The “Three Heroes of Tiananmen Square”

Tiananmen Square fell silent. The student protestors were stunned into shock. The huge portrait of the leader of the communist revolution, Chairman Mao, which dominated the square, had just been defaced by splatters of red and black paint. And beneath the iconic portrait stood three young men – their hands stained with the exact same colours. United by a love of literature and disillusionment with the Chinese Communist Party, these three young men committed an unprecedented act of defiance for which they would pay a heavy price. This is the story of Yu Zhijian, Yu Dongyue, and Lu Decheng: ‘the three heroes of Tiananmen Square.’

Zhijian was a chemistry teacher and Dongyue an arts editor. They were more academic than Decheng who was a bus driver, known for his physical prowess. Their lives seemed to be worlds apart but they bonded over the works of Lord Byron and Heinrich Heine, the German poet, during late nights in Zhijian’s apartment.

Poetry and prose were not the only things bringing them together. As calls for democratic reform intensified in Beijing, the trio shared their dissatisfaction with the country’s political landscape: rife with corruption, brimming with nepotism and pervaded by the ruthless suppression of one’s freedom of expression. They watched from Hunan as the pro-democracy movement heated up in Beijing. They were provoked by seeing their fellow Hunan native, Hu Yaobang, the former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party who had been sympathetic to the student activists, being dismissed by the de facto head of the government, Deng Xiaoping. Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, and vast numbers came to his funeral to show they agreed with his desire for liberalisation. Meanwhile, students’ requests to meet with party officials to voice their concerns were repeatedly ignored. The government published an editorial vilifying the pro-democracy movement as a ‘destabilising anti-party revolt’. By May 1989, the trio had lost all faith in the Party; they had to act. They scraped together their savings, solicited donations outside the train station and gathered enough money for three tickets to Beijing to support the student movement.

Armed with their handmade banners, with messages such as ‘Down with Deng Xiaoping!’ and ‘End One-Party Dictatorship!’, the three arrived on May 18 in Tiananmen Square, the epicentre of the pro-democracy movement. Yet they were to be disappointed. After a week in Beijing, they were frustrated with the students leading the movement whom they thought to be divided and exclusionary; they felt the students were ignoring provincial grassroots workers who had travelled from the four corners of the country to join the movement. Growing increasingly disconsolate with their lack of impact, Dongyue, the arts editor, even proposed that the trio self-immolate. Desolate, Zhijian, the chemistry teacher, looked up at the imposing Tiananmen Gate tower where the six-metre-tall portrait hung, depicting the late Chairman Mao. He had an idea: they would symbolically declare an end to Communist tyranny by attacking its most famous leader. 

Thus began their operation. The trio went to a department store and bought twenty eggs but then realised that the splatter would not be sufficiently eye-catching. It was then that Dongyue — appropriately the fine arts teacher and artist  — suggested filling the eggs with paint. There was no way their demonstration would be unnoticeable then. They bought the paints, filled the eggs with them and wrote their last goodbyes to their families back in Hunan – their letters full of quotations from the literary greats that had inspired them. Zhijian quoted Byron whereas Dongyue compared his endeavours to Don Quixote tilting at windmills. An eloquent poet, he quoted a line from a famous mythical Chinese hero: ‘The wind howls, and the waters of the River Yi are cold. When a hero sets out, he never returns!’ He had no idea how true his words would turn out to be. 

Armed with their eggs, the three young men inscribed a couplet onto a giant sheet of paper: ‘Five thousand years of tyranny ends here. No more personality cults from now.’ With that, they embarked on their great act of defiance. Zhijian blocked the flow of people from entering the gate tower, while Dongyue and Decheng put up the couplet and threw the eggs at the portrait of Mao Zedong. Splatters of red and black began to litter Mao’s face. Tiananmen Square went silent, unable to react. The iconic image of the Supreme Leader – the focal point of the great square – had been scorned and defaced. The trio stood in front of the portrait, still covered in paint, unaware of the painful consequences they would soon face for their act of bravery. 

They were brought to the headquarters of the student movement in the square and soon handed over by the students to the local police who threw them into a detention centre. For the next two weeks, the trio sat idly; they were not brought in for questioning nor transferred to prison. But all this changed on June 4th, the day of the notorious Tiananmen Massacre. 

In the early hours of the 4th, Zhijian was startled awake by the sound of gunfire, penetrating even through the walls of his cell. Trapped, he feared for his fellow activists outside. He was unable to sleep, his muscles convulsing uncontrollably. “This is what they mean when they say political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, he thought. Finally, by daybreak, his cell door was opened, and groups of students began flooding in, filling up the detention centre. Tiananmen Square had been washed in blood and this was the aftermath. While he was waiting for his trial, the detention centre was taken over by merciless soldiers. They treated the detainees with indiscriminate violence, beating them roughly. While transferring Zhijian to another centre, a soldier lifted him and threw him towards the jeep before smashing his rifle in Zhijian’s face, knocking his tooth out and causing blood to spew from his face.

Finally, the trio were put through a kangaroo court – a sham trial. The whole thing took less than two hours. While Zhijian and Decheng made no defence, knowing its inevitable pointlessness, Dongyue, the arts teacher, argued that what they did was “the most outstanding piece of performance art of the century, and that people would only understand what it really meant several years later”. Of course, his defence was to no avail: the three were sentenced, separated, thrown into prison and prevented from making contact.

Zhijian, the chemistry teacher, was sentenced to life in prison. While there, he attempted to inform his fellow inmates of the cruelty of the party and the atrocities of the massacre on June 4th. For that, he was beaten up five or six times by the police with fists and steel-tipped shoes – even with electric prods. His clothes were taken, and he had to lie on the ground naked. He served eleven years before his release. Yet even after being released, he was regularly put under house arrest for ‘reactionary’ articles, watched twenty-four hours a day and tailed by police. He was finally unable to bear the perpetual surveillance he was subjected to and fled to the US with his wife in 2009.

Decheng, the bus driver, was given fifteen years and tortured psychologically. In 1995, his wife visited him in prison and handed him divorce papers, leaving with their daughter. Released after nine years in 1998, he was unable to find work and hounded by the authorities. He eventually fled the country, making an epic journey through mountains and jungles to Burma and eventually to Thailand, before arriving as a refugee in Vancouver.

But it was Dongyue, the defiant arts editor, who endured the worst fate. Serving the longest sentence of all, he was released only after seventeen years. Two were spent in solitary confinement, facing violent forms of torture from electric shocks to beatings, for being a political prisoner. After writing the slogans ‘Down with Deng Xiaoping’ and ‘Re-evaluate June 4th’ on a prison blackboard, Dongyue was beaten brutally again and later transferred to a labour camp. The solitary confinement cell he was kept in was pitch-dark, the size of a closet and lacking heating or ventilation. A fellow prisoner said he had been tied to an electrified pole and left out in the hot sun for several days. A prodigy who had graduated from college at eighteen, his brilliant mind had been broken and he was finally tortured into insanity. Despite repeated petitions by Zhijian, Decheng and his family for an early release on medical grounds, the authorities cruelly kept him behind bars. By the time of his eventual release, he had become incoherent – babbling incomprehensibly. When Zhijian visited him, he found not his quick-witted and spirited friend but an empty-eyed husk who did not recognise him. When Dongyue finally reacted to him, it was to kneel in front of Zhijian, yelling loudly, ‘Don’t kill me!’ He no longer responded to his name, nor did he have control over his bodily functions. 

Thirty-six years after that fateful day in June 1989, the three are no longer the idealistic young men they once were, full of hopes of changing the world. Now, one has died, one is in Canada and one no longer recognises his family — or himself. That was the price these “Three Heroes of Tiananmen” paid for their bravery – a price exacted by China’s brutal communist regime. 

Sources:

Bullets and Opium: Real-life Stories of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre by Liao Yiwu (2012), Chapter 1.

“China Is Accused of Torturing 3 Who Defaced Mao Portrait,” The New York Times, 1 June 1992.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/01/world/china-is-accused-of-torturing-3-who-defaced-mao-portrait.html

Radio Free Asia (Mandarin), “余志坚案回顾,” 23 August 2017.
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/renquanfazhi/ck-08232017113327.html

“Man Freed After Years in Jail for Mao Insult,” The New York Times, 23 February 2006.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/world/asia/man-freed-after-years-in-jail-for-mao-insult.html

Radio Free Asia (Mandarin), “毛像泼漆案20周年：狱中生活不堪回首,” 4 June 2009.
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/mao-06042009212229.html