Today I de-camped at dawn to watch the torch relay in that you-know-which-famous-square. A couple dozen other journalists and I were herded to a spot facing Mao’s portrait, We waited and waited. The last time I’d waited that long in that place, that early in the morning, was in 1989 during a brief and ill-fated Beijing Spring.
Back then I was waiting for Chinese police to come clear the square of hundreds of youthful protestors who’d hung colorful silk banners off official flagpoles in front of the granite obelisk known as the Monument to the People’s Heroes. (Chinese look down on your political movement if you don’t have flags made of luxuriant silk, and if you don’t know how to brandish them just right so that the fabric floats like butterflies’ wings.) These kids in 1989 – about the same age as the youth in the square this morning -- chanted pro-democracy slogans and strummed folk-songs on guitars.
That earlier time I had stayed overnight in the square, surrounded by this moonlit and surreal Chinese Woodstock scene, because the next day Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was due in town for a historic Sino-Soviet summit. I assumed police would come waving their truncheons, and maybe lobbing tear gas, to clear the square of this ragtag assembly of demonstrators before Gorby’s arrival. Otherwise the protestors would be able to hijack the summit spotlight, China’s leaders would be embarrassed, and things would get messy.
Police never came that night. Leaders were embarrassed. Things got messy.
We still don’t know exactly how many people died in the crackdown, and the topic remains an extremely touchy one still for authorities. Despite the unblocking of a number of websites on Aug. 1 -- after the IOC squawked and Chinese officials caved (sort of) -- many sites related to the 1989 crackdown remain inaccessible to ordinary Netizens.
Which is why this item will not mention the name of that famous-square-whose-name-cannot-be-mentioned.The last blog posting we did on this topic, by my colleague Jonathan Ansfield, (who did name names) not only created access problems for this blog but even managed to get certain pages of another blog blocked for a time because it had cited Jonathan’s item (sorry, Roland).
So, back to the torch relay, which entered Beijing amidst much hoopla on its way to the finale and the Aug. 8 Olympics opening ceremony. Today there were many, many luxuriant silk flags fluttering in the square. Red and white flags representing the Olympics and the Beijing Games. Lots of familiar red Chinese national flags. And a sea of crimson flags wielded by youth in matching red t-shirts, caps and backpacks all exhorting observers to revel in the glory of….Coca Cola.
Not to be outdone, on the opposite side of the square was another group of exuberant youth, with another Chinese national flag that was truly enormous. It required a number of excited kids to coordinate in holding it parallel to the ground, tilted slightly so that photographers could capture the true impact of its immense size. After all, who could be more worthy to be flag-bearers in China than these enthusiastic volunteers brought to you by….McDonald’s.
Indeed, the torch relay organizers who bussed us into the square amidst extremely tight security thoughtfully gave each journalist a bag of McDonald’s goodies. A Big Mac’s for breakfast is something I never dreamed of in Beijng (or anywhere else) in 1989.
In today’s China we don’t blink an eye as we chow down on carb-heavy Western fast food waiting for worldwide basketball celebrity Yao Ming to grab the Olympic torch and trot past icons of the Chinese Communist Party’s continuing supremacy (such as the national emblems on the Great Hall of the People), as onlookers organized by famous Games sponsors cheer and tiny shaven-headed boys dressed in daffodil-yellow pajama-style outfits perform martial-arts maneuvers while a massive security presence including a brand-new spit-polished black Hummer with police markings lurks in the alleyways, a CCTV news helicopter captures what will become the official version of the scene while flying lazy arcs over the square, and Chairman Mao Zedong’s portrait gazes sternly on the entire proceedings from the south gate of the fabled Forbidden City.
What would Mao think of all this? Marxist ideology has given way to McDonalds. The Communist party has linked arms with Coke. Beijing police watch CSI Miami for tips on how real police act and outfit themselves (even if Hummers are themselves wider than some Beijing sidestreets). The youth in the square today were not chanting “Democracy! Freedom!” as they did in 1989 but rather “Go China! Go Beijing!” Mao’s squat and stolid mausoleum was all but eclipsed by fluttering silk flags, floating over all of us like a red tide.The square has come full circle.
