Black Heads Bobbing on a Sunny Spring Day
This was my personal view of the student demonstrations in China 20 years ago.
On May 4th, 1989, Youth Day in China, I saw a sea of black heads bobbing as they marched along in the warm spring sun. They walked about eight abreast in a jovial, but orderly fashion. On either side, they held hands to make a human rope.
Baggy-green-uniformed police nervously preceded the marchers, some with loud speakers to keep the onlookers back. The marchers filled about one lane of the road, while bystanders, supporters, and those just trying to go about their daily work jammed the sidewalks and the other lane of the road. The traffic jam was of people and bicycles since buses and cars were not able to move.
The marchers held aloft a few banners proclaiming their demands, and leader/response slogans were chanted without benefit of loud speakers. These were the students of Hangzhou, China, answering the country’s students’ call to rally to the cause of freedom.
The students, young and fresh looking, did not have angry, demanding faces. Instead, they were smiling and seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves, for it was a welcome break from the usual pervasive sense of boredom and frustration that one picks up from China’s college students. Unable to choose their own careers, and shackled by a well-entrenched system of personal connections as the only key to upward mobility, or even to a decent lifestyle, these students don’t feel they have much to lose.
Education and intelligence are not highly valued in today’s China. To the contrary, one’s intelligence often seems to be a liability, leading only to a dead end. Children of the terror of the Cultural Revolution, these students were led to believe that the only path out of a poor and common life lay in passing exams that would lead to a university. Their parents had pleaded, pushed, and sometimes even beaten them into studying harder and harder, desperately wanting their children to achieve what they had not. The students of today’s China, many of them children who had never had the chance to enjoy their childhood, feel a sense of betrayal and broken dreams and promises. Their hard work and suffering, and their parents’ sacrifices on behalf of their education, seem a cruel joke played on them all.
And yet they are now young adults — intelligent, and knowledgeable of western ways. Those that dare to dream (and many do not) dream of a China that will value them, appreciate them, free them to make decisions about their own lives.
The bystanders lined the streets, climbed up to higher vantage points, stared out from office windows and apartment balconies. They took pictures, applauded the demonstrators, ignored them, or looked on with pride, or amusement, or a sense of wonder that Chinese were again daring to criticize their government.
Some people eyed me curiously. What was a middle-aged foreigner doing walking alongside the march? One student said, “Walk with us.” But, a woman sputtered in Chinese to me in worried fashion, urging me to stay away from the demonstrators. Without understanding what she was saying, I understood clearly her concern that there might be trouble. With her bicycle, she determinedly pushed me more and more to the side, out of possible harm’s way.
I did not march amongst the students, for China is not my country. I am a visitor, and although I sympathize greatly with the students, especially after coming to know them intimately in these past months as their friend and teacher, this must be their struggle. They must reform their own country.
As I walked, my memory went back to other students, to another main street thousands of miles away and over 20 years ago — to Berkeley, California. Anyone who lived through the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations cannot forget the beauty or the pain of the late 1960’s. In the end, the students there won out. It was not without a price.
As I walked, I wondered what price these students will pay for what they might dare to do. But this day, there were no confrontations, no violence, no guns, no blood. It seemed more like a festival, a spring celebration in Hangzhou.
And thus thousands of students spent this May 4th, the anniversary of a student movement of the past. They spoke out against what is, and dared to dream what can be.
Tags: Student demonstrations in China in 1989, Travel
