Tiananmen Ghosts. Twenty years after China's tragedy, a secret journal reveals new details of the power struggle that led to the massacre
BY ADI IGNATIUS
WHEN THE TANKS AND troops blasted their way into Beijing's Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, crushing the student-led protest movement that had captivated the world, the biggest political casualty was Chinese Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, the man who had tried hardest to avoid the bloodshed.
Outmaneuvered by his hard-line rivals, Zhao was stripped of power and placed under house arrest. The daring innovator who had introduced capitalist policies to post-Mao Zedong China spent his last r6 years virtually imprisoned, rarely allowed to venture away from his home on a quiet alley in Beijing. As his hair turned white, Zhao passed many lonely hours driving golf balls into a net in his courtyard.
Yet as it turns out, Zhao never stopped thinking about Tiananmen. Through courage and subterfuge, he found a way, in the isolation of his heavily monitored home, to secretly record his account of what it was like to serve at China's highest levels of power-and more amazingly, he sneaked his memoir out of the country. Published this month, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang provides an intimate look at one of the world's most opaque regimes during some of modern China's most critical moments. It marks the first time a Chinese leader of such stature-as head of the party, Zhao was nominally China's highest-ranking official-has spoken frankly about life at the top. Most significantly, Zhao's account could encourage future Chinese leaders to revisit the events of Tiananmen and acknowledge the government's tragic mistakes there. Hundreds of people were killed or imprisoned by government forces, though few Chinese today know the full story.
In the book, Zhao, who died in 2005, details the drama and conflict behind the scenes during the Tiananmen protests. The priority of the party's leaders ultimately wasn't to suppress a rebellion but to settle a power struggle between conservative and liberal factions. China's hard-liners had tried for years to derail the economic and political innovations that Zhao had introduced; Tiananmen, Zhao demonstrates in his journal, gave the conservatives a pretext to set the clock back. The key moment in Zhao's narrative is a meeting held at Deng Xiaoping's home on May 17, 1989, less than three weeks before the Tiananmen massacre.  Zhao argued that the government should back off from its harsh threats against the protesters and look for ways to ease tensions. Two conservative officials immediately stood up to criticize Zhao, effectively blaming the escalating protests on him. Deng had the last word with his fateful decision to impose martial law and move troops into the capital. In a rare historical instance of a split at the party's highest levels, Zhao wouldn't sign on: "I refused to become the General Secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students."
With his political career more or less finished, Zhao went to Tiananmen Square to talk to some of the tens of thousands of protesters massed there. Premier Li Peng, Zhao's primary rival, tagged along-though Zhao says Li was "terrified" and quickly left the scene. A teary Zhao spoke to student leaders through a bullhorn. "We have come too late," he said, urging students to leave the square to help calm things down. Few heeded his words. About two weeks later, the tanks and troops were sent in.
When the assault on Tiananmen began, he could only wince as he heard the pop-pap-pop of automatic rifles near his home: "While sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire," he wrote. "A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all."
Zhao's effort to record and preserve his memoir required both secrecy and conspiracy. Under the noses of his captors, he recorded his material on about 30 tapes, each roughly an hour long. Judging from the content, most of the recording took place in or around 2000. Members of his family say even they were unaware that this was taking place. The recordings were on cassettes-mostly Peking opera and kids' music-that had been lying around the house. Zhao methodically noted their order by numbering them with faint pencil marks. There were no titles or other notes. The first few recordings were of discussions with friends. But most were taped alone, and Zhao apparently read from a text he had prepared.
When Zhao had finished the taping after a couple of years, he found a way to pass the material to a few trusted friends who had also been high-level party officials. Each was given only some of the recordings, evidently to hedge against their being lost or confiscated. After Zhao died four years ago, some of the people who knew about the recordings-they can't be named here because of fears of retaliation from Chinese authorities-launched a complex, clandestine effort to gather the material in one place and transcribe it for publication. Later, another set of tapes, perhaps the originals, was found hidden among his grandchildren's toys in his study.
The power structure described in the book is chaotic and often bumbling. In Zhao's narrative, Deng is a conflicted figure who urges Zhao to push hard for economic change but demands a crackdown on anything that seems to challenge the party's authority. Deng is at times portrayed not as an emperor but as a puppet subject to manipulation by Zhao or his rivals, depending on who presents his case to the old man first.
Once placed under house arrest, Zhao could do little but obsess over past events, rewinding the clock to pore over the technicalities of the state's case against him. His few attempts to venture out met with almost comically Kafkaesque resistance. For example, when authorities finally permitted him to play pool at a club for party officials, they first swept the place of other people, ensuring that Zhao played alone. His captors ultimately succeeded in keeping him out of view and silencing his voice, and they put up enough obstacles to deter all but the most determined visitors. As he said in his recordings, "The entrance to my home is a cold, desolate place."
Yet inside the gate, Zhao was busy at work, taping the journal that now gives him a final say about what really happened and what might have been. It's a fitting final act for a man who made enormous contributions to today's China. Although Deng generally gets credit for modernizing China's economy, it was Zhao who brought about the innovations-from breaking up Mao's collective farms to creating free wheeling special economic zones along the coast-that jolted China's economy from its slumber. And it was Zhao who had to continually outflank powerful rivals who didn't want to see the system change.
The China that Zhao describes is very much alive now. The country's team of leaders continues to promote economic freedom yet intimidates or arrests anyone who dares to call for political change.
At the end of last year, more than 300 Chinese activists, marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, jointly signed Charter 08, a document that calls on the party to reform its political system and allow freedom of expression. Beijing responded as it often does: it interrogated many of the signatories and arrested some, including prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was active during the Tiananmen protests.
At the end of his journal, Zhao concludes that China must become a parliamentary democracy to meet the challenges of the modern world-a remarkable observation from someone who spent his entire career in service to the Communist Party, and one that might well provoke a debate on China's Internet discussion boards and in its chat rooms. Zhao's ultimate aim was a strong economy, but he had become convinced that this goal was inextricably linked to the development of democracy. China's ability to avoid another tragedy like Tiananmen might depend on how quickly that comes about. •
TIME May 25, 2009
Ignatius is the editor of Harvard Business Review and one of the editors of Prisoner of the State
*
Bài trên Paris Match cho thấy, không một sinh viên nào nghĩ quân đội sẽ bắn vào đám đông, xe tăng sẽ nghiền nát cuộc biểu tình.
Họ chỉ nghĩ, cùng lắm là bị bắt, bị bỏ bóp, rồi cho về, và đa số mang theo lương thực, đủ dùng trong 10 ngày, ngây thơ y chang đám sĩ quan Ngụy!

Zhao's ultimate aim was a strong economy, but he had become convinced that this goal was inextricably linked to the development of democracy. China's ability to avoid another tragedy like Tiananmen might depend on how quickly that comes about. •
Mục tiêu tối hậu của Zhao là một nền kinh tế mạnh, nhưng ông tin rằng, nó gắn chặt với sự phát triển dân chủ. Khó mà tránh một cú Thiên An Môn trong tương lai, nếu ‘nhất bên trọng nhất bên khinh’!

THE POET IN AN UNKNOWN PRISON
Thi sĩ trong nhà tù không ai biết

On April 16, the PEN American Center named the Beijing-based writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo the recipient of the 2009 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. The award honors international literary figures who have been persecuted or imprisoned for exercising or defending the right to freedom of expression.
Liu is a literary critic, activist, and poet who participated in the prodemocracy movement in China in the spring of 1989. After the Tiananmen crackdown he spent two years in prison, and since then has been often harassed by the police and imprisoned several times for his political activism and writing. On December 8, 2008, he was arrested for signing Charter 08, a declaration calling for democracy, human rights, and an end to one-party rule in China, which has now been signed by over 8,500 people throughout the country. * Since his arrest Liu has been held without charges or trial at an unknown location in Beijing.
*****

* See www.nybooks.com for a translation of Charter 08, together with a postscript by Perry Link ["China's Charter 08," NYR, January 15]; and for remarks by Vaclav Havel on presenting the Homo Homini Award to Liu and other signers of Charter 08 in Prague, as well as the text of speeches given by two of the signers of Charter 08 at the award ceremony.

The following remarks were sent to PEN by Liu's wife, Liu Xia, and read at the award ceremony in New York on April 28.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a pity that both my husband Liu Xiaobo and I could not be present this evening to receive this award.
Twenty-six years ago, both of us were writing modern poetry. It is through our poetry that we became acquainted and eventually fell in love. Six years later, the unprecedented student democratic movement and massacre occurred in Beijing. Xiaobo dutifully stood his ground and, consequently, became widely known as one of the so-called June 4 "black hands." His life then changed forever. He has been put into jail several times, and even when he is at home, he is still, for the most part, not a free man. As his wife, I have no other choice but to become a part of his unfortunate life.
Yet I am not a vassal of Liu Xiaobo. I am very fond of poetry and painting, but at the same time, I have not come to view Xiaobo as a political figure. In my eyes, he has always been and will always be an awkward and diligent poet. Even in prison, he has continued to write his poems. When the warden took away his paper and pen, he simply pulled his verse out of thin air. Over the past twenty years, Xiaobo and I have accumulated hundreds of such poems, which were born of the conversations between our souls. I would like to quote one here:
Before you enter the grave
Don't forget to write me with your ashes
Do not forget to leave your
address in the nether world (1)
Another Chinese poet, Liao Yiwu, has commented on Xiaobo's poem: "He carries the burden of those who died on June 4 in his love, in his hatred, and in his prayers. Such poems could have been written in the Nazis' concentration camps or by the Decembrists in Imperial Russia. Which brings to mind the famous sentence: 'It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.''' Such statements are also characteristic of the situation in China after 1989.
I understand, however, that this award is not meant to encourage Liu’s Xiaobo the poet, but rather to encourage Liu Xiaobo the political commentator and initiator of Charter 08. I would like to remind everyone of the close connection between these two identities. I feel that Xiaobo is using his intensity and passion as a poet to push the democracy movement forward in China. He shouts passionately as a poet "no, no, no" to the dictators.
In private, he whispers gently to the dead souls of June 4, who, to this day, have not received justice, as well as to me and to all his dear friends: "yes, yes."
Finally, I extend my deepest gratitude to the PEN American Center, the Independent Chinese PEN Center, and everyone in attendance at this event tonight.
Liu Xia, April 17, 2009,
at my not-free home in Beijing
(translated from the Chinese by Liao Tienchi)
NYRB May 28, 2009
(1)
Truớc khi bước xuống huyệt
Nhớ viết cho tớ
Bằng tro cốt của bạn
Đừng quên ghi địa chỉ của bạn
Ở phía bên cánh cửa (2)
(2)
Hãy mở giùm ta cánh cửa này, Gấu đập và khóc ròng!
Ouvrez-moi cette porte où je frappe en pleurant.
Apollinaire
Vĩnh Biệt
*

Mấy câu thơ trên làm Gấu nhớ tới câu trả lời của tay blogger Perez Hilton, trên Time, June 8, 2009: Nếu may mắn, tôi sẽ tìm ra cách để tiếp tục viết blog, từ phía bên kia nấm mồ.

Cùng số báo, có bài viết, liệu cái đói có làm ngỏm nghệ thuật? Curtains: Can The Arts Survive The Recession?

Tờ Granta số mới nhất, Mùa Xuân, 2009, đề tài Lost and Found, có mấy bài viết về Thiên An Môn, 20 năm sau. Một, Chinese Whispers, một hồi ức về Đêm Thiên An Môn, của Elizabeth Pisani, một nữ phóng viên mới vô nghề, và những kinh nghiệm đầu đời trong đời ký giả của bà, qua những bản tin, records, gửi về toà soạn: Như Graham, tôi chẳng bao giờ quên nổi cái đêm trải qua ở Bắc Kinh đó. Nhưng tôi đành chấp nhận sự kiện, là, những khung cảnh xuất hiện trong hồi ức về nó, thì cứ chập chờn thay đổi liên tục. Chúng ta có thể sửa đi sửa lại, viết tới viết lui những bản tin, những tường thuật như là chúng ta thích, nhưng chẳng bao giờ chúng ta kể, cùng một câu chuyện đó, hai lần

Một, của một du khách, về kiểm duyệt tại TQ, bôi đen mấy dòng trên tờ National Geographic.

Cắt ngón tay li khai: Để phản đối biến cố Thiên An Môn, 1989, nghệ sĩ Sheng Qi cắt ngón tay, tạo ra một số hình ảnh bàn tay cụt ngón tay của mình, trong có tấm hình ở nơi lòng bàn tay, là tấm hình một đứa bé trai.

*

EDITOR'S LETTER
ALEX CLARK
The vanishing point: Điểm biến
When something is lost, our first instinct is often towards preservation: either of the thing itself, its memory and its traces in the world, or of the part of us that is affected by what is now missing. The pieces in this issue of Granta reflect on the complex business of salvage and try to bring into the light what we discover when we come face to face with loss.
It is rarely a straightforward process. JeremyTreglown's thought provoking exploration of the gathering movement to exhume the victims of the Spanish Civil War amply demonstrates the tensions created when a desire to commemorate clashes with a desire to move forward, and when both entirely natural impulses are claimed by other agendas. Although his investigation illuminates the continuing aftermath of a particularly dark and disastrous episode in Spanish history, it has clear parallels with other countries' attempts to recover from traumatic events and forces us to question whether an apparently simple urge to remember and to pay tribute can remain uninflected by other equally complex concerns.
A similar ambiguity informs Maurice Walsh's dispatch from Ireland, where he travelled to spend time with the Catholic priests whose numbers have been diminishing over the past few decades. He reports of a decline in vocations that coincided with a widespread rise in secularism and an attitude towards the Church that hardened - perhaps irreversibly - after the wave of child-abuse scandals in the 1990s, which were seen not merely as instances of individual wrongdoing but as evidence of a collusion between a powerful hierarchy and those whom it had sent into the community as trusted individuals. This shift in perspective has been well documented and, when the writer and I spoke about the piece in its earliest stages, we agreed that a fruitful focus would be what the priests themselves felt about this process of marginalization.
Elsewhere, we feature some extremely personal stories, perhaps none more so than Melanie McFadyean's 'Missing', which relates the experiences, over nearly two decades, of the Needham family. Ben Needham, a child of twenty-one months, disappeared on the Greek island of Kos in 1991; he has never been found. The moment of his disappearance - the moment when he was last seen by members of his family - resonates through her account with its utter simplicity; a child, playing in the sun, running in and out of doors, being completely childlike and completely unselfconscious. Then silence, and absence; and then the continuing lives of Ben's mother, Kerry, his grandparents, his uncles and the sister born after he disappeared. It is a familiar fictional device, and often characteristic of the stories we tell ourselves about defining periods in our lives, to suggest that everything can change in an instant. Much of the time, that is not really true, and rather more likely that a crisply delineated sequence of events allows us to cope with chaos and confusion. In the case of the Needhams, though, even that world-altering single moment, viewed through the prism of different people and the passage of time, can remain painfully resistant to closure.
There is a different kind of examination of the past going on in Elizabeth Pisani's 'Chinese Whispers', in which the author recalls the night that she spent in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, frantically attempting to phone in reports to her news agency as tanks (not to be confused with armored personnel carriers, as her bosses on the other end of the line curtly impressed on her) rolled in to crush the ranks of pro-democracy protestors filling the Square.
But Pisani's resurrection of a night that, to her, an inexperienced reporter of twenty-four, was the most momentous she had ever lived through, proves rather harder to pin down in the retelling. Is her version of events correct to the last detail? Or has she embroidered and finessed her memories in the intervening years?
Sometimes, of course, the changing of the guard makes room for us to cast a lighter eye over events, as in Don Paterson's piece of memoir, which tells of his youthful passion - and passion is the right word - for evangelical Christianity, an effort to exoticize his everyday life that led to fervent prayer sessions enlivened by the odd bout of angeloglossia. It seems that what he discovered as his faith faded was an unshakeable enthusiasm for rational thought. But he also conjures, as the best memoirs do, a portrait of another time - in this case, a world of weak tea, Jammie Dodgers and fearsome bullies. Equally evocative are the pipe smokers, captured in Andrew Martin's ode to a pleasure in peril, who have found themselves defending their commitment to a slower, temptingly detached way of life - their special brand of 'hypnotic latency', as Martin puts it.
In among these surveys of vanishing worlds come three pieces of fiction: an artfully poignant story by Janet Frame, a wry tale of dentistry and disarray by A. L. Kennedy and two pieces of work by Altan Walker. Of Earthly Love, Walker's debut novel, was several years in the writing, rewriting and recasting and had yet to be finished when the writer died in 2007. As I began to read the manuscript, knowing that it would never now be completed, I felt immediately that if it were to remain unseen readers would be deprived of a true delight; one that would introduce them to a wild, shifting, ungovernable voice, capable of great acts of ventriloquism and imagination. It is a real pleasure to be able to publish part of Walker's manuscript here and to know that, in among the varieties of loss that we are often subject to, there remain treasures to find. _

Elisabeth Pisani là phóng viên, phần lớn viết cho Reuters, đã từng tường thuật, trong khoảng 1986-1995, từ India, China, Việt Nam, Cambode và những nơi khác. Bài viết cho số Granta, Lost and Found, là toan tính tái sinh, resurrection, Đêm Thiên An Môn bà đã từng trải qua, khi còn là một phóng viên chưa có kinh nghiệm. Kể lại nó thế nào cho đúng sự thực? Bài viết là một suy tưởng về hồi ức, khi được viện tới, để kể lại một sự kiện. Có những nhận xét thật tuyệt, về sự kiện Thiên An Môn:
Foreigners with a special interest in China know that 'the Tiananmen massacre' acts as a convenient shorthand for a much messier and certainly very bloody reality that affected the whole of Beijing. But for many other people outside China, the narrative has been rewritten around that single geographical point. For many people in China, of course, there's no narrative at all. The events of that night have been wiped from the record entirely. So much so that three editors on a provincial newspaper were sacked in 2007 because a young clerk, clueless about what had happened eighteen years before, allowed a tribute to the victims of '4/6' to slip into the classified ads column.
Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. But this first draft is edited before it even hits the page, or the airwaves, by individual journalists who weave facts into a story that will engage the reader. It then gets edited over time into the dominant narrative. Details that seemed important to a reporter in the moment - friendly troops, babies on laps - get drowned by larger events and eventually disappear.
Nhân đây, post bài phỏng vấn Ma Jian, tác giả Hôn Thuỵ Bắc Kinh, của tờ L'Express, số đề ngày 14 Tháng Sáu, 2009.
*

DOCUMENT

Ma Jian

« En Chine, chaque jour est un 4 juin 1989 »

Il serait l' « une des voix les plus courageuses et les plus importantes de la litttérature chinoise actuelle », selon Gao Xingjian, prix Nobel de littérature ... Vingt ans après l'écrasement sanglant de Tiananmen, le 4 juin 1989, Ma Jian revient sur le Printemps de Pékin, qui fournit la trame de son roman magistral, Beijing Coma (Flammarion), dont paraît ce mois-ci la version en mandarin. Ancien photographe au service de propagande des syndicats chinois, cet écrivain inclassable a fui Pékin, au début des années 1980, et traversé le pays de part en part, trois ans durant. Après l'interdicction d'une de ses nouvelles, il choisit l'exil à Hongkong, puis à Londres, où il vit désormais. Dans son dernier opus, le narrateur gît dans un coma éveillé après avoir reçu une balle dans la tête, place Tiananmen. Alors qu'il se remémore les événements qui ont précédé la nuit tragique du 4 juin, le monde change autour de lui...