Culture

A student looks at contemporary Chinese perspectives

Sunrise Over Tiananmen: A student looks at contemporary Chinese perspectives

by Evelyn Atkinson

Wednesday February 22, 2006

My friend Megan and I arrive at Tiananmen at 3 a.m. The square is blocked off at night, and the gates aren’t open yet, but already people are clustered around the entranceways. Men, women, grandparents, little girls in party dresses with perfect, still-wet braids, all dressed up for Chairman Mao. Everyone waves miniature Chinese flags. Megan and I also wave one, which draws quizzical looks. What are two foreigners doing at the flag-raising?

The flag-raising at Tiananmen is a profound and venerated ceremony. Tiananmen Square is a Mecca for Chinese people who flock to the square to shuffle past Mao’s embalmed body and take their pictures in front of his monolithic, airbrushed portrait. My Chinese teacher told me that when she was six and came to Beijing for the first time, the first place her family visited was Tiananmen.

It is not uncommon to see small children being posed by their parents under the benevolent-looking Chairman’s portrait, saluting the camera and brandishing a Chinese flag.

Now, waiting outside, the crowd pushes and shoves in contagious anticipation. Then the gates are withdrawn. Suddenly, the mass of people surges forward, pouring towards the marked-off area surrounding the flags. Megan and I run too.

Across the square, we see that the other entrances have similarly opened their floodgates. There are a thousand people stampeding across Tiananmen Square tonight.

We are among the first to reach the barrier and plop down, sitting cross-legged instead of squatting like the Chinese people around us. A young woman near us eyes us curiously and starts to talk. She is an English teacher from Northern China, she says. She has not seen a foreigner in six years. She has come to Beijing for a medical exam. But first, of course, she has come to Tiananmen.

"Why are all these people here so early?" we ask.
"To see the marching," the teacher replies seriously. "These soldiers march better than any others in the world. It is hard to lift your legs up and down like that."

My Chinese teacher had said the exact same thing.
"Don’t you have a flag ceremony like this in America?" she asks.
"Maybe…" I tell her about the Pledge of Allegiance.
"You mean they make you promise to love your country?" says the woman in shock.

"That sounds really Communist," Megan whispers to me.
The woman leans forward. "So," she says, "do you both have guns?"

Megan and I are confused.
"On TV," she continues, "I see that most Americans have guns. In your movies, you have lots of guns. Also at your schools. Some boys shot their schoolmates. It was in our newspapers."
"That is very rare," I say. "Most Americans don’t have guns. Like in Chinese movies, the actors fly, but we know Chinese people themselves don’t fly."

"Ah," she said. She seems to get the point. "So you do not have a gun?"
"No," I say.
She nods. "Because you are a girl," she says, as if that explains everything.

One day, I had asked my Chinese teacher what she thought of the Tiananmen Massacre. I had called it "that bad thing that happened to students in the 80s." I asked her if it were in her history books.

"No," she said, "but in a hundred years it will be. It is a…"
"Sensitive topic?" I supplied. "Then how did you hear about it?"
She told me that her teacher had been there and had told her about it. "She came the next morning and saw lots of bodies and blood and not good things." She shook her head.

I asked her if that affected how people today saw the square.
"Oh no," she said. "It happened in the past. Chinese people look towards the future. What happened was a sacrifice. Those students, they were dangerous to the future of China. They would keep China from being one country. The government had to protect China. It was terrible, but it was a sacrifice. We all have to make sacrifices."

Whereas Americans prize individual rights, the Chinese value the good of the nation as a whole over the good of the individual. So by Chinese logic, chilling as it may seem from an American perspective, my teacher’s response made sense.

Yet here was my conception of Tiananmen full of blood and destruction, and here was this young woman’s view of American teenagers: they were precisely the same.

The sky has faded into pink, and the clouds above Chairman Mao are shot with silver. Suddenly, the crowd stirs. Marching music begins to blare from a set of scratchy speakers. A file of Chinese soldiers, some so young that their uniforms hang on them as if on hangers, march toward the flags. They stop and stand at attention while one hoists the flag. The music continues to blare. Everyone around us holds their breath.

Then the soldiers about-face and march away. They march the same as any soldiers I have ever seen.