Some days before the massacre, DAVID RICEwrote the following piece for 'The Irish Times'and had it smuggled out of China, but it never reached its destination.
RED IS everywhere. The banners held aloft by the marching students are flaring red; the posters on the walls are red; all around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square enormous red flags fly high above the massing students, put there to honour Gorbachev’s visit and never taken down. Even the scarves around the necks of the children are red – those little ones who have now shyly joined their million older brothers and sisters at Tiananmen Square. The only red thing absent is blood. The cacophony of ambulance sirens is everywhere: an interminable high-low screeching as the hunger-strikers are carted off to hospital every couple of minutes – each to be immediately replaced by a new volunteer who promptly goes on jue shi – hunger-strike – and is then joined by the student who is back from hospital.
The screech of those sirens mingles with the pulsing of a million voices, the singing of the Internationale, and the chanting and cheering that comes and goes from different parts of this enormous square.
At twilight, Tiananmen Square takes on a surreal look, with the Great Hall of the People a black block against a fading orange sky, and the flags and banners turning into purple silhouettes. A hush seems to fall.
Then suddenly the streetlights come on and the pulsing cheering starts again, and floodlights pick out the concrete stele that commemorates the Heroes of the Revolution, with tiny human figures clinging like massed ants around its base, and the white-clad medics moving among the 3,000 hunger-strikers lying on the flagstones at the foot of the monument.
What is happening here in Beijing is giving a new meaning to the word escalation. Every day is the high point, with the greatest enthusiasm, the biggest ever crowds, the most ever workers and trade unions joining in with the students. And then the next day it is bigger again. And again the next day. It is like Mount St Helens, that volcanic mountain in Washington state that began swelling and swelling until one day it blew.
Something has to happen. By the time this is printed something may well have happened. And everyone hopes and prays that it will be something good. For up to now this is being called The Gentle Revolution. It is a revolution of smiles and caring and astonishing emotion. Students take the stranger by the arm and say, “Thank you for being with us”; the little money they have goes into cardboard collection boxes for the cause; everywhere I go, people break bread and offer me some. I sat with one of the hunger-strikers, a strikingly beautiful young woman called Lin Na. She told me she was 20, and a student of French at the Beijing Institute of Languages. I asked her why she was on hunger strike. “To help others, and to help China,” she said. I asked, why bother to help others, what’s in it for you?
She thought for a moment and then said:“When I was only six, my mother took me on a visit here to Beijing. I saw my first ever beggar, sitting on the side of the street. And then we were eating in a little restaurant, and someone came in and asked my mother for what was left on the plate. I think I never forgot that. If I come out of this alive, I plan to go to Africa and work in one of the French-speaking countries there. As a teacher.”
“Will you come out of it?” I asked. “Are you prepared to go to the end?” She nodded.
“What if the authorities don’t give in?” I asked.
“They will give in,” she said fiercely. “They have to.”
“In my country the authorities didn’t give in to hunger-strikers,” I said, as gently as I could.
“And what happened?”
“They died,” I said. She bit her lip and her eyes filled up with tears.