[Photos] What I saw at Tiananmen in 1989 before I was shot (Part 2)

Read part 1 here: [Photos] What I saw at Tiananmen in 1989 before I was shot (Part 1)

That night, I scarcely slept at all. My mind was in turmoil, and sleep was impossible. At around five o’clock in the morning, I woke up and said to Yang Du, “Let’s go back to the square and see what’s happening.”

Another senior China Times colleague, Musong Zhao, joined us, and the three of us walked back together to Tiananmen Square.

Beijing at dawn looked as though it had been ravaged by war. Burnt-out military vehicles lay scattered across the streets. The silence that followed a night of anger carried an unmistakable sense of sorrow. The mute desolation of the scene was no less shocking than the violence itself.

We entered the square from the south, just as groups of students marched past us chanting slogans — some of them were crying.

At that moment, several tanks charged aggressively into the square. Like ruthless beasts, they ploughed straight through the students’ tents with a heavy crunch.

The first troops climbed the steps of the Monument to the People’s Heroes and fired warning shots into the air. Gunfire echoed continuously around the square as military formations gradually advanced.

Yang Du and Musong Zhao had already left, but I stayed to continue observing.

The world turned black

After a while, the troops had moved very close to me. The soldiers and I were within direct eye contact, perhaps no more than two metres apart. Their expressions were full of hostility, as if asking: “Why are you still here?”

I had no choice but to leave.

I walked towards the area beneath Zhengyang Gate. There, another company of soldiers sat on the ground awaiting orders. They paid no attention to the people around them and did not appear particularly threatening.

Then I took a few more steps forward.

Suddenly, it was as though the entire world turned black. Everything went dark, and I knew nothing more.

If there is a point in my life where memory was abruptly severed, that was it.

When I finally opened my eyes again, half-conscious and in a haze, I found myself in a hospital bed and three days had passed. Yang Du was standing beside me, leaning over and looking down at me.

I asked, “What happened?”

He replied sadly, “Chung-mao, you were shot.”

As I drifted in and out of consciousness and my mind was fogged, all of my memories from that period exist only as scattered fragments, disconnected and incomplete.

I was unconscious the moment I was shot, so I have no knowledge of what happened until I woke up in the hospital. Everything I know came entirely from the accounts of the people who rescued me.

After I collapsed, a young carpenter from northern Jiangsu named Shao happened to be nearby. Together with several passers-by, he lifted me onto a tricycle cart and took me to a nearby clinic. Finding it closed, they transferred me onto a flatbed handcart and pushed me to Tongren Hospital, where I received emergency treatment.

Because I had lost so much blood, a head nurse named Ms Li immediately gave me a blood transfusion.

Later, hospital staff found my business card in my pocket, along with the key to my hotel room, which had the room number attached. They telephoned the hotel, and Yang Du happened to answer the call. As soon as he learned what had happened, he rushed to the hospital to help.

Only afterwards did I learn that an independent Beijing photographer named Xu Yong had been moving from hospital to hospital, photographing the wounded. At Tongren Hospital, he also took photographs of me while doctors were attempting to save my life.

Later, Xu travelled to France, where an exhibition of those photographs attracted considerable attention. Several years afterwards, he returned to Beijing and established a photography company. He subsequently published a professional volume of Tiananmen-related photographs entitled Negatives (底片), which included images of me being treated at Tongren Hospital.

At the time, Xu had only heard from people around him that the wounded man in the photographs was a journalist from Taiwan.

Nine years later, through mutual friends in Taiwan’s photography community, we finally met at his home in Beijing.

Back then, I was a gravely wounded patient lying unconscious in a hospital bed, while he was a complete stranger behind the camera. Whether I would survive at all was uncertain. Yet, almost a decade later we sat face to face, talking like old friends reunited after many years apart.

It truly felt like one of life’s miracles.

Road to recovery

After receiving emergency treatment at Tongren Hospital, I was transferred to the better-equipped Tiantan Hospital. Shao stayed by my side every day, and Yang Du visited regularly as well. I later learnt that representatives of Taiwanese organisations in mainland China had also come to see me. However, I was unconscious most of the time and have no memory of their visits. It was only when I was preparing to leave the hospital and they came to see me off that I realised they had been there.

In total, I spent seven days in hospital. I was in a fog for most of that time. I was like an infant: I would wake briefly in the morning, only to fall asleep again almost immediately. I had little understanding of my own condition. I did not know how seriously I had been injured, nor did I know anything about how my wife and family were.

Of course, they were not in danger; it was I who was the source of their concern.

Eventually, the doctors advised me that I should begin getting out of bed and moving around. Determined to regain my confidence, I forced myself to stand and walk. At the time, however, both of my arms remained paralysed, and I was unable even to raise my hands.

On 12 June, with the assistance of Susie Chiang, the China Times correspondent based in Hong Kong, arrangements were made for one Ms Huang to fly to Beijing and escort me home. The newspaper’s position was very clear: once I regained consciousness and was able to travel, they wanted me brought back to Taipei as soon as possible. With the hospital confirming that I was fit to be discharged, plans were immediately put in motion to get me home.

In truth, my mental state was still extremely confused. I have little recollection of the journey from the hospital to Beijing Airport, or even of boarding the aircraft. Much of that period remains a blur.

What I do remember is arriving at Hong Kong Airport. Medical personnel were waiting and immediately carried me off the plane on a stretcher. There, I saw my wife Maggie, who had come to meet me. As she watched me being carried out, tears streamed down her face. From that moment on, she was constantly by my side taking care of me.

The nurses in Beijing later told me something I had no memory of myself. They said that while I was unconscious, I had suddenly awakened and said to a doctor, “Doctor, you must save me. I love my wife very much.”

I had no recollection of saying those words. The nurses also told me that I had asked, “Am I going to die?”

It seems that the human instinct to survive is stronger than we often imagine.

Maggie was a flight attendant with Singapore Airlines. At the time of the incident, she was in Copenhagen. Relatives in Malaysia saw the news reports and informed Singapore Airlines, which immediately contacted her. She flew straight to Taipei and stayed at our home for a week to wait for me, before the newspaper told her to fly to Hong Kong to meet me.

I spent two months at Taipei Veterans General Hospital (VGH). Maggie took an extended leave of absence from work so that she could look after me in my private room. She cared for me with extraordinary devotion and attention.

At night, she slept on the sofa in the room. I felt sorry for her having to rest there, so I asked her to come and lie beside me. According to hospital regulations, family members were not allowed to sleep in a patient’s bed. Yet when nurses came into the room during the night to change my dressings, they would see a wife nestled against her severely injured husband. While continuing their work, they simply pretended not to notice.

Gradually, my consciousness returned. Each time I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but the white walls of the hospital room. Yet part of my mind remained in Tiananmen Square, with those horrifying scenes often flashing before my eyes.

Forgiveness and gratitude

The medical team at VGH conducted a thorough assessment of my injuries. Their conclusion was that the bullet had entered through my neck, grazed one side of my spinal column, passed through my throat, and exited through my mouth.

Shao, the young carpenter who helped save me, later described the amount of blood I had lost as being “like slaughtering a sheep”. Within a single week, I lost ten kilograms in body weight.

The most astonishing finding came from the medical team’s wound report, which said the shot had been fired from a “small-calibre weapon at close range”, meaning that someone armed with a handgun had shot me at relatively close range, almost execution-style.

I found that hard to believe, because according to Shao, there were not many other soldiers in my immediate vicinity when I was shot. Nor was I politically important. Of course, it is also possible that a soldier simply did not like the look of me and fired at random; besides, even 50 metres would be considered close range.

This might remain forever a mystery, but it does not matter to me.

After I got back, I said in public that I bore no hatred towards the person who shot me, because we were all part of the same historical moment, and I chose to look at it from a broader perspective and with a greater generosity of spirit.

Around the middle of 1990, my two-year Taiwanese travel permit for mainland China was still valid, and I went back to mainland China to thank the people who had saved my life.

Back at Beijing Airport — which I had left the previous year — I felt something that is difficult to put into words.

The shooting had left permanent damage to my sympathetic nervous system. The left side of my body remained weak, while the right side had lost its sense of touch and temperature, which left me vulnerable to burns and injuries. The area around my wound was in constant pain, and in damp weather I suffered severe nerve pain. At the age of 30, I was already experiencing the kind of neuralgia more commonly associated with someone in their 70s.

I could never forget the incident, because the lingering pain was a constant reminder.

When the immigration officer at Beijing Airport examined my travel documents, he immediately telephoned his superiors for instructions. They, in turn, conducted further checks. I asked the officer, “Is there a problem?”

He looked at me and replied gently, “It should be fine.”

In the end, I was allowed to enter without difficulty.

While in Beijing, I visited the doctors at Tiantan Hospital who had treated me the previous year, as well as Nurse Li, who did the blood transfusion, and thanked them for what they had done.

Afterwards, I travelled to Yangzhou to visit the young carpenter Shao.

Perhaps he was what some people on the mainland would dismiss as an “uneducated” migrant worker — a man from the countryside who had come to Beijing in search of work, earning a living by repairing doors, windows and furniture. To some Beijing residents, he might have seemed just another worker from out of town, doing grunt work. But it was this ordinary man who bravely helped me and saved my life.

My last stop was Fudan University, where I was reunited with the teachers and students from the debating team. By then, we had developed a close friendship, and they all knew of what had happened to me. Some of the students were involved in the protest movement and were subsequently expelled from the CCP. I gave them some money in US dollars, and they later went to Guangzhou and eventually became highly successful business owners.

Finally, I had a chat with Professor Wang Huning in his office. We exchanged views on what was next, and what China was going to do, and how it would move forward. My opinions were of little consequence, but Wang’s views would become the core of mainland China’s policy direction and political thinking over the next few decades.

Winds of change

After returning to Taiwan, my subsequent application to visit mainland China was rejected. By this time, the Soviet Union was collapsing, communist ideology was in tatters, and intellectual circles in the mainland were in complete disarray. Naturally, political controls were tightened.

I could only follow developments in China through external news reports. In 1990, after returning to Singapore, I once again covered the university debate championship. That year, Nanjing University represented the mainland. During a private conversation, one of the debating team members, or perhaps an instructor, remarked to me, “The internal debate within the country right now is extremely intense.”

At the time, mainland China was engaged in the debate over whether its policies were “socialist” or “capitalist”. There was open argument in official state media, showing that there was no consensus within the CCP itself.

Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an unalterable fact, while it was also time to reaffirm China’s policy of reform and opening up.

In 1992, Deng Xiaoping embarked on his Southern Tour, reopening the path of reform and opening up. It was like a spring breeze sweeping across a frozen mountain landscape — ice and snow melted, flowers burst into bloom, and the hills and valleys sprang to life in beauty.

Mainland China entered a new political era, and my application to visit the mainland again was approved.

From 1993 to around 2000, I went to mainland China a few more times to conduct interviews. During that period, there was a fundamental change in the public mood.

The previously messy institutional reform was no longer an issue, and the opening of the free market was no longer up for debate. Most importantly, the people’s desire to make it rich had been sparked; so many people were obsessed with making money that no one wanted to discuss politics.

I produced a series on the transformation of China’s emerging technology enterprises, focusing on institutional reform. These reporting assignments brought me into closer contact with mainland intellectuals who, as the system opened up, were becoming involved in research, production and market-oriented activities.

Later, I compiled these interviews and observations into a book, which was subsequently published in Japanese as well.

To put it simply, as mainland China underwent profound institutional change, I adapted quickly and kept pace with those developments, redefining the focus of my own work accordingly.

This was the spirit of a new era, and the emergence of a new landscape.

From spectator to participant

During the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-1996, after American aircraft carriers moved closer to Taiwan, many young people in mainland China once again rallied behind the CCP government. Historical memories of foreign invasion were rekindled, fuelling a renewed wave of patriotism accompanied by strong anti-Western sentiment. In a sense, this represented a swing to the opposite end of the spectrum, away from the admiration for Western-style democracy that had characterised much of the Tiananmen movement.

Even so, because of the severe injuries I had sustained, I was no longer physically capable of reporting from conflict zones. Instead, I turned increasingly towards intellectual exploration, and threw myself into writing — I had several books published, and developed a deep passion for compiling and editing historical photographic collections.

From 1995 onwards, I began editing a series of large-format pictorial works, including Taiwan: 50 Years after WWII, A Journey Through China: A Pictorial Walk, 1927-1997, The Great Migration (《大迁徙》), The Joys and Sorrows of the Chinese People (《中国人的悲欢离合》 ), and the 60-volume series Twentieth-Century Taiwan (《20世纪台湾》). These beautifully produced collections, documenting the historical development and experiences of the Chinese people, became important works in Taiwan’s publishing history.

In 1998, while visiting the SDX Joint Publishing Company (Sanlian Book House) in Beijing, I came across the bestselling booklet series Old Photographs (《老照片》), published by Shandong Pictorial Publishing House. Its approach of telling history through photographic stories closely matched my own interests. I called the editorial office, and the editor-in-chief, Feng Keli, answered. I introduced myself as a Taiwanese author and expressed an interest in contributing.

Before long, my first article, focusing on the family of Chiang Ching-kuo, appeared in the fourth volume of Old Photographs. For mainland readers, this was an unusually rare subject. It was as though a new window onto historical imagery had been opened.

Thereafter, I became one of the publication’s principal contributors, providing illustrated historical essays for almost every issue. As the influence of Old Photographs grew, the significance and readership of my own contributions increased as well. More than a year later, I even made a special trip to Jinan to meet Feng Keli and discuss publishing my own books.

In 2001, Shandong Pictorial Publishing House published my first historical photo collection in mainland China, Historical Photographs You’ve Never Seen (《你没见过的历史照片》), in three volumes. The books were compact, inexpensive and easy to read. I supplied a large number of previously unpublished photographs from the Republican period and the War of Resistance against Japan. For mainland readers, the material was striking, challenging many long-established perceptions and historical viewpoints.

The collection remained at the top of Sanlian’s bestseller list for three months. It was later re-edited into a single-volume edition and ultimately sold more than 300,000 copies. Yet its real significance lay not in the sales figures, but in the connection it helped me establish with the deeper currents of mainland Chinese society.

That same year, together with mainland authorities, I organised a photo exhibition commemorating the 56th anniversary of Taiwan’s retrocession at the Museum of Chinese History, on the east side of Tiananmen Square — not far from where I had collapsed in a pool of blood 12 years earlier.

Among those in attendance was then Chinese Vice-Premier Qian Qichen. Representing a Taiwanese organisation, I delivered a speech expressing the hope that Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait could work together to create a better future.

By then, I had already decided to move forward through cooperation with the mainland.

I was no longer merely an observer of the Tiananmen incident. Instead, I chose to participate positively in China’s development. I had become a participant rather than a spectator.

Over the previous decade, I had long since decided not to remain trapped in a single emotion or way of thinking. Instead, I sought to contribute, however modestly, to the future of the Chinese nation with a broader outlook and a more generous spirit.

That same year, I left the China Times and established my own business. Independence gave me greater freedom to express my political and cultural views and to become more deeply involved in mainland China’s cultural development.

I founded Qin Feng Studio (秦风老照片馆), introducing many modern historical photographs to audiences in mainland China, and growing along with the mainland.

In my view, national development cannot depend solely on demonstrations and protests. The growth of education and culture, the growth of capital and technology, and the continual improvement of political institutions and social governance are all long-term processes that require patience, persistence and sustained effort. Progress cannot be achieved through shortcuts; attempts to force sudden leaps forward often result only in greater setbacks and may leave deep and lasting scars.

As for the events of 4 June 1989, I believe that when the time is right, events of history will be resolved naturally and will be balanced out appropriately.

So, the mission for the Chinese people remains: to overcome obstacles to progress, to continue creating fresh impetus for improvement, establishing new models, as well as contributing to peace and prosperity for a new world.

Read part 1 here: [Photos] What I saw at Tiananmen in 1989 before I was shot (Part 1)

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