This Day in 1989: June 2, 1990, Hou Dejian, Zhou Dou, and Gao Xin Detained Again

On June 2, 1990, Hou Dejian, Zhou Dou, and Gao Xin were detained by police ahead of a press conference they had planned for the one-year anniversary of their hunger strike.

They spent three weeks in custody before being released after the June "sensitive period."

Days of 1989

This Day in 1989: September 1, 1989: Li Peng Interviewed by Le Figaro

On September 1, 1989, Premier Li Peng granted an interview by the French newspaper Le Figaro and answered a series of questions by Alain Peyrefitte. He cited the testimony by Hou Dejian to reiterate that there had been no death during the "clearing of Tiananmen Square," and that the "truth about Tiananmen was distorted."


Days of 1989

This Day in 1989: August 17, 1989, Hou Dejian Reappears

Right after the massacre, Hou Dejian had secretly sought refuge in the Australian embassy in Beijing. After two months' negotiations, Hou Dejian finally exited the embassy voluntarily on August 16, 1989, after receiving a guarantee for his safety.

Immediately, Hou Dejian conducted an interview by the New China Press, and a brief report was published in the official press. It emphasized that "No one person was killed or crushed by tanks during the withdraw [from Tiananmen Square]". A week later, Hou Dejian published a much more detailed account in Hong Kong press.

Days of 1989

Pictures of 1989: The Terror in Darkness around 4AM on June 4, 1989

Students at the Monument of People's Heroes around 4am.

Around 3:45, Hou Dejian (center) and Zhou Duo (right) negotiate with troops.

At 4am, darkness fall at Monument as most of lighting in Tiananmen Square are turned off.

Soldiers on the move in Tiananmen Square.

Soldiers on the move in Tiananmen Square.

Soldiers on the move in Tiananmen Square.

Tanks approach the Monument of People's Heroes.

APC's approach Monument of People's Heroes.

At the Monument of People's Heroes, students sing and shout slogans with V-gestures.

The ruin of the Goddess of Democracy.

Pictures of 1989

Pictures of 1989: "Four Gentlemen" Hunger Strike on June 2, 1989

"Four Gentlemen" Gao Xin, Hou Dejian, Zhou Duo, and Liu Xiaobo (from left to right) launch hunger strike on June 2, 1989.

The one on the lower-left is Chen Xiaoping.

Liu Xiaobo is giving a speech. Next to him are Zhou Dou, Hou Dejian, Gao Xin, Wang Dan, and Wuer Kaixi.

The star power of Hou Dejian attract thousands back to Tiananmen Square.

Pictures of 1989

Document of 1989: Four Gentleman's Hunger Strike Manifesto

At the end of May, 1989, the student movement has reached a low point. Students' hunger strike has long ended. Martial law was declared many days ago, but the troops were blocked outside of the city by residents. Students continued to occupy the Tiananmen Square and several attempts of organized withdraw had failed. It was at this time Liu Xiaobo, then a lecturer at Beijing Normal University, suggested to launch a hunger strike relay by famous intellectuals, a symbolic action of plunging into the movement themselves. He was only able to recruit Hou Dejian, Zhou Dou, and Gao Xin. Together, they started a hunger strike on June 2 and were collectively referred as the "Four Gentlemen."

The manifesto of this hunger strike was drafted by Liu Xiaobo himself. In this document, he declared for the first time his famous slogan, "We have no enemies," which he insisted to this day.

The following is a translation. The original in Chinese can be viewed here.

Four Gentlemen Hunger Strike Manifesto

6/2/1989

We start our hunger strike! We protest! We call upon people! We repent!

We are not looking for death. We are searching for true life.

Under the tremendous pressure of irrational militant violence by the Li Peng regime, Chinese intellectuals must end their all-words-but-no-action tradition of osteomalacia. We must protest the military rule with our actions. We must call for the birth of a brand new political culture with our actions. We must repent the mistakes we made from our long-time weakness. Each of us bears a part of the responsibility for the backwardness of our Chinese nation.

1. The Purpose of Hunger Strike

The current democratic movement, unprecedented in China's history, has always used legal, non-violent, and rational means to appeal for liberty, democracy, and human rights. However, the Li Peng regime went so far as to mobilize a military force of hundreds of thousands to suppress the unarmed students and people of all walks. Therefore, we start our hunger strike, not for petition, but for protesting the martial law and military rule! We advocate the pushing for progress in China's democratization with peaceful means and we are against any form of violence. However, we are not afraid of violence. We want to use peaceful means to demonstrate the toughness of our civil and demoractic force, to demolish the undemocratic order supported by bayonets and lies! This ultra-foolish act of using martial law and military rule against students and masses in peaceful petition establishes a precedence of the very worst kind, put the Communist Party, the government, and the military in shame, and destroys the fruit of a decade of reform and openness in a single day!

The thousdands of years history of China is filled with hatred and violent clashes. Even in the modern era, the sense of enermy is a heritage for Chinese people. After 1949, the slogan of "Class Struggle as the Guideline" pushed the tranditional senses of hatred, enemy, and violence even more to the extreme. This military rule is also a result of the "class struggle"-style political culture. Because of this, we start our hunger strike, to call on Chinese people to gradually abandon and eliminate the senses of enemy and hatred, absolutely abolish the "class struggle"-style political culture -- because hatred could only produce violence and tyrancy. We must begin China's democratic reconstruction with a democractic sense of tolerance and cooperation. The democratic politics is a politics without enemy and hatred, but only consultation, discussion, and voting based on mutual respect, mutual tolerance, and multure compromises. As the Premier, Li Peng has made serious mistakes and should resign according to democratic procedures. But Li Peng is not our enemy. Even after he steps down, he should continue to enjoy his rights as a citizen, including the rights to uphold his incorrect opinions. We call upon the government and every ordinary citizen to abandon the old political culture and start a new political culture. We demand the government to end the military rule immediately. And we call upon students and the government to once again negotiate peacefully and to resolve their conflicts with consulation and dialogue.

This student movement has received unprecedented sympathy, understanding, and support from all walks of the society. The implementation of the military rule has turned the student movement into a democratic movement participated by all people. But there is no denying that many people support students only out of humanitarian compassion and resentment to the government and lack a true sense of citizenship out of political responsibilities. Therefore, we call upon the whole society to gradually abandon the spectator and mere sympathy attitudes and build up a true sense of citizenship. First and foremost, citizenship is a sense of political equality. Every citizen must have the self-confidence that his own political rights is equal to that of the Premier. Secondly, citizenship is not only justice and sympathy, but also a rational urge of participation. This is also the sense of political responsibility. Every person does not just sympathize and support but participate directly in the democratic reconstruction. Finally, citizenship is the consciousness of taking responsibilities and obligations. The existence of rational and legal social politics is to everyone's credit. The existence of irrational and illegal social politics is to everyone's fault. Consciously participating in social politics and consciously taking on responsibilities is every citizen's loyal obligation. Chinese people must understand: in democraticized politics, everybody must be a citizen first, and then be a student, professor, worker, cadre, soldier, etc..

For thousands years, the Chinese society went through vicious cycles of overthrowing an old emperor and establishing a new one. History has shown that the stepping down by one leader who had lost people's heart and the rise of another leader beloved by the poeple cannot solve the true problems in Chinese politics. What we need is not a perfect savior but a complete democratic system. Therefore, I call for the following: First, the society should form legal, independent organizations by various means, gradually establish a grass-root political force to balance the government power. Because the essence of democracy is balance, we would rather have ten devils balancing each other than a single angle with absolute power. Second, gradually establish a thorough procedure for impeachment by impeaching leaders who made serious mistakes. It is not important as of who to step up or down, it is important in how they step up or down. An undemocractic appointing and firing procedure can only lead to dictatorship.

In this movement, the government and students have all made mistakes. The mistakes by the government are mainly for standing on the opposite side of the vast student and resident mass and escalating the conflicts, guided by the old "class struggle" political mindset. Students' mistakes are mainly in the shortcomings of their own organizations. They showed many non-democratic elements during their efforts in petitioning for democracy. Therefore, we call upon both government and students sides to reflect calmly. It is our opinion that, as a whole, the main mistakes in this movement are on the government's side. The actions of demonstrations and hunger strike are ways for people to express their opinions. They are absolutely rational and legal, and not turmoil. But the government ignored the fundamental rights guaranteed to every citizen by the Constitution and adopted a tyranical political mindset to characterize this movement as turmiol. This led to a series of incorrect policies and again and again pushed the movement to new heights, made the conflict more and more dramatic. Therefore, the real culprit of creating turmoil is government's errenous policies, whose seriousness is not any less than that during the Culture Revolution. It is only due to the restraints of students and residents, including the many strong voices by enlightened individuals in the Party, government, and military, that we are spared of any large-scale bloodshed. Because of this, the government must admit and reflect on these mistakes. We believe that it is still not too late for corrections. The government should learn a hearty lesson from this large-scale democratic movement, acquire a new habit of listening to people's voices, get used to people expressing their opinions with the rights guanranteed by the Constitution, and learn to govern the nation democratically. This wide-range democratic movement is teaching the government how to manage society with democracy and rule of law. The mistakes on the students' side are mainly in the chaos in their internal organizations, the lack of effenciency and democratic procedure. For instance, their goals are democracy but their means and procedures are undemocratic; their theory is democratic but their handling of real issues are undemocratic; they lack the spirit of cooperation, their powers cancel each other and led to confusion in decision-making; their finance is a mess and waste is rampant; they have abundance of emotion but not enough of reasoning; they possess too much sense of priviledge but lacks equality, etc. etc.. In the most recent hundred years, the struggle to achieve democracy by the Chinese people has mostly limited at the level of ideology and slogans. It only concerns with the idea of enlightening but not the actual implementations, only the goal but not the means, processes and procedures. We believe that the true realization of a democratic politics is the democratization of the actual process, means, and procedures. Therefore, we call upon Chinese people to abandon the traditional empty democray of ideology and slogans and to begin the actual implementation, to transfer the democratic movement centered in enlightenment to a democractic movement of actual implementations, acting from every detailed piece of issues. We call upon the students to start their own reflections by focusing on establishing the order within Tiananmen Square.

The big mistakes the government made are also represented in their use of the term "a small clique". With our hunger strike, we want to tell all the media home and abroad that the socalled "a small clique" means such a group of people: they are not students but they are willingly participating in this students-led democratic movement as citizens with strong senses of political responsibility. Everything we do is legal and rational. They want to use their intelligence and action to help the government repent in the areas of political culture, personal character, and ethical power, openly acknowledge and correct its mistakes; to help the students refine their independent organizations with democratic and legal procedures. We must admit that it is an unfamiliar concept to every Chinese citizen to govern the nation democratically. All Chinese citizens must learn from the scratch, that includes the top leaders in the Party and the government. In this process, mistakes by the government and the people are unavoidable. The key is to acknowledge the mistakes, correct the mistakes, and turn these mistakes into positive treature so we can learn how to govern our nation democratically through the process of correcting mistakes.

2. Our Slogans

We have no enemies! Don't let hatred and violence poison our intellegence and China's democratization process!

We need to reflect! It's everyone's responsility for China's falling behind!

We are citizens first!

We are not looking for death! We are seeking the true life!

3. Hunger Strike Location, Time, and Rules

Location: Under the Monument of People's Heros at Tiananmen Square

Time: 72 hours, 6/2 4pm to 6/5 4pm

Special Note: Since Hou Dejian has to travel to Hong Kong for recording in 6 days, his hunger strike will be 48 hours, 6/2 4pm to 6/4 4pm

Rules: Only consume plain water, any beverage containing nutritious ingredients (super, starch, fat, protein) is not allowed

4. Hunger Strikers

Liu Xiaobo: Doctor in Literature, Lecturer at Beijing Normal University

Zhou Dou: formerly lecturer at Peking University, Stone Corp.

Hou Dejian: Known song writer

Gao Xin: editor-in-chief of Beijing Normal University Weekly, member of Chinese Communist Party

Documents of 1989

Book Excerpt: Liu Xiaobo in 1989

Amid much anticipation, jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his "long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."

Liu Xiaobo, then a professor at the Beijing Normal University, was an active participant in the 1989 student movement, especially at the latter stage. He made his first appearance in the book Standoff at Tiananmen in the critical meeting of May 27, 1989, in which he unsuccessfully tried to promote student leader Wuer Kaixi as a spokesperson of the movement, which infuriated other leaders such as Chai ling and Feng Congde.

On June 2, 1989, Liu Xiaobo took an initiative of his own and led the so-called Four Gentlemen hunger strike:

Few people noticed that the roar of the "Flying Tigers" had disappeared for several days. It was not until May 30 when the government announced that a dozen leaders of that motorcycle gang had been arrested for "inciting violence and public disturbance." There was hardly any reaction. Most people still regarded the gang as punks.

The Workers Autonomous Federation sprang to action when they learned that some of their leaders were seen being dragged into vehicles and hauled away. They asked students for help. Students and workers marched together to the office building of the Ministry of Public Security. After a day of sit-in, they successfully forced the release of the abducted workers. Still, nobody bothered to inquire about the "Flying Tigers."

Just like Liu Gang before him, Wang Juntao was now seeing his influence dissipating. His grand vision of a George Washington style leadership crashed and burned with the failure of withdrawing from Tiananmen Square. The Capital Joint Conference had moved to the university campus area and had rapidly become a mere shell of its previous self. Most prominent intellectuals had disappeared. They left the capital for the provinces or went into hiding. Wang Juntao shared the pessimistic sentiment. He told Chen Ziming that it should be time for them to plan for the aftermath as bloodshed was now inevitable.

Wang Juntao instructed personnel at their Institute to produce fake identification papers for leaders of the movement. He arranged safe houses in the outskirts of the city and concocted a rough plan of evacuation in stages. He even went so far as to pull out Liu Gang and Zhang Lun, two of the non-students from his Institute who were involved the deepest, and send them out into the suburbs. Chen Ziming was not as convinced of the imminent danger. He believed that the movement had reached such a scale that the possibility of an outright crackdown had diminished.

International Children's Day arrived on June 1. Students occupying Tiananmen Square tried their hands at being good big brothers and sisters. They cleaned up the place and prepared small gifts for young visitors who came with their parents for the newest tourist attraction in town: the Goddess of Democracy. But the day did not start well. Li Lu was awoken by the disturbing news that Feng Congde and Chai Ling had been kidnapped. He rushed over and found the couple tied up and gagged in a tent. Li Lu assessed the situation and realized that it was not a government operation but the action of a renegade group within their own ranks. It was yet another coup attempt to overthrow their leadership. Calmly, Li Lu summoned student marshals and resolved the conflict. However, the escalation of their infighting had clearly reached an alarming level.

Professor Liu Xiaobo was very upset. After the brief excitement at the Capital Joint Conference, he was seeing his fellow intellectuals reverting back to their usual ways. They were running away in droves at the first sign of danger. Some went into hiding. Others were helplessly resigned to the fact that they had no control of the situation dominated by radical students at Tiananmen Square. Nobody, in his mind, was taking any responsibility. It was a deep-rooted tradition of Chinese intellectuals, a community that had been rightfully regarded as pathetic and hopeless by numerous generations.

As someone who had returned to Beijing in the face of the April 26 People's Daily editorial, Liu Xiaobo believed that it was time to take a stand. He realized that he had to commit himself to the movement personally before he could hope to have any real influence. To achieve that, he had to make a grand gesture of his own: a hunger strike.

Wang Juntao did not agree with the idea at first but was convinced by Liu Xiaobo's reasoning. To avoid escalating hoopla this time, they decided to launch it as a relay of symbolic strikes only, conducted by teams of prominent intellectuals. When one team finished their strike, another continued on. In this manner, they could parade famous names and faces in Tiananmen Square to sustain the occupation to that precious date of June 20.

The trouble was that there were no longer many prominent intellectuals left within their ranks. Liu Xiaobo was only able to recruit Zhou Dou, a middle-aged scholar who had been active behind the scenes, and Gao Xin, a young school newspaper editor in Liu Xiaobo's Beijing Normal University. Neither of them had any name recognition. But they eventually got the prominent name they needed in the form of a rock star Hou Dejian.

Hou Dejian made his fame with his folksy little songs in the college campuses of Taiwan during the 1970's. In 1978, when the United States abandoned Taiwan for a formal relationship with mainland China, the young Hou Dejian wrote Children of the Dragon to express the sorrow and determination of his people. Despite its origin, the song became an overnight sensation when it was introduced on the mainland two years later. The phrase "children of dragon" became a synonym for the Chinese identity.

But Hou Dejian did not see much future in Taiwan for himself. In an act considered traitorous on his home island, he permanently settled in Beijing and cultivated his fame with a much larger audience. Little did he know that his little personal adventure would lead him right into a standoff at Tiananmen Square. Hou Dejian had just come back from a concert in Hong Kong to rally support for students in Beijing. He had already committed to another concert. Therefore, he could only fast for forty eight hours while his comrades pledged a seventy-two hour hunger strike.

In the late afternoon of June 2, the four of them, referred to as the Four Gentlemen, walked into Tiananmen Square. They read a manifesto of their own, with a stab at the Chinese intellectual community:

We start our hunger strike. We protest. We call upon people. We repent. We are not looking for death, we are looking for the true life. Under the irrational militant violence by the Li Peng regime, Chinese intellectuals must end their all-words-but-no-action tradition of osteomalacia. We must protest the military rule with our actions. We must give birth to a brand new political culture with our own actions.

The lengthy manifesto went on to criticize the government and "radical students" for escalating the crisis with their irrationality. It proudly claimed that they, the new hunger strikers, would "not allow hatred to poison our wisdom, for we have no enemies."

Nobody paid any attention to the manifesto. Thousands and thousands of people rushed into Tiananmen Square with only one thing on their minds: Hou Dejian. People in Beijing found a new reason to come: "Go see the Goddess first and then the 'monkey [Hou]'!" Yet even the Goddess of Democracy could not compete with the power of a live rock star. Sitting on the pedestal of the Monument to People's Heroes, Hou Dejian, a shy and skinny figure, was forced to sing his songs repeatedly. Again and again, he led the entire Square in renditions of Children of Dragon. When he had to take a break, Liu Xiaobo tried to make his speeches. While hatred did not poison his wisdom, the "Square fever" did. Facing thousands of cheering fans, the rational thoughts contained in the well-written manifesto were blown away. He praised the students with extreme enthusiasm and vowed to carry on their struggle to the very end. He did not get to say much anyway, as the impatient audience broke out into loud chants. "Hou Dejian," "Hou Dejian!"

Just like that, the Four Gentlemen's hunger strike evolved into a freaky circus show.

Only a day later, in that fateful morning of June 3, 1989, Liu Xiaobo and his Four Gentlemen helped persuade protesting students into a peaceful withdraw as the tanks closed in on them during the massacre.

After the massacre, Liu Xiaobo was arrested. He was initially fingered by the government as the "black hand" behind the movement, a charge later dropped for lack of evidence. After being jailed for a year, he was eventually released without a formal sentence.

Chai Ling Baptized

The Underground reported today that former student leader Chai Ling has embraced Christian faith and was baptized over the Easter holiday.

In a lengthy testimony, which is available here, Chai Ling recalled her first encounter with the Bible while still an undergraduate student in Peking University. She also briefly told the story of the movement without going into much details. Curiously, she described her survival as "for some miraculous reason, I survived," without even a hint of the efforts Zhou Dou and Hou Dejian had made to negotiate a peaceful withdraw, or the dramatic voice vote by the student collective led by her former husband Feng Congde. It appears that she only needs to credit her new found Lord now.

Almost a year ago, after being absent from public scene for about a decade, Chai Ling made a high-profile "return to the movement," pledging large donations and active participation. She hasn't been heard much since, other than an ongoing lawsuit against the producers of documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace. In her testimony, she described how Chinese government agents had harassed her family in China for her limited involvement. It was also during that time that she suffered a panic attack and then eventually found God, according to her testimony.

This Day in 1989, June 3, The Even of Massacre

Tension escalated during the day of June 3, 1989. Large crowds of military troops, wearing white shirts but army pants, were discovered everywhere around Tiananmen Square. They were surrounded by students and residents. Unarmed, the soldiers either sat silently on sidewalks or retreated into large government buildings.

Near Xinhuamen, students seized another nondescript van and found weapons including machine guns and automatic assault rifles inside. They displayed the guns on the roof for news cameras. At high noon, just as a huge crowd assembled there, barrages of tear gas canisters rained down the scene. Soldiers burst out of Xinhuamen to disperse the crowd and recover the vehicle.

By the nightfall, thousands of students and residents still gathered at Tiananmen Square, demanding to see the hunger striking folk star Hou Dejian. Zhang Boli was preparing for the openning of a University of Democracy at the foot of the Goddess of Democracy. Most students, however, gathered closely at the base of the Monument to People's Heroes, where they would spend an unforgettable night.

Gunshots were first heard around 10pm.

For the rest of night, read an excerpt from my book, Standoff at Tiananmen.


Days of 1989

This Day in 1989, June 2, the Calm before the Storm

There were clear signs that tension between the students occupying the Tiananmen Square and the government was gradually building on June 2, 1989. More soldiers were seen around the area, either marching or jogging in formation, or just wandering about. Some of them were blocked by students.

In the early afternoon, close to a thousand students rode bicycles to the office of Beijing Daily and burned copies of that days edition in a protest of the newspaper's "degenerative" report on the movement.

Later, Liu Xiaobo led Gao Xin, Zhou Dou, and Hou Dejian into the Square and announced their own hunger strike. They would become known as the "Four Gentlemen." Liu Xiaobo read a manifesto of their own criticizing both the government and the students' erratic behavior during the movement and vowed to steer the movement into a more sensible direction. But the day belonged to Hou Dejian, a folk song writer and star originally from Taiwan. Huge crowd started to build up during that evening for the newest attraction in town: the Goddess of Democracy and Hou Dejian in a public square.

The day ended with an unexpected excitement. A speeding military jeep lost control at the Muxidi intersection on Chang'an Avenue and smashed into pedestrians, killing three at the scene. Thousands of students and residents rushed to the scene in a frenzy, thinking it as an early sign of military movement. Along the Chang'an Avenue, they did discover vehicles carrying sacks of military supplies, including helmets, rifles, and bayonets. Some of weapons were displayed on top of buses for television cameras. Alarms went off on campuses calling for students to enforce Tianamen Square. After fourteen days of martial law, the wolf was finally coming.

It was the night before the tragedy.


Days of 1989