中国 | 2009.06.05
十几万港人烛光纪念六四
德国之声：李华南，你好！这是香港政权交接后港人第12次举行的烛光纪念活动。与往年相比，今年烛光晚会的纪念活动有哪些特殊的地方？
李华南：今年比较特殊的地方是，在首先的集体默哀之后，维多利亚公园内响起了赵紫阳的一段录音。这段录音是赵紫阳反思当年六四的一段讲话。因为往年主要是请王丹等在海外的学运领袖与会场连线。但是这次人们可以亲耳听到赵紫阳的声音。
另外，在美国的一位当年学运的领袖熊焱今天也成功入境香港，在会场上发表讲话。他说："全球各地能够在香港有这么一块地方来进行六四悼念活动，他感 到非常骄傲。他也感谢香港市民给了他这么一个机会来纪念六四。"此外，还有一位被香港拒绝入境后遣返回美国的当年的民运人士，他留下了一封书信在会议上也 被朗读了。这是今天活动区别于以往的几个层面。
德国之声：现场的气氛如何，尤其是播放了赵紫阳的那段录音以后？
李华南：今天香港十分闷热，大会现场被围的水泄不通。维多利亚公园六个足球场都挤满了人。大家身着黑白两种颜色的T恤衫，手中都拿着蜡烛，他们有的 带着孩子来的家庭每个人手中还有一朵小白花。在播放了赵紫阳的录音后，比较坦率的讲，香港本地市民都听不太懂录音里的内容，但是语言并不是问题，在场的人 都能感受到当时那种肃穆的氛围。尤其是上周末《赵紫阳回忆录》在香港推出后，这更让香港人对中国的前总书记有所了解。
德国之声：我们知道，早在一个月前，北京政府就开始压制与"六四"有关的一切活动，从互联网封锁、到对异议人士的监控，相比内地，您觉得香港的此次活动是不是希望给北京政府压力，从而促使中国能尽早正视"六四"问题呢？
李华南：无论是会议的组织者还是当年经历过这场学生运动的人都希望这一天能来得越早越好。但是与此同时，善良的愿望不等于能够替代政治现实，更不能 天真地以为我们一两次的行动就能达成目的。相反，我们应该从更长远的角度来看待中国历史。包括，当时六四为什么会以悲剧收场？其实，我觉得与其从当年整个 事件本身来看，还不如从中国100多年现代化的发展来看。
因为中国现代化的发展一直是步履维艰，尤其是政治现代化。从当年的洋务运动到孙中山的辛亥革命，到后来的国共争斗。他们一直没有完成这个使命。其实这里边有很多深层的文化上的原因造成的。
当然今天活动的组织者--香港市民支援爱国民主运动联合会的负责人也表示说，"现在很多人都在追究学生当年有没有错。"他的观点是，无论当年学生们有没有错，最后的处理方式一定是错误的。
所以，我觉得大家的"六四"情结主要是对当时中共的处理方式的不认同，这其实是造成今天很多人对"六四"难以忘怀的根本原因。
采访记者：严严
责编：石涛
Tiananmen Square Scars Soldier Turned Artist
Chen Guang, 37, a Beijing painter, was a soldier in Tiananmen in 1989 has created a series of works based on his photographs of the incident.
BEIJING — Soaked in sweat, his heart racing, Chen Guang descended the steps of China’s Great Hall of the People and aimed his automatic rifle at the sea of student protesters occupying Tiananmen Square. A 17-year-old soldier from the countryside, Mr. Chen and his comrades had just been given chilling orders: to clear the symbolic heart of the nation, even if it meant spilling blood.
Opinion
Remembering the Tiananmen Protests
Nicholas D. Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist who was Beijing bureau chief for The Times in spring of 1989, recalls the city's mood and the student protests leading up to June 4, 1989.
China's New Rebels
Two decades after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, how do the Chinese speak out against the government?
Multimedia
“We were assured there would be no legal consequences if we opened fire,” Mr. Chen recalled in an interview on Tuesday. “My only hope was that the students would not put up a fight.”
Twenty years after Chinese troops shot their way into the center of Beijing, killing hundreds of people and wounding many more, Mr. Chen provided a rare window into the military crackdown that re-established the Communist Party’s supremacy after six weeks of mass unrest and then, for most Chinese, disappeared in an official whitewash.
Speaking publicly for the first time — and defying security officials who have told him to keep silent — he explained how soldiers from the 65th Group Army dressed in civilian clothes on June 3 and stealthily made their way to the Great Hall on Tiananmen Square’s western edge. At midnight, with clips of ammunition slung across their chests, they faced off against demonstrators, the air filled with the singing of students and the sound of gunfire.
“I can assure you I didn’t shoot anyone,” he said.
Now an artist and a bit of a provocateur living on the outskirts of Beijing, Mr. Chen said he spent the next 20 years suppressing memories of that day. But last year he began working on a series of paintings based on hundreds of photographs, taken at his unit’s request while he was on the square. They include gauzy images of protesters commandeering a public bus, exuberant students parading with pro-democracy banners and soldiers feeding their abandoned encampments into bonfires.
“For 20 years I tried to bury this episode, but the older you get the more these things float to the surface,” he said, chain-smoking in his apartment. “I think it’s time for my experiences, my truth, to be shared with the rest of the world.”
But by publicizing his experiences through his art, Mr. Chen risks provoking the authorities, who are eager to suppress discussion of the episode and excise June 4 from public memory. In recent weeks, as the anniversary of the crackdown approached, the police have harassed or detained dissidents who they feared might draw attention to June 4. Last spring, Zhang Shijun, a former soldier from north China, was arrested after telling The Associated Press that he regretted his role in crushing the pro-democracy protests.
Last summer, after local galleries refused to show his paintings, Mr. Chen posted them on the Internet. Within hours, however, they had been taken down.
A slightly built man who talks softly and without emotion, Mr. Chen says he is not worried about the consequences of speaking out, even if he has received warnings to keep his paintings to himself.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said. “I’m just talking about my experiences.”
Raised in rural Henan Province, the son of a factory worker, he dropped out of high school at 15 because, he said, he was a poor student. He wanted to be an artist, but everyone told him that was no way to make a living. “The pressure from my family was intense so I decided to join the army,” he said. Because enlistees had to be at least 18, he lied about his age.
Less than a year later, in mid-April, Beijing was convulsed by protests touched off by the death of Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party chief who had been forced to resign to take responsibility for what some rival leaders viewed as reckless economic and political reforms.
Isolated in their barracks three hours north of the city, Mr. Chen said he and his fellow soldiers understood little about protests. They knew only what military officers told them: “that bad people were trying to destroy the nation that was established with the death of martyrs,” he recalled.
On May 19, they were given orders to enter the city. But their path was blocked by throngs of students and average Beijing residents supporting the demonstrators. For two days the troops were lectured to and fed by strangers while the nation’s military leaders debated what to do.
On the third day, his unit withdrew, but Mr. Chen said the episode left him confused. “We were told they were bad people but the students seemed so honest and earnest,” he said.
After nearly two weeks isolated in their barracks, the soldiers were given civilian clothes and told to make their way to the Great Hall in groups of two or three. Mr. Chen said his assignment was far more unnerving. He said he was the only passenger in a double-length bus with its seats removed and its interior filled to the windowsills with guns and ammunition.
Unfed and terrified, the soldiers, most of them teenagers, waited inside the Great Hall while military commanders, perched at a second-floor window, strategized the assault. Around midnight, power to the square was cut and the soldiers eased their way down the broad steps to the street. To frighten the students into leaving, he said, the men were told to fire into the air. The tactic had the desired effect.
By 2 a.m., tens of thousands of students were weeping and singing the Internationale as they filed out of the square. Not long afterward, armored vehicles rolled in. One went to work on the Goddess of Democracy, a papier-mâché statue that art students had built just days earlier. “It took them three rams before it fell to the ground,” Mr. Chen said.
Most of the deaths in the crackdown, according to multiple accounts of the incident, occurred in the streets leading toward the square, not in the square itself.
Less than a year after the suppression, Mr. Chen enrolled in the military’s art school, then transferred to the Chinese Academy of Fine Art. In 1995, he left the army.
In those early years, Mr. Chen was drawn to photography and performance art, creating work that was lurid and provocative. He spent months filming prostitutes and took photographs of himself copulating on the Great Wall. He also produced a series of sexually explicit photos of himself posing with an elderly intellectual man who had been persecuted by the Communist Party. “I wanted to portray myself having a visceral connection to someone who had experienced China’s tumultuous history,” he said.
Although none of his early work refers directly to Tiananmen Square, he said most of it had been influenced by the trauma there. “Even if a connection is hard to see, everything I do is touched by that experience,” he said. Mr. Chen said he saw soldiers bloodied by rocks and a protestor having his head rifle butted by soldiers. But the image that haunts him most is rather mundane. As he was cleaning up the square that morning, he spotted a luxuriant ponytail amid the detritus of crushed bicycles and tangled blankets.
The clump of hair, held by a purple band, had been crudely shorn, perhaps as an act of protest but possibly the result of something more sinister. “It was a startling image,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about that hair and why it had been cut off.”
In recent months, he has produced a score of self-portraits. In each, his neck, shoulder and chest are littered with scraps of hair. He cuts his own hair only every year or two and then stores the clippings in his apartment. So far he has filled the equivalent of two dozen coffee cans, raw material for a future project.
He said he did his most intense work every June, around the same time that he was hit with wrenching stomach pain. It is the same twisting of the gut that he first experienced on the square, he said.
It was around this time last year that Mr. Chen decided to revisit the cache of photographs he had taken in 1989. Just before the assault on the square began, Mr. Chen’s commander handed him a camera and 20 rolls of film and told him to wander freely. When it came time to hand back the film, he hid three rolls in his army-issued satchel.
He said the photographs inspired him to take on a subject that few in China care, or dare, to touch. His paintings are artistic depictions of history, he insisted, not expressions of right or wrong. The images are largely dispassionate, although Mr. Chen has rendered them in a washed-out, melancholy blue.
“I have no regrets about what I did,” he said. “But I feel that this tragedy could have been avoided. Maybe if we start talking about this event, we can prevent it from happening again.”
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