THE 1989 DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT IN FUJIAN AND ITS AFTERMATH
*
Mary S. Erbaugh and Richard Curt Kraus
From
The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the
Provinces, edited by Jonathan Unger (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.,
1991)
The 1989 democracy movement in Fujian province followed a very
different course from the tragedy in Beijing. The events in
Fujian were derivative, confined to a small group of
intellectuals and students, with very little participation by
workers or other citizens. Activists were well-informed about
developments in Beijing; they organized numerous demonstrations,
with a few slogans which matched those in Beijing but with no
specific demands. There was only one brief hunger strike, and
little tension before the 4 June Beijing massacre. The massacre's
impact was felt quite broadly throughout Fujian society, although
with considerable detachment, as people adjusted their lives to
China's newly uncertain political environment.
Fujian is one of the smaller of the traditional eighteen Han
provinces in both size and population, with 26 million people
living in an area the size of Nicaragua or Czechoslovakia.
Fujian's relative detachment in the 1989 democracy movement
strongly resembles reports we hear from Guangdong, and for
similar reasons. Fujian's sights have historically been trained
outward, away from Beijing, since the province has many other
sources of financial and cultural support. The economy has
boomed, while contacts outside China are close and increasing,
with half a million Taiwanese visitors in the first nine months
of 1989 alone. Trade and investment from Taiwan is enormous. In
addition to legal commerce through Hong Kong, smuggling between
Fujian and Taiwan is a thriving business. Fujian is now even
beginning to export labour to Taiwan; Taiwan sources report that
most of the crews of Taiwan ships come from Fujian, and Fujian
prostitutes now work in Taibei. Culturally distinct,
geographically cut off by high mountains, Fujian has often been
an independent-minded province. A Beijing student who visited
Fuzhou in February insisted that 'Fujian isn't really China', as
he tried to make sense of the wide-open atmosphere, stores
dripping with tropical fruit, fancy imported electronic goods,
and books which were difficult to obtain in Beijing, such as Yan
Jiaqi's history of the Cultural Revolution. Interior Fujian is
much poorer and more isolated than the prosperous, narrow coastal
strip where most people live.
We spent nine months of 1989 in Fujian. From 1 January through
the end of June we were in Fuzhou, where Kraus was resident
director of Oregon's Chinese language program at Fujian Teachers
University, while Erbaugh was researching language policy. From
October through December we lived in Xiamen, continuing our
research while Kraus was a visiting professor at Xiamen
University. We travelled extensively throughout Fujian,
especially during the period of greatest unrest. This report of
course is limited by the nature of our contacts, most of whom are
academics, artists, or journalists. We also base our report on
the
Fuzhou Evening News
, the
Fujian Daily
, the
Xiamen Daily
, and Fujian television. We give disproportionate emphasis here
to Fuzhou, although we know that Xiamen, and probably other
cities, had similar experiences. (1)
Seven Weeks of Demonstrations: From Hu Yaobang's Death to the
Beijing Massacre
Former Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang died on 15 April,
mourned by
Xinhua
as a 'fighting pioneer' who had a strong 'experimental spirit'.
Hu suffered a heart attack during an 8 April Political Bureau
meeting; Fujian rumour had it that he collapsed when his former
ally, Hu Qili, told him that he had no right to voice an opinion.
The news of the nature of his death must have unnerved China's
geriatric leadership, especially since no report of his illness
was issued until a week after his death.
Fujian Teachers University was quick to reveal public mourning.
Students from the history and Chinese departments placed huge
paper flower funeral wreaths outside a dormitory. A traditional
funeral-style altar offering appeared in a dormitory doorway,
with steamed bread (covered with flies), wine, incense, roses and
funeral inscriptions arranged in front of Hu's portrait, cut from
the newspaper. This mini-shrine disappeared the following day,
but the wreaths, large pencil-drawn funeral portraits, ten-foot
banners, and big-character posters remained in place for a week.
In very literary language these wished 'Teacher Hu' peace as his
soul passed beyond the rivers of hell. A scattering of
mimeographed fliers glued to the walls bemoaned his death as 'the
greatest tragedy in our young lives'. Others were explicitly
political, complaining of the poor pay and lack of respect for
intellectuals, whose cause Hu was believed to have championed.
On Saturday, 22 April, the University held a memorial service,
organized around the Central Television broadcast of Hu Yaobang's
funeral. Students ridiculed Yang Shangkun's accent in reading a
long eulogy, claiming he pronounced 'The national anthem' (
guoge
) so it sounded like 'The devil's anthem' (
guige
). People seemed unfamiliar with the faces of the leaders and
uncertain about their backgrounds, suggesting, for example, that
Zhao Ziyang was a native of Sichuan.
Much of the region ignored Hu's death. An American student who
spent 15-19 April in a small Jiangxi town near the Fujian border
town did not hear about Hu's death until she returned to Fuzhou.
(2)
Student excitement built as 4 May approached. The University
scheduled extra dances, outings, and cultural events to absorb
excess energy, but at noon on 4 May several thousand students
marched through Fuzhou. Striking features of this first
demonstration were that at least 90 per cent of the marchers were
male, and that there had been little preparation or coordination.
Students carried few signs or banners, although one group held
aloft an empty length of red cloth, with faded marks where paper
characters had once been pasted, possibly once used to open a
conference or to promote birth control.
A blocks-long column of people marched fifteen abreast in steady
rain. Erbaugh walked alongside on the sidewalk, asking a dozen
marchers where they were going, but none of them knew. The
students seldom chanted; the few slogans included 'Long live the
4 May Movement!' 'Down with corruption!' 'Down with Zhao Ziyang!'
'Long live the People's Republic of China!' 'Long live freedom
and democracy!' and, startlingly, 'Long live teachers!' Erbaugh
asked many students what they were marching for. Most replied
with vague remarks about freedom. Some personalized their
protest: teachers don't make enough money and they did not want
to be teachers.
The march made its way to the heart of the city, where Fujian
Teachers University students joined demonstrators from Fuzhou
University, the medical school, and the agricultural college in
May First Square, under the stony gaze of a giant statue of Mao
Zedong. At the main shopping district, some stores took the
precaution of locking their steel gates, while sidewalks, roof
tops and overpasses filled up with shop clerks and customers,
hustlers and workers and neighbourhood residents, grinning with
excitement, asking 'what's going on?' 'Long live freedom!' 'Long
live students!' the marchers replied.
TV news vans captured the happy demonstrators on videotape, and
buses with university officials scanned the crowd. Police calmly
diverted traffic. Seventeen kilometres from campus, the marchers
reached Provincial Party Headquarters. The gates were chained
shut, guarded by a row of police. The crowd milled about; some
shoved toward the gates, but retreated. After an inconclusive
confrontation, the area was deserted by early evening. Police
were quite relaxed all day. They had been called out in advance
at all major intersections. Traffic was blocked but there was no
real trouble. Many students took photographs. Students laughed
when asked about the risk of having their cameras smashed, or
being photographed by the police. 'No danger', they said. 'We are
students. No one will hurt us'. And that day, in Fuzhou, no one
did.
Students fearlessly continued to march every Wednesday afternoon
(when there were no classes anyway), and at other times, cutting
class. 'We support the Beijing students, and we don't want to
work for those lousy teachers' salaries when we graduate' was the
consensus. Class attendance fell by 80 per cent in many
departments. Faculty members seemed unperturbed: 'they are young,
you know'. Students said that at least eight of their number had
gone to Beijing in mid-May, but returned soon after. Students
themselves collected funds for train and bus fares, as well as
heavily-used fax, long distance phone calls, and mimeographed and
photocopied communications.
The biggest demonstration that we saw occurred on 16 May.
Bookstore clerks asked us what the march was about; they had not
heard of events in Beijing. When other bystanders set off
firecrackers, no one reacted, American-style, as if it might be
gunfire. A fat middle-aged Communist Youth League official who
had given a long TV speech on patriotism and public order,
strolled about the rally in May First Square, walkie-talkie in
hand, before riding off in a chauffeured limousine with a
beautiful woman in the back seat. No one paid attention to him,
far less threatened to punch him, as might well have happened at
a Western demonstration.
This absence of anger was impressive. Most of the demonstrators
were lighthearted, and the atmosphere was often picnic-like, even
when it rained. The police smiled benignly on the crowds, who
enjoyed sympathetic local media coverage. No speeches were given
at any of the demonstrations we witnessed or heard described. Nor
did we see or hear of petitions or lists of demands.
When our students from the University of Oregon observed the 16
May demonstration, they naively failed to understand that Chinese
officials would not distinguish between their participation
(which they did not intend) and their merely walking along with
their Chinese friends (whose company proved irresistible). Two of
the blondest Oregonians were broadcast on that evening's local
news, easily identifiable in a close-up, in the centre of a crowd
of thousands of Chinese. Discipline was immediate. Several
officials telephoned to rebuke Kraus for his failure to control
the Americans even before the broadcast ended. Although the
students presented university officials with a self-criticism
written in Chinese, Fujian police refused to extend any student's
visa beyond the end of the school term.
By 18 May, when demonstrations reached their peak, student
marchers were joined by a scattering of older intellectuals and
secondary school students. Demonstrations spread to smaller
cities, not only Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, but also to such remote
places as Nanping and Longyan. (3) We were in Ningde, a small
district capital in mountainous northern Fujian on 18 May, where
we watched some five hundred young people march excitedly with
signs saying 'Support the Beijing students'.
When Li Peng imposed martial law on Beijing on 20 May, the
quality of the Fujian demonstrations changed. Some students
became more cautious, others bolder. In Fuzhou that day, a
thousand students blocked the express train to Beijing, demanding
to see Vice-Governor Chen Mingyi (Governor Wang Zhaoguo was in
Europe), but dispersed peacefully after five hours. From this
time on, demonstrators stopped chanting slogans critical of Zhao
Ziyang, who had become a more sympathetic figure in their eyes.
As the standoff in Beijing dragged on, so did the Fujian
demonstrations. On 27 May we watched from the top of a hill as
the remaining hard-core demonstrators blocked a major bridge over
the Min River for an hour.
Fujian officials were reluctant to take tough measures against
demonstrators, perhaps because they could not predict the outcome
of the crisis. Some officials informally said this was an issue
for the central government, not local authorities. Some correctly
predicted dates and times of future demonstrations. As late as 18
May, leaders of the Provincial Party Committee received
demonstrators and praised their patriotism. Other actions, such
as diverting traffic and cancelling classes, could be interpreted
as tacit support. Coastal Fujian has profited from Zhao Ziyang's
reformist policies; Governor Wang Zhaoguo, once a leading member
of the Party Secretariat, had been transferred to Fujian after
the 1976 dismissal of his patron, Hu Yaobang.
The leaders' hesitancy also emerged in their treatment of
Fuzhou's statue of Mao Zedong, which towers over May First
Square. In March Mao had been wrapped in scaffolding, as Fuzhou
belatedly prepared to follow Beijing and other cities in
destroying this Cultural Revolution relic. But the demonstrations
changed the political climate, so that tearing down the statue
might appear to be a deliberately militant gesture against Mao's
memory. Fujian's large PLA forces, for instance, might have
misinterpreted this as yielding to the demonstrators. So the
scaffolding went up and down repeatedly during the spring as
officials debated. Eventually, Mao was simply cleaned up a bit,
although two large flanking walls with copies of poems in Mao's
hand were torn down.
Response to the Beijing Massacre
We were awakened about 1 am on 4 June by voices singing 'The
Internationale', then watched thousands of students march past
our apartment, singing, shouting and crying, moving toward the
city centre. News of the Beijing massacre had reached the campus
even while it continued. Some students were terrified that troops
from a neighbouring base would attack their dormitories, but no
confrontations occurred. We did see an unusual number of military
transport planes fly out of Fuzhou over the next few days,
perhaps ferrying troops to the North.
After dawn, University loudspeakers played 'The Internationale'
and 'the funeral dirge' over and over, using the same
widely-available tape which had accompanied Hu Yaobang's funeral
broadcast. An early afternoon bike tour of the city revealed an
absolutely quiet, normal, hot Sunday: little girls in lace
dresses, popsicle sellers, fruit vendors, old men lying on rattan
couches in the street listening to opera. There were no wall
posters, fliers, speeches, or students, nor were extra police or
soldiers visible. Late in the afternoon, a police sound truck
cruised by. These vehicles usually harangue listeners to obey
traffic laws or practice family planning, but this time a female
voice spat out the words 'Beijing', 'putting down disorder', and
'injured soldiers'. Cyclists slowed down to ride alongside,
trying to make out what turned out to be the
People's Daily
editorial. If soldiers had been injured, what about the
civilians? People's faces went stiff with concern, but no one
said a word.
On Monday the 5 June, students marched again and again, this time
organized by department, carrying banners with mourning slogans
and beautifully drawn fists, hearts, and drops of blood. These
slogans were heartfelt and colloquial, a poignant contrast to the
highly formal eulogies for Hu Yaobang. Even the shyest women
students marched, some in high heels and parasols, outraged and
heartsick. Many held aloft large tape recorders playing the
funeral dirge. Still, there was no conflict with the police, many
of whom were rumoured to be sympathetic.
That day the Oregon students took their already scheduled final
examinations, then went through graduation ceremonies in an
atmosphere of horror. University officials and members of faculty
were grey-faced with worry about their children and friends in
Beijing. Phone calls and telegrams were not getting through. Our
offer to cancel that night's farewell banquet was immediately
accepted with relief.
Many Chinese students maintained a vigil in the centre of campus
on the night of 5 June, singing 'The Internationale' and the
national anthem over and over, chanting, terribly upset. Slogans
included 'We won't go to sleep till Li Peng hangs himself' (
Li Peng bu shangdiao, women bu shuijiao
). Another described chopping Deng Xiaoping into tiny pieces,
stewing him up into a brew too stinking to swallow. Students were
delighted when Americans pointed out that 'Deng' is a pun with
the English 'dung'. But there was a realistic acceptance that
further demonstrations would be dangerous. We only witnessed one
more, on 6 June, when a small group from the provincial
agricultural college marched somewhat dejectedly through the
centre of Fuzhou.
On 6 June, Australian English instructor Rod Curnow hiked two
hours up a mountain above Fuzhou to a friend's native village
which is barely reachable by road. The villagers had heard news
of the massacre, but were indifferent. They thought Deng was a
fine leader, though the last time they were interested in
politics was 1981 when Deng gave them back their land. They were
also happy with Deng for allowing them to purchase wives from
Sichuan.
The Oregon students remained calm despite frantic phone calls
from family in the US. The Beijing-focus of Western reporting
made many American parents believe that civil war had broken out
over all China. Many callers insisted that the students, deprived
of the American mass media, could not possibly understand what
was happening in China. The students patiently rearranged their
travel plans and left by bus for Hong Kong. Hysteria reigned,
however, among American English teachers (and covert Christian
missionaries) at the South China Women's College, a private
institution in Fuzhou. Some feared that they would be taken
hostage by the PLA, to be held until the United States gave up
Fang Lizhi. Rumours spread wildly that five children of Fujian
Teachers University faculty members had been killed in Beijing,
and that the father of a murdered student had posted an anguished
big-character poster at the school gate. Chinese friends assured
us that no such poster existed, and that the five offspring
originally feared missing had all been safely accounted for.
Fuzhou closed its universities two weeks early, but on 6 June the
national and provincial education commissions demanded that
schools make students return to class. A poster on campus and a
tiny notice in the
Fujian Daily
requested that students return. Fujian Teachers University sent
postcards to families 'within convenient travelling distance'
instructing them to send their children back. Many families, of
course, kept their children safe at home. One mother, a PLA
member from Xiamen, had rushed to Fuzhou on 4 June to take her
son back to her unit, where he would be safe.
By 18 June, Fuzhou was utterly quiet, though the People's
Liberation Army printing factory across the street broke its
normal silence to crank its noisy presses around the clock for
three days, churning out what were no doubt copies of 'Comrade
Deng Xiaoping's Important Speech'. Late in June, toasts at our
farewell banquet were confined to 'Fujian-Oregon Friendship',
leaving out the national governments entirely. No one wanted to
mention Beijing. We declined a banquet by the provincial
government for fear of being opportunistically televised as
foreign supporters of Beijing (as happened in other cities to
Western visitors). But we heard of only one case of a foreigner
being subjected to a hardline Beijing view of the virtues of
martial law.
Xiamen's demonstrations had been much like those in Fuzhou,
perhaps with more fliers and posters. Xiamen University
loudspeakers had broadcast news from BBC and the Voice of
America. A few students had held a hunger strike for two days in
front of the Cultural Palace, which ended when the University
president came to speak to them personally after Li Peng declared
martial law. The police were calm, even vacating a police box on
Zhongshan Road so that the students could climb up and take
photos. As in Fuzhou, on the night of the Beijing massacre many
Xiamen University students feared an impending military attack on
their campus. Much discussion concerned the direction PLA troops
were facing, whether toward Kuomintang-controlled Jinmen (Quemoy)
or toward the campus. Some students stood guard around campus
with bottles and bats.
Fujian is a long way from Beijing, and historically has been
little concerned with the capital and its politics. When the
demonstrations first began, much of Fujian's local intelligentsia
regretted that Fujian was this way, as the demonstrations were
tepid compared those of cities and provinces further north. After
the massacre, the same people were relieved that the locals are
more interested in making money than in politics. Others took
pride in Fujian's avoidance of violence. A surprising number of
intellectuals said that the Beijing students should have stayed
home or that people who block traffic deserve what they get. Many
intellectuals followed the government in distinguishing sharply
between student demonstrators and those from worker or other
backgrounds. One reason Fuzhou stayed calm, we were told, was
because 3,000 petty criminals, scheduled for release in May, had
been detained in prison until the crisis passed. Depressingly,
Fujian was one of the earliest provinces to express support for
the troops, on 6 June. Later we heard (perhaps incorrectly) that
the head of the provincial Communist Party, Chen Guangyi, is
married to Deng Xiaoping's niece, and was merely fulfilling his
family obligations.
An Elitist Movement
As in Beijing, the chief slogan of the demonstrators was
'democracy'. The meaning of democracy for most Fuzhou
demonstrators was vague at best. Their demand had little
relationship to Western concepts of popular rule. In the words of
Jackie Smith, an American studying Chinese, 'When I asked a
student in Fuzhou what democracy meant for her, she defined it as
a policy of accepting [educated] people into government roles
based upon their skills and not upon their connections. As the
system is now, she and many others - though they may be qualified
- are unable to enter governing positions'. (4) Others were
horrified at the suggestion that truly popular elections would
have to include peasants, who would certainly out-vote educated
people like themselves.
Fuzhou students seemed mostly concerned with improving their own
economic situations. Although students make up only 2 per cent of
the college-age population in China, in Fujian they rarely
reached out to other groups. Specific complaints about a lack of
personal or press freedom almost never reached our ears; they
were not prominent even in the slogans shouted. What the
intellectuals deeply resented was financial pressures, fearing a
drop in living standards. The hottest topic among educators, and
the students at our university, who were all future teachers, was
the low wages and bad living conditions for teachers. Many
students firmly believed that US teachers are the most
highly-paid members of society, while Chinese teachers make less
money than the lowest peasant or street peddler. This mix of
doggedly optimistic ignorance about the West and gloom about
their own position in Chinese society formed the basic ideology
of the student demonstrators.
Intellectuals also resent pressures from runaway internal
immigration which fuels inflation, crowds buses, and limits
housing. Fuzhou, with an official population of 700,000, has had
250,000 such migrants in the past year; some 30,000 lived in our
neighbourhood, a dozen inside the dormitory building under
construction twenty metres away from us.
A lack of respect for their status also depresses intellectuals.
According to an instructor at our university, in 1988 two hundred
grade schools in Fujian closed down completely because of a lack
of funds. Sixty per cent of the teachers in the province's
community-funded
minban
schools are unqualified, lacking even a junior high-school level
teacher-training course. (5) The teacher's union investigated 200
cases of teachers who were beaten by students in 1988. (6) In
addition, many classrooms and teacher's dormitories are
physically unsafe. Both Fujian and Beijing TV news featured a
Pingtan Island classroom with such huge holes in the floor that
second-floor students could watch and hear classes on the first.
While there were no clashes with police or soldiers in Fujian,
open tension between students and the army erupted even before
the demonstrations began, poignantly prefiguring the class
barriers between urban students and rural recruits which
exacerbated the Beijing tragedy. Fujian Teachers University is in
a neighbourhood with many military installations. When women
students from the Fine Arts department were mocked by a group of
local troops one Saturday evening in March, the women sent for
their male classmates to defend their honour. During the ensuing
confrontation, a soldier cut one young artist's face with a
broken bottle. Provincial Party Secretary Chen Guangyi is said to
have negotiated a settlement whereby the PLA apologized and
agreed to hire a top-rank plastic surgeon to repair the damage.
A similar incident broke out in Xiamen shortly after Hu Yaobang's
death, when a group of picnicking Xiamen University students
taunted a group of soldiers: 'What are you doing here? Defending
us against Taiwan? Taiwan businessmen are everywhere!' The
soldiers beat up a student, generating the immediate cause of the
first Xiamen demonstration. The somewhat narcissistic thrust of
the Fuzhou demonstrations also emerged in the reaction to a fight
in which Fujian Teacher's University soccer players were beaten
and hospitalized after they played Fuzhou University. This
mid-May incident sparked large, angry big-character posters on
campus which drew larger and more sympathetic crowds than any
other poster last spring.
Students could not easily overcome their isolation from other
social groups. In Xiamen, bystanders made few expressions of
support for demonstrators, although some donation boxes appeared.
Some local merchants made contributions, while in Fuzhou workers
in one factory donated 10,000 yuan in one hour. Some Xiamen
University students visited factories to solicit worker support,
but stopped quickly after the factory managers visited campus
officials to complain. Outreach to other groups was limited, in
part because students know so little about them. Many firmly
believe, as do their professors, that peasants have become the
richest class in China, and that all market peddlers have large
secret stashes of money. Yet when asked why they don't turn to
trade, most react with horror. There was no mention of women's
issues, but they are increasingly urgent, with women being
kidnapped and sold as brides, fired from their jobs
en masse
as part of 'streamlined' management schemes, incidents of female
infanticide, and so on. Several employers at a commercial spring
job fair openly refused to employ women.
No Shortage of Information
Many people in Hong Kong and the West mistakenly believe that
Chinese in the provinces had no idea of the events in Beijing.
When we visited Hong Kong in July, many were unwilling to believe
how much information was available in Fuzhou. Sources were
diverse.
The official Chinese media reported far more than most foreigners
realize. Even when the editorial twist was hostile, one could
glean important information. The
Fujian Daily
and the
Fuzhou Evening News
emphasized student apologies for disrupting public order in
their 20 May front page accounts of blocking the train tracks.
Highlighting the apologies may have been a deliberate effort to
protect the students. Other reports gave detailed accounts of
riots in Xi'an and Chengdu, complete transcripts of Li Peng's
televised meeting with student demonstrators, and of Tom Brokaw's
interview with Yuan Mu.
Foreign broadcasts were numerous. Many Chinese have shortwave
radios; during the crisis they shared them with friends to listen
to the BBC, Radio Australia, and Voice of America. The VOA and
BBC were broadcast over the loudspeakers on our campus and at
Xiamen University. Taiwan radio in Chinese, and Taiwan's
commercial English-language FM station, ICRT (International
Community Radio, Taiwan) reach Fuzhou clearly without shortwave.
Ordinarily ICRT broadcasts a bizarrely misplaced simulacrum of
midwestern American pop radio ('this song is dedicated to Tammy
Lin'), but during the crisis it became an all-news station,
relaying hours of reports from BBC, the US networks, and even its
own highly professional reporters who were in Beijing to cover
the meeting of the Asian Development Bank. None of these
broadcasts was jammed. Foreign broadcasts had been jammed for
several days in March, when the Chinese government imposed
martial law in Tibet. But from March on, the jammers let the
information flow.
We and our students continued to receive all mail, including very
critical articles, in English and Chinese. Mail was delayed for
several days after the burning of the train in Shanghai on 6
June, but all arrived, apparently unopened. Other reports came
via fax, sent directly from Hong Kong and elsewhere. Even after
the massacre, illustrated news stories faxed from Hong Kong were
posted on walls and lamp-posts around Fuzhou. Police did not
remove these until 7 June. Throughout the crisis summaries of BBC
reports, handwritten in Chinese, then xeroxed, were posted around
the city.
Hundreds of thousands of overseas Chinese visit Fujian every
year; many brought in Hong Kong and foreign newspapers, to say
nothing of verbal reports. Many Fujian intellectuals have
relatives in Beijing, whose letters and visits provided
additional information. An informal network of telephone contacts
kept people informed with impressive speed, as illustrated by the
Fujian Teachers University students' sombre march at 1 am on 4
June. A small number of Fujian students visited Beijing and
returned with stories about the demonstrations. Photographs of
the demonstrations there, including the 'Goddess of Democracy',
circulated freely. In addition, a Beijing student representative
was rumoured to be visiting Fuzhou. However, we saw no indication
of any student pamphlets or newspapers in Fujian, nor did any of
the short-lived publications by Beijing demonstrators seem to
make their way to Fujian.
After the massacre the flow of information diminished sharply,
although visitors to and from Beijing brought fresh and often
apparently accurate rumours (including reports of gunfire and the
assassination of soldiers). Most intellectuals derided official
television news, but even this conveyed a clear sense of the
depth of China's crisis. On the evening of 4 June the Beijing
nightly news program was unable to produce its customary weather
map, leading viewers to speculate (correctly) that Chinese
television headquarters was under siege. Off-camera reporters
relied upon titles on the screen, apparently to shield themselves
from blame for the lies they were forced to report. One
anchorwoman defiantly wore black clothes, for which she was
reportedly assigned off-camera work. Some editors sabotaged the
official line in subtle ways, for instance by broadcasting on two
successive nights (5 and 6 June) the same irrelevant stories
about grain in North China and fibre optic surgery on injured
kneecaps. And when Deng Xiaoping was finally brought out for
display on 9 June, Beijing television editors chose to broadcast
a segment in which the elderly Deng was unable to speak clearly,
requiring a prompt from Li Peng in order to complete a sentence.
None of these images suggested a government in control.
A Half-hearted Campaign to Restore Order
After the massacre, Beijing authorities attempted to restore
order to the capital by destroying the remnants of the student
movement. Fujian officials mounted their own less heavy-handed
campaign. The only visible sign of Beijing's harshness were
posters in Fuzhou's Taijiang commercial district (a river-front
neighbourhood full of transients) describing the most-wanted
Beijing demonstration leaders. One member of Beijing's Academy of
Social Sciences was, in fact, arrested when he returned to his
Fuzhou home, and soon after the massacre a group of Beijing
student leaders were apprehended off the coast of Lianjiang
County in a fishing boat as they tried to sail to Taiwan. The
arrangements for this trip had been made through small-scale
entrepreneurs who supported the movement. Moreover, most of the
nearly 500 Chinese repatriated from Japan in March 1990 were
Fujianese who had left by boat in the confusion after the
massacre. In early December, our Xiamen University car was
stopped on the highway between Xiamen and Zhangzhou by a group of
machine-gun-toting officers who checked our vehicle for wanted
student and worker leaders from Beijing. But most of the efforts
to find other fugitives in Fujian were apparently unsuccessful.
Several dissidents escaped to Taiwan via Xiamen in late
September. (7) A few Fujian students were questioned by the
police, but we heard of no arrests. One Fuzhou participant in the
railway station sit-in was photographed by a security camera,
shouting to the crowd with a bullhorn. When the police questioned
him, he cleverly argued that he had been urging the crowd to
disperse. The Fujian police were willing to go along with such
evasions, but such a story would not have been long tolerated if
provincial officials had turned more repressive.
Many Fujian journalists were said to be deeply depressed by the
massacre. Some said that they been able to produce 'only three
days of real news'. Throughout the spring, Chinese TV broadcast
almost nightly news of the Palestinian uprising, often directly
after an item about Tibet. Such coverage stopped after the
massacre, though the news media were slow to present a coherent
official line. But by mid-June, Fuzhou newspapers and television
were obediently and soberly on-side and were praising four
mediocre colleges for their passive behaviour during the
demonstrations.
It was soon obvious that few people were taking the official line
seriously. Political meetings were highly routine. University
students were required to take turns reading Jiang Zemin's
National Day Speech aloud; faculty members engaged in empty
discussions. In at least some Fujian meetings, intellectuals
could read magazines or even nap. Individuals felt little
pressure to speak. Such meetings were reportedly without much
political interest, although at least one discussed Zhao Ziyang's
visit to Xiamen University, where he is said to have suggested
selling state-owned factories to foreign investors, a view which
his adversaries likened to Milton Friedman. Zhao Ziyang had also
visited Fuzhou in the spring; speaking without any handlers from
the military commission, he angered PLA commanders by proposing
that front-line troops had become superfluous and should be
dispersed. (8)
But Zhao was not held in disrepute by everyone. In August, the
Hui'an Stone Carving factory displayed a carving of both Zhao
Ziyang and Li Peng on a past inspection tour of the factory. The
grimace on Li Peng's face is unmistakably unpleasant. This little
bit of heresy had not been present in an earlier visit in May; it
sat beside two big carvings of Mao Zedong which were present in
May, but which sported new red ribbons by August.
The Situation in Late 1989
The Beijing massacre affected the Fujian economy, although its
impact is difficult to disentangle from the national policy of
cooling an over-heating growth. Before June limited electricity
supplies routinely blacked out whole neighbourhoods in Fuzhou as
local industry strained for extra power. By October production
had declined enough for an adequate power supply to the whole
city. Manufactured goods became cheaper, although food prices
continued to soar. The drop in business relieved some strain on
transportation, so that gasoline prices dropped by 40 per cent.
Exchange rates on the black market dropped by half, apparently
due to weakened demand for luxury imports. Xiamen suspended the
issuing of new business licenses, delayed the opening of several
restaurants, and closed at least three massage parlours. However,
Fuzhou opened several square blocks' worth of shiny new
businesses. Local officials attempted to cushion the economic
decline by continuing major highway construction projects. Taiwan
investment declined somewhat, but by autumn the number of Taiwan
visitors had actually increased over 1988 figures. Fujian has
never had many Western tourists, so this income loss was minimal
compared to that suffered by Guilin, Beijing, or Xi'an.
By autumn, students did not seem especially anxious. Foreign
reports that all freshmen in Xiamen had been sent to the
countryside for a year are incorrect. (9) We did hear that four
Fuzhou students had been denied graduate school admissions
because of political activity. Campuses were holding more
political meetings than in recent years, but of a rather routine
sort. Credible stories of impressive solidarity among
intellectuals who participated in demonstrations reached us from
many sources. One describes how an entire work unit lied to
protect one of its members who had marched. But plausible rumours
of students recruited to spy upon their professors also
circulated. Members of faculty in controversial areas were
understandably toning down some of their lectures until the
political freeze ended.
The greatest anxiety arose from young intellectuals who were
hoping to go abroad. One of Kraus's jobs in Fujian was to arrange
for six Fuzhou academics to spend a year at Oregon universities.
After the massacre they all worried that first, the US side would
cancel their visits, then, that China would do so (as in fact
happened in one case). Some young intellectuals were trying very
hard to emigrate, leading to unpleasant and bizarre
conversations. One painter insisted that we should show photos of
his work to US millionaires. He was unwilling to believe that we
know no millionaires.
By November Fujian had settled down into a campaign against
pornography. This served as a cover for purging books by the
likes of Yan Jiaqi, but it also allowed the Party to move
discussion away from the massacre toward such pettier issues as
playing-cards with pictures of naked women. The campaign focused
on Fujian, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Hainan. It appeared milder
than the 1987 campaign which banned the song 'Never on Sunday'
for glorifying prostitution. In Fujian, at least, several
intellectuals spoke of the new direction with relief. Most proper
Chinese intellectuals agree not only that pornography should be
controlled, but also that it is better to burn books than to bury
the scholars.
But views about the future were far from uniform. The younger
intellectuals were bitter toward Deng Xiaoping, and deeply
depressed. Middle-aged veterans of the Red Guard wars were more
optimistic. Some even continued to regard Deng Xiaoping as a
necessary leader for China, as the immediate alternatives struck
them as even nastier. One artist was overheard telling his
friends with anger that Fang Lizhi had pushed a good situation
too far: 'Fang Lizhi sings his song for only a handful of people
- why should he screw up cultural relations for everyone?' Still
others obediently went through the motions of Party loyalty, but
with many private reservations.
By late 1989, new slogans were painted up in Fuzhou and along the
coastal highway. But their content was perhaps consciously
benign: 'conserve water', 'promote afforestation, plant fruit
trees, wipe out poverty'. The Fuzhou Mao statue now appeared as a
backdrop for TV news stories. In November, the Xiamen University
Party Committee announced moves to clamp down against abuses in
the allocation of housing and foreign travel opportunities, and
in the management of university-owned enterprises. But such
efforts were having little impact on the attitudes of the
university staff. The great majority of intellectuals, it seemed,
were more united than at any time since 1949, in their powerful
belief that the current regime has forfeited its legitimacy.
Endnotes
1 We have used information learned from Yoshiko Ashiwa, David
Wank, Jackie Smith, Gretchen Ross, Rod Curnow, and Ian McKelvey,
as well as many Chinese friends and acquaintances who must remain
anonymous. We are responsible for the interpretation of events in
Fujian, and for any inaccuracies which may remain in this report.
2 Jackie Smith, personal communication (20 April 1989).
3 '
Wosheng gedi gaoxiao shengyuan shoudu xuesheng qingyuan
huodong
' [Higher Education Activities Throughout our Province Support
the Beijing Students' Petition], Fujian Daily, 19 May 1989.
4 Jackie Smith, 'Report from China',
Capital Area Peace Studies Chronicle
, vol.1, no.1 (September 1989), pp.4-5.
5 'Zaojiu gao zhiliangde jiaoshi duiwu, tigao da, zhong, xiaoxue
jiaoxue zhiliang' [Create a High-quality Teaching Corps, Raise
the Quality of Education in Trade Schools, Secondary Schools, and
Colleges],
Fujian Daily
, 30 March 1989.
6 Chen Zongliang and Xue Congmeng, 'Weihu jiaoshi hefa quanyi'
[Protect the Legal Rights and Interests of Teachers],
Fujian Daily
, 4 April 1989.
7 Voice of America, 1 October 1989.
8 Luo Bing, 'Junwei wenjian pi Zhao tu yong bing zizhong'
[Military Commission Documents Criticize Zhao for Using the
Military for His Own Purposes],
Zhengming
, no.143 (September 1989), p.11.
9 Frank Viviano, 'Part of China Still Talks Openly of Democracy',
San Francisco Chronicle
, 4 October 1989.
