Free Forbidden City by William Bell

Zhao Zi-yanghad made a speech later in the afternoon and said that he thought the situation would calm down and that there would be no turmoil in China.
    After the newscast ended we all looked at Lao Xu, waiting for an interpretation. I was beginning to learn that the Chinese often speak in a sort of code so that they don’t have to say things straight out.
    Lao Xu looked worried. He sighed and said, “Zhao Zi-yang has broken with Deng Xiao-ping.”
    “What!” Eddie shouted.
    “Remember the editorial on April 26, Eddie? It came from Deng and it said that the students were promoting chaos. Now Chairman Zhao is saying that there will be no chaos. He has rejected Deng’s analysis. That means he has rejected Deng.
    “The Communist Party now talks with two voices. That means trouble. Big trouble.”
    I wondered where the students and Lan and Hong fit in to all this. Then I realized it. They were right in the middle.

Things have gotten
really
hairy around here.
    I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to keep this journal every day. Everyone thinks there’s a big wind of change blowing, and when the storm passes, I want to remember every second of it.
    On May 13 the students in Tian An Men Square changed their tactics. Up until then, thousands had refused to leave the square, and every day the placewas a carpet of humanity. But on the thirteenth one thousand students started a hunger strike and vowed to keep it up until either they died or the government promised to meet with their representatives and to begin reforms. When I heard that I rushed down there. The students were set up in the centre of the square, sitting or lying on spread-out newspapers, surrounded by thousands more who were not hunger-striking. The
da zi bao
, the big character posters, demanded that the Communist Party become more democratic and that corruption in the high levels of the Party be stopped.
    I spotted Hong and Lan among the strikers, but I couldn’t get near enough to talk to them.
    Later, when I asked Lao Xu what this stuff about corruption was all about he looked a little bit uncomfortable. He gave me a vague answer about a few bad men being dishonest. Eddie butted in as he usually does.
    “Lao Xu is giving you the Party line, Alex. He doesn’t want to criticize the government.”
    Lao Xu looked even more embarrassed and laughed the way Chinese do when they feel uncomfortable. Eddie shouldn’t have centered him out like that, I thought. I let the matter drop until Lao Xu had left. Then Eddie told me that the powerful men and women in the Party got special treatment in everything, from buying foreign goods in special stores that only they could shop in, to housing, to special hospitals or special sections of already existinghospitals that had all the latest medical equipment. They made sure their relatives and children got good jobs and privileges. They sent their kids to universities in Europe, Canada, and the States, all at government expense. And they used government money to fatten themselves. Meanwhile, ordinary people stayed poor.
    I remembered that Lao Xu had told me that most of the powerful men in the Party were Long March veterans.
    “All
of them?” I asked. “Are they
all
crooked?”
    Eddie frowned. He didn’t like being contradicted. “They control everything, and they keep most of it for themselves,” he summed up.
    Anyway, at least a thousand students started the hunger strike, and a day or so later, two thousand more joined them. Things in our office were pretty frantic. Eddie was going nuts, bossing everybody around, contradicting himself. He was supposed to be covering the upcoming visit of Premier Gorbachev, but he said he knew in his newsman’s bones that the student demonstrations were the bigger story. Dad was loving every second of it, spending millions on taxis. He’d dash off to tape the preparations for the state visit, then rush back to see what was going on in the square. Lao Xu seemed busiest of all,