No Enemies, No Hatred

Xiaobo Liu, Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, Xia Liu

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674071940
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on December 10, 2010, its recipient, Liu Xiaobo, was in Jinzhou Prison, serving an eleven-year sentence for what Beijing called "incitement to subvert state power." In Oslo, actress Liv Ullmann read a long statement the activist had prepared for his 2009 trial. It read in part: "I stand by the convictions I expressed in my 'June Second Hunger Strike Declaration' twenty years ago—I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies."That statement is one of the pieces in this book, which includes writings spanning two decades, providing insight into all aspects of Chinese life. These works not only chronicle a leading dissident's struggle against tyranny but enrich the record of universal longing for freedom and dignity. Liu speaks pragmatically, yet with deep-seated passion, about peasant land disputes, the Han Chinese in Tibet, child slavery, the CCP's Olympic strategy, the Internet in China, the contemporary craze for Confucius, and the Tiananmen massacre. Also presented are poems written for his wife, Liu Xia, public documents, and a foreword by Václav Havel.This collection is an aid to reflection for Western readers who might take for granted the values Liu has dedicated his life to achieving for his homeland.

PART I

POLITICS WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

LISTEN CAREFULLY TO THE VOICES OF THE TIANANMEN MOTHERS

Reading the Unedited Interview Transcripts of Family Members Bereaved by the Massacre

Late at night on June 3, 1989, a 17-year-old boy named Jiang Jielian was shot and killed by People’s Liberation Army troops in Beijing. Later his mother, Ding Zilin, a retired professor of philosophy at People’s University, joined with Zhang Xianling, who had lost a 19-year-old son, and Huang Jinping, who had lost a husband, to form and lead a group called the “Tiananmen Mothers.” They took it as their mission to seek out family members of others who had been killed or wounded in the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. Their effort required patience and persistence—the Chinese government had made it clear that any victim of the massacre was by definition a “counterrevolutionary rioter,” so families who provided information to the group might face further trouble from the government. Still, after a decade of work, the Tiananmen Mothers had compiled enough material to publish a booklet, Witnessing the Massacre and Seeking Justice, in which they listed the names, along with photographs and capsule histories, of 155 who died in the massacre. The booklet also included twenty-five accounts of the arduous work involved in seeking out family members of victims. An expanded version of the booklet was later published in Hong Kong under the title In Search of the Victims of June Fourth, 1989–2005 (Open Magazine Press, 2005).

Liu Xiaobo, who regards himself as a student of Ding Zilin, was an early and stout supporter of the Tiananmen Mothers. What follows is an excerpted version of a long essay that Liu wrote in 2004 on the eve of the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre. Two months before Liu wrote it, Ding Zilin, Zhang Xianling, and Huang Jinping had been seized in their homes and held in detention for several days, apparently because (although Party officials never specified the reason) they had publicized their work with the families of victims.—Ed.

READING THE RECOLLECTIONS of bereaved family members allows me to see in detail the cruelty of the executioners, and, even more clearly, the brightness of humanity that shone in the midst of great terror.

Immediately after the massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989, Chinese authorities exploited their monopoly of the mass media in order to blur the difference between black and white. They constantly repeated how cruelly so-called thugs had treated the martial-law troops and tried their best to hide the truth about how the troops had wantonly slaughtered ordinary people. But despite the government-imposed lockdown on alternate sources of information, the troops’ cruelty could be gleaned in some accounts that appeared at the time. One of these told of what happened near Xidan when troops used tanks to chase and crush students and civilians. Several eyewitnesses had reported this outrage at the time, but now, thanks to the bereaved families who are speaking out in these transcripts, we have fuller and more vivid testimony.

It is obvious from the transcripts that troops opened fire blindly in all directions and killed a great number of innocent civilians. Around 10 p.m. on the evening of June 3, troops moving from west to east along Fuxing Boulevard had already begun spraying bullets back and forth into residential compounds, with no regard for life. Around 11 p.m., when a detachment of infantry scouts was passing the bridge at Muxidi, an order suddenly rang out and soldiers hit the ground. Then one of the officers among them rose to one knee, raised his submachine gun, and fired blindly all along the road while many people fell in pools of blood. The startled crowd broke in all directions. Students who tried to stop these blind killings themselves were shot.

Because the gunfire was so blind, many people died inside their homes. Among the 182 documented dead in the transcripts, some were people who had never joined the protests, never confronted the troops, and never even gone out to watch the excitement. Yet bullets, fired randomly, took their lives. A woman named Ma Chengfen, who had been a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, was shot and killed while sitting on a staircase chatting with a neighbor. A 66-year-old worker named Zhang Fuyuan was shot in the backyard of his relative’s home. Another victim was an old lady from Wanxian in Sichuan who had been working in Muxidi as a nanny in the 22nd-floor home of the head of a government ministry. She was shot dead after she went down to the 14th-floor balcony to see what was going on. In the same building the son-in-law of a deputy inspector was killed in his kitchen.

Perhaps most shocking of all, passersby who simply encountered martial law troops along the street were sometimes chased down and killed by soldiers who had been carried away by their mission to kill. One group of seven, five men and two women, who were walking near Nanlishi Road were chased down in this way. Three of them, Yang Ziping, Wang Zhengsheng, and An Ji, were killed. Two of the others were wounded.

These transcripts show, too, how martial-law troops could be so cruel as to impede help for the wounded and dying. Zhang Xianling, one of the original Tiananmen Mothers, reports an instance in which a young man rushed out to take a photo just as the troops began firing and was struck by a bullet. People who saw the boy fall wanted to help him, but soldiers would not let anyone go near. One old lady went to her knees to beg them. “He’s a kid,” she said. “Please let us go help him!” A soldier answered by pointing his gun at her and roaring, “He’s a thug! I’ll shoot anyone who takes one step.” Later two ambulances arrived, and soldiers stopped them. When a doctor got off and tried to negotiate, the troops refused and the ambulances had to turn around. In short, they killed people and wouldn’t let others help: how cruel is that?

Readers of the transcripts can also learn how the shameless murderers sought to cover up the evil they were doing. They hid bodies of the dead. Many people disappeared on June 4, 1989, and even today it is hard to know how many are living and how many died. After Zhang Xianling’s son Wang Nan was shot, martial law troops buried his body in a lawn in front of the gate to No. 28 Middle School (now known as Chang’an Middle School) near Tiananmen. However, because he had been wearing a military uniform and a soldier’s belt, the soldiers later feared he might be one of their own, so they dug up his body and sent it to a hospital. When Zhang Xianling was finally able to locate her son’s body, the troops at first wouldn’t let her take it home. “You can’t have it,” a soldier barked at her. “Get out or you’ll be arrested.” The mother later learned that there actually had been three unidentified dead bodies in that pit. The two others had already been sent to a crematorium—as “unknown corpses.” “During our search,” Zhang Xianling observed, “we ran across people from a dozen or so other families who were looking for their loved ones, be they dead or alive, but were looking in vain. They may well have been looking for some of those ‘cremated unknown.’ ”

Guilt feelings stab at my heart like daggers as I read these transcripts, because it is clear that not one of the people whose lives were so cruelly snuffed out that night was among the “elite.” None of the conspicuous activists—like me—were killed. The victims ranged from a 66-year-old senior citizen to a child barely 9. There were people in their thirties and forties, the prime of life, a youngster of 17, another who was 20-something … But they were all just ordinary students and civilians, people who apparently wanted to live ordinary lives and to enjoy everyday sorts of happiness, and on that blood-soaked night they had made the mistake of acting on impulses of sympathy or of justice, and it had cost them everything.

Some of the dead had been participants in the 1989 movement. They had stayed in the square until the last moment, as if waiting for the bullets of evil to take their lives. For example:

Cheng Renxing, a 25-year-old student at People’s University, was just about to withdraw from the square when a random shot felled him. He collapsed at the base of the flag pole that faces Tiananmen.

Dai Jinping, a 27-year-old M.A. student at Beijing Agricultural University, was shot to death around 11 p.m. on June 3, 1989, right beside the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall.

Li Haocheng, a student in the Chinese Department at Tianjin Normal University, had been among 5,000 students and faculty from his school who traveled to Beijing to protest. Early on the morning of June 4, as martial law troops entered Tiananmen Square, Li stood at the southeast corner of the square taking a photo to document the moment. A flash of his camera, then he fell and died.

Wu Xiangdong, a 21-year-old university student who had been part of the 1989 movement from the beginning, had already written a farewell note to his family: “The fate of a nation rests with each single person. If this costs my life, then so be it …” It did cost his life.

Others had originally been bystanders to the protests, but then, moved by the moral intuition that is native to human beings, they came to the aid of the protesters during their hour of peril. When the massacre began, some of these people rushed straight into the most dangerous scenes. Here are some examples:

On the evening of June 3, Jiang Jielian, a 17-year-old high school student, defying the tearful admonitions of his mother, who had locked all the doors of their residence, jumped out of a bathroom window and ran toward the blood-stained Chang’an Boulevard to join a mass of people who were trying to dissuade the martial law troops from advancing. His dissuasion failed, and a bullet took his life.

Wang Nan, a 19-year-old student in senior high school, felt an urge to “record the true facts of history.” He ran toward Tiananmen Square carrying a camera. But before he could use his camera to document anything, his own life itself was spent as a piece of evidence of the barbaric massacre.

Yan Wen, a 23-year-old student at Peking University, also wanted to record events for history. He headed with some classmates for Muxidi. A bullet struck him in the thigh, crushed a main artery, and led to uncontrollable bleeding. He stopped breathing fairly quickly.

Still other cases were of people who braved danger trying to rescue the dying and assisting the wounded. Here are a few examples.

At 7 a.m. on June 4, Yang Yansheng, 30 years old, went out of his way to help a wounded stranger. Troops delivered a bullet to his liver, where it exploded, and he died.

Du Guangxue was a 24-year-old worker, a passionate young man who had visited the protesters at Tiananmen many times. At midnight on June 3 he heard that people had died at the square, so he hopped onto his bicycle to see what he could do, and was shot to death while biking past Xinhuamen.

Zhou Deping, age 25, was an M.A. student in electrical engineering at Tsinghua University. During the evening carnage of June 3, 1989, he volunteered to a group of his Tsinghua classmates to go to Tiananmen Square to check out what other classmates were facing. He headed off on his bicycle and never returned.

Sun Hui was a 19-year-old chemistry major at Peking University. He, too, volunteered to go look for a group of classmates who had said they were going to withdraw from the square but who failed to appear back on campus. Sun was shot to death while riding his bicycle near the overpass at Fuxingmen.

The transcripts tell of the deaths of three people who, had cameras been able to record their images, would have given us three more heroes to stand alongside the famous “tankman” who stood before a row of tanks.

Duan Changlong, age 24, was a recent graduate in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University. After that night in which bullets flew in every direction, and as bad news kept pouring in, he spent his day visiting emergency wards trying to save the wounded. In the evening he went to the area near the National Minority Palace to try to persuade the martial law troops to stop confronting the people. As he ran toward a military official, he apparently never imagined that a bullet would come flying out of the official’s revolver to greet him.

Wang Weiping, age 25, was a graduate of the Beijing University of Medicine and was about to begin an assignment in the OBGYN department of People’s Hospital. On June 4 she threw herself into the volunteer effort to save the lives of the wounded. Eyewitnesses report that she seemed utterly without fear, as bullets flew and flames burst forth on every side, while she concentrated solely on the people, one after another, who were lying in pools of blood. As she was applying dressing to a wound of one of them, she lifted her head slightly, was struck in the neck by a bullet, collapsed wordlessly, and that was that.

Yuan Li, age 29, worked in the Automation Research Institute in the Ministry of Electrical Engineering. Watching as troops shot recklessly in every direction, and no longer able to endure the sight of the slaughter of innocent civilians, he stepped forward, raised his right arm, and shouted, “I was a graduate student at Tsinghua University …” Before he could finish, a shot rang out and his life disappeared into the black night.

Killings are only part of the story of the suffering of these “nameless” heroes. Among people who were sent to prison for their roles in the protests, the ones who got heavy sentences—ten years or more—were predominantly people of this kind, not famous intellectual leaders. Wang Yi, a student at the Beijing College of Broadcasting, was sentenced to eleven years for blocking a military vehicle. Chen Lantao, a youngster from Qingdao, got eighteen years merely for making a protest speech in public once the massacre had begun. The Sichuan poet Liao Yiwu reports that the ordinary Tiananmen prisoners with whom he was locked up included many who were serving terms of ten years or more. There are uncountable others all across the country, and many remain behind bars today.

Among the well-known figures during the demonstrations—people who have high opinions of themselves and sometimes even look down on their ordinary followers—not one died or was wounded on June 4, and v...