I wasn’t there, didn’t see it. But it affected me.
On June 3, 1989 my girlfriend and I flew into Hong Kong. We were planning to stay for a few days, then travel on to China. For months, we’d been traveling around Southeast Asia and reading all the while about the inspiring protests in Beijing. We were recently-graduated from college and veterans of student protest movements. Protesting apartheid in South Africa, we participated in sit-ins and building shanty towns on campus. But the masses of young people camping out in Tiananmen Square was on another level: the energy, creativity, and bravery of the young people was revolutionary. Although we had spent months traveling, we were eager to travel up to Beijing and see the protest — maybe even join in.
We stayed outside the Hong Kong urban center and up the mountain at a bare-bones youth hostel. The morning of June 4, we made our way downtown by bus. When we got there, we found a city in chaos. People were out on the streets, anxiously reading headlines in shop windows and on tv. Some people were crying. There were rumors and whispers, but little real information. Something was happening in Beijing.
We had thought we would spend just a few days in Hong Kong and then travel to China. We needed a visa, which was more or less automatic if you applied in Hong Kong. But as the day unraveled, it became clear that we wouldn’t be traveling to China immediately. Over the next few days there were wild rumors that Army units had defected and civil war was breaking out. There were rumors that military columns were headed to Beijing. It was clear that the students had been displaced from the Tiananmen Square, but what happened? The student leaders that been on tv and in newspapers every day, who had become international celebrities, disappeared. Were they hiding, arrested? Dead? Western media reporting was sketchy. China was trying to black out news, but also insisting publicly that everything was normal.
Massive protests and gatherings spontaneously broke out in Hong Kong. The streets were filled with marches and ceremonies grieving for the student movement. We heard that phone and other communications were cut off to China, that there was no news about Beijing being reporting through the country. Stickers appeared all over Hong Kong: “Fax the truth” with the idea that fax machines in China were still working and activists should fax Western newspaper stories to Chinese fax machines to share information ad news.
There were rumors that the border was closed. But a steady stream of backpackers leaving China showed up at our hostel. They reported that travel was still possible, that things were weird, but not unmanageable. We heard the Chinese consulate was still open and issuing visas.
Over two weeks, we hunkered down in Hong Kong, took part-time jobs handing out advertising fliers on street corners, and tried to figure out what to do. We heard that Shanghai and Beijing were locked down and hard to manage as a tourist, some hostels would not take new visitors. But travelers coming from other areas reported the situation normal, even good. They said it was easier to find rooms because there were fewer tourists. And Chinese people involved in the tourist trade were eager to make deals and find business.
So eventually, we got our visas, bought overnight berths on a ferry running from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, and headed into China.
I won’t bore you with our travel stories over the next 7 weeks. But we had a great time, a big adventure, avoided major cities, headed west: to Guilin, Yangshuo, Kunming, Dali, Lejian. We found people friendly, curious, careful about politics. We saw some police activity, but mostly very little evidence of the political crisis that China was in. When we were in China, our only sources of real news were other travelers who came with BBC or fresh reports from outside.
China was hard for a low-budget, backpacker traveler back then. There was a Lonely Planet infrastructure, but just barely. There were lots of complications, bureaucracy, grumpy train clerks. But there were amazing experiences, delicious food, friendly people. We avoided talking politics to Chinese people, recognizing that it was risky for them, and perhaps rude for us. But, occasionally, people would say things; quietly, sometimes furtively. On a train ride, an English-speaking man caught be between train cars and out of earshot and told me how worried he was for the students, how sad he was that the movement was being suppressed. There were rumors that the activists were heading into the southwest and crossing the border out of China into Burma, that there was an underground railway to help the student escape. We were woken by a night-time police raid at our hotel in Kunming; they were looking for student activists.
…. to be continued.
[working document, to be updated and edited]
