One year later I was teaching people who were actually there
A year later I spoke to one of those bike riders who ferried people to hospital…. Yes, it REALLY happened! Yes, people died. A former member of the Beijing Ballet told me — almost the first English she spoke to me: “Tiananmen. I was there. My best friend beside me. He was shot.” And more did I hear in 1990 and the years after.
In time I met one of the hunger strikers, the notable and noble Liu Xiaobo, who many years later died in prison…. So don’t try telling me it was “nothing much”…. I do recommend Wikipedia on this. People have done an excellent job with that article.
Some on the Left — rather extreme views — will tell you that nothing much actually happened 34 years ago in Beijing!
A sample — and I have heard it all before from certain quarters.
It’s highly unlikely that our “front-line” soft power combatants employed by the ABC and Nine-Fairfax Media have not read these articles or similar articles, so they have either chosen to believe that all these witnesses and independent investigators are liars, or that they have all succumb to false memories, in which case no amount of evidence to the contrary will change these people’s mind. Alternatively, they do know the student “massacre” thesis is flawed, but they are determined to hold the line anyway — a modern day Deus hoc vult (the righteousness of their cause and the free world is on their side, so any means, including making up lies, justifies the ends). Either way, if you are looking for stories by independent journalists who report the facts accurately and fairly then the ABC and Nine-Fairfax Media are not the places to look, at least in regards to China.Source
My problem with that
I began by saying that in 1989 I really was not paying attention. 1989 was in many respects a personal annus horribilis encompassing a burn-out that forced me to give up my job at Masada — at one point I was off the radar to such an extent that my mother sent the police to do a welfare check and the Deputy Principal of Masada came to Paddington to see what was going on. Therapy with the amazing Dr Cedric Bullard in Randwick really helped. By the end of the year I was working again at Sydney Boys High. There was also the suicide of a dear friend and the death of my father in 1989. So Tiananmen did not really occupy my thoughts at the time.
But that changed in 1990 when I found myself teaching Chinese adults at Wessex College of English.
Rather awkwardly for the hoax thesis I was teaching people who were actually there.
Richard Zhang who one day in 1990 in the coffee shop next to the language college burst into tears when he told me he had a letter from his mother telling him it was too dangerous to go back to China. Through his tears he said to me: “I used to believe in Communism. Until I saw them killing their own people.” That was not the Fairfax Press — that was a living breathing person who sat across the table from me. I had arranged to have coffee with him as I was concerned that his English was going backwards and he seemed really preoccupied.
The ballet dancer who asked why we teachers did not talk more about Tiananmen, to which I gave a diplomatic answer. She had been a member of the Beijing Ballet. “My best friend was beside me. He was shot.”
The guy working in the Darlinghurst coffee shop who as he served me noticed I was reading a picture book about Tiananmen. “I can tell you all about that,” he said. He was one of the guys in Tiananmen Square riding his bike and taking the wounded away.
And then there was the one in an evening class — clearly suffering PTSD of some kind — who would suddenly shout out a slogan like “The People’s Army loves the people” and laugh….
In later years in the 1990s I met one of the hunger strikers who later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — Liu Xiaobo. Yes,him I actually met. Eventually he was committed to a long spell in prison. On 26 June 2017, it was reported that Liu had been granted medical parole after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in late May 2017. He died in July 2017.
Another of the hunger strikers was rock star Hou Dejian. I never met him but I did meet his Australian biographer Linda Jaivin. See my post Linda Jaivin on Hou Dejian.
I am finding it fascinating in itself, but also because I have some kind of connection, albeit minor, as I mentioned in Lost in translation–and also in time! in December 2013.
I renewed contact with an ex-student from SBHS the other day via Facebook/Twitter. Chris Rodley now writes for The Guardian, among other things. Point is, he was part of a cohort that I was teaching when I was working on my book From Yellow Earth to Eucalypt which Nicholas Jose so kindly remembered in his contribution to Telling Stories, which I am still reading. In other words, around twenty years ago! As presumably is the Christmas party – I think it was Christmas – in Riley Street Surry Hills at Nicholas Jose’s place where I would have met Linda Jaivin. That all happened through my then partner M, who had known both Jose and Jaivin in China and subsequently…
Hou Dejian’s song “Descendants of the Dragon” became a kind of anthem on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
I did not dream any of that or read it in the media. Those things all really happened and remain vivid memories. And I could tell you more.
With Bill from Guangzhou in China — Hyde Park 1990. He said he was a good swimmer as he had practised swimming the distance from the Pearl River to Hong Kong.
So yes — it really did happen, so put that far Left propaganda in the nearest bin. Though it is true not so many were killed in the Square itself. But the streets around the Square? Another matter.
34 years is a long time and much has changed. That is true. In many ways life for Chinese people has greatly improved. The advances in many fields have been quite remarkable. I am not a supporter of the more extreme neo-Cold War rhetoric one sees and hears too often. See my March 2023 post On China — hysteria and caution — with update.
Me in deep conversation with Andrew, a former member of the People’s Republic of China Air Force, in a Berala backyard in 1991.
Jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiabo was offered asylum from Australia in 1989 but turned it down and went on to become China’s most famous dissident.
Following his role in supporting student protesters in the run-up to the brutal crackdown that year, the literary critic turned philosopher and agitator would be imprisoned and tortured.
After the Olympics he was picked up again and this time given an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power”. He won the peace prize from behind bars and it was awarded symbolically to an empty chair.
The Australian embassy in Beijing’s cultural counsellor at the time, Nick Jose, had become a good friend of Liu Xiaobo in the run-up to the crackdown on June 3-4 when the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on protestors to reclaim Tiananmen Square.
“I took him in my car from my flat to the embassy gates and I said ‘Well this is it, we can drive in, the gates will open and the gates will close and you will have effectively sought asylum from Australia or you can go and find friends who live nearby’, friends I also knew,” Mr Jose said.
“He thought about it, he looked at me and said ‘Thank you, but no’, he would stay in China, he was Chinese, China was his country, China was his fate…
Nicholas Jose, Claire Roberts and M at M’s Chinese New Year Party, Redfern, 2009
In the first grey light of dawn, We curl into the air, Trailing from the ground Up into the open sky above the square. Limp, leaden, dumdum-pocked The corpses lie Mashed into the concrete. Suddenly weightless We drift Like balloons.
We hear the sound Of your weeping.
Mother, I beg you Not to look for us again in the square, The wasteland, where Crushed tents, banners, command posts, Public address stations Strew the ground. Teachers, students, friends Are all gone. The acrid smoke of gunfire Fades as Thousands of lives Turn to ash.
Tomorrow will be Environment Day — A Sanitation Show is planned, The square will be scrubbed Nice and clean, As if nothing ever happened.
We hear the sound Of your weeping.
We fell together, Together we rise, Joining once more our parted hands, Holding our torches even higher. A wound gapes On one man’s chest; A tank tread Furrows one man’s brow. But these wounds lie On the body’s husk; We are beautiful beyond compare. Nothing can hurt us now. We will share The city’s splendour With the stone beasts — They, on their columns, We, on the People’s Monument — Calling Across the square.
When I published an account of my interaction with Liu Xiaobo in Chinese whispers in 1995, I felt I should not identify him by his full name. As one of the thinkers who best articulated the alternative China that many people envisaged in the late 1980s, Liu had played an important, courageous role in the events of 3–4 June 1989. I was with him when he made the fateful decision not to take refuge in the Australian embassy. That same night he was picked up while riding his bike along a nearby street and taken away. When he was released from detention 18 months later, he went on with his reasoned critique of the Chinese system, eventually authoring Charter 08, a call for reform, for which he was arrested again and heavily sentenced in 2009.
He was in prison when he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, which he dedicated to ‘the Tiananmen martyrs’, and in prison at the time of his cruel, state-sanctioned death in 2017, aged 61. His ashes were scattered at sea, preventing the site of his remains from becoming a shrine. It is hard to believe that one individual could so enrage the powerful Chinese Communist Party. It is hard to understand why China would destroy one of its best and brightest for advocating non-violent reform in legal and constitutional ways.
One post is worth reposting as it summarises the ideas that got Liu Xiaobo into trouble, but which China really needs to hear:
Dr. LIU Xiaobo is a renowned Chinese literary critic, dissident writer and human rights activist based in Beijing, as well as the Honorary President of the ICPC (Independent Chinese PEN Centre). On 8 December 2008, Dr. Liu was taken into the Police custody and now serves a sentence of 11 years for what he wrote…
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