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When it happened, suddenly a million or more marchers were streaming into Tiananmen, perhaps ten times as many as had been there the day before. It was the largest demonstration in modern Chinese history. People poured out of factories and hospitals, the Foreign Ministry and kindergartens. And not just in Beijing. By midweek the ferment had spread to at least a dozen other cities, with another hunger strike taking place in Shanghai. In some provincial cities, plans for a general strike were reported.
At times, Tiananmen looked like the site of a corporate jamboree: supporters of the hunger strikers paraded around the square, their placards and signs bobbing up and down, proclaiming the presence of CAAC (China's civil airline), CITIC (China's largest investment company) and PICC (people's insurance company). Held aloft beside them were the ubiquitous signs inscribed sheng yuan (support the students) or HUNGER STRIKE -- NO TO DEEP-FRIED DEMOCRACY. Other signs had a distinctly American provenance. I HAVE A DREAM, said one, echoing Martin Luther King Jr. Another amended the words of Patrick Henry: GIVE ME DEMOCRACY OR GIVE ME DEATH.
Even if some of the demonstration's rhetoric was borrowed from America, it was the Soviet Union and, more specifically, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose presence counted more than any other. Countless banners lauded PIONEER OF GLASNOST, while posters with his portrait declared him AN EMISSARY OF DEMOCRACY.
For Gorbachev, who came to Beijing in his guise of Triumphant Conciliator, the demonstrations, which hailed his other persona of Democratic Liberator, were something of an embarrassment. The contrast with the treatment accorded Deng, once recognized as a great economic reformer and the author of China's recent prosperity, could not have been starker: huge effigies were paraded around with placards saying DOWN WITH DENG XIAOPING.
Despite the palpable anger at the party leadership, the spirit of much of the week-long demonstration was exuberant, as though a long-silent nation had again found its voice. Acrobats tumbled, children sang and banged drums, and musicians from both the Central Philharmonic and a rock band performed to offer the students "spiritual uplifting." A pack of close to 200 Beijing ) motorcyclists, many of them getihu (private entrepreneurs), roared along Changan Avenue, which leads into the square, their girlfriends sitting behind them, clinging tightly.
With spirits running so high and the crowds so thick, the total absence of violence up until Saturday bordered on the miraculous -- a testament to the skill of the demonstration's young organizers. "This was not an explosion from nowhere. This had been building for a long time," explains David Zweig, an assistant professor of government at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Even so, he adds, "it is remarkable how unviolent it has been."