Tiananmen Square chaos drove physicist to suburbs

STORY BY TARA MALONE | Daily Herald Staff Writer
PHOTOS BY PATRICK KUNZER | Daily Herald Photographer

Soldiers offer a solemn salute as the Chinese flag is raised at dawn during a daily ceremony in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. A portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong hangs from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where the former leader stood Oct. 1, 1949 to herald the new People’s Republic of China.

BEIJING — Weimin Wu shouldn’t have been there.

Thousands of university students swarmed Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, demanding democratic reform and an end to corruption that crippled the communist party swept to power by popular unrest four decades earlier.

Armed with banners and a conviction that China needed to change, university students marshaled a movement that drew city workers, farmers, journalists and scientists.

Student leaders were too young to know what would follow: military sweeps, arrests and a paranoia that turned neighbor against neighbor.

But he knew.

Wu had seen the government’s untethered authority before.

The Shanghai native was among thousands exiled to the countryside to be “re-educated” by peasants during the Cultural Revolution designed to stamp out any suggestion of anti-communism during the 1960s.

Yet such memories did not keep him from Tiananmen Square. Wu could not stay away, even though the chaos that followed would force him away from his home forever, eventually toward sanctuary in Chicago’s suburbs.

As a scientist with China’s Institute of High Energy Physics, Wu’s research had led him to laboratories in Switzerland and Western Europe often enough to give him a lesson in democracy.

So, when a communist leader who pushed for reform and was sidelined by party officials because of it died, Wu, then 45, joined others beside a hastily constructed “Goddess of Democracy” in Tiananmen Square.

Weimin Wu witnessed the Tiananmen Square protest. “It was horrible, like a war zone,” Wu, 62, recalls.

Together, they filled the expansive public square that sits at the political pulse of China.

Together, they stood when government dismissal of the protest turned to government force.

It was June 1989.

“I am not a hero. I’m afraid to die,” said Wu, now a 62-year-old Lisle resident. “But by any standard, this is totally wrong. You cannot use the army to shoot people in the street.”

June 3, 1989

Seemingly impenetrable tanks rolled into Beijing, bound by executive order to subdue protesters in the public square.

Their arrival followed nearly two weeks of martial law and two months of mounting protests that brought nearly 1 million people to Tiananmen Square.

That the tanks came was not a surprise.

That they fired into the crowd was.

“Nobody believed they were using real guns, real bullets to smash people. People think the tanks came to scare people,” Wu recalled.

A soldier patrols Beijing’s Tiananmen Square — the world’s largest public square — during a Sunday evening

The melee began at nightfall June 3.

“When the army came in and then, of course, people, some people throw stones to the army trucks and then army also throw stones back,” Wu says. “Army trucks just go forward. … They start to hear the gun shot, and then first see wounded people go to the hospital.”

“Like a war zone,” Wu recalled quietly, “burning tanks, burning cars.”

Tanks driven by young military recruits entered the outskirts of Beijing. Because most soldiers came from rural provinces, many tanks lost their way in the urban labyrinth of Beijing at night.

Some protesters met them head on along Chang’an Jie, the four-lane road that slices Beijing from east to west and skirts Tiananmen Square. Some fled the city along the same avenue. Others rode bikes, watching the clash between students throwing rocks at tanks and soldiers firing back.

“It’s like a battlefield,” said Wei Rao of Bolingbrook who, like Wu, left China after witnessing the Tiananmen Square riots. “You can see fire and fighting. … Part of you is scared, part of you wants to see.”

The clash continued until June 4. A lone protester stared down a row of advancing tanks for 30 minutes, an image that defined the Tiananmen Square protests in the eyes of the Western world.

Wu saw this chapter in Chinese history unfold firsthand.

A Chinese flag blows over a Sunday afternoon crowd in Tiananmen Square, where thousands of protesters gathered in 1989 to call for an end to government corruption.

Beijing police rounded up protest leaders. Foreigners spotted outside after dark risked getting shot. Pro-democratic banners draping university gates were removed. Independent worker unions and student organizations credited with the nascent democratic movement were outlawed.

Within a week, military and police officials arrested an estimated 1,600 people in Beijing. Executions for crimes such as setting fire to army trucks, stealing military supplies and attacking soldiers, meanwhile, received barely a mention in Chinese national news.

No one knows how many people were killed in the fighting or how many died in the aftermath. Still. Western estimates peg the death toll at anywhere from 500 to 2,600.

On June 10, an aging President Deng Xiaoping — the communist leader credited with both China’s economic opening and its political stagnation — called the military response “a steppingstone for a better future.”

His Western counterparts at the U.S. Department of State called it “a tragedy for China, its people and for the legacy (supreme leader Deng Xiaoping) sought to pass on.”

As diplomatic relations sank to a historic low between the Chinese and U.S. governments since full ties were re-established in 1979, Wu plotted his escape West.

He’d already lived through one era of communist isolation during the Cultural Revolution. He didn’t want to do it again.

“People wanted to get democracy and wanted not only economic reform, but political reform,” Wu said. “You cannot make changes to Chinese society with only one side, without political reform.”

Finding Higgs

Nearly 17 years after the Tiananmen Square protest, Wu now spends his days sequestered in his Batavia office, searching.

His quest? To find the missing link that will reveal what makes mass.

At Fermilab’s Wilson Hall, Wu pores over computer models, hoping to detect what scientists liken to a single drop of water created out of vapor. Statistically speaking, the odds of finding the Higgs particle — named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs — are about the same.

Yet Wu knows something of long shots and luck.

He joined Fermi in April 1990, less than a year after Beijing protesters clashed with the military, prompting the communist crackdown on political dissidence and the stinging rebuke from the Western world.

Wu had served as a Chinese liaison to Switzerland’s CERN, or the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, which is credited with creating the World Wide Web.

Wu is credited with sending the first Chinese e-mail. On August 25, 1986, Wu sent a message from his Chinese research institute to colleagues in Switzerland, an e-mail now said to have hastened the Internet’s arrival in China.

“Everything was ideal until 1989,” Wu recalls.

But his stature among China’s premier scientists made his participation in the protests both conspicuous and risky.

Dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, a vocal critic of the communist government, did not join the Tiananmen uprising. Still, he was burned in effigy at government rallies staged in the aftermath and so he sought protection at the U.S. Embassy compound in Beijing.

Watching such chaos unfold, Wu decided to leave China, quickly. At Fermilab, he found an open door and intellectual sanctuary.

“I am here as a physicist, not as a politician,” Wu said recently of fleeing his office in Beijing for one in Batavia. “I am an ordinary physicist. I don’t want to be involved in any political organization or cause. I want to do my research.”

Tiananmen today

Whispered murmurs and camera clicks punctuate the silence that cloaks Tiananmen Square at dawn.

People crowded five deep watch soldiers marching lockstep to the flagpole, preparing to raise the Chinese star on a new day.

A splash of red explodes in the air as the winter breeze unfurls the flag in a quick snap. It billows against a backdrop of Chairman Mao Zedong’s portrait hanging from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. A sea of arms hoist digital cameras and camera-equipped cell phones into the air.

Weimin Wu guides his 8-year-old daughter, Yvonne, as they make spring rolls in their Lisle home. Wu, 62, settled in Chicago’s suburbs after the Tiananmen Square protests nearly 17 years ago, but hopes to give his U.S.-born daughter a connection to her Chinese heritage.

At 4.7 million square feet, the square is as big as Vatican City. Today, Tiananmen Square is a tourist destination, drawing students eager to practice their English, onlookers who come to see Mao’s Memorial Hall and peddlers with postcards of the Forbidden City — home to five centuries of Chinese emperors.

Nothing in the vast expanse of the world’s largest public square marks the site of the tragic clash there nearly 17 years ago.

The 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square never are discussed publicly. Finding anyone in China who will talk to foreign journalists about it is nearly impossible.

“No one will touch it,” said Yang Li, hired to translate for the Daily Herald.

But the memory of the riots remains amid the silence.

“This is one of the pages of Chinese history. People still remember,” Wu said. “This page of history is over, but not over totally.”

The political reform still has not arrived to join the economic reform. Yet, Wu contends the economic explosion of China onto the world scene — becoming the world’s fourth-largest economy — quickened the national recovery after 1989. He offers himself as an example.

Wu came to the suburbs with little but a suitcase, a commanding physics career and an outdated passport.

Officials with the Chinese Consulate of Chicago refused to renew his expired documentation. Fleeing Beijing as he did in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests, and then bringing his wife and oldest daughter from China to the Chicago suburbs a year later, branded Wu a political outcast.

Only later, after China cemented its role as a political and economic power, did Wu’s invitation to the new year gala hosted by the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Chicago arrive.

Wu witnessed the 1989 protests, but today, that does not carry the stigma it once did. Wu travels freely to China, visiting his siblings who live there still. Wu recently was honored for sending China’s first e-mail.

“This got me thinking society is changing,” Wu said.

“China is not a democratic country yet. But China is much advanced compared with 10 years ago,” Wu said. “People have much, much more freedom compared with five years ago, 10 years ago.

“You can say the communist party is bad,” he continued, noting the new freedom in his native land. “You can access all kinds of information. It’s important for China to have this kind of change.”

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