Pioneer had been a student then. In the spring of 1989, the Iron Curtain in Europe was crumbling, rusted out from the inside by corruption and a half century of oppression. The Soviet Union, having built the Warsaw Pact through violence, was forced to watch its handiwork come apart at the political welds and economic rivets. The Chinese leaders in Zhongnanhai were determined to avoid the Russians’ mistakes.
The students had to come mourn Hu Yaobang, a reformer purged by the Party two years before his death. On the eve of his funeral in April, a hundred thousand people came to the square and many never went home. When Gorbachev came to China that May to discuss his programs of perestroika and glasnost, the student leaders anxious for democracy saw a singular opportunity to push their cause on the party elders. For his part, Deng Xiaoping wanted the world to see a summit where the two great Communist powers were going to close ranks. He opened Beijing to the foreign media and they came with their portable satellite dishes and microwave links by the hundreds. It was a mistake. The student leaders began a hunger strike before Gorbachev’s arrival. They made their way to Tiananmen Square and before the day was over the number of strikers had grown to three thousand. Within days, over one hundred fifty thousand people filled the square, some protesting, some there only to see the protests, but even that was an act of courage.
Pioneer was one of the latter at first. He was not one of the true believers in the beginning. At first he came and went, not staying in the square but going home to his soft bed each night. But he did come back. The more he saw and heard, the more he began to believe. By the end, Pioneer was sleeping on the ground with the rest, chanting slogans during the speeches, and wondering whether he could become a leader in the movement. With no resistance from the government, it was easy to cultivate that seed of faith planted as a new convert to the cause.
It went on for weeks and the Politburo began to grow nervous. They knew a revolution when they saw one. Many of them remembered Mao’s revolution. Many of them had helped stage it. If Communism had drilled only one precept into their old, corrupt heads, it was that revolutions were inevitable when the masses were oppressed by the bourgeoisie, which the party leaders had become. Now they were losing control of everything in full view of their own country and the world. Protests were emerging in other cities far from Beijing, and it seemed like the whole world was behind the students. The Politburo’s meetings devolved into vitriol and invective.
The crowd in Tiananmen Square surged to over one million.
The party declared martial law in Beijing. The protests in the other cities were smaller and easily handled, but the Tiananmen Square mob refused to disperse. Journalists were banned from the square and forced to stop their broadcasts. The students were ordered to evacuate. The PLA ordered divisions into the city, totaling more than one hundred eighty thousand soldiers.
The students built barricades to stop vehicle traffic around the square. Where they couldn’t build barricades, they lay down in the roads. The PLA responded with tear gas. Pioneer still remembered how his own eyes and mouth had burned when a canister had landed near him, a million needles in his throat pushing out. He had picked it up and thrown it back at the soldiers but not before inhaling a full dose of the gas. He had gagged his breakfast onto the concrete. He had wanted to claw his own eyes out of his head as his lungs burned, a feeling that was refreshed every time he drew breath.
His new friends held him on his feet. One, Jianzhu, was a student from Qinghua University like himself, a senior in the school of journalism who thought that facts could change the world. Another, Changfu, was a Foxconn drone who had worked the assembly line and walked out, giving up his job for the revolution. There will be better jobs when there is a better China, he said. He had almost no education and no money, but his faith in the future was infectious. A third, Xishi, was a beautiful girl two years younger than Pioneer, a talented calligrapher who taught him a bit during the boring stretches sitting on the Tiananmen cobblestones. It was a strange little group they formed. Pioneer knew they would never have met if not for the protests, and the pressure of Tiananmen began to forge that bond that soldiers built on the battlefield.
The stalemate held. The Politburo and the students each squabbled amongst themselves as to the next move. The threat of military force seemed to fade, and over the long days the number of protesters dwindled. The students finally decided it was time to go home and settled on June 20 as the day to walk away.
The great irony of the Tiananmen Square massacre was that the party decided to use force to break up a protest that was in its waning days.
Mao once said that political power flowed from the barrel of a gun, and the party held that gun. On June 1, it declared that the students were engaged in a counterrevolutionary plot against the state. The order was given: the PLA and the People’s Armed Police were to clear Tiananmen Square by any means necessary.
Soldiers began moving through Beijing to the square, and the citizens of Beijing flooded into the streets, throwing rocks and debris at the marching formations. The Twenty-Seventh and Thirty-Eighth Armies fought their way to the square, arresting and killing citizens. Mobs erupted, pulling soldiers into them and tearing them to pieces. Students threw Molotov cocktails, and PLA vehicles burned in the street, filling the air with the smoke and stench of burning rubber, but flaming vodka bottles are a poor match for machine guns. The soldiers turned their weapons on the crowd and fired with abandon.
Pioneer heard later that PLA troops had even fired on other army units that got in their way. With tens of thousands running in all directions, neither the student leaders nor the army commanders had been able to maintain order. The battle raged for three days and it was a slaughter. At least hundreds died, maybe thousands. If the party had ever tallied a count, it hadn’t made it public, and Pioneer had never been able to find it even in the secret records.
To his unending shame, Pioneer had fled the chaos. He’d never found comfort in the thought that thousands of others did the same thing.
He remembered the supersonic crack of one bullet that passed close to his head and the wet noise it made as it punched through Xishi’s soft body. It severed her aorta and spilled the teenager’s blood in great gushes onto the cobblestones. A second round took Jianzhu’s face and life in the same instant with a gory display that had cost Pioneer at least a year’s sleep over the years since he’d seen it. The last time he saw Changfu, the older man was rushing toward PLA soldiers, who raised their guns, and then the mob blocked Pioneer’s view. His nerve and faith broke in that instant and he abandoned his friends on their field of battle.
The PLA lines broke and the protesters flooded the streets. Soldiers started firing in self-defense to protect themselves from a mob that was far beyond obeying orders. Pioneer had jumped over the fallen bodies of trampled soldiers and revolutionaries alike, even climbed over a tank to get out.
The protest was broken. The PLA controlled Tiananmen Square and the streets of Beijing.
The authorities never identified Pioneer as being present in Tiananmen Square. The party could never identify everyone who had been a part of the event, but that wasn’t considered a problem. It didn’t need to punish everyone. True leadership is a rare skill; they only had to punish those who had shown that talent. Many of the student leaders had died in the battle, and the party hunted the rest for years after. The government handed out lengthy sentences to many after trials that lasted only hours.
Unarrested, unmolested, Pioneer’s cowardice had bought his life and freedom when his friends’ bravery had bought them prison and death.