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Behind the street theater, though, a profound seriousness pervaded Tiananmen, born of the knowledge that people were prepared to die for democracy. Construction workers and medical volunteers erected a makeshift clinic, using scaffolding and canvas, as doctors and nurses ministered to the hunger strikers, some of whom had sworn off water as well as food and were wilting rapidly in the warm weather. The strikers were given glucose solutions, intravenously or orally. When the weather turned foul on Wednesday night, they were moved inside buses that had been brought to Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Red Cross.
All along, the wail of sirens was the week's background music, as ambulances ferried the sick to hospitals. Such efficiency was another sign of the students' organizational abilities: while central Beijing ground to a standstill because of the crowds that thronged to the square, the demonstrators, using packing string and their own bodies, cordoned off lanes so the ambulances could always get through. Many hunger strikers made the trip out; almost as many came back to resume their fast once they felt well enough to do so.
More than anything else, this drama of so many endangering their lives for a common good triggered the vast outpouring of solidarity from a people used to tending to their own.
The forbidding gap between private lives and that distant sense of a common ground was first bridged on April 26, when 150,000 people flooded the square to show disapproval of an inflammatory People's Daily editorial that denounced the students. "That was a major breakthrough in Chinese modern history," says Roderick MacFarquahar, director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. It marked the "first time since 1949 that a demonstration by society against the state was made successfully in the face of a powerful government."
The achievement almost proved short-lived. As the number of demonstrators in the square dwindled to nearly none, the students decided to employ one of civil disobedience's most sacred weapons, the hunger strike. With a large contingent of foreign press on hand for the Gorbachev visit, the decision seemed a brilliant public relations ploy. But the choice of tactics also harked back to the sensibility of a much earlier age.
"The students have struck an ancient chord in Chinese history," explains Thomas Bernstein, a China scholar and chairman of Columbia University's political science department. "It is the idea of the scholar-official who remonstrates with the emperor about some evil in the kingdom that the ruler should put right. The emperor won't listen, and the scholar-official takes his own life as a witness, or sacrifice, to the higher good." By casting themselves in the role of the scholar-official, the students have become the bearers of that tradition.
All but eclipsed by the rebellion was the Sino-Soviet summit, an event whose significance dropped to that of a sizable footnote. What was intended as an elaborate celebration of China's assured and independent standing and the Soviet Union's new civility in the international arena became incidental entertainment beside the pro-democracy demonstrations. Early on, Mikhail Gorbachev quipped about his comeuppance. At a meeting with President Yang, the Soviet President remarked, "Well, I came to Beijing and you have a revolution!"