Oracle Bones (21 page)

The demonstrations had been primarily political, but Chinese leaders were convinced that Islam played a major role. After 1985, the government abruptly changed its strategy, responding to Uighur uprisings by clamping down on religious activities. But Islam continued to grow—many believed that both the government encouragement and the subsequent repression had precisely the same effect. And to Uighur intellectuals such as Polat, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was almost as threatening as Maoism. He believed that the Uighurs were being driven from one orthodoxy to another.

The Uighur world was relatively small, and within that world there were few people whom Polat trusted. He regularly telephoned a couple of Uighur exiles who lived in the United States, and periodically in Yabaolu he organized dinners of close friends who worked in Beijing. All of them were intellectuals, and most had been compromised in some way—they had fallen to the level of traders, or they taught at local minority colleges, which were controlled tightly by the Communist Party.

One evening in the spring of 2000, Polat invited me to a dinner that he had arranged in honor of a close Uighur friend. In the past, Polat had told me about the man, who sometimes picked up extra cash by playing foreigners in Chinese movies. He had just worked on another film, down in the south, and now he was passing through Beijing on his way home to Xinjiang.

Polat reserved a long table in the Uighur restaurant at the Ritan Hotel, next to Hollywood. There were about a dozen men total, and I felt less out of place
than I usually did in China; most of the men, like me, had dark features and long noses. There was only one subtle sign that something was amiss—much of the conversation was in Chinese. I knew that these men didn’t like speaking that language together, and I was touched that they would go out of their way to make me feel included.

All of them were Uighurs except for one, a Tatar who had been born within China’s borders. He told me that, of the nation’s fifty-plus minority groups, the Tatars were the only ethnicity that had no native land in the country. They were the descendants of people who had fled across the Soviet border in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly in reaction to Stalin’s policies.

The Tatar was blond, and so was the part-time Uighur actor. “He’s a
jia yangguizi
,” Polat joked. “A fake foreign devil. You’re the real foreign devil.”

Usually, the phrase described Chinese who slavishly imitated Western things. I asked the man about his film work, and Polat teased him good-naturedly.

“How many times have you been killed by Chinese?” he said.

“A couple,” the man said with a grin.

“That Chinese woman killed you in
The Opium War
!”

Another Uighur, a professor, spoke up. “They used a lot of students from the Nationalities University for extras in that movie. Somebody got injured on the set—I think a Kazak student.”

One guest remarked that he had played a French imperialist in a propaganda film. “I executed a Chinese revolutionary,” the man said proudly. He was also a professor. “That was a great day for me.”

The others laughed and raised their glasses of vodka. The table filled with Uighur dishes: roast lamb, flat
nan
bread, skewers of fried meat and vegetables. As the evening progressed, and the men continued drinking, the language shifted away from Chinese, until at last I couldn’t understand a word. I sat in silence, watching and listening. I liked the sound of the Turkic tongue, and the way the men’s faces lit up when they spoke it. At the end of dinner, Polat stood up and slowly walked around the banquet, toasting the others one by one. On that night, at that table, in the heart of Yabaolu, it seemed as if he were at the center of the world.

AFTER A YEAR
in the capital, I became more familiar with the rhythms of the city’s calendar. Beijing time wasn’t steady: occasionally, a week seemed to stretch forever, or it would require months to prepare for a single morning, like the National Day anniversary of 1999. There were days that the Party wanted to remember, and days that the Party wanted to forget. There were days when things had to happen, and days when nothing had to happen. And occasion
ally there were days that created new moments to be commemorated in the future.

Often, the Beijing police made neighborhood sweeps in the prelude to some mark in the calendar. It might be an anniversary of June Fourth, or the birthday of the People’s Republic, or a convocation of the National People’s Congress. Either way, it felt the same—more police in the alleyways, making door-to-door checks for registration. These periods were hard on migrants, who often didn’t have the proper papers, and Uighurs also had trouble. Polat always tried to lay low if an important date was coming up.

But for most people in Beijing, including the police, it was simply a nuisance. The command undoubtedly came from the top: some bureau told a lower-level bureau to be vigilant, and then the word filtered down through the layered bureaucracy. Eventually, it reached the neighborhood cops, who dutifully performed the sweeps. But usually their hearts weren’t in it; they did what was necessary for appearances’ sake and then moved on. Whenever they knocked on my door, I simply kept quiet and didn’t answer. I never registered in the apartments where I lived, because they were technically off-limits to journalists.

Of course, any news reporter became particularly attuned to the city’s calendar. For certain events, there would be preparatory articles, and then the day itself was marked by hours in Tiananmen Square, watching for protests. Most of it was uninteresting, and sometimes unpleasant; occasionally, I felt like the police—compelled to mark these days against my will. It was hard to make sense of events when everything was so scattered: a protest here, an anniversary there. And the fragmentation worked in the Party’s favor. If one person went to the Square to commemorate June Fourth, and another went to mark a crackdown on Falun Gong, the two people never met. The days didn’t overlap; the calendar lurched along without creating any kind of narrative.

But it felt different if you saw an event and then its echo. In that situation, a single thread stretched across the years, connecting two points in time. For me, the first day to happen twice was April 25.

April 25, 1999

The city is still new to me. In the mornings, I often ride my bicycle aimlessly, trying to get a feel for the streets. I am near the center of downtown when my pager goes off. I find a public phone and call the number: Ian Johnson, my boss at the
Journal
. He asks me to swing by Zhongnanhai, the central government compound next to the Forbidden City. There is a rumor that some people are protesting.

I head west on Wenjin Street, past Beihai Park, and then I see the crowd lined along the sidewalk, three and four people deep. Most seem to be middle-aged, and they wear simple clothes—provincials. My first instinct is to estimate the numbers: one hundred, five hundred, a thousand, two. Along that street alone, I guess five thousand, and there are more on Fuyou Street.

For a spell, I’m so wrapped up in the numbers that I notice nothing else, but then the silence strikes me. Nobody is shouting slogans; nobody is chanting; nobody is singing. No banners, no signs. The people simply stand there, staring calmly out at the street.

Passersby are confused. A few Beijing locals stop their bicycles and ask the protestors why they are there. No response. One man becomes angry. “You know what will happen,” he says. “This is only going to cause trouble for everybody. Why are you doing this?”

Silence. I dismount and walk through the crowd, hoping to find somebody who will talk. I try to speak to a middle-aged woman: silence. An elderly man. Silence. A man, a woman, a man. Silence, silence, silence. Finally, a woman in her forties answers. She is better dressed than the others, and she speaks Mandarin with an accent that I cannot place. I sense that she is some sort of leader. “We practice Falun Gong,” she tells me. “All we want is official recognition. People criticize us and misunderstand us, and they won’t stop until the government recognizes us as a good group.”

We talk briefly, and then a black sedan pulls up to the curb. The windows are heavily tinted; one of them rolls down. Somebody signals from within. The woman hurries over; a door opens, and she gets in. A couple of minutes later, she steps out and the car pulls away. But when I approach her again, she simply shakes her head. Without a word, she disappears into the silent crowd of protestors.

AFTER THAT INITIAL
Falun Gong demonstration, time accelerated. In a sense, it already had: since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, there had been massive changes in China’s religious climate. Initially, the Communists were critical of religion, and then they became deliberately destructive during the Cultural Revolution. Maoism was a faith that left room for nothing else—but Mao died in 1976, and the Cultural Revolution ended. Two years later, Deng Xiaoping initiated the reform period, and once more China was faced with the spiritual vacuum that had tormented the nation since the nineteenth century.

Nowadays, many Chinese seemed inspired by two semi-faiths: materialism and nationalism. But traditional religions also recovered; churches found new converts, and temples and mosques were rebuilt. Such faiths, however, were strictly limited, because the Communist Party recognized only five legal religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

In the 1980s, a number of Chinese also became fascinated by
qigong
, exercises that involve traditional breathing exercises and meditation. These systems were never described as “religious”—any attempt to declare a new faith would have been tantamount to challenging the Party. Instead,
qigong
practitioners registered their systems as exercise and health routines. In the 1990s, a man from the northeast named Li Hongzhi started a new form of
qigong
that he called Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa. Like other systems, it featured meditation and exercise routines, but Falun Gong was clearly different. It had a charismatic leader; its books outlined points of faith as well as exercise; and many of Falun Gong’s symbols and terminology were Buddhist or Taoist in origin. Regardless of how it was registered, it felt like a religion.

And it spread like one. Falun Gong outlined three basic principles—truthfulness, benevolence, tolerance—and this simple morality appealed to many average Chinese who were coping with the changes of Reform and Opening. During the 1990s, Falun Gong gained millions of believers, many of whom practiced together in morning sessions at public parks. When I had lived in Fuling, a group of Falun Gong practitioners had tried to recruit me after meeting in a teahouse. They gave me copies of Li Hongzhi’s books, and they telephoned my apartment at all hours. The men impressed me as harmless fanatics—I was annoyed by the early-morning phone calls, but the believers were always polite. There was no question about their sincerity; the practice of Falun Gong gave structure to their lives.

In the late 1990s, skeptics in the Chinese media began to criticize Falun Gong as superstitious and unhealthy. A pattern emerged: if an article was unflattering, Falun Gong practitioners would organize a peaceful protest at the media outlet and demand a retraction. Many of the publications were lower-level ones, and they found it easier to back down rather than risk being blamed for stirring up trouble. In May of 1998, after Beijing Television broadcast an interview in which a professor criticized Falun Gong, more than two thousand protestors appeared at the station. This happened to occur during one of those sensitive moments in the Beijing calendar—June Fourth was approaching—and the station quickly aired another program that was sympathetic to Falun Gong. The demonstrators dispersed.

By that point, practitioners had learned that peaceful protest was an effec
tive tool, and they had also become efficiently organized. In April of 1999, a journal at Tianjin University published unflattering comments about Li Hongzhi, who had emigrated to the United States. Thousands of believers collected on the campus, but this time the journal refused to publish a retraction. Finally, the protestors traveled to Beijing, hoping to address the nation’s leaders directly, and that was the April 25 demonstration that I had witnessed. On that day, high-ranking officials had finally agreed to meet with Falun Gong representatives, who made their case and then told the crowd to disperse peacefully.

The protest ended without incident, but a line had been crossed. For the first time, the nation’s leaders realized how well organized Falun Gong had become. In the weeks that followed, the government responded with the sort of silence that was always a bad sign in China. Beijing newspapers didn’t publish a word about the protest; nothing appeared on the television news. There was no debate, no public discourse, no commentary of any sort. For weeks the city waited.

And then the storm broke: on July 22, the government banned Falun Gong. There were more protests, followed by arrests; leaders were sentenced to labor camps. On October 26, the Communists stepped up the attack, initiating a shrill public campaign that declared Falun Gong an “evil cult.” But practitioners kept demonstrating. Often they traveled to Tiananmen Square, where they unfurled banners, sat in the lotus position, or raised their arms over their heads—the starting point for Falun Gong exercises. Plainclothes cops staked out the square. Foreign journalists watched. Soon, Hong Kong-based human rights groups began to report incidents of practitioners beaten to death while in police custody.

In February, a grandmother named Chen Zixiu died while being held by the police in a small city in Shandong province. She was one of the many who had tried to come to Beijing to protest; a plainclothes officer nabbed Chen before she had even made it to the Square. (Practitioners refused to lie about their faith, so cops often patrolled the region around Tiananmen, asking people if they were believers.) After Chen Zixiu’s death, her daughter searched for somebody to tell the story; through various connections, she eventually contacted Ian Johnson. He met the woman and published the article on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
. After it appeared, Ian followed up by researching the Falun Gong structure, as well as the nature of the police response. He discovered that it was another instance of top-down commands: local police units were being fined for every believer who slipped through their clutches and made it to Beijing to protest. What started at the top as an idea—ban Falun Gong—materialized at the lowest levels as sheer brutality, for the stupidest, most pragmatic reason of all: money.