On January 8, 1977, the sides of Tiananmen Square were lined with wreaths commemorating Zhou Enlai. The year before the Qingming Festival, tiananmen Square broke out to mourn Zhou Enlai, oppose the "Gang of Four", and shock the world's "April Five-Year Movement". He Yanguang/Photo
Walking to Tiananmen Square around the Qingming Festival in 1976 was a risky act.
But on April 3, about 1 million people walked to Tiananmen Square, and on April 4, qingming festival, the number of people probably exceeded 2 million.
Hordes of cadres, students, workers and peasants wore black veils and wreaths in mourning Premier Zhou Enlai, who died about three months ago. Mourning poems began to be posted, speeches against the "Gang of Four" increased, and small bottles were hung on pine branches in the square, meaning "Xiaoping". Wei Junyi, then editor of the People's Literature Publishing House, later recalled that tiananmen Square during that period, "there were countless poems, countless people who copied poems."
This mourning campaign was wrongly characterized as a "counter-revolutionary incident" at the time, and more than 300 people were detained. It wasn't until November 15, two years later, that Xinhua News Agency issued a message to the whole of China: "The Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China declared that the 'Tiananmen Square Incident' was entirely revolutionary action..." The next day, the 239-word news was published on the front pages of many domestic newspapers, and was called a sign that China had begun to rectify the process of rectification.
The Resolution on Several Historical Issues Concerning the Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China, adopted at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on June 27, 1981, stated that the Tiananmen Square incident "laid a great mass foundation for the subsequent smashing of the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary clique."
venture
It is difficult to describe the mood of the witnesses in the days around the Qingming Festival in 1976. Wei Junyi, a veteran party member who participated in the "12.9" movement, seemed to have returned to his classmates and marched forward with everyone holding arms, "shouting slogans according to his own will." She squeezed into the crowd, "only worried about the fear of meeting the people in her unit."
Yu Guangyuan, who was one of the heads of the State Council's Political Research Office at the time, was "in a very special state of excitement" in those days. Although his research office was in the whirlpool of the "criticism of Deng Xiaoping and countering the right-leaning reversal of the case" movement because of the direct leadership of Deng Xiaoping, he knew that "the situation in China will certainly change greatly."
Around the Qingming Festival that year, Yu Guangyuan was silent in the organs, and every day on the way to and from work, he always instructed the driver to drive around the monument first, and also went to Tiananmen Square for two consecutive nights. On April 5, his experience of his car being blocked at the east gate of the Great Hall of the People also made him afraid: "At that time, as long as someone copied down my car license plate, he could put me on the charge of 'directing the Tiananmen atrocities.'" Later, he heard that Song Zhenming, the then minister of petroleum, was also censored by someone at the Jinshui Bridge when he was riding through Chang'an Avenue in front of Tiananmen Square that day.
In the words of Bai Jiefu, then a member of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal CPC Committee and deputy director of the Municipal Revolutionary Committee, there was not much to say about the "Gang of Four" at that time, and I dare to say that most of the "Gang of Four" were workers, "they may be more bold, but basically everyone is sneaky."
Among the bold young people was He Yanguang, who was later arrested. On the eve of the Qingming Festival in 1976, 25-year-old He Yanguang took the lead in leading more than 80 young workers from the chemical fiber factory in Beijing's Chongwen District to the square to lay wreaths to Premier Zhou, and the spearhead was pointed at Jiang Qing. In May 1976, he and two other colleagues at the factory were arrested and imprisoned in Beijing's Banbuqiao Prison after several interrogations.
Wang Haili, a 23-year-old communication worker in the Fengtai Electric Section of the Beijing Railway Branch at the time, also walked to the square with a blood book he had written. In his eyes, the world's largest square is "crowded like a sea, wreaths like mountains" and "too small." He wrote in a blood book, "Dear Premier Zhou! We will defend you to the death with blood and life", and added three exclamation points to the back and signed it as "The Red Descendants of the Chinese Proletariat".
There were more and more people around the Monument to the People's Heroes, and Yu Bin, a young wuhan man who stayed in Beijing on a business trip at the time, saw at the scene that "there were workers, students, intellectuals, and plasters gathered", and there were more and more wreaths, "some are very large, several people carry them, some are very small, and one person is on his chest."
Among those who sent the wreath were employees and family members of the Beijing Broadcasting Equipment Factory, and nearly a thousand intellectuals, cadres, and workers from the Institute of Semiconductor Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Wu De, then first secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China and director of the Municipal Revolutionary Committee, later wrote in an oral article that at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on the evening of April 4, he, as the head of the Beijing MunicipalIty, reported that there were 2,073 wreaths sent to the monument, with a total of more than 1,400 units. Among the wreaths sent, the maximum diameter is 6 meters.
"We should all come"
A young woman once wrote in a memoir about the scene she saw in Tiananmen Square on April 4, qingming festival: "In the pine forest of the Zhengyang Gate and the monument, a long row of poems written on paper the size of a large character newspaper hung ... From the bunting flag to the north, every few meters is a long row of wreaths, all the way to the tall flagpole in front of Tiananmen Square. ”
A large number of poems appear on the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square, on the nearby Pine Berlin, on lampposts, and on Huabiao. A five-character poem posted by a young worker was widely copied, and one of the sentences, "I cry and the jackal laughs," became a classic for many witnesses to recall tiananmen square poetry. The whole poem was later pieced together by Zhang Chunqiao and others as important evidence of the "Tiananmen Counter-revolutionary Political Incident".
Underneath a bouquet of flowers, a poem signed "A Family Of Old And Young" bluntly expresses the nostalgia for the prime minister. Wei Junyi was also reading poetry, and she squeezed desperately in the crowd, forgetting that she was "an old lady who is nearly sixty years old." Bai Xingui, a party member teacher in the mechanical department of Tsinghua University, set out alone every morning and went home at night, and copied down what he thought was the best poem and sent it to Zhou Enlai's wife, Deng Yingchao, in parts.
In special chaotic times, people at that time needed an opportunity to express complex emotions that had accumulated for a long time. Guan Xiangsheng, who was then deputy director of the General Office of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee, saw the Tiananmen mourning on television, and he later said in an oral essay: "The premier left with regret. He is gone, many people do not know where China is going, very confused... The people's hearts are very bitter. ”
Confusion, worry, indignation, and complex emotions hung over the people at that time. In a letter to his high school classmates, Yu Bin asked: "Where is our future?" Will we live like this for the rest of our lives? Time passes day by day, but we are in the same place, what should we do in the future? ”
The classmates who corresponded with him have been sent to the farm and have also confided in him: "The mood is not happy, all day long in addition to labor or labor, facing the loess and facing the sky and 'repairing the earth'... I don't have any books here, and if you look at any books, send me two books and spend a little time. ”
It can be said that these bitter voices are expressed in poetry in a certain form. Wei Junyi later recalled that when she tied a small hundred flowers to a pine tree, she and one of the rebel leaders of the unit "met in a narrow way." This person who had scolded her in the early days of the "Cultural Revolution" was also "picked up" by the military propaganda team, but the other party nodded and said, "You are also here", Wei Junyi looked at it, he also had a small white flower on his chest, she nodded and replied: "We should all come." ”
Roger Garsed, a British embassy official who had been to the scene at the time, described the scene this way: "This people's mourning of Zhou Enlai is more moving than any national funeral I have ever seen. The actions of large crowds are based on faith... Expressing the thoughts and emotions that have surged over the years. This is...... Anger over the treatment of Zhou Enlai after his death is concern about China's future. ”
The will of the people
The Tiananmen square was erroneously characterized as a "counter-revolutionary incident." On April 5, when Wang Haili returned to Tiananmen Square, the wreath was emptied, thousands of white flowers on the pine tree walls were washed away, and some of the people guarding the wreath were captured.
But the number of people flocking to the square is still increasing. Wang Haili later described the idea at that time in his self-report: "Suppress it, you take away one person, and there are millions; you steal a wreath, and the people will do another million!" The people's nostalgia for the prime minister cannot be taken away by anyone. ”
In this battle, which has been called "the great struggle between light and darkness" by those who have experienced it, tens of thousands of people, mainly young people, know the risks, but they resolutely go there. At a time of crisis when the country continues to suffer turmoil and catastrophe, the strength and bravery of ordinary people are demonstrated.
Wang Haili remembers that while reciting the blood book, he received a note from workers, fighters, members of the Communist Youth League and students, which read: "I am willing to be your revolutionary comrade-in-arms and fight with you for life and death!" ”
Later history proved that the voice and will from the people were unstoppable. Yu Guangyuan said in his reminiscences that after the Tiananmen Incident, the attack on Deng Xiaoping was increased, but I always thought it was a heavy blow to "criticize Deng.".
When the next day's train broadcast announced that the mourning of Premier Zhou in Tiananmen Square in the past few days was a "counter-revolutionary incident", "the carriage was silent." But Yu Bin did not expect that when he got off the bus and shook hands with his fellow travelers to say goodbye, the other party shook hands and said loudly: "Goodbye when we are four modernizations." In his reminiscences, he recalled, "His tone was so firm, sad, and confident," and that the "four modernizations" were the tasks first proposed by Premier Zhou in 1964, which became synonymous with mourning the premier during the Tiananmen Square incident.
Rehabilitating Tiananmen was the most concerned issue at the time. In August 1978, He Yanguang, who had been released for nearly two years, was rehabilitated by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and the Chongwen District Committee. He has delivered more than 70 presentations. In an oral essay, he said: "At that time, people's desire to rehabilitate Tiananmen was very strong. Why am I willing to talk about it? My problem is solved, but there are still many people who have not been rehabilitated, the whole incident has not been rehabilitated, give me this platform, I will not refuse. ”
The political situation at that time was unclear. On October 10 of that year, the newly resumed China Youth Daily expressed its position on the Tiananmen Square incident, publishing Wang Haili's article "We Want to Be a Good Descendant of the Proletariat" on the second page, and distributing a short commentary entitled "A Generation with Great Hope," saying that "the experience of Wang Haili and thousands of young people in heroic struggle against the 'Gang of Four' reflects the mainstream and essence of China's contemporary youth" and "they are the essence and example of contemporary youth, representing the future of the party and the hope of the country."
Two days later, on October 12, People's Daily and China Youth Daily published a lengthy newsletter titled "Haiyan in the Storm : Remembering the Heroic Struggle of Young Communist Party Member He Yanguang against the Gang of Four."
This all coincides with the relevant expressions in the later "Resolution on Several Historical Issues Concerning the Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China." The resolution said the Tiananmen Square incident "laid a great mass foundation for the subsequent smashing of the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary clique." Yu Bin also wrote this statement into his memoirs, because of the Tiananmen Square incident, he "deeper understanding of the 'will of the people'."
Source: China Youth Daily