Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (4 page)

After sixteen rounds of negotiations in little more than a week, the party finally told the family it intended to organize a modest, invitation-only funeral and refrain from publishing an official evaluation of Zhao’s life. The family would be allowed to submit a list of guests and take his ashes home. Zhao’s children reluctantly agreed, but outlined their concerns in a letter to party authorities. They noted that their father had been held under illegal house arrest for nearly sixteen years, and urged the party to give people who had been prevented from seeing him for so long a chance to attend the funeral and say good-bye. They said their father never changed his position on the Tiananmen Square movement, and neither would they. The party was just wrong, they wrote, and no matter what it said about him now, “history would draw the correct conclusion.”

A
BOUT A WEEK
after Wang Junxiu visited Zhao’s house, the family arranged for him to get an invitation to the funeral. Wang knew that attending the service would be a political statement, and that there could be consequences. Perhaps the secret police would put his name on some blacklist, or scrutinize his company’s finances, or put pressure on his business partners. Anything could happen, or nothing could happen. The uncertainty had the effect of magnifying fear, and the party used fear to discourage people from concerning themselves with politics or public affairs. It preferred that they focus on their narrow self-interests, because that made it easier to keep them divided and prevent them from coming together to challenge its rule. It preferred that people skip Zhao’s funeral. Wang recognized that there was no benefit to attending the service, only risks and costs. But he decided almost immediately that he would go. His conscience demanded it. As a member of the Tiananmen generation and one of the many students that Zhao had tried to defend, he felt it was the least he could do.

Wang woke before dawn on the morning of the memorial service. The Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery was on the other side of the city, and he had arranged to meet a few friends and share a ride. It was a frigid winter day, and brisk winds had cleared away the pollution that usually choked Beijing, revealing a cloudless blue sky. Despite the cold, Wang dressed lightly, just a sweater and a leather jacket. He took a cab to a nearby light rail station, passing the headquarters of the army’s 2nd Artillery Division, the offices of the computer manufacturer Lenovo, and a vast construction site where yet another luxury apartment complex was going up. The train took him from the suburbs to a subway station in the city, where his friends picked him up in a jeep. There were three others in the car with him: Xue Ye, an environmental activist; Mo Zhaohui, a book publisher; and a driver employed by Mo’s publishing house. Both Xue and Mo had participated in the 1989 demonstrations, and the three of them had been friends for years.

Sitting in the back with Xue, Wang noticed three large bundles of white cloth on the floor of the jeep. In the days before, he and his friends had decided to carry banners in honor of Zhao to the service, and Mo had paid a company to make them. “You are free at last!” read one. “Our memories will not fade, your ideals will never die!” read another. The third said, “You inspired awe by maintaining justice, and that will not diminish with time!” Each was signed “The 1989 Generation.” Wang had felt strongly about bringing the banners. He knew that most of the leaders of the Tiananmen movement had been exiled, and that others who participated had been detained in recent days to prevent them from attending the funeral. He thought the banners would speak on their behalf. He also wanted other people, especially those younger than them, to know that his generation had not been silenced and had not forgotten what happened. But as he examined the bundles of cloth in the car, Wang realized there was a problem. They were too big and too heavy. At least two people would be required to carry each one, even if they were not unfurled. After some discussion, Mo and Xue said they would carry one in first, and if no one stopped them, Wang would recruit friends to help him bring in the other two.

As they drove toward the cemetery, Wang noticed more and more police taking up positions on the streets, men in dark blue uniforms with motorcycles, cruisers, and vans. The vast deployment seemed intended to crush any attempt to stage demonstrations in the city. Some of the officers were setting up checkpoints and roadblocks, and Wang began to worry they might be stopped and prevented from going to the funeral. Xue wondered aloud if the police might try to seize the banners and get rough with them. He scribbled a few names and numbers on a scrap of paper, then handed it to Wang along with his house keys. “If anything happens,” he said, “call these people and give them my keys.” Wang looked at his friend, and it suddenly occurred to him that they were not young anymore. The 1989 generation had grown up. As they approached the cemetery, it was almost 9
A.M.

The memorial activities had begun four hours earlier, in the hospital where Zhao died. The authorities had prohibited Bao Tong, his chief political aide, from attending the funeral, but at the family’s insistence, the party agreed to let him pay his respects in a private ceremony at the hospital. He arrived in a police motorcade under armed guard at 5
A.M.
and walked into the room with his hand still bandaged from the scuffle two weeks earlier. Bao looked thin and frail, the white flower still pinned on his shirt, and as a funeral dirge played, he bowed his head before Zhao’s body. It was the first time since Bao’s arrest in May 1989 that he had been permitted to see his old colleague. “You are the only person now with a clear understanding of some things,” one of Zhao’s sons said to him, referring to the party’s secret deliberations before the crackdown. “It’s clear to everyone now,” Bao replied. “Everyone knows what happened. The people all know.” After the ceremony, he posed for a photograph with Zhao’s extended family. But as soon as Zhao’s daughter took out her camera, party officials objected and tried to take it from her. Her brothers came to her defense, and there was yelling and chaos. “If you are human, leave us alone!” Bao shouted. It was only after the family threatened to cancel the funeral that the officials finally backed off and let them take the picture.

The funeral motorcade departed the hospital soon afterward. It was still dark out, and police stopped traffic at every intersection on the route to the cemetery. The motorcade sped through the sleeping city, almost racing, as if the authorities were worried someone might wake and catch a glimpse of it going by. Zhao’s family urged the police to show some respect and slow down, but they were ignored.

At the cemetery, there was a dispute over a funeral scroll the family had prepared. “You advocated democracy and stood by your conscience. Your children are proud of you,” it said. “In the Western heavens, you finally won your freedom. Your grace remains with us forever.” A party official objected. “Democracy, hmph! Freedom, hmph! You can’t put these up during a funeral hosted by the organization.” Zhao’s family refused to back down and threatened to walk out if the scroll were not put up. But at 8:10
A.M.
, twenty minutes before the funeral was scheduled to begin, the family was asked to take their positions for a practice run of the ceremony. Instead of a rehearsal, though, the party started the actual service. Without a warning to the family and without the funeral scroll going up, an orchestral dirge started playing, and the first guests, members of the party’s senior leadership, walked into the hall.

Zhao’s successors—the retired party chief, Jiang Zemin, and the new president, Hu Jintao—didn’t bother to show up. Neither did Premier Wen Jiabao, who once served as an aide to Zhao and accompanied him on his last desperate visit with the students in Tiananmen Square. Instead, the government was represented by Jia Qinglin, a man many considered one of the Politburo’s most corrupt members, precisely the kind of figure Zhao had hoped his political reforms would prevent from rising to power. Jia and the few other party bigwigs who came were whisked away before other guests were allowed to enter.

Neither the time nor the location of the memorial service had been announced to the public. But outside, thousands of people from across the country were converging on the cemetery. Hundreds were already waiting at the gate. The family had submitted a list of nearly three thousand guests to the party, including almost everyone who had visited their home or contacted them after Zhao’s death. But it was clear that many more had come hoping to pay their respects to Zhao. Uniformed and plainclothes police were everywhere, trying to stop those without invitations while letting the others through. One group of mourners hoisted a banner that said “Zhao Ziyang’s spirit lives forever,” and then police tackled them. Others tried to break through the police cordon and were dragged away.

Wang’s companions dropped him off in the crowd, then took the jeep to the parking lot, where they were going to try to bring their banners in through a different gate. He got in line, and began making his way toward the cemetery through the police checkpoints. Along the way, he ran into one old friend after another, and marveled at the number of people who had decided to come. At one gate, a small crowd had gathered around officers who had stopped an elderly woman because she didn’t have an invitation. She was in her eighties and could walk only with the help of her granddaughter, who did have an invitation. Several of the guests were arguing with the officers, urging them to show compassion and let the old woman in. Later, inside the cemetery, Wang saw another small crowd gathered around the police, and then realized that his friends Mo and Xue were at the center of the group. The police had taken the banner from them. After a brief delay, they let them continue inside without it.

Wang and his friends fell in behind the crowd of mourners waiting to enter the memorial hall. They stood in a row of four, talking quietly as they stepped inside. Fifty funeral wreaths were placed along the walls, and the photo of Zhao in the blue denim shirt was displayed at the front of the small room. Zhao’s pale and gaunt body lay on a dais, dressed in a traditional, high-collared jacket and covered by the red-and-white Communist Party flag. As loudspeakers played the dirge, Wang and his friends bowed three times before Zhao’s body. Then they each shook hands with Zhao’s relatives, who stood along a wall to the left. But no one was allowed to linger. Plainclothes officers briskly ushered Wang and his companions out as others behind them repeated the ceremony.

As he left the building, Wang felt an intense anger welling up inside him, and he wept in frustration. It was not just the scaled-down memorial service, which he considered an unacceptable substitute for the full state funeral Zhao deserved. Nor was it only the disrespectful behavior of the police and the huge security presence, which he found insulting to Zhao’s memory and his legacy. (How could the authorities send an armored antiriot vehicle to the funeral of the man who refused to order troops into Tiananmen Square?) Rather, he felt a deep despair over what had become of his nation since Zhao’s death. Leaning on a wall outside the memorial hall with tears in his eyes and a police officer barking at him to keep moving, Wang was overcome by the magnitude of the country’s problems—the rampant corruption and abuse of power, the rising inequality and injustice, the moral decay of society.

And then he noticed the people around him. The mourners represented a remarkable cross section of China’s emerging civil society. Wang had met some of them before. Others he knew only by reputation. There were environmentalists and journalists, businessmen and bloggers, and a generation of students too young to remember the prodemocracy movement of 1989 yet still inspired by its ideals. Wealthy entrepreneurs and well-known scholars stood shoulder to shoulder with humble farmers and laid-off factory workers. There was the labor activist Lu Kun, whose husband was in prison for starting a study group to discuss democratic reform, and the young AIDS activist Li Dan, who had clashed with the authorities to expose a hidden epidemic caused by local blood banks. There was Li Heping, one of several self-taught lawyers at the forefront of a campaign to protect the rights of ordinary citizens and force the party to obey its own laws. Wang remembered the missing faces, too, people whom the police had detained in recent days to prevent them from attending the funeral, including his old classmate Pu Zhiqiang, now a prominent freedom-of-speech lawyer, and the historian Ding Zilin, who lost a son in the massacre and was working with a group of mothers to compile a list of all those killed in Tiananmen.

Zhao’s death marked the end of an era in China. If the nation were ever to undergo the democratic transition he envisioned, it wouldn’t be because of one of Zhao’s timid successors in the Communist Party leadership. It would be because of these people who had come to his funeral—people who refused to forget the past and dared to work for a different future. Despite the pain of decades of violent political turmoil and the temptations of a flourishing and freewheeling economy—or perhaps precisely because of both—these people had not given up on Zhao’s vision of a more democratic China. On a day of mourning, Wang saw in them a glimmer of hope.

O
n the afternoon he lost his last steady job, Hu Jie bicycled aimlessly through the smog and traffic of Nanjing, brooding over the mystery of his abrupt dismissal. It was a sweltering Tuesday in the summer of 1999, and his shirt clung to his back with sweat as he navigated the alleyways of a bustling district not far from the Yangtze River. In the sky above, dark clouds threatened a downpour. But Hu kept pedaling, unsure where he was going or what he should do. His mind was racing, disturbed by the past, troubled by the future, returning again and again to the same question: Had the authorities discovered his obsession with the dead woman?

He was a lean, imposing man, with broad shoulders and intense eyes, and he looked younger than his forty-one years. For much of his life, Hu had been a soldier. He served in the air force as a fighter jet mechanic, then as an officer and a political instructor, and there was still something of the soldier in the way he walked and talked, even in the way he sat: watchful, on edge, ready to snap to attention. But there was a bohemian quality about him, too. The plain dark t-shirts he favored and the beard covering his square jaw hinted at his life after the military, when he moved into an artists’ ghetto and tried to reinvent himself as an oil painter, then as a documentary filmmaker. It was only years later, as he surrendered to middle age, that Hu took his latest, most conventional job, as cameraman and producer for Xinhua, the government’s official news agency. There he put together video reports for private screening by party officials across the country. It was a comfortable post, with all the benefits and privileges associated with a position near the top of the state’s propaganda apparatus, and it allowed him to provide a stable home for his wife and son.

Hu Jie

Yet Hu knew he didn’t really fit in at the agency. Xinhua paid the bills, opened doors, and gave him access to equipment and resources, but Hu always saw himself as an independent filmmaker first and an employee of the state second. Between assignments, he continued working on his documentaries, examining poverty in the countryside, the status of rural women, and other subjects the news agency routinely ignored. His films were not truly subversive, but they cast a critical eye on Chinese society, and that was usually enough to alarm the high priests of the propaganda ministry, who labored to project a sunny image of the party’s rule and quash anything that might cast doubt on that ideal. Hu knew the censors would never approve his documentaries for release in theaters or dissemination through other official channels, so he distributed them himself on videodiscs. He also knew it was only a matter of time before someone at Xinhua noticed what he was doing and decided a fellow like him didn’t belong there.

Now, after two years on the job, it seemed that day had finally come. Earlier that humid afternoon, Hu’s boss had called him into his office and fired him. The man didn’t say much. He just mumbled a weak apology that he “couldn’t resist the pressure from above.” Hu was furious, but he went quietly. He didn’t press for an explanation; he knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer. He signed a resignation letter, cleaned out his desk, and collected the last of his wages.

As he bicycled through the traffic of Nanjing, along boulevards lined with poplar trees, past office towers gleaming with mirrored glass and apartment blocks adorned with damp laundry, Hu considered his sudden unemployment. He felt uneasy, almost nauseous, certainly worse than he had expected. Searching for the source of his anxiety, he recalled his latest project, a subject he had come across only a month earlier, while doing a favor for a friend. He had been helping her move furniture for an old classmate of her parents, and during a break from the heavy lifting, she had mentioned that her parents also went to school with someone named Lin Zhao.

“Lin Zhao? Who’s that?” Hu remembered asking.

His friend hesitated a moment before answering. Lin Zhao was a young woman who attended Peking University in the 1950s, she said, a talented poet and writer who grew up not far from Nanjing, in the ancient canal city of Suzhou. Of all the students at the university, she was the only one who refused to write a political confession during Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign. Her intransigence was rewarded with a prison term, and later, during the Cultural Revolution, with a death sentence. But she left behind a secret legacy: she had continued writing in prison, using her own blood as ink.

Hu was stunned. He considered himself a well-informed and educated person, but he had never heard a story like this, never imagined that anything like it could happen in China, even during Mao’s rule. His head was swimming with questions: Why was Lin Zhao executed? What did she do? And what about her prison writings? He knew there was a tradition in ancient China of government ministers and military commanders sending urgent messages to the emperor in their own blood. But what would drive a young woman, living just a few decades ago, in a city not far from his own, to cut her flesh and write in blood? Surely, Hu suggested, she must have scrawled out only a few words. But his friend said no, apparently she had written hundreds of pages.

Hu wanted to hear more. He had been searching for a new subject for a documentary, and this seemed to have potential. When he asked his friend for help, she agreed to go to her parents for more information. In the weeks that followed, Hu began looking into Lin Zhao’s story, and he was quickly drawn in. It was as if he had stumbled upon a lost and precious piece of history, a mystery waiting to be unraveled. If he had been merely curious at first, soon he found himself thinking about the dead woman at all hours, at work, during meals, as he lay in bed trying to sleep. The more he learned, the more questions he had. He knew he was poking around where the authorities didn’t want him, and his instincts told him that what he was doing might be dangerous. But he pressed ahead, because despite the passage of time, what happened to Lin Zhao felt urgent and relevant to him, while the risks of pursuing the story seemed vague and uncertain.

But the risks were coming into focus now. Would his wife lose her job at the bank? Could they be evicted from their apartment? Would his teenage son be denied admission to university? He suspected the Ministry of State Security was behind his firing, and if the secret police was involved, anything was possible, even arrest and imprisonment. The thought made him nervous, and angry. It seemed ridiculous that that could still happen in China, which had come so far and changed so much in his lifetime. He just wanted to make a documentary, about something that had happened long ago, and now he was out of a job and worried about going to jail.

Hu knew the safe thing to do would be to abandon the Lin Zhao research. He knew his firing from Xinhua was a warning. Still, he could not shake a feeling that he was meant to uncover what happened to that young woman so many years ago and record it for the future. Now that he was unemployed, he had the time to focus on the project, but he wondered if he had the courage. Years later, when he described the moment for me, Hu said a passage written by the ancient Confucian philosopher Mencius came to mind as he wandered the city on his bicycle:

“I just kept thinking about her story, and how it might be lost forever,” Hu told me. “And I thought, if I didn’t preserve it, who would?” By the time he got off his bicycle, he had made up his mind.

T
HERE WAS LITTLE
in Hu’s background to suggest he would press ahead with the Lin Zhao project, much less devote the next five years of his life to it. He had no formal training in history, or journalism, or even filmmaking. His parents had been factory workers, and like most Chinese of his generation, his schooling had been haphazard, disrupted by Mao’s final and most destructive political movement, the Cultural Revolution. He was eight when the campaigns began, and he stopped going to regular classes soon afterward. Instead of high school, he worked in a machinery factory. At age nineteen, a few months after Mao’s death, he enlisted in the military.

What little Hu did pick up about his country’s recent history was limited to the rosy version of events promulgated by the party. In these accounts, Mao was “the Great Teacher, the Great Leader, the Great Commander, the Great Helmsman,” “the reddest of red suns,” and “the greatest genius and teacher of revolution in the present age.” The Communist Party was “the mightiest, most glorious, most correct, most lovely party,” “the great emancipator of the toiling masses of the Chinese nation,” and even “our dear father and mother.” In newspapers and on the radio, in textbooks and in speeches, the economy was always setting new records and the waves of political purges ordered by Mao were described, if they were mentioned at all, as victories against “reactionaries,” “counterrevolutionaries,” or other enemies allied with the forces of “international capitalism” and the “American imperialists.” It was history scrubbed clean, an elaborate fiction designed to sustain the party’s rule. Fabricating and controlling history was so important to the party that it devoted a vast bureaucracy to the task, an army of propagandists, ideologues, and censors who labored to deceive the masses in the name of serving them. By some estimates, the party employed one propaganda officer for every hundred citizens. The result was a complex tapestry of truth and lies intended to bury unpleasant memories and obscure inconvenient facts. Those who built and served this official history twisted even the Chinese language to their purpose: blessing certain phrases with the approval of the state, stripping others of meaning or legitimacy—trying to manipulate not only how people talked but also what they thought. Those who challenged the official truth did so at their peril.

But after Mao’s death in 1976, things began to change. The trauma of the Cultural Revolution damaged the party’s authority, and its control over history weakened. In the 1980s, with the government in retreat, a wave of freethinking swept the country, and prohibited material—literature, films, music—suddenly became available. The old orthodoxies—Marxism, Leninism, “Mao Zedong Thought”—had been discredited, and people were searching for new answers. At the height of this intellectual fervor, the military pulled Hu from his duties repairing jets and sent him for training as an officer who would be responsible for the indoctrination of troops in party ideology. Yet even the Air Force Political Institute in Shanghai was not immune to the changes taking hold in the nation. A liberal-minded general there suspended almost all classes in the tired socialist canon, replacing them with lessons in market economics, Western political theory, and Freudian psychology. History was still largely off-limits, but Hu began to question what he knew. Later, as the party tried to reassert control, it sent Hu materials condemning books and other writings that it had banned, so he could better indoctrinate the soldiers under his command. But Hu found himself more interested in the prohibited works than in the party’s critiques of them. He read the investigative reports on party corruption by the journalist Liu Binyan, the underground verse of the soldier-poet Ye Wenfu, even a Chinese translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
The Gulag Archipelago.

After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the party clamped down again and redoubled its efforts to shape the public’s understanding of events. Mao’s cult of personality had collapsed, the ruling ideology had been exposed as a terrible mistake, and now the state had ordered soldiers to kill students in the heart of the capital. The party’s ability to define history—to suppress memories and guard its secrets—was more important than ever to its grip on power. The propaganda machine pressed harder. Newspapers and magazines were “rectified.” Scholars and journalists were purged or silenced. But the party could no longer dominate popular consciousness as it once did. Too much had happened. Too much had changed. Too many people refused to forget.

Until he heard the story about Lin Zhao, Hu had never given much thought to his country’s recent history. But he knew that what he had been taught was incomplete, that there were gaps and blank spots, facts that had been hidden and people who had been erased. He knew just enough to make him curious.

T
HE
M
ONDAY MORNING
after he lost his job, Hu was standing in the crowded lot of Nanjing’s central bus station, video camera in hand. Throngs of travelers, most of them migrant workers laden with bundles of goods to be sold in the countryside, jostled for position around a fleet of mud-splattered buses. In the chaos, Hu focused his camera on an elderly woman waiting to board a bus headed for Hefei, a provincial capital a few hours to the southwest. She was in her late sixties, small and frail, with graying hair and a slight shuffle to her step, but there was something about her that projected strength. Hu zoomed in on her wrinkled hands, which were clenched around a small brown bag. Inside the bag, he knew, was a bundle of papers: poems, letters, essays, and other tributes to Lin Zhao written by people who had known her. The old woman had spent years collecting them, and now she gripped them tightly, as if worried they could be scattered by a breeze and lost forever. Those papers—and her own fading memories—were all she had left of an old friend.