

Too bad “democracy” is a word too closely associated with “capitalism” and “anti-communism.” After the first breathtaking view of “The Goddess of Freedom,” I worried that it was the wrong symbol. Chinese call the Statue of Liberty “The Goddess of Freedom.” Their Goddess of Freedom had a stance of her own and the students sang “The Internationale” when they unveiled her; they were trying to integrate two political systems that have divided the world this century. (A Statue of Liberty continues to stand in Canton; she had been built with contributions from cities and towns all over North America and the Pacific to honor 72 martyrs of the 1911 Revolution.) A world at peace is a vision so rare, its symbols have hardly been invented.

The students did the right thing, dismantling guns and pouring the gasoline out of the Molotov cocktails. And holding up their fingers in the 1960s V-for-peace sign. And sitting beside a flower in front of the row of seated soldiers. And wearing a slogan painted in red on the back of one’s jacket--in the 4,355-year-old tradition Gen. Yue Fei the Patriot, whose parents dedicated him to China by cutting vows on his back. (The two consulate members who defected in San Francisco did so during the week of the dragon boat races, a festival honoring Chu Ping, a courtier who was banished in about 300 BC for protesting the emperor’s war plans.) And walking up to the tanks with nothing but one’s life and ideas.

Nonviolence Amid Tumult

Unfortunately, the students performed nonviolence in the midst of tumult. Before their sit-in, riots broke out in Xian, where 130 policemen and uncounted others were hurt. During the sit-in and hunger strike, a teacher at Cornell showed me a letter from China; a student had been killed, and many students beaten. It would have been best for the practitioners of nonviolence to have waited for a lull in events when their purity of motive would be obvious. But that may be an impossible circumstance.

The three weeks of nonviolence inside that square was itself to have been an example of how the government and the workers, unionists, unemployed could negotiate differences, how the elders could make changes without resorting to yet another revolutionary civil war. Chai Ling, the 22-year-old woman student who was “Supreme Commander of the Defense of Tian An Men,” said after the massacre, “Ours was a struggle between love and hate. Our objective was to make a peaceful petition, and our chosen method would peacefully achieve this. It wouldn’t be a battle of weapons because we were making a peaceful petition.”

The Chinese in the United States are devising inventive political actions in response to the massacre of June 3-4. They are interviewing witnesses to document what they saw happen. They are starting a newsletter and a video and preparing a presentation to the U.N. They are jamming the informers’ hot lines while speaking and arguing with the operators and reporting Li Peng as a criminal. They are sending news and encouragement via fax and posting announcements and exchanging thoughts on computer bulletin boards. They are nominating Chai Ling for the Nobel Peace Prize.

With its genius for community, San Francisco’s Chinatown has organized the Foundation for Chinese Democracy, 1118 Grant Ave., 101, San Francisco 94133, to raise and distribute funds and to coordinate and support “activities and programs that promote Democracy and Democratic Rights for ALL Chinese.” The immediate aims are to lobby for work permits, and for liberalization of the J-1 visa so that students would not have to go home for their two-year residency. At a safer time, there will be more direct nonviolent help for the students in China.

Describing the young man who danced in front of the tanks, and stopped them for minutes, novelist Betty Bao Lord, wife of former Ambassador to China Winston Lord, said, “His ancestors are with him.” Yue Fei the Patriot and Chu Ping of the Dragon Boat Races are his ancestors. His ancestors are also Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. His relatives were with him, too, and they include all of us on whose behalf he was braving a way of peace.

The students at Tian An Men (the Gate of Heavenly Peace)--our children--are the latest evolution of human kind toward being a peaceful species. In China and in every country we will have to repeat the nonviolence that those students accomplished until we establish peace, until we establish love.