Ron McMillan's Blog
Beijing Spring 20 Years On
I find myself once again glimpsing snapshots from fading memories, the current ones inspired by a newspaper that got the jump on the opposition by running a Remember Tiananmen news feature. The feature coincided with the anniversary, not of the armoured cars arriving in the square in the early hours of June 4th 1989, but of the spontaneous gatherings after the April 15th passing of Party reformer Hu, Yao-bang that spawned the later demonstrations.
On April 22nd 1989, despite the fact that I was several hundred miles away, the news reached me by word of mouth. I was on a station platform in Pyongyang, capital of North Korea and twenty-four hours away from Beijing by train. The sleeper from the Chinese capital had come in earlier that day, and with it arrived fast-spreading murmurs of momentous events in downtown Beijing, Chinese whispers writ real.
Our group of journalists posing as tourists arrived back in Beijing hoping above all that the story would still be alive, and we were not disappointed. The tens of thousands were no longer in the square, but several hundred die-hard students clung on around the obelisk memorial to fallen heroes, some already showing signs of exhaustion, sleeping soundly on nothing more forgiving than marble steps for mattresses.
With clients in New York impatient for North Korea photographs, I soon had to head to Hongkong, from where I watched the Beijing story grow. A month later I was back in Tiananmen, rubbing shoulders in mid-square with the cock-sure media elite and the emerging dissident royalty behind the biggest protests to rock China since the birth of the communist state almost exactly forty years before.
Two decades on, the same, instantly-recognisable Chinese faces stare out from newspaper stories, now mapped with years of strain and hardship and surely not a little guilt, years that have only proven what we in the square could never have anticipated: the Tiananmen Spring would not even qualify as the biggest story of 1989, a status that was to befall the collapse of the Berlin Wall a few months later.
As the crowds in the square dwindled, so too did the attendant Press Corps, and to my eternal regret, I left for Hongkong on an Airbus full of like-minded journalists, certain that things were going to peter out without great event. Before leaving, however, I undertook one foray whose naïvety still makes me shiver. I went out looking for the armoured cars. Alone.
I coralled a willing taxi driver, and since we shared not one word of verbal common ground, scribbled a line drawing of a tank and some question marks on the western suburbs of a tourist map. An hour and multiple stops to beg directions later found us in a narrow lane with armoured cars concertinaed nose to tail in the sunshine and draped with bored men in ill-fitting uniforms.
Now I had to be quick. Before I registered on anyone’s radar, my camera motordrives were running, firing off a few shots with a medium telephoto before changing to wide angle. As soldiers peeled themselves from armour plate and slid down turrets, a strong young hand came to rest on my forearm. Its owner was a student, who very firmly turned me around and marched me away. He waved one arm at the soldiers and addressed me in English:
“We must be considerate of the soldiers,” he said, “For they too are Chinese.”
I didn’t argue. The shots were in the bag, and right now I had to protect my nervous taxi driver from the army officer hell-bent on intercepting him.
None of what were almost certainly the first photographs ever taken of the tanks that a few days later rolled into Tiananmen Square were ever published. Until today.
Photo (c) 2009 Ron McMillan, All Rights Reserved.
