Final essay

Plumes of smoke from fires frame the Gate of Heavenly Peace, as soldiers pile the students’ possessions to burn them. No civilians are present. This world is inhabited only by khaki-clad, helmeted men whose sole task is destroying evidence. The soldiers pore over a flotsam of hastily abandoned tents, sleeping bags, and papers. A swathe of red banners tumbles along the ground, its scarlet a vis- ceral echo of the bloodshed preceding this scene. It is June 4th, 1989, early in the morning; the violence is unseen but ever present.

Swarms of armored personnel carriers, their guns stark against Tiananmen Gate, stand where Chairman Mao stood 40 years earlier in 1949 to declare the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Tank after tank is lined up in front of the most politically charged site in China.

These scenes at Tiananmen were witnessed only by the army. The students had finally straggled out of the square after seven weeks, leaving at gunpoint as 150,000 soldiers were mobilized in a massive military operation. The number of dead still remains unknown. The preliminary Chinese account put it at 241, including 23 soldiers. The Chinese Red Cross initially estimated that 2,600 people had died, a figure basically corroborated by the Swiss ambassador who had vis- ited Beijing’s hospitals and claimed 2,700 had died, but both quickly withdrew these figures under diplomatic pressure. A  U.S.  diplo- matic cable from June 22, 1989 concluded that such numbers were

Soldier1 ::

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not unreasonable “given the nature of the conflict and the weapons used by the PLA.” In any case, the numbers do not convey the sheer sense of betrayal as the People’s Army turned its weapons on its own people.

For one of the soldiers involved, it took time—days, weeks, even years—to make sense of his role in what happened. To this day, the scenes he captured on the square as a 17-year-old military photog- rapher obsess him. Today, Chen Guang is a painter whose artwork reverberates with echoes of that night; he creates whole collections that he knows cannot be publicly shown in mainland China. That night bisects his life. He will never regain the innocence he once had or forget what had taken it from him. It also bisects the life of the nation; China’s modern history pivots on that night—though it is unspoken and increasingly unknown among the younger generation.

Perhaps the most sinister of all Chen Guang’s pictures are the most innocuous: propped up against the wall, a triptych of almost identical paintings of a wristwatch. It is a silver-colored wristwatch with a metal strap, a cream face, and a cheap jewel set at 12:00. Under that is a red outline of the Gate of Heavenly Peace set above the word “Beijing.” Beneath the watch’s central pivot is a small sketch of an olive-helmeted soldier, his face resolute and determined. Along the bottom of the watch in small Chinese characters are the words “June 89 to Commemorate the Quelling of the Turmoil.” This watch was the souvenir given to all martial law troops who took part in the suppression of the pro-democracy movement.

•  •  •  •

Chen Guang was waiting for me by the side of a potholed road, watching a pack of stray dogs scavenge among grubby plastic bags spinning in the wind. A  slight, sprightly figure with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, he wore a well-cut black coat with a fashion- able, detachable collar. In this outer suburb of Beijing, grey factories push up against spartan brick bungalows, all melting into the nev- er-ending horizon of urban sprawl punctuated by pointillist piles of trash. Chen led me to his studio tucked away in the inner depths of

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a printing factory where no one cared about what he was painting. An air of diffidence distinguished Chen Guang from the brash painter-entrepreneurs making millions from China’s art boom. His decision to paint pictures that cannot be shown has shut him out from the easy money and “insta-fame” that have become the badges of success.

As a child, Chen Guang’s dream of becoming an artist had seemed impossibly aspirational. He was born to a factory worker father and a housewife mother in a farming town in the poverty-stricken county of Shangqiu in Henan province, a place that has since become notorious as the ground zero of an AIDS ep- idemic. Desperately poor peasant farmers had sold their only com- modity—their blood—to government-sponsored blood collectors, who pooled the blood, skimmed off the plasma, and then re-infused the remaining red blood cells back into the farmers, facilitating the spread of AIDS through the area’s farming villages. Though Chen was unaffected by the crisis, his poor grades at school had left him with dim prospects. “People thought you had to either find a job or join the army,” he told me. “There was no third path.” So in the spring of 1988, at just 16 years of age, he dropped out of high school. The minimum age for enlisting in the People’s Liberation Army was 18. He lied about his age, hoping that military service would provide him with a springboard into the prestigious military art academy.

Joining the army was a decision Chen regretted from the very moment he boarded the train for his new barracks in Zhangjiakou in Hebei province. From day one, he was exhausted by the unre- mittingly grueling routines of army life. Each day started at 5:30 a.m., with an obligatory cross-country run in cold so bitter that it made him retch. By the time he returned to base, a thin layer of ice had formed on his cotton cap. The day’s activities consisted mostly of endless drilling and political education sessions, in which the soldiers listened to army officers reading the PLA newspaper out loud and then painstakingly explaining the correct understanding of each article. Worst of all was the lack of sleep; soldiers were forced to get up several times a night to stand watch, participate in night- time training sessions, and endure emergency inspections, during which they were required to leap out of their beds to pack up their

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entire kits in five minutes flat. By May 1989, having been in the army for just over a year, Chen Guang was disillusioned. Nothing had prepared him for the rigors of army life, which had taken a toll on his health, leaving him struggling with chronic bronchitis and diarrhea.

One May day as his unit was drilling, a warning siren sud- denly began to blare. The order had come down: His unit was being deployed to Beijing to defend the capital from “serious upheaval.” Chen and his fellow soldiers did not know what this meant. At the time, they had little idea that there had been massive demonstra- tions snaking through the capital’s streets in an unprecedented display of public protest. They did not know that students had first marched in mid-April to mourn the sudden death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang, and then—emboldened by the government’s restrained response—had begun to issue calls for press freedom, democracy, and an end to corruption. They did not know that many thousands of workers, even from government ministries, had joined the marches. They did not know that there were divisions at the highest level of government about how to deal with the protests, with the reformers pitted against the conservatives. And they did not know—yet—that they themselves were to become pawns in a political game with the highest stakes.

For the most part, the soldiers—raw country boys in their teens—didn’t expend much energy thinking about what they were heading into. If anything, it seemed like an adventure. Few of them had visited the capital before, and they were finally being offered the chance. “We weren’t scared, we thought it would be fun,” said Chen Guang, laughing wheezily as he remembered their naïve excite- ment. “We felt that going to Beijing would be more fun than doing drills at base.” Their barracks in Zhangjiakou were about 100 miles from the capital, but the journey took the soldiers two days and two nights, packed tightly into green army trucks bumping over isolated and winding mountain roads.

For soldiers hoping for some fun, the Chinese capital initially seemed even more boring than barracks life. Chen Guang’s unit was billeted at a PLA shooting range in Shijingshan, 12 miles due west of Beijing. With no drilling grounds available, they spent every

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day listening to articles read out loud from the PLA Daily and the People’s Daily. They were repeatedly told that an extremely small number of troublemakers with ulterior purposes had taken advan- tage of the situation. This minority, they were told, was opposed to the leadership of the Communist Party and the Socialist system. Its aim was to sow dissension among the people and plunge the coun- try into chaos. The army must be resolute and comply with the or- ders of the party. For Chen Guang, the mission was clear-cut. As a soldier trained in the art of obedience, the very thought of question- ing an order—even in the privacy of his own head—was impossible.

On May 19th, as China’s Premier Li Peng declared martial law would go into effect the following day, the order the soldiers had been waiting for was finally issued:  to secure Tiananmen Square. Their convoy set out from the barracks, but had only traveled a few miles before the trucks were swamped by successive waves of people surging forward to enclose them. Each time they nosed forward, a new wave of people crested around them, backed up by trucks and buses blocking the roads. The soldiers were hemmed in by this out- pouring of humanity whose aim was to block the troops’ advance into the city. For Chen, this was a turning point. “It didn’t feel fun anymore,” he remembered. “It felt real.”

Those surrounding the trucks were both students and ordinary citizens. Trying to employ reason against the use of force, they deployed a continuous stream of talk to counter the political educa- tion the soldiers had been receiving inside their barracks, with one speaker taking over from another. This continued day and night. The students and citizens spread newspapers on the ground and slept in front of the wheels of the PLA trucks. They told the soldiers that their duty was to protect the border regions and ensure the safety of Chinese territory, and not to deploy to the capital where their presence was not needed. This combination of earnest stu- dents and kindly grandmothers argued and pleaded with the young men in the trucks not to use violence against the Chinese people. The soldiers were under orders not to reply; they were packed so tightly into their trucks, they had to take turns sitting down.

This was not at all the kind of reception that Chen had been expecting. “The atmosphere was not like some kind of turmoil,” he

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remembered. “The students were very friendly, with bright smiles. Their spirit was welcoming.” Three days and four nights passed as it became increasingly clear that the PLA chiefs had neither pre- pared for this eventuality nor formed a strategy for the next step. Each soldier was carrying only one bread roll. At first, the troops refused offers of sustenance from the students, but as the hours stretched into days, they were unable to bear their hunger. “A few people accepted,” Chen Guang remembered. “And then the stu- dents were so enthusiastic—they really wanted to feed us—that you could only refuse them so many times, then you felt embarrassed and accepted.” People gave instant noodles, bread, fruit, and min- eral water to the grateful troops, and slowly the barriers between the besiegers and the besieged crumbled.

As the days passed, the citizens began to vary the topics of their lectures, tiring of the one-note pleas against violence. Instead, Chen remembered listening to a riff on the meaning of life, fol- lowed by a lecture on the spread of corruption within China. For Chen, this unexpected civic education was beginning to have an effect, “All at once you felt like you hadn’t understood this society. Does China really have that many corrupt people? Is there so much injustice? You suddenly started to think about these problems. Before that, you didn’t have that kind of consciousness. Though you couldn’t talk to the students, their words had an effect on your mind.” Once Chen had mentally formulated such questions, they led to other questions that he had never considered, which in turn led to doubts,  “You might have said that our army was big and powerful, but at that time, we didn’t feel big and powerful. We felt very useless.”

Slowly the soldiers began to relax, lowering their guard to chat with the residents about their hometowns and their lives. At one point, the PLA—clearly worried about fraternization—began drop- ping leaflets from helicopters, warning the soldiers not to believe rumors and to remain resolute. The students scooped these up, hop- ing to keep them from the soldiers. By then, Chen was already un- able to bridge the gaping disconnect between what he was seeing and the army’s repeated warnings against troublemakers with ulte- rior motives. “You began to wonder which of the students were the

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bad ones. But it was hard to say who the bad ones were. Everyone seemed so normal.”

Finally, the order came to return to the barracks in Shijingshan. It did not feel in the least like a humiliating withdrawal. Beijingers set off firecrackers along the route of the soldiers’ retreat. The troops’ own relief combined with the students’ elation to create an atmos- phere of triumphant festivity. Banners were even hung from build- ings en route with slogans like “The PLA came on orders. We support you” and “There is no disorder in Beijing. You guys go on home.”

Chen’s unit was not the only one to have had this experience. At least seven PLA divisions had tried to enter the city around the same time to impose martial law. Their orders were to converge on the capital from the west, the southwest, the south, the east, and the north. All were immobilized by the sea of civilians and eventually forced to retreat, with some even finding it difficult to return to base.

The people had stood up to the army—using nothing but their bodies and their wits—and had won. For the students, this was a major triumph, a sign that their movement had become a mass movement. They saw it as tantamount to an admission by the gov- ernment that it had lost the trust of the people who granted its pre- rogative to rule, the traditional “mandate of heaven.” According to the Confucian philosopher Mencius, while heaven gave the ruler the right to rule, heaven sees with the eyes of its people, and hears with the ears of its people.

The people’s victory—which only increased the urgency of the central government’s need to regain control—was to be short-lived. Martial law was not rescinded. After returning to the garrison, the troops spent the next 10  days in a fog of intense ideological edu- cation. Their only task was to listen to lectures that warned them about the turmoil in Beijing and the importance of their mission to protect the capital. Then the order came for a second time: to secure Tiananmen Square.

•  •  •  •

The first time Chen Guang told me his story, he avoided giving too many details of that long night. He revealed his role in June 4th only

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gradually. The next time we met, I visited him in his new home in Songzhuang, a modest farming village 16 miles east of Beijing that has tried to reinvent itself as an art hub.

Instead of peasants selling watermelons by the roadside, artists squatted in the dust hawking bad Van Gogh copies or shaky line drawings of Chairman Mao drinking tea. Art supply shops had supplanted all others to the extent that purchasing gold-flecked calligraphy paper had become far easier than buying staples like fruit. The proliferation of art museums was exemplified by their names:  the Czech China Contemporary Art Gallery, the National Defense Art Zone, and the African Art Museum. But even the big- gest and the flashiest, Songzhuang Art Museum, was empty during my last few visits, its doors chained and windows covered in dust. These deserted exhibition spaces were testaments to the failure of the “build it and they will come” school of central planning. The authorities’ investment of $13 million to create a “cultural and crea- tive industry” cluster in Songzhuang had attracted some 4,000 art- ists, but it did not appear to have resulted in an economically viable artistic destination.

Chen Guang’s new home was inside a building site, hidden be- hind a bright blue corrugated iron fence. The approach was un- promising, consisting of a yellow dirt road frequented only by delivery trucks. But nestled out of view was a row of handsome three-story grey brick buildings. Although he was unable to show his work inside China, he was evidently doing reasonably well selling it overseas, as he had just bought a pair of neighboring industrial studios with 25-feet-high ceilings and chic mezzanine balconies. Sandwiched between two construction sites, his studio was a bright, airy refuge from the hammering and drilling ema- nating from the dozen 16-story buildings that were sprouting up behind his apartment.

Inside, two decades worth of paintings were propped up against the wall, carefully protected in bubble wrap. They represented and reinforced his memories of that night. As we sipped green tea and he chain-smoked, he told me what had happened.

The first sign that the troops would take a more covert approach to enter Beijing was the arrival on June 3rd at the shooting range

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of a truck piled high with civilian clothing. The authorities were determined that any second attempt to enter Beijing would not be derailed in the same way. Each soldier was ordered to pick out a civilian outfit to hide his true identity. Chen Guang chose a pair of navy-blue trousers and a grey T-shirt. Instead of entering the capital in trucks, as before, the mufti-clad soldiers were ordered to make their own way into central Beijing by subway, bus, or even on foot. The rendezvous point was the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square before 6:00 on that same evening.

At the time, Chen Guang was taking antibiotics for asthma and diarrhea, leading his superiors to fear that he might not be strong enough to reach the square on his own. He was ordered to travel to Tiananmen Square inside a converted public bus. When he saw it, he noticed that all the seats had been removed to make room for crates of guns and ammunition that were stacked up to the window ledges. Chen Guang, crouching alongside the crates, was the only passenger on the bus. His first emotion was relief that he was get- ting a ride, thereby avoiding the danger of getting lost in the huge, unfamiliar city.

The bus crawled into Beijing. It was blocked only once by a crowd of students who glanced inside perfunctorily and then let it continue on its way. At that time, Chen had no idea how lucky he had been. In fact, his journey was so smooth that he was one of the first soldiers to arrive at the Great Hall of the People, getting there at 3:30 p.m., more than two hours before the rendezvous time. He was ordered to unpack the bus and carry the guns inside. As he grappled with arm- fuls of submachine guns—five or six at a time—and hauled them into the Great Hall of the People, Chen’s hands and clothes became coated with the black grease in which the guns had been packed for preservation. As he toted the guns into the cavernous atrium, he saw that it was filling up with troops in plainclothes trying to find their own units. Once they had done so, they were given strips of colored cloth, each identifying a different unit, to tie around their arms until they could change into uniform. Chen was used to seeing the Great Hall of the People on the news, peopled by tidy tiers of delegates applauding politely as they attended annual meet- ings of the National People’s Congress. When he saw this hallowed

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place filling up with armed soldiers, he felt as though he had fallen through the cracks into an alternate, incomprehensible universe.

At around 6:00 p.m., the soldiers of Chen’s unit—now wearing their uniforms—were given a new task. They were told that they must rescue arms and ammunition that criminals had stolen from a bus that had been apprehended near the Telegraph building, close to the Xidan intersection of Chang’an Avenue. “Only then did I start feeling very afraid,” he remembered, as it dawned on him that a soldier just like himself had been discovered escorting weapons into central Beijing.

The next day he heard that, in the early hours of the morning of June 4th, a 25-year-old soldier named Liu Guogeng was murdered by a mob near to where the guns were taken. The image of his dead body became iconic in the state-run Chinese media since it illus- trated the real dangers faced by the martial law troops; Liu’s burned corpse had been suspended by the neck from a blackened public bus, naked but for his socks, an army hat incongruously perched on his head. He was instantly elevated to martyr status. His weeping father was shown on television being consoled by the country’s leaders.

According to an official account, Liu’s unit had been surrounded on Chang’an Avenue, where protesters had disabled some of the vehicles carrying troops and ammunition toward the back of the column. When Liu realized what had happened, he returned on foot to help his unit. The approved version of history, released in a book called The Truth about the Beijing Turmoil, describes what then happened, “A group of rioters turned upon them ferociously. Bricks, bottles, and iron sticks rained on their heads and chests. The driver was knocked unconscious there and then. Liu Guogeng was first beaten to death by some thugs, then his body was burned and strung on a bus. Afterwards, his body was disemboweled by a savage rioter.” This was part of an aggressive propaganda initiative in the initial aftermath of the killings, during which the govern- ment tried to saturate the country with its version of events.

On the streets, a widely circulated alternative version of events was that Liu had shot four people with his AK47 and was lynched after he ran out of ammunition. In fact, the photos of him hanging from a bus had been framed in such a way as to exclude the slogans

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scrawled in the dirt on the side of the bus: “He killed four people! Murderer! The People Must Win! Pay Back the Blood Debt!” To Chen, the sight of a soldier’s corpse suspended from the same kind of public bus in which he had transported weapons signaled some- thing altogether different. “This guy was doing the same thing as me,” he told me confidently, shrugging off the discrepancies.

On the evening of June 3rd, following orders to recapture the stolen weapons, Chen Guang’s battalion went out the backdoor on the west side of the Great Hall of the People, only to be met by a surging crowd once again using the sea-of-humanity tactic to swamp the soldiers. Chen and his battalion were immobilized. Protesters were still lecturing them, but now they were doing some- thing more, “Bricks came flying at us, from I don’t know where, and glass bottles. Some hit us in the head. Some soldiers’ faces were cov- ered in blood. We soldiers held onto each other very tightly, as the bricks and bottles bounced off our helmets.”

The troops had received no orders, so they simply sat down cross-legged outside the hall. At one point, they even engaged in a sing-off against those surrounding them, a farcical competition that may have lulled the students into a false sense of security. The soldiers belted out military songs, trying to drown out the students’ rendition of the Communist anthem, the “Internationale.” After about three and a half hours—sometime around 9:30—the troops were ordered to retreat back into the Great Hall of the People. Bricks smashed against the windows as they waited inside.

Then a period of high tension began. The troops stood lined up behind the massive doors to the square, waiting for the order. By about midnight, ammunition had been distributed—four clips per person, each carrying around 50 or 60 bullets, one clip to be loaded into the gun and the three others to be slung across their chests. “Of course I  was afraid,” Chen Guang said, his hands shaking as he poured another cup of delicate green tea. “When you have a gun with no bullets, it’s meaningless. It’s not even as dangerous as a kitchen knife. But once the bullets have been loaded, it’s dangerous.”

Nerves were so taut that there were numerous accidental dis- charges, bullets flying through the ceiling of the hall. “At 9:30 when we went back inside, they said we were going to head straight out.

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Then at 10:00, 11:00, then 12:00, we were supposed to be heading out. Instead we were just waiting and waiting, standing there, holding our guns and waiting.”

Chen had lost track of time when suddenly the doors swung open. The order had come to clear the square. As he stood with his detachment on the steps in front of the Great Hall of the People, permission to shoot was passed through the ranks. “At that time, it wasn’t as if there was a direct order, but the guys in front would tell the guys behind them that if you run into danger, you can open fire. And that’s an order from above. It was just spread down the line from person to person.”

Chen was gripping his gun so tightly that his hands were shak- ing. One of his unit’s leaders saw him struggling and decided that he was unfit for the task ahead. A stills camera was pushed into his hands. He was to work with the unit’s cameraman, who was grap- pling with a heavy television camera. Chen went back into the Great Hall and climbed the marble staircases to the roof, from where he snapped pictures and listened to gunfire slowly coming closer, as units farther away fought their way toward Tiananmen Square, the heart of the city. Down below, he saw the soldiers opening fire. But from his vantage point, he couldn’t tell whether they were firing warning shots into the air or firing directly at the students, tiny as ants, who were slowly retreating back toward the grey column of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a 10-story-high obelisk near the center of the square. Soldiers advanced toward them and tanks approached from both east and west.

When he climbed back down the marble staircases, he discovered that the ground floor of the Great Hall of the People had been turned into a makeshift field hospital. Hundreds of injured soldiers lay on the floor, many bleeding profusely, as they were tended by nurses.

Chen struggled to process the enormity of what he was seeing through the viewfinder of his camera. Occasionally, he was assailed by the same flashes of doubt he had felt when his truck had been stopped by the masses. “I started to feel conflicted. There were so many injured people lying on the first floor. You would think, ‘How could something so big happen?’ ”

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Outside, he watched as the last of the students—a few thou- sand—left the square from the southeast corner. As Chen later learned, the students had held a vote by voice on whether to stay or go, and though both sides shouted equally loudly, the decision had been made to leave. Chen’s initial emotion was enormous relief be- cause, despite the injuries he had witnessed, he believed any major loss of life had been avoided. He continued to watch as an armored car crashed into the Goddess of Democracy, the lumpen sister to the Statue of Liberty, that had been erected by art students just a few days earlier and had become an instant icon for the movement. After the first collision, the statue wobbled, but it did not fall. It took three or four more attempts before it slowly keeled over. And he watched as a line of armored cars careened over the tents in which only hours earlier students had been living. Chen insisted that he did not see any people killed in the square—either civilians or mil- itary—nor did he at any time fire a gun himself.

When the sun came up, the extent to which central Beijing had become a war zone was clear. Hulks of burnt-out armored vehicles and tanks dotted the square’s expanse. Some of the trees lining Chang’an Avenue had caught fire, leaving smoldering black trunks flanking the boulevard. Even the railings separating the pavement from the road were black with soot. Despite all this, Chen Guang’s overriding emotion was utter relief. He had heard gunfire, yet he still believed the square had been cleared without any major loss of life. That morning at around 7:00, he slept deeply—the slumber of exhaustion and relief—for two hours.

The unit’s first task was to restore the square to normality by expunging any trace of what had happened. All the possessions left behind by fleeing students were to be heaped into big piles and burned:  battered bicycles, bags of belongings, tents, banners, and the crumpled papers of their speeches. By then it was raining, and rivulets of black water from the sooty piles ran across the square, darkening its surface. These were the scenes that Chen Guang cap- tured with his camera. Some of the negatives he kept; others he hid, propelled by some instinct he could not explain.

It was then that Chen spotted something that has obsessed him ever since. Tangled in the spokes of a bicycle’s wheel was a braid of

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woman’s hair, secured with a red rubber band. Who was this young woman, and what had she been thinking as she brushed her hair that morning and carefully plaited it? Under what circumstances could that braid have been hacked off? And where was she now? As the rain pelted down, flames from the soldiers’ pyres engulfed the braid, which hissed and crackled as it burned.

A quarter of a century later, the echoes of that moment still rever- berate throughout Chen Guang’s work. His latest series of portraits depicts people having their hair cut, wet tendrils of severed hair lying on their bare shoulders. The detail is photographic, the effect eerily unsettling. These are pictures born of a quarter-century of unresolved guilt, of one man’s post-Tiananmen posttraumatic stress disorder.

•  •  •  •

Within months of June 4th, Chen Guang managed to gain a trans- fer into the Military Art Academy on the strength of his copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. In 1992, he won entrance to China’s best art school, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Then located just a stone’s throw from Tiananmen Square, its students had been the ones who created the iconic Goddess of Democracy statue. During the three years he studied at the academy, he kept his mil- itary past a secret from all but a few close friends. “It wasn’t that I was afraid. I just didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to bring up that stuff. I didn’t even want to think about that stuff.”

His denial lasted for almost 15  years, though the events of that day continued to loop through his mind almost endlessly. First, he committed to canvas the same scenes he had captured on film in the aftermath of the killing. Pictures of fire devouring piles of rubbish in Tiananmen Square; flames licking the base of a lamppost stand- ing among a wasteland of devastation; soldiers sorting through de- bris, guns slung carelessly over their backs. He placed one photo he took that day of the cleanup effort into a wooden chest that he painted white, the color of mourning in China, ringed by shards of a mirror, so that anyone looking in sees his or her own face sur- rounded by splintered reflections of destruction. This is, he believes, his confession.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chen Guang’s artwork was incompre- hensible to his military comrades, who suspected he was using it to insult the government. Many have now risen to senior positions in the government bureaucracy, in part due to the honor accrued from their actions that day in June. “Because they participated in the ‘suppression of counterrevolutionary turmoil,’ as the govern- ment calls it, some were promoted,” Chen Guang told me. Few have questioned whether the repression was the right move. “They didn’t think it was a bad thing at all. They felt it was necessary. To this day, they feel it was necessary.”

Even his artist friends wish Chen would choose other subject matter. In the go-go capitalism of China’s ever-ballooning art bubble, his decision to forgo profit to depict this most charged moment in the country’s recent history was viewed as stubborn, retrograde, and simply eccentric. More than that, his choices were overtly confron- tational, forcing viewers to admit the existence of events that most would rather not remember. There is a cost to taking such a path, Chen admitted. “You definitely pay a very big price. You find that the world is no longer yours. China’s mainstream society is no longer yours.” The political nature of his work means that it cannot be exhib- ited, posted online, or even created in front of those who might report him to the authorities. So Chen has shut himself out from the clubby sociability of the art world. He has not married nor has he had chil- dren, finding it difficult to form close attachments. His work—and the isolation required to produce it—is not conducive to relationships.

Could he have behaved otherwise on that June night? This is a question he has struggled to answer. “Of course there is guilt,” he admitted. “Over a long period of time, you realize that there were many things you could have chosen not to do.” But if there were other choices, the callow 17-year-old soldier did not realize it at the time. He was well trained, and his job was to obey. Desertion never once crossed his mind.

•  •  •  •

Some soldiers did rebel, however. The most famous conscientious objector was Major General Xu Qinxian, the commander of the

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38th Group Army, traditionally the most elite division. The major general refused to agree to the deployment of troops in mid-May when the troops’ transports became bogged down by citizens. Xu’s own account of what happened, which was not made public for two decades, was relayed to me by Yang Jisheng, a retired Xinhua journalist who has been fearless in his pursuit of historical truth. Yang met Xu twice and has provided the fullest account of what happened.

In May of 1989, Xu had been following the protests while laid up in a hospital suffering from kidney stones and had become opposed to the idea of using the PLA to crush the students. On May 17th, he was in a good mood, having just expelled a kidney stone, when the deputy commander of the Beijing military region, Li Laizhu, called a meeting of military commanders. Li announced the verbal order to mobilize troops and asked each commander for an expression of support. All the commanders complied except for Xu Qinxian, who replied that he could not follow a verbal order; he needed a written order. Li replied, “There are no written orders today. We’ll get them later. That’s what happens in wartime.” Xu responded, “Now is not a time of war. I cannot implement a verbal order.” Li told him he must telephone his political commissar—a political of- ficer assigned by the Communist Party—to tell him of his decision. His words were, “I am communicating that I  will not take part. This has nothing to do with me.” Then he returned to the hospital, a convenient place of shelter in times of political crisis in China.

Xu told friends that he was prepared to be executed for insub- ordination. “I would rather be beheaded than be seen as a crimi- nal by history!” He was indeed arrested in the hospital shortly afterward. His party membership was stripped from him, and he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment. Xu spent four years in Qincheng Prison near Beijing, where China’s most fa- mous political prisoners have traditionally been held, followed by one year in a police hospital. On his release, he was told to retire to Shijiazhuang in Hebei province, where he received treatment commensurate with that of a deputy commander. Since then, he has lived under state surveillance, his freedoms sharply curtailed. In photos taken with Yang Jisheng several years ago, Xu looks less

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like a major general than a portly, retired government servant, perched on the edge of a cream leather sofa, his eyes shaded by the capacious dark glasses favored by a previous generation of leaders.

Xu has spoken publicly only twice about his role—once to Yang Jisheng and once to a foreign radio station. For these two exceed- ingly brief interviews, his already limited freedom was rescinded. From then on, he was escorted to the doctor and was temporarily banned from visiting Beijing. “He’s very cautious,” Yang said. “He spoke very carefully. He didn’t speak very openly.” Yang is sure of one thing: Xu Qinxian has never regretted the insubordination that cost him his career and his freedom. However, as the most senior army officer who refused to act against his conscience, he remains— even 25 years later—a potent symbol.

Xu was not the only soldier to refuse to follow orders. In a clas- sified speech, it was revealed that 21 officers at division-level com- mand or higher, and 90 other officers of lesser rank, had “breached discipline in a serious manner during the struggle to crush the counterrevolutionary rebellion.” Nonetheless, the act of insubordi- nation by the commander of the 38th Group Army was to have a profound effect on the way that ordinary soldiers were treated at the square.

Another ex-soldier from a different division described to me how his company’s leadership was suddenly reshuffled and new leaders were put in charge days before they were sent to Tiananmen. The scenes he described from his deployment on the night of June 3rd were like something from a dystopian nightmare: civilians weeping as they watched ammunition being distributed to the troops; young soldiers running into the city on foot in a dazed panic, with those at the front shooting warning shots into the air. After the clearing of the square, every soldier in his company was ordered to hand over his ammunition, leaving their weapons as empty showpieces. But this ex-soldier told me that he had seen a visiting commander being accompanied by machine-gun-toting bodyguards, though the troops he was inspecting had no ammunition. He believed that the PLA, paranoid about the loyalty of its troops, was taking all

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necessary precautions against a mutiny or, worse still, an outright armed rebellion.

•  •  •  •

Chen Guang’s anguished guilt about June 4th does not seem to have been shared by Deng Xiaoping, who as chairman of the Central Military Commission was ultimately in charge of the army. His daughter later told his biographer Ezra Vogel that he never once doubted that he had made the correct decision. Deng had laid his groundwork carefully. By forcing every military commander to biaotai, meaning to state his attitude toward the imposition of mar- tial law—the test of loyalty that Xu Qinxian failed—he ensured that everyone was incriminated in the act of violence.

It is significant that Deng Xiaoping’s first public appearance after the suppression was to congratulate the martial law troops on June 9th, five days after the killings. He began by offering his condolences on the deaths of soldiers, a courtesy he did not extend to civilians killed by his army. He then labeled the protest move- ment as “counterrevolutionary turmoil” aimed at overthrowing the Socialist system and establishing a “totally Western-dependent bourgeois republic.” Deng’s speech set in place the party orthodoxy that both the protests and their suppression were inevitable: “This storm was bound to come sooner or later,” he declared. “It was just a matter of time and scale.”

Deng’s speech to the martial law troops was more than just a thank you from on high. A  quarter-century later, this post-suppression justification reads like his living will, setting out the future polit- ical direction of the country by emphasizing that, while economic reform and the opening up of China should continue at an acceler- ated pace, they should not be accompanied by similarly fast polit- ical liberalization. Deng also laid in place the theoretical basis for strengthening the security apparatus:  “From now on, we should pay attention when handling such problems. As soon as a trend emerges, we should not allow it to spread.”

Over the years, Beijing has progressively softened its language as it moves to conceal and neuter those heady weeks of the student

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movement and its ensuing violent repression. Deng’s “counterrev- olutionary turmoil” has morphed over time into plain “turmoil” and then a “political storm.” Nowadays, if it is referred to at all, it is often called the “June 4th incident,” a term notable for its blandness. Just one year after the killings, when American interviewer Barbara Walters asked then-President Jiang Zemin how he looked back on the events of 1989, he told her that it was “much ado about nothing.”

Though the language may have changed, the Communist Party has not budged in its official assessment of the events. Speaking on the 2013 anniversary, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hong Lei emphasized that judgment, saying, “A clear conclusion has al- ready been made concerning the political turmoil that happened in the late 1980s.” Identical sentiments are repeated every year, de- spite cyclical hopes that new men at the top might bring about a reassessment.

In that first post-Tiananmen appearance, Deng Xiaoping praised the martial law troops repeatedly, stating, “The People’s Army is truly a great wall of iron and steel of the party and state.” Chen Guang’s memories of that period paint a very different picture. As Deng Xiaoping was congratulating the troops, Chen’s unit was still stationed at the Great Hall of the People, sleeping on the floor. The troops spent their days obsessing over their gnawing hunger, since at that point, all their rations were being airlifted in by helicopter, and one day’s rations consisted only of a single packet of instant noodles to be split among three men. Chen says the ravenous, ex- hausted troops were shocked and baffled by the lack of supplies.

This detail is repeated in a book published by the People’s Liberation Army, One Day of Martial Law, which paints a vivid pic- ture of the scene inside the packed Great Hall of the People after three days during which the soldiers had been given only small amounts of instant noodles to eat, “The warriors were now bearing the torture of hunger. Some were snuggled up close to each other, some were lying on one side, some were squatting, some were lost in thought staring at the ceiling.” The officer who wrote the piece, a senior colonel, describes how he followed the sound of weeping to discover a young soldier driven to tears by hunger, lying in a fetal position, his knees pulled up against his chest. In a pep talk, the

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senior colonel tells the troops, “This struggle is complicated and in- tense. We must fear neither death nor hardship. Hunger is testing us. The senior officers and other comrades are suffering hunger just like you.”

That much, at least, may not have been true. According to Chen, the military leadership was still based at the Great Hall of the People and was being fed in grand style, served by waitresses who would wheel them trolleys of food kept warm under glass domes covered with white napkins. As the waitresses’ heels clacked across the marble floors, the soldiers’ catcalls spread from the ground floor up through the second and third stories to echo across the entire Great Hall of the People. Watching this spectacle made Chen Guang think about the social structure, how China’s privileged classes operated in full view of ordinary people with their approbation, and how these pockets of privilege had become entrenched in the army.

Chen Guang described the mood as angry and bitter. The sol- diers ripped up the carpets, threatening to use the carpet rods as weapons. “It was like being at the battlefield,” he said, grimacing as he remembered the subsistence rations. He spent a total of 10 days billeted in the Great Hall of the People. For the next decade, the smell of instant noodles made him retch.

•  •  •  •

It was drizzling during my final visit to Songzhuang, which looked even more depressed than ever. The artists had disappeared from the roadsides, and the streets seemed eerily empty. Something else was missing, though it took me some time to figure out what it was. It was the absence of noise. The ever-present hum and buzz of con- struction had stopped. The building sites had fallen silent. Most of the half-finished buildings had been draped in enormous white banners emblazoned with red Chinese characters reading “This building is an illegal construction, and has already been sealed by the government.” The banners also included warnings that pur- chases of “apartments with limited-property rights” did not enjoy any legal protection.

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This was something I  had never before seen during more than two decades in China. Given the raft of necessary planning per- missions, it seemed impossible that such buildings could have been built without the knowledge of the relevant government depart- ments. Nobody I  asked believed the official line. It appeared that these apartments were part of a compromise, technically illegal, that allowed urban buyers to purchase cheap apartments constructed on rural land in exchange for giving up some of their property rights. Despite its illegality, this happened all over China, accounting for one fifth of all property under construction, according to one es- timate. But in Songzhuang, there had recently been a political re- shuffle, resulting in a crackdown on this practice. Most people believed this was basically a government-backed shakedown that would allow local officials to wring more funds from the property developers. The chance of the half-finished buildings actually being torn down, everyone seemed to agree, was precisely nil.

All the construction sites around Chen Guang’s new house had also fallen silent, and the big development outside his back window was shrouded in white banners, giving it a funereal air. This, Chen Guang sighed, was one of the hazards of life in China. Policies could be reversed at the drop of a hat, with no warning whatsoever. He had invested the proceeds from all his years of art into his studio and the neighboring one, which he had bought with an eye to ex- pansion. Now they were suddenly surrounded by illegal buildings. Was he worried? I asked him. “The reality in China is like this,” he replied. “There’s no point worrying.” He was, he said, smiling, as safe as any other artist in Songzhuang.

On the wall in front of us was a large photograph of a young- looking Chen beside a 75-year-old man. Both were bare-chested. The older man had one arm around Chen’s neck; the other caressed his nipple. Chen Guang’s determination to use art to break taboos had at one stage led him to have sex with 100 different people. This particular piece of performance art, he said, was all about politics. The older man was a history professor who had been a victim of almost every political movement sweeping contemporary Chinese history. During Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, he had been sent twice to labor camp and was prevented

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from earning a living because of his background. Hence, the elderly victim of one of the most shameful periods in China’s history was physically embracing the young perpetrator of a different outrage. Yet, according to Chen, both were equally guilty,  “We are all par- ticipants in building this society. If you are living quite comfort- ably, I  believe you are guilty, almost like the religious concept of original sin.”

In their own ways, Chen and the elderly history professor were among the few who acknowledge the past instead of turning away from it. Chen believes that amnesia is, for many, the easy option. “People find it very easy to forget, because there is no way to cleanse their consciences. China’s political education forces you to forget what happened in the past—forget the bad things that the party did, and only remember the good things. For a collective, this is very destructive. You can only think about things that are beneficial to you. This makes people live like animals. In order to serve your own interests, you can do whatever you want to the culture or the environment.”

Sitting in his apartment surrounded by half-built illegal build- ings bathed in the white miasma of the smoggy pollution that regularly engulfs large swathes of northern China, this argument seemed convincing. Politics, he believed, was like the air in China. “If you can’t breathe, you’ll die. If you breathe, you’ll be infected by these viruses. The air is so polluted, but who can’t breathe?”

•  •  •  •

Back in 1989, once Chen Guang’s unit had finished cleaning up the physical reminders of June 4th, their next role was to serve as the public face of the suppression. For two additional months, his unit remained in Beijing, staying at a guesthouse in Qianmen close to the square. One of its main tasks was public relations; in groups of seven or eight, the soldiers performed a kind of victory lap, visiting schools and residential committees to recount their role in sup- pressing the counterrevolutionary riots. To Chen’s surprise, they were treated like conquering heroes, given hyperbolic introductions by school principals, and personally thanked by the students.

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Another duty, one that he hated even more, was taking part in police raids to capture “counterrevolutionaries.” The soldiers were still carrying their rifles, and sometimes they were encouraged to use them to hit the terrified, cowering targets of their raids, who were mostly students. This was a necessary part of the propaganda campaign of intimidation that leaned heavily on wall-to-wall television coverage of armed police and soldiers rounding up “rioters,” who often bore visible bruises as stark warnings of the cost of resistance. “At the time, we thought those people were definitely bad people,” Chen said. “Only bad people would be arrested. Good people wouldn’t be arrested.”

What shocked Chen Guang most was the change in attitude to- ward the martial law troops. He detected no malice or fear directed at himself or his fellow soldiers despite their role in putting down the largest protests to shake Beijing in modern history. In fact, he was bemused by the fawning treatment they received from local residents, who often brought them presents of food and drink. “The residents suddenly changed to become really nice to the soldiers,” he remembered. “I thought about this a lot at the time. It really con- fused me. Why was it like that? On June 4th, all the residents sup- ported the students. So overnight how did they come to support the soldiers?”

Chen Guang struggled to comprehend how a swarming sea of Beijingers had stopped the PLA’s advance with their own bod- ies, and now these same people were pressing gifts onto the same troops. He did not believe this about-face was motivated by fear, but rather by a deep-seated desire—a necessity even—to side with the victors, no matter the cost. “It’s a survival mechanism that people in China have evolved after living under this system for a long time. In order to exist, everything is about following orders from above.”

In his new sitting room, tucked carefully away in a desk drawer, Chen has kept the commemorative souvenirs issued to all who “quelled the turmoil.” He took them out to show me. There was a small red linen-bound book titled The Defenders of the Capital, which contained pictures of rows and rows of soldiers rallying in the square, with the caption “We will always be the protectors of the people’s interests.” One photo showed two schoolgirls looking up adoringly at a martial law soldier while shyly caressing his rifle.

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There was also a gold-colored medal issued by the Central Military Commission depicting Tiananmen Gate superimposed on a star and a wreath above the words “Defender of the Capital.” Then there was the wristwatch.

The care with which Chen Guang handled these mementos of glory and guilt sum up the contradictions that roil him. He knows that he will spend the rest of his life painting what has become the defining fact of his existence. As a taboo-busting artist, his aim has been to confront the Chinese people with the truth about Tiananmen. Yet how can he confront people about an event that many no longer remember with art that cannot be shown? There is no answer to this question.