Mao to Now

After his death, memorial wreaths and portraits of Hu began materializing in Tiananmen Square. A shrill editorial in the People's Daily accused the mourners of creating "social turmoil" and of plotting to overthrow the party leadership—but the day I got to town, the editorial was publicly criticized as "too strident" by the then party chief Zhao Ziyang. I asked a diplomat friend about the conflicting signals coming from the regime, and his answer chilled me: "There's an unholy power struggle going on."

A lot of people think Tiananmen was all about democracy. They're wrong. Economics also had a big role. After a decade of impressive but halting economic reforms, inflation was running wild, and although farmers were making money for once, city dwellers were lagging—especially on university campuses, where labs and classrooms were as decrepit as the housing. Still, idealism was a driving force. Since long before the time of the communists, students have acted as society's conscience in China. My father taught me that. In the 1930s he led a student delegation to plead with China's then leader, Chiang Kai-shek, to take a tougher stand against Japanese aggression. Now I was watching a drama straight out of classical Beijing opera: righteous students, willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, were challenging an aging emperor who had become brutal and corrupt.

Gorbachev's impending visit scared me. I figured authorities had to clear out the protesters before the summit or lose huge face. On the eve of the Soviet leader's arrival, I stayed the night with hunger-strikers in the square. Moonlight illuminated a patchwork of multicolored protest flags and banners fluttering in the breeze. I NEED FOOD BUT I'D RATHER DIE FOR DEMOCRACY, read one in English. Another, in Cyrillic, read, WE NEED OPENNESS. IN the square that night, 21-year-old student Tian Hong began riffing on democracy: "Our country is opening up!" he told me. "We understand the failure of autocracy over the past few years." With memories of Burma still fresh, my eyes welled with tears. The next day Gorbachev's Chinese hosts had to sneak him into the Great Hall of the People through a back door.

Inspired by the students, people kept pouring into the streets all over the city even after martial law was declared on May 19. In many neighborhoods they built barricades, disrupting military traffic. I saw things I could scarcely have imagined possible. Fifty soldiers holding Kalashnikovs sat on the ground, listening intently as students with megaphones lectured them about democracy and fed them Popsicles. In another neighborhood a soldier emerged from his blocked convoy to shout: "We're soldiers of the people! We would never suppress you!" as the crowd roared its appreciation. One morning before dawn another convoy tried to cross the city secretly, transporting dozens of tarp-covered missiles—totally unrelated to the protests—and was trapped by a swarm of civilians. The crowd oohed and aahed over the weaponry while the helpless soldiers sulked.

Crackdowns follow a pattern, I've learned: the tipping point tends to come several weeks into a crisis, after the government and the international press are both exhausted. The phone woke me up at 2 a.m. on June 3. There was trouble near the square. Thousands of raw young soldiers—unarmed—had come marching down Beijing's main drag, Changan Avenue, only to be blocked by alert protesters. I arrived to find a scene of fear and confusion. Bewildered troops milled around aimlessly. The crowd had roughed up some soldiers, and others were bruised and scratched from being pelted with shoes and trash. A few of the troops wept in frustration.

But most of the interaction was peaceful, even cordial. "Think it over, get some rest," one man urged, patting a soldier on the shoulder and forcing cigarettes on him. "You're too tired." Another soldier seemed to be baffled by such friendliness: "We were told there were bad people here—hooligans." "Do we look like bad people to you?" a civilian replied. "Can there be that many bad people in Beijing?" "Which way is east, anyway?" a confused soldier pleaded. Although carrying no weapons, they were weighed down with all kinds of bulky gear: canteens, bulging knapsacks, even camp stoves. One soldier's rucksack had fallen to the ground, spilling a worn pair of plastic slippers and a flashlight. People tried not to disturb it, until one curious woman peeked inside to check out the PLA's field rations. "Instant noodles," she reported. "How pitiful."