Original subtitles

{n8}Subtitles by Andante

For more than a quarter century,

Mao Zedong was China's absolute ruler.

When he died

Few could imagine China without him.

My neighbor said,

what is China going to do?

We've lost direction.

Heaven is collapsing.

With Mao's death,

a new era began.

With new leaders, new visions,

and a dramatic new course

for the Chinese people.

Never in the history of the world

has a nation been transformed

with such speed and magnitude.

This was communism's new revolution.

In 1976, when Mao died,

China was a poor country,

largely isolated from the rest of the world.

A quarter century of communism

had failed to bring prosperity

to the Chinese people.

Mao's vision of the path to communism

had been one of continual revolution.

He had interrupted periods of growth and calm

with one turbulent political campaign after another.

In the last decade of his rule,

he had launched the Cultural Revolution

and brought China to disaster.

Mao's most fanatic supporters,

millions of teenage red guards,

followed his orders to attack

their teachers, intellectuals,

communist party officials,

even their own families.

Few escaped the violence.

To educate the masses,

people who were going to be executed

were put on public display and tortured.

{n8}It felt like a ritual sacrifice.

You were the goat put on the altar.

I was the main target,

and my father and brother were brought to watch.

I could hear people shouting, shoot him.

The pain from seeing my father below

was deeper than any physical pain

I suffered.

During this period,

Mao's wife, Jiang Qing

and three of her colleagues,

later called the Gang of Four,

gained great power.

They pushed the Cultural Revolution

to its most brutal extremes.

When Mao saw that China was

on the brink of civil war,

he turned on the red guards.

He ordered them to leave their homes in the cities

and move to the countryside

to be educated by the peasants.

These young people became known as sent-down youth.

{n8}Many people were shocked

{n8}after they got to northern Anhui

{n8}and saw what it was like.

There was nothing there except a few grass huts.

The people ate sorghum that was hard as iron.

It was awful.

We really didn't want to be assigned there

for the rest of our lives.

Once a brigade official said to me,

both you and your sister are staying here.

Stop dreaming about leaving the countryside.

I couldn't sleep the whole night after hearing him.

I cried and cried as if I had gone mad.

Millions of young people lost

years of education and family life

laboring in the countryside.

By the time of Mao's death,

many were relieved.

{n8}His policies had brought so much suffering

{n8}and catastrophe to China.

So I thought that Mao's time was finally over.

And it was high time.

The unknown Hua Guafeng

was Mao's official successor,

but his position was far from secure.

Mao's widow, Jiang Qing,

together with her allies,

posed the most immediate threat to his power.

Less than a month after Mao's death,

in a move that thrilled the country,

Hua Guafeng arrested

the Gang of Four.

People hated them very much.

It was only because they had

Mao's favor and protection

that they reached such high positions.

After Mao's death, they lost power.

There is a saying in Chinese,

when the big tree falls down,

all the monkeys run away.

People went to buy crabs.

They bought one female crab,

which symbolized Jiang Qing,

and three male ones,

which symbolized the rest of the Gang of Four.

Everyone was joking around like that.

Every family went to the store

and bought four crabs,

which they tied up and held on a string.

They would wave the crabs at friends to say hello.

And then they took the crabs home and cooked them.

We Chinese called this

our second liberation.

Everyone was really happy about it.

With his immediate rivals disposed of,

Hua Guafeng worked to strengthen his position.

I saw Hua Guafeng several times

at meetings.

{n8}The impression he gave me was that

{n8}he was doing his best to imitate

Mao Zedong.

Like the way he walked and the way he talked.

Hua had an historic opportunity.

But unfortunately, he didn't seize it.

Soon after he arrested the Gang of Four

in October,

I was informed of his instructions.

That every word by Mao

must be followed.

It was the same old way of talking.

I saw an editorial in the Beijing Daily,

which had a line that really amazed me.

We must obey Chairman Hua

the way we did Chairman Mao.

And we must love Chairman Hua the way we love Chairman Mao.

I was so shocked that I started shouting,

how can they write stuff like this?

A colleague poked me with his pen and said, stop.

Chairman Hua himself approved this editorial.

I never had much hope for him after that.

Hua Guafeng soon faced

another powerful rival,

the tough, resilient

Deng Xiaoping.

At 72 years old,

Deng was a veteran revolutionary.

One who put economic prosperity

before socialist purity.

For this, he had twice been purged by Mao.

{n8}Of course he believed in socialism,

{n8}but he didn't think socialism was dogma.

He had a famous saying,

it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, he said,

as long as it catches mice.

He encouraged everyone to concentrate on results,

to see if what they were doing was good for the country.

Deng was a pragmatist,

but he also believed in the absolute authority

of the Communist Party.

Without it, he thought,

China would splinter apart

and slip into chaos.

Deng appeared in public

for the first time since Mao's death

in July 1977

at a soccer match in Beijing.

The venue was symbolic.

In this stadium,

the Gang of Four had led thousands

in rallies against him

during the Cultural Revolution.

Deng moved skillfully

to consolidate his power.

His first step was to mobilize the party

to exonerate the millions of people like himself

who had been attacked during the Cultural Revolution.

Guoyang had spent 22 years in exile

and labor camps.

When I returned to Beijing,

{n8}they told us the charges

{n8}had been made in error.

My God,

for those 22 years,

I was a rightist and a counter-revolutionary,

and it was all a mistake.

Those 22 years were really hard,

but I started a new life.

The problem was whether you could cooperate

with the people who had attacked you.

We returned to our old jobs

with the same old people.

Society had to go on.

{n8}We could still work for many years,

{n8}so I agreed to take back my old job.

I had no choice.

Throughout China,

the scars of Mao's rule ran deep.

The children of his revolution,

especially the sent-down youth,

were a generation unlike any other.

Shaped by the traumas of the Cultural Revolution

and their years in the countryside,

they began to return home.

My friends and I did not know what to believe.

{n8}Even if we could come back to Beijing,

and in fact I was transferred to Beijing

in 1979

after two years of great efforts,

but even if we could return and find jobs,

we still thought we had been wronged,

that something had been taken away from us.

When I came to Beijing,

I felt that the city was full of profound changes.

{n8}Everyone felt that something historically

{n8}significant was going to happen.

Quite a few salons sprang up,

where people talked about politics.

Everyone was having big debates

about where the country was going.

In the autumn of 1978,

the debate spilled onto the street.

To an area in western Beijing

which became known as Democracy Wall,

people came and pasted up writings,

articles and poems.

They wanted to express

their anger and sorrow

about the Cultural Revolution,

And to understand how such a catastrophe

could have engulfed the country.

I examined the Cultural Revolution,

and criticized Mao Zedong directly.

This was not party line.

I said that Mao did not launch the Cultural Revolution

because he made a mistake,

but because he was an evil man.

I think it was the first time anybody had ever said

anything like that about Mao.

My speech caused quite a stir.

On November 27, 1978,

the People's Daily reported that

Deng supported the movement.

We have no intention of denying

the right of the people to express their views

by putting up wall posters,

he was quoted.

Deng's words fueled the movement.

One of the most outspoken activists

was a young electrician and son of a party official,

Wei Jingxiang.

The leaders of our nation must be informed

that we want to take our destiny into our own hands,

he wrote boldly.

Democracy, freedom and happiness

are the only goals of modernization.

It was in this heady atmosphere

that the Chinese Communist Party met

in December 1978.

Behind the ritual facade,

Deng Xiaoping ousted Hua Guofeng.

It was at the third meeting of the Congress

that Deng established his political power.

Although he was still a vice chairman,

his voice became the party's voice.

And his policies were accepted by the whole party.

Deng Xiaoping was now

the most powerful man in China.

In 1978,

the Chinese people lived in almost

total isolation from the outside world.

For nearly three decades under Mao,

international relations,

especially with America,

had been cold and often hostile.

Now, China and the U.S.

were eager to move forward.

At the end of 1978,

Americans partied with their Chinese colleagues,

in a relaxed atmosphere

not seen for decades.

Under Deng Xiaoping,

negotiations for full diplomatic relations were swift.

On January 1, 1979,

Ambassador Leonard Woodcock

welcomed Deng to the American embassy

to celebrate the new relationship.

This had been a long desire on the part of the Chinese

to affect normal relations

with the United States.

{n8}So that Deng Xiaoping had made this

{n8}a major item of his program,

he was extremely happy, all the Chinese were.

At the end of January,

Deng Xiaoping made an

official visit to America.

Deng Xiaoping was the first Chinese leader

ever to visit the U.S.

One of the places he wanted to go was the Space Center

in Houston.

He had a very curious mind and

he was most anxious to see all he could see.

And then they asked him

if he'd like to get in the simulator where he'd manipulate the controls.

It was though he in fact was in

a spaceship bringing it into a landing.

And he was so fascinated by that.

They had trouble getting him out and he just wouldn't move

because he was so fascinated with it.

Deng Xiaoping knew how to live.

Deng loved these activities

and was happy to go to them.

He had a sense of humor.

For example,

when we went to the rodeo in Texas,

everyone was given a hat.

Deng got a kick out of wearing it.

Before he made the trip,

the Chinese apparently had an inquiry from

our State Department.

What kind of food

should he be served?

And the answer that they got was

a cautious diplomatic bland food.

So the State Department made a decision

there's no blander food than veal.

So at the State Dinner he got veal.

At every dinner he went to he got veal.

When we got to Atlanta,

Governor Busby, then the Governor of Georgia,

said to him.

Is there anything about the United States that

particularly impresses you, Mr. Vice-Premier?

He growled yes, veal at every meal.

Throughout his trip,

Deng discussed his ambitious plans

to modernize China and make it

part of the world economy.

One senior American official said

everyone who met Deng was amazed

at the boldness and sweep

of his vision.

But Deng's vision did not include

political tolerance.

By the time he returned to China in February,

the democracy wall movement

had spread to other cities.

Posters at the wall began to make

serious criticisms of the Communist Party.

When activist Wei Jingxiang

warned that Deng was becoming a dictator,

Deng ordered Wei arrested.

In a show trial lasting just one day,

Wei was accused of counter-revolution.

His outspokenness earned him

Deng's personal enmity

and a harsh sentence of

15 years in prison.

Liu Qing was arrested for handing out

copies of the transcript of Wei's trial.

{n8}They forced us to sit up straight on small stools.

Only after hours in the same position

were we allowed to stand up

and quickly go to the bathroom.

For more than four years,

I was a vegetable.

Except for breathing, they restricted me

from moving any part of my body.

So I decided to go on a hunger strike.

On the sixth day, they force-fed me.

They strapped me to a chair while more than ten people

held me down.

They squeezed my throat so I had to open my mouth to breathe.

Then they twisted an iron thing into my mouth.

It split the corners of my mouth open.

Then they used pincers to pull my tongue forward

and forced a tube down my throat.

They stuffed liquid food into the tube.

Food, water and blood mixed together

and went into my stomach.

After I had been through all that,

I understood the Communist Party better.

I wanted to die before,

but after this I felt I must survive.

To let the world know what had happened.

The posters were torn down

and their writers intimidated.

The journals which had briefly flourished

were shut down.

One young poet

dared to pin a final tribute

on the wall.

My friend,

parting time is pending.

Farewell, Democracy Wall.

What can I say to you?

Should I speak of spring's frigidity?

Should I say you are like the withered winter sweet?

No.

I should instead talk of happiness,

tomorrow's happiness.

Of pure orchid skies,

of golden flowers,

of a child's bright eyes.

We ought to part with dignity.

Don't you agree?

For the vast majority of Chinese,

the aspirations of the Democracy Wall activists

seemed remote.

Most people lived in the countryside

and were concerned with more basic needs.

Life was extremely difficult.

{n8}We had nothing but coarse grain to fill our stomachs.

{n8}We barely survived.

With a family of ten, you had to work hard.

We only had a few cents to live on.

I mean, that was really hard.

We had to go to work very early in the morning.

We had to work for two hours on an empty stomach.

{n8}We ate less than half a pound of rice a day.

{n8}The men held the land while women

pulled up the seedlings for transplanting.

Everybody had to work.

You wouldn't get anything to eat if you didn't.

Life was so miserable.

Peasants led regimented lives in large communes.

There was little incentive to work harder.

Even in a crisis,

most of their harvest had to be given to the government.

In 1978,

there was a devastating drought

in Anhui Province in central China.

Facing starvation,

peasants in one village took a bold step.

They stopped communal farming

and divided the land among the families.

Each household worked with new initiative.

For after giving their grain quota to the state,

they would keep the surplus crop.

The farmers knew that people had done this in the past

and gone to jail for it.

They promised to look after the families of anyone

who got into trouble.

And they signed an agreement

with their fingertips dipped in blood.

The risk was worth taking,

because that year they ate.

Local officials sent a representative to Beijing

to ask for permission to continue.

{n8}In July 1979,

{n8}an old man, Guo Chun-i,

{n8}came to Beijing.

{n8}First he went to the People's Daily,

but nobody dared see him.

Then he went to the China news agency,

but still no one dared see him.

I heard about him and invited him to my group.

When he spoke, he stressed that he was pleading

for the peasants.

I was very moved.

{n8}The household responsibility system

{n8}caused a great debate inside the party.

Some senior leaders thought it would upset

the whole communist system.

But others firmly supported it.

They saw it as the only solution to the poverty

in China's countryside.

In a monumental decision,

Deng's government decided

to allow the household responsibility system.

Soon after,

they disbanded the communes,

the main means of communist organization

and control in the countryside.

In villages around the country,

like Shenjali,

many were confused

by this dramatic change.

{n8}Was this socialism?

{n8}Was our country still socialist?

{n8}Was it capitalism?

That's what I wondered.

{n8}What I was afraid of was

{n8}there were not enough laborers in my family.

{n8}My three children didn't know how to farm.

I was the only one who worked.

Anyway, it was useless to object.

It was the government's policy.

It was policy.

If folks were against it, it was no use,

right?

Policy is policy.

Under the new system,

village after village produced bumper harvests.

For centuries, the Chinese people

had lived on the edge,

facing one famine after another.

Now, the average family

had enough to eat.

At that time, there was a popular saying among the peasants.

Mao Zedong gave us liberation,

and Deng Xiaoping

has given us food.

Deng wanted to do more than give people food.

He wanted to make China a world economic power,

to open the entire country to market forces.

Working closely with him

were innovative leaders

Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.

Hu Yaobang was Deng's second in command.

He had impeccable revolutionary credentials.

He had been on the long march with Mao and Deng.

Like Deng, he suffered in the Cultural Revolution.

Some joked they were close because Hu was

the only member of the Central Committee

shorter than the 4 foot 10 Deng.

He was, as we say,

a young old official

because he was one of the youngest of the older generation.

When he had a discussion,

he treated others as equals.

You could express different opinions

and he wouldn't criticize you.

He was a good listener.

Unlike Hu Yaobang,

Zhao Ziyang was not a Red Army veteran,

nor a Beijing insider.

He had spent his career in the provinces

and he understood the economic realities of rural life.

In 1980,

Deng decided to use his experience

and called him to Beijing.

He tried to make you less nervous.

He dressed casually,

wearing cotton jackets and cotton shoes.

Sometimes when he sat on the sofa,

he even took off his shoes and put his feet up

like a northern peasant.

He did this to make you feel closer to him,

so you would tell him what you really thought.

As Zhao and Hu Yaobang worked

to reform the economy,

they faced opposition from

conservative members of the party

who believed the reforms

threatened communism itself.

In private, inter-party meetings,

Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang

argued their case with remarkable frankness.

At the top level,

Zhao and Hu Yaobang had to report to Deng.

Deng thought, this is simple.

If there is a political problem,

I'll deal with it.

What are you guys afraid of?

Just go ahead.

They launched a bold new plan of

economic development,

designed to attract foreign technology

and foreign money.

Deng Xiaoping authorized

four special economic zones

in the south,

carefully placed near the booming economies of

Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The farming village of Shenzhen was won.

The government brought in electricity,

built roads, office buildings

and apartment blocks.

They approved policies

inconceivable under Mao.

Foreign companies were welcomed with financial incentives.

They were allowed to use capitalist business methods.

For Chinese workers,

wages in Shenzhen seemed

fantastically high.

From all over the south,

people poured into the zones

looking for jobs.

{n8}Most people had to wait a year or two to get a job,

{n8}but I got one just a month after

{n8}I applied.

It was hectic to start work right away

because I was expecting a baby.

But I couldn't miss this opportunity.

Many people tried to get to Shenzhen,

but not all of them made it here.

If you worked full-time,

you had a stable income

and bonuses were good.

Living standards went up.

For example, we got a television

and then we bought a color one to replace the black and white.

We followed the fashions

and didn't want to fall behind.

So the changes were dramatic.

Economic growth spread

throughout southern China.

In the early 1980s,

most foreign investors were from

nearby Hong Kong and Taiwan,

where millions of Chinese had

fled communist rule.

Hong Kong, the booming center

of international business,

was also one of the last remnants

of British colonial rule.

At the end of the 19th century,

the British had forced the Chinese

to lease them most of Hong Kong's

territory for 99 years.

In the early 1980s,

investors began to worry about

what would happen when the lease

expired in 1997.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

went to Beijing in 1982

to negotiate with Deng Xiaoping.

{n8}The Prime Minister spoke about the treaties.

The Treaty of 1842

and the Treaty of 1860,

which gave us

certain areas of Hong Kong.

And this didn't go down too well.

Deng said that there could be

no question of

the Chinese allowing Britain

to run the place.

The Chinese government

couldn't face its own people

if that happened.

He added that if there was trouble

in Hong Kong before 1997,

then perhaps the Chinese would have to move in

before that.

And that provoked

very heated exchanges.

I remember during the meeting,

one senior official said,

This is Iron Lady meeting Iron Man.

In a way, each one was

involuntarily impressed

by the other.

Deng wasn't accustomed

to dealing with someone

as tough as Mrs Thatcher.

And she, for her part,

was certainly daunted by him,

because he was someone

from a quite alien

political experience.

You realise that was the end of the line

when Deng had spoken that was it,

there's no appeal.

He exuded authority.

For months, in discussions

fraught with profound cultural differences,

the English and Chinese negotiated.

It won't do anyone any good

if this very flourishing Hong Kong

that has been built up

is destroyed.

It's in China's interest to keep it.

It's an investor's interest

the world over to keep it.

Above all, it's in the interest of the people of Hong Kong

to keep it.

Finally, Deng Xiaoping proposed

the idea of one country, two systems,

and broke the impasse.

China would recover Hong Kong,

but the territory would keep

its capitalist economic system.

In 1984,

Mrs Thatcher returned to Beijing

to sign the Joint Declaration,

the agreement which would return

Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Champagne glasses clinked

and the cameras rolled

and many nice things were said.

And they reflected a mood of goodwill,

genuine goodwill.

The Chinese, I'm sure,

felt great pride

in having achieved,

ensured the recovery of

this bit of national territory.

And Deng particularly would feel it

because he was doing something that

even Mao couldn't do or didn't do.

For the Chinese,

Deng's recovery of Hong Kong

erased the last humiliating

legacy of 19th century colonialism.

And it signaled China's growing power

as a major player on the world stage.

Conservatives in the party

responded to Deng's successes

with mixed feelings.

The money-oriented lifestyles of

Hong Kong and the special economic zones

went against everything their revolution stood for.

Shenzhen really was different from inland areas.

The young people there just wanted to get rich.

They didn't care at all about the future of the country.

Beijing sent people to make speeches

about socialist values.

But the young people wouldn't listen.

They shouted that they wanted to ask questions

and they didn't want to listen to that stuff.

As social controls loosened,

people moved around more freely.

Smuggling, profiteering,

prostitution and pornography

all reappeared.

Hardliners blamed the rise in crime

on Deng's reforms and

decadent foreign influences.

In 1983,

Deng moved to appease the conservatives' anger.

He allowed the first campaign of

the post-Mao era

an assault on spiritual pollution.

It came very fast

with a fierce start.

This upset and frightened people.

{n8}Some schools asked young students to take part in the campaign.

Those students ran home to grab

their parents' wedding photos,

their mothers' lipsticks or perfumes,

and gave them to their teachers.

Saying they had spiritual pollution at home.

The focus on appearance

was reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.

But now people found the targets absurd.

There were inspections in some army units.

One soldier was discovered

with a book with a picture of a foreign woman

in a very low-cut dress.

This picture was confiscated

as spiritual pollution.

But later, when people looked at it more closely,

they realized it was Karl Marx's wife.

There were a lot of stories like this.

I think that people in the north

took it more seriously

than most of us in Guangdong.

Maybe that reflects the difference

between the north and south.

Northerners thought, oh,

you people in Guangdong,

living near Hong Kong,

you've been under foreign influences.

Even though many Chinese did not

take the campaign seriously,

it frightened foreign investors.

Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang

sensed the problem.

So they issued a few instructions.

For example,

the movement was not to be carried out in the countryside,

so it wasn't.

Then they said there wasn't any spiritual pollution

in the economic sphere,

so it wasn't carried out there either.

After a few months,

the campaign fizzled out.

The party redirected the movement

to a major crackdown on

crimes like smuggling.

Thousands of criminals were arrested,

quickly tried,

and executed.

In January 1984,

Deng personally signaled that

economic reform would continue.

He traveled to the special economic zones

in a highly publicized trip.

He made up a joke which revealed

how he felt.

Karl Marx sits up in heaven

and he's very powerful.

He sees what we are doing with socialism,

and he doesn't like it.

So he's punished me by making me deaf.

Deng was, in fact, deaf in one ear,

but his point was clear.

His reforms looked far more

capitalist than Marxist.

In a move that would transform

China's coast,

the government opened most of it

to foreign investment.

And 14 more cities were

designated freewheeling

special economic zones.

Outside the cities,

China's peasants were better off

than they had ever been.

By the mid-1980s,

much of rural China was booming.

Families farmed on their own.

They earned cash

selling their surplus produce.

In towns throughout China,

markets reappeared

for the first time in decades.

{n8}My youngest brother graduated from junior high.

{n8}One day during summer vacation,

he came home and said,

I'm going to the market to sell vegetables tomorrow.

We said, are you kidding?

How will you do it?

Won't you be embarrassed?

When I came home in the evening,

I saw my brother coming back.

He said, I made more than

three dollars today.

I couldn't believe he had made so much money.

The entrepreneurial spirit

seemed to have caught everyone.

Families built up their own private

sidelines to earn extra cash.

In villages like this one in Anhui,

which had faced starvation only five years earlier,

even party officials became businessmen.

They set up small collective factories.

They made simple goods,

bricks, pots, shoes, and matches,

which had been in short supply

for decades.

The local government asked me

about making lamps

if I had the courage to start a new venture.

I said, I didn't know anything about this kind of work.

But the government told me not to worry.

They said that the responsibility

would be taken collectively.

So I thought, why not?

I threw myself into it.

At the beginning, we concentrated on small lamps

just for the domestic market.

Not for export overseas.

The rural factories began to fuel

the national economy,

with growth rates of more than

20% a year.

And they provided jobs for the peasants,

allowing them to earn more money

than they had ever dreamed.

People spent it equipping

their houses with televisions,

electric fans, and refrigerators,

luxuries unthinkable under Mao.

With their new prosperity,

villagers had leisure time

to look beyond their immediate needs.

They returned to traditional religious practices,

long banned under Mao Zedong.

They worshipped Buddha

as well as local deities.

In Shenjali,

villagers prayed to the old father God.

{n8}We always believed in him.

{n8}Even during the Cultural Revolution,

{n8}people secretly believed in him.

When Chairman Mao was alive,

his horoscope was very powerful,

and the gods did not dare come out.

Then, because Mao died,

Buddha and the gods came back.

When I went to the countryside,

I really felt a sense of freedom.

Under Mao,

people had to work in the fields every day.

If you wanted to visit relatives or friends,

you had to ask for leave.

Now they could use their time freely.

It was like the end of slavery,

the same feeling as if they had been freed from slavery.

In October 1984,

the Communist Party celebrated

its 35th year in power.

The scene was really moving.

I think this was when he was the most popular.

His prestige was at its height.

Everyone was very happy

and wanted him to strengthen his leadership of China.

{n8}When the students and faculty of

{n8}Beijing University marched past,

we saw a special banner that said,

Hello, Comrade Xiaoping.

It was obvious that

they had made it spontaneously.

And they were not marching in a very formal way like the others.

They were trying to express

their affection for Deng Xiaoping.

They had great hope in him.

They hoped he would lead China

on the road to glory and prosperity.

But the hopes of the young people

were very different from Deng's.

Before long,

the soaring expectations he had created

would turn into a nightmare,

threatening not just his leadership,

but the power of the party itself.

We now continue with part two of

Born Under the Red Flag.

From our first class in elementary school,

all through high school,

we had political study all the time.

The subject was always communism.

Our brains were flooded red.

We were young and didn't even realize

how we were being molded into a certain kind of person.

In 1985,

I first heard rock music

and I knew immediately

that it was my kind of music.

What I remember most clearly

is when we made my second song,

Nothing to My Name.

When I finished it,

I realized the doors had suddenly opened for me.

The appearance of Sui Jin was

so fun, so fresh.

His song, Nothing to My Name,

reflected exactly how I felt.

We really like this song.

We could really identify with it.

Every student was broke,

and their parents didn't have anything either.

All we had were our brains

and our hands.

In China,

the 1980s was a decade of

constant change and flux.

The generations born under the red flag

began to question the meaning of communism.

Like their parents and grandparents before them,

they dreamed of political change

and paid a heavy price.

Sui Jin's huge popularity

as China's first rock star

coincided with a growing enthusiasm

for Western music and culture

and a dramatic new flowering of

Chinese art and literature.

I started Beijing University

in 1985.

I ran right into what we called

cultural fever.

{n8}People my age were the most affected by it.

{n8}My whole way of thinking,

even my personality, was greatly influenced.

This cultural fever helped people

make choices based on their

personal experience.

This individualism,

this spirit of openness,

gave me self-confidence.

I realized I was capable of doing things for myself.

The most significant change for me was a shift of focus,

from the political to the personal,

to the humanity of people's lives.

We began to ask questions about the meaning of life.

In Hefei in central China,

Fang Lizhi was vice-president

of the University of Science and Technology.

{n8}I encouraged my students to think and study freely.

We tried to create an environment

that cultivated knowledge and qualified people.

Not a place to train docile tools of the party.

The atmosphere of openness at the University

was so unusual and appealing

that it attracted young people

from all over China.

Deng Xiaoping's heir apparent,

Hu Yaobang,

shared many concerns of the

students and intellectuals.

He, too, questioned communist dogma.

More than any other leader,

he seemed to be in touch with ordinary people.

In 1986,

Hu Yaobang, with Deng's support,

worked to initiate political change.

They wanted the oldest members of the Central Committee to retire

and to loosen party controls in many areas of life.

{n8}Maybe what Hu Yaobang did was

{n8}too radical

{n8}and went beyond what other people could accept.

So he was opposed by many people.

Especially by the older veteran revolutionaries

who were not used to these things.

While Deng Xiaoping supported Hu Yaobang's efforts,

he could not ignore the views of the party conservatives.

Political reform was shelved.

But on the nation's campuses,

students were not satisfied.

In December 1986,

in Shanghai, Beijing and Hefei,

they held demonstrations.

They demanded the right to nominate

candidates in local elections.

They wanted better conditions on campus

and the say in jobs

they would be assigned for life.

We were so eager to express ourselves.

But we didn't have anywhere to air our views and feelings.

I felt that taking to the streets

was the only way we could find

to let people know,

to let the Central Committee know what we felt.

In Shanghai,

30,000 students marched

and they were joined by huge numbers of city residents.

When students tried to sit in at Communist Party offices,

clashes broke out with the police.

My students thought that they should support

the students in Shanghai.

They demanded that our provincial government

condemn the Shanghai authorities for beating the students.

It was extremely dangerous to make such a demand.

Deng, like almost every leader,

viewed demonstrations as an unacceptable threat

to the party's leadership.

The government banned all further demonstrations.

The Anhui Provincial Party Committee warned us that

there was one last chance to avoid trouble.

I was not sure I could convince so many students

who were extremely excited to withdraw.

I remember my last words.

I have said all that I have to say.

You should go back to school.

Now go.

My surprise, all the students stood up.

It was unbelievable, but they all left the square.

I had succeeded.

I was very happy.

By the end of December,

students around the country returned to class,

but not in Beijing.

On January 1, 1987,

students defied orders to remain on campus.

They marched to Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.

Police were ready for them.

{n8}The police began to club the students at random.

I saw two students knocked down

and kicked by the police.

They kicked their heads.

After that, two policemen

grabbed their feet and dragged them

to police vans in the square.

It looked like water had been poured onto the square on purpose.

It was freezing, so the water became a sheet of ice,

and it was easy to knock the students down with the clubs.

Then they were dragged away.

That was the first time in my life

I saw a confrontation between police and civilians,

the first time in my whole life.

Working quickly,

Hu Yaobang prevented the conservatives

from jailing the students.

He ordered the young people bust back to campus,

and raged hardliners struck back.

{n8}It was rumored that there was a blacklist of intellectuals

{n8}who would be punished.

I was definitely one of them.

I remember some of us were having dinner at Guiyang's one night.

CCTV had announced there would be

important news at seven o'clock,

but they did not say what.

So we watched TV during dinner and heard the news flash

from the government.

They announced that Hu Yaobang had been ousted.

The conservatives forced Hu Yaobang out,

blaming him for weak leadership

and for not crushing intellectual dissent.

When we heard the news, we felt that it was all over.

We were in shock and realized that

we wouldn't be able to turn to him for protection anymore.

We were doomed.

Then the hardliners went after intellectuals

who had questioned the party.

I wanted to leave the party

before they ordered me out.

I did not want to belong to that kind of party.

But I was angry.

I felt it was unfair.

Fang Lijue had persuaded his students

to return to campus.

Still, he was expelled from the Communist Party.

And he was fired from his job.

I had worked at the University of Science and Technology

for 28 years.

I was really close to the students and teachers.

Of course, I was really sad.

I didn't care about being expelled from the party

or being accused of being anti-Marxist.

In fact, I'd said publicly many times that

Marxism was out of date.

Hundreds of students found that their futures were ruined.

{n8}At the time, they guaranteed they would not punish the students

{n8}who joined in the activities.

But when those students were assigned jobs,

they used all kinds of excuses

to send them to very remote places.

We knew what was going on.

They were all top students.

The authorities assigned them that way to retaliate

because they couldn't stand those students.

The party's other leading reformer,

Zhao Ziyang,

took over from Huyaobang.

While the student movement had been silenced,

Zhao had to deal with a growing number of social problems.

{n8}China is about to enter into another baby-boom period.

In the 1960s and early 1970s,

the population growth was

very high in China.

And the people who were born

in those days

are about to enter

child-bearing periods.

The size of China's population was overwhelming.

Nearly 1.2 billion people.

Almost one-quarter of all mankind.

If the population continued to grow unchecked,

the party feared it would be impossible to maintain

social stability,

to govern and feed so many people.

In 1979,

the party had started the one-child policy.

Women who already had one child

were made to use contraceptives.

If they became pregnant again,

they were pressured to have abortions.

But throughout rural China,

the policies met resistance.

In villages like this one

in northwest Shaanxi Province,

people traditionally wanted large families.

For thousands of years,

people have wanted to have sons

to carry on the family name.

{n8}For instance, when a man grows old,

{n8}he won't be able to support himself if he doesn't have a son.

We have several cases like this in this village.

Old people in their 70s or 80s

become helpless without sons.

Xincu's mother enforced

family planning in their village.

At first, the policy was not so strict.

Later, they started to control even the second child.

They used tractors to take women

to the hospital to get their tubes tied.

The local police did this.

The villagers became really enraged

and extremely uncooperative about family planning.

Since they were furious with the policy,

they vented their anger on the person who carried it out.

They took their rage out on my family,

on my mother.

Women fled their villages

to give birth in secret elsewhere.

Others paid huge fines

for violating the policy.

I can't support the policy of family planning.

Of course, people can't afford to have too many children.

When you have three or four girls,

your burden becomes too heavy.

Some families in the village have to have three or four girls

before they finally get a boy.

If you have a girl, you can't just get rid of her.

The government was powerful enough to control

the most personal aspects of people's lives.

Despite resistance,

family planning policies cut population growth by almost half.

But the huge size of the population

remained a problem.

Away from the coastal regions,

the rural economic reforms

produced new dilemmas.

Village factories could not employ the millions of peasants

freed from collective farming.

{n8}When they proposed that I take 70% of my wages and leave,

{n8}I said I would.

Before they laid people off, 50 workers would inspect

the same small amount of cloth.

How could they pay so many people?

So everyone was sent home,

cut off like a knife.

We felt that the economy along the south coast was growing,

but it had nothing to do with us.

Those southerners had special economic zones,

and they were open to the outside world.

While we northerners were still sealed off in small towns,

we had no contact with the outside world.

The party faced equally daunting problems in cities throughout China.

Most people worked in vast state-run enterprises

where they faced a subsistence life of numbing routine.

In exchange,

factories gave workers

an iron rice bowl,

a guaranteed job, housing,

and benefits for life.

These enterprises were inefficient,

their benefits costly,

and they often made products no one wanted.

They were losing the government vast sums of money,

but they were the backbone of communism.

Zhao Ziyang asked a group of young economists to tackle the problem.

The iron rice bowl was a common problem.

{n8}It didn't matter if you worked well or badly.

It didn't make a difference whether factories were efficient

or profitable or not.

And workers' salaries were all the same.

So why should you work?

It was very hard to fire a worker.

The Public Security Bureau ordered managers to rehire workers.

{n8}Since they might create social unrest.

Some people who lost their jobs

even went to their boss's home and said, I have nothing to eat.

You still have food, so I am eating with you.

Few workers dared give up the security of their iron rice bowl.

{n8}Nobody wanted to give up his job

{n8}and jump into the sea, as the saying goes,

{n8}which means doing business on your own.

Not one of my friends had the guts to do so.

By 1988,

workers were growing nervous

as they saw inflation eat into their fixed wages.

And they grew angry as they saw

government officials use their connections to make fortunes.

From the families of top party leaders

to local village officials,

corruption riddled society.

We were not sure what to do next.

Our leaders were pretty frank about it.

They admitted they were crossing the river by touching the stones.

This means that if you want to cross the river

but don't know how deep the water is,

you have to feel for the stones

every step you take.

Otherwise,

you may fall into deep water and drown.

{n8}The leaders of the Central Committee

{n8}started to say that we needed to experiment,

that this was the first stage of socialism and that

mistakes were inevitable.

My in-laws, who were mid-level government officials

and had worked for the party for decades,

began to criticize Deng more openly

and said that he had made a mess.

But in the communist system,

people had no way to make their voices heard.

In the spring of 1989,

a chance came.

Hu Yabang, the popular leader ousted two years earlier,

suffered a heart attack.

He died on April 15, 1989.

When Hu Yabang passed away,

this anger which had been suppressed exploded.

All of a sudden, overnight,

the campus was full of big posters.

In the days following his death,

students in Beijing flocked spontaneously

to Tiananmen Square to pay tribute to Hu Yabang.

They seized the occasion to make political demands

for freedom of speech,

for the right to form student unions,

and for an end to government corruption.

The official memorial service for Hu Yabang

was on April 22 in the Great Hall of the People.

During the service,

thousands of students waited outside.

When the service in the Great Hall of the People ended,

everybody was very hesitant.

{n8}If we just went home, it would have felt as if

{n8}we hadn't expressed our feelings.

Zhou Yongjun and several other students

were allowed through the police lines.

They tried to give the government a petition with their demands.

The other two went up to the front of the Great Hall of the People

and knelt.

All I could do was follow them and kneel,

but I only knelt on one knee.

I felt humiliated.

All kinds of feelings welled up in my heart.

I stood there and cried silently.

My tears were running down,

running down non-stop.

The young men waited on their knees for nearly an hour.

No official came to receive them.

The emotional impact of the students kneeling

in supplication to the government

fueled more protests in the following days.

But on April 26, 1989,

in an editorial in The People's Daily,

Deng warned the students

to stop the demonstrations.

He condemned their activities

as turmoil.

{n8}The People's Daily is the mouthpiece of

{n8}the Chinese Communist Party.

This editorial represented the view of the Central Committee,

the views of the leaders.

That's why this kind of editorial

gets so much attention in China.

It's just like the party giving orders to the whole country.

{n8}We were outraged when we learned

{n8}that the Central Committee had labeled

{n8}the student movement turmoil.

We had gone to the streets only to express our feelings.

We all wished the best for our country.

We never wanted to bring down the government.

For the first time since the founding

of the People's Republic of China,

the People refused to be intimidated

by an official condemnation.

The next day, a line of students

four miles long

marched to Tiananmen Square.

Often at the intersections,

we were confronted by the police.

But the students broke through

each police line one by one.

We marched through all the

intersections just like that.

I remember that while we were marching

on the overpass at Fuxingmen,

I looked down at the streets below

and saw the long, long lines of students.

And I felt a special thrill in my heart.

It was really fun.

I felt that we had the support of the whole city.

On May 13th,

a few hundred radical students

donned white headbands

and marched to Tiananmen.

They camped in the middle of the square

and began a hunger strike.

Thousands more students

rallied around them.

Images of the young people

ready to die in protest

transfixed the world.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev

was to arrive the next day

on May 14th.

The world press was in Beijing

to cover the historic visit,

marking the end of the long rift

between the Soviet Union and China.

The summit turned into a terrible humiliation

for Deng Xiaoping.

Welcoming ceremonies for Gorbachev

were held at the airport

instead of in Tiananmen Square.

What should have been a triumph for Deng

was completely overshadowed

by the thousands outside

who were now calling for his resignation.

The crisis escalated

as students all over the country

marched in support of the movement in Beijing.

People acted out of conscience.

{n8}They wanted to do something for the country.

The students were in their prime,

but they were risking their lives on a hunger strike.

So we had to do something too.

It was the most exciting time of my life.

{n8}Our boss didn't want us to stop working.

He was suspicious of the movement.

Since we weren't allowed to go downstairs,

some of us threw money out of the window.

Who knows if the students got it?

We joked there was so much cash floating in the air,

it looked as if it was snowing.

Thousands of students from provincial cities

poured into Beijing.

By then Beijing had become the center of a national movement.

We had to stand together with Beijing and set up contacts.

In Tiananmen Square, the student organizations

were in chaos.

It was because it was a spontaneous movement.

Many students were enthusiastic

after they got there,

but they were not well organized.

Tiananmen Square became

a world unto itself.

Beijingers had never seen anything like it.

The entire city seemed to march

in support of the students.

Workers from steel mills,

teachers, doctors, housewives,

even the staff of the Communist Party's official newspaper,

The People's Daily.

We walked to Tiananmen,

where it was a sea of people.

I remembered how I had joined the demonstrations

in the late 1940s,

but that was under the rule of the nationalists.

The slogan we shouted back then was,

we want freedom and democracy.

I thought, my goodness,

after so many years, we've gone full circle,

and now we're back,

shouting the same slogan.

By the middle of May,

three weeks after Deng had condemned the demonstrations,

the crisis was at a stalemate.

Many students wanted to return

to campus to try to negotiate

with the government,

but the radical students refused to leave.

The government also was sharply divided over what to do.

Zhao Ziyang indicated he wanted to negotiate.

He was more informed about the situation.

He knew what the students were thinking.

He had many contacts with them.

That was why he hoped that there would be a moderate way

to convince the students and to get better results.

As the government watched,

the crisis escalated even further.

Workers began to make their own demands,

forming labor unions and holding

their own demonstrations in the square.

We formed a standing committee

for the Workers Autonomous Union.

{n8}When we ran to be on the committee,

{n8}I said,

we're not electing someone to a position

or a right or a status.

We're selecting who will have the longest prison terms

or who will be shot dead first.

That will probably be the result of our election.

What seemed like a life or death crisis in Beijing

meant little to the majority of the population

who lived in the countryside.

In the middle of the protests,

Shen Weirong returned to his village for family reasons.

In villages like ours,

the student movement did not mean a lot.

My mother and my grandma did not care much about politics.

They were only concerned about my well-being.

{n8}I didn't agree with the student movement opposing Deng Xiaoping.

It was only after Deng came to power

that my son could go to college

based on his own merits.

Freedom and democracy were too far removed for them.

They had no concept of such things.

They'd say,

what kind of freedom do you want?

You were in college.

You can say and do anything you like.

What more freedom do you want?

I could not communicate with them.

By May 18th,

the hunger strikers had been without food for five days.

Finally, that day,

the government invited student leaders to a meeting.

While Wu Arcai Shi was speaking,

I watched Li Peng's face and

saw him flush with anger.

I think the students must have enjoyed seeing him so upset.

I certainly did.

The atmosphere at the meeting changed.

This was not a dialogue,

but a serious confrontation.

Neither the students nor the government

would back down.

And now the struggle between

the reformers and the conservatives,

which had racked the party for the last decade,

came to a head.

Deng Xiaoping continued to believe it was turmoil.

Since it was turmoil, it was completely bad,

and there was nothing good about it.

Just hours after the meeting,

reformer Zhao Ziyang came to the square.

With tears in his eyes,

he apologized for not having been able to resolve the crisis.

This was Zhao Ziyang's last public appearance.

The hardliners stripped him of his posts

and banned him from public life.

The next day,

the government declared martial law.

The students called off the hunger strike.

As troops tried to enter the city,

the people of Beijing blocked their way.

For two long weeks,

they stopped the army from reaching Tiananmen Square.

But on June 3rd,

the situation changed.

Students heard that troops were

forcing their way through the crowds to the square.

By evening,

the citizens of Beijing were fighting pitched battles

with the troops.

I never imagined the PLA would open fire.

People told me the army would take control

and would kill if necessary.

I said I didn't believe it because I had been a soldier.

During our political study sessions,

the major lesson was that the job of the PLA

was to serve the people.

When I heard shots, I ran out

and saw pink tracers all over the sky.

I didn't know what to do.

The only thing I knew was I should stay.

But to do what?

Wait for my death?

Or fight back?

I had no idea at all.

The demonstrators who chose to remain

gathered in the center of the square.

By early morning,

the troops had surrounded them.

The soldiers,

their helmets were shining,

and their bayonets gave off

a cold light under the lamps.

We had to retreat.

We linked arms to make a solid line to march out,

with a flag at the front.

As we were leaving,

bullets whistled past us in the air.

The sound of shooting was very intense.

From behind,

the tanks raced to scatter us.

But they couldn't.

So some people at the rear were crushed to death.

The people at the back told those at the front to hurry.

But they couldn't go faster than the tanks.

There were screams from behind us.

The sound of terror.

My heart was filled with grief.

But I didn't shed a single tear.

I was numb.

I just gripped my teeth in rage.

As the sun rose on the morning

of June 4th,

the students finally headed back to their homes.

It is estimated that more than

200 people died that night.

Most of the casualties were ordinary citizens,

killed in the streets leading to the square.

The government arrested

thousands who had joined

in the demonstrations.

Many of the movement's young leaders

fled abroad.

A few chose to stay.

They were sentenced

to one prison term after another.

I had stomach pains.

They said I was faking it.

They said I could control my stomach and

make myself throw up.

I said you've got to be kidding.

But they didn't believe me.

They hated me for not cooperating with them.

I was furious.

I said okay,

I don't need help anymore.

I want you to watch me kill myself.

Then I started to hit my head on the wall.

I shouted the Chinese are so pathetic.

Those who can hear me just remember what I'm saying.

I will never be Chinese in my next life.

Don't be Chinese.

It is too horrible to be Chinese.

Too sad.

As the world watched horrified,

foreign governments condemned the crackdown.

International businesses recalled their employees

and scaled back their investments.

Deng Xiaoping was unrepentant.

On June 26,

Chinese television showed him

congratulating the army

for a job well done.

As 1989 came to a close,

Deng and the rest of the party

watched communism collapse

in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

They held firm to their position.

The government was nervous about the students

who participated in the movement

and thought they should be re-educated.

I refused to be re-educated with the others.

That's why I couldn't get a decent job.

So I decided to try my luck in the South.

{n8}Politics is too dangerous.

{n8}Because it won't just destroy your ideals.

It will eat up your soul and ruin your life.

Political repression did not mean

that Deng Xiaoping abandoned

economic reform.

On the contrary,

in the early 1990s,

he launched China into its most

spectacular period of economic growth.

In January 1992,

Deng visited the thriving economic zone of Shenzhen

and called on the entire nation to copy its example.

Communism will not be saved

by rhetoric, he said,

but by improving people's living standards.

His words were soon translated into policy.

A few months later,

Deng's third heir apparent,

Zhang Zemin, addressed

the 14th Party Congress.

The policy worked.

Lured by the promise of China's vast market,

foreign investors returned.

Companies from America, Taiwan,

Japan and Europe

scrambled for Chinese contracts.

In the bright lights of the coastal cities,

young people concentrated on money.

My job is to organize the girls

and to supply them to clients who want them.

I control that.

I'll find clients whatever they want.

Most men just settle for some quick sex.

The good thing about my job is the money.

It's always exhilarating for me to count it.

Communism began to produce its first millionaires.

The country's economy soared.

But the party's call to make money

ignored the problems which had been mounting for the last decade.

At least 100 million peasants

roamed the land searching for work.

In China's vast interior,

people watched the new prosperity

pass them by.

Foreign companies did not invest far inland.

Village factories could not pay their workers.

Peasants, long the base of the party's support,

felt abandoned.

We were hit by natural disasters.

The irrigation system was damaged

and nobody cared.

We didn't have enough food.

When people don't have enough food,

they naturally become discontented with society.

In Mao's time, our lives were so peaceful.

Everyone was poor.

Everyone had the same bitter life.

Now there is a huge gap between rich and poor.

The rich have villas and air conditioners.

But very few are rich.

For most people, life is hard.

We need help from the government.

Nobody pays any attention.

But when it comes to collecting grain tax and money,

they come.

The peasants' burden is really too heavy.

In February 1994,

Deng appeared in public for the last time.

At 90 years of age,

he was finally too ill and frail

to exercise power.

Deng Xiaoping was the last of the generation of men and women

who founded China's Communist Party.

Who fought the revolution

and unified the country.

We believed the Communist Party

would make China a democratic country.

A Communist Party government

would be honest and clean.

I dedicated my life,

all my energy, to the cause.

Under the Communist leadership,

the Chinese people built a strong,

more prosperous nation.

The cost was high.

Millions paid the price of failed ideals.

Of a brutal, outmoded communism

and a harsh new capitalism.

40 years later, looking back,

I feel very sad.

I have such an intense sense of loss.

Where is the goal

we've been striving for all these years?

My best years are gone.

Lost, just like that.

It's very sad.

But I won't give up.

Perhaps I still feel like a young man.

I still want to fight for our goal.

{n8}Subtitles by Andante

Funding for this program was provided by the Freeman Foundation,

the Ford Foundation,

the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,

the Albert Kunstadter Family Foundation,

Corporation for Public Broadcasting,

and by annual financial support from viewers like you.

This is PBS.