John Pomfret Interview (2007): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Before we talk about the latter part, the themes that emerge once capitalism hits, and the things that you learned had happened to these people, let's talk about Tiananmen, because you had become a journalist. You had left China, then you came back, and then that whole movement began and you were working for the AP and you were on the scene. Give us a sense of that excitement which you talk about in the book, and the time of possibilities.
Tiananmen -- yes, I was in China from 1980 to '82 and then I left. I became a journalist and got training back in the States, and then I was sent by the AP to China in late '88. And actually the first demonstration I was sent to was in Nanjing, in December of 1988. There was a very strange demonstration -- and I'm going to talk about this for a second, before we get to Tiananmen. That demonstration began when an African student wanted to take his girlfriend to a dance, his Chinese girlfriend. Nanjing, like lots of other cities, had these waves of crackdowns on foreigner-Chinese relationships, and it was in the middle of one such crackdown, so it was bad timing. So, when the African student tried to take his girlfriend to the dance, the guy at the gate said she had to register. The African student knew that if that woman had registered she would be contacted by the police and there would be problems for her, so he said, "No, she's not going to register." The guy at the gate said she must register, so a fight ensued. By the end of the evening, eleven African students were wounded, I think three Chinese students were hurt, and the whole city was bananas with thousands of Chinese youths marching down the streets saying, "Down with the black devils." By the next day, tens of thousands of people are on the street marching against African students, the "black devils" as they're called in China, saying, "We want these people out of our country" blah, blah, blah.
I went down there at the end of the second day, and by the third day the demonstration had lost all of these racist overtones and it had already morphed into a demonstration for democracy and human rights. Go figure. But that disconnect in a foreign mind is one of the things that happens so often in China. You have this anger about a nativistic [issue], could be a racially motivated anger, that morphs rapidly into an anti-regime type protest march.
So, when the demonstrations began about Hu Yaobong in April of 1989, no one among the foreign community realized that this thing was going to be big. It was demonstrating because this poor old communist had died without much fanfare, and they began to demonstrate for a better funeral for this character. And soon into April, we had after several weeks of demonstrations, you had 100,000 people in the streets of Beijing, and then in May you had 500,000, possibly more than a million, maybe two million people in the streets in Beijing. One of the reasons obviously was because within the Communist Party there was a lot of factional fighting, but the complicated thing in China is that demonstrations against or for one thing can quickly morph into an anti-regime demonstration that will literally shake the very foundations of the Communist Party.
Being in Beijing at that time was, for a thirty-year-old reporter, the most amazing experience at that time in my life, up to that point. You're watching history happen before you. In some cases you could literally look down on history because in Beijing there are lots of elevated sidewalks over boulevards, and the boulevards weren't filled with cars, they were filled with people with banners stretching up and down the street literally for miles, as far as the eye can see, with these wonderful slogans like, "Down with corruption," and "We want human rights and freedom." It was an extraordinary period.
Beijing people have a reputation of being very citified, obnoxious, sort of like New Yorkers in a way. And then suddenly for several weeks in April, May, and June of 1989 people became nice to each other again. You bumped into people on the street and they would say, "Excuse me," which was extraordinary because in Beijing they never did that. So, from all sorts of levels the change and the way society felt was extraordinary.
It moved away from corruption and issues about who could get into school to broader political issues. It started with students and then was mobilizing all sectors of the society.
Right. It metastasized, as the Party would say. The basic demand, the first demand, was to set up a student union independent of Communist Party control. People might say, "How obscure is that?," but actually it's an important point because if you establish the precedent of an organization outside the control of the Party, then you really have the potential for creating civil society, and that's the last thing the Party wanted. And then, of course, it moved into all reaches of society, into all reaches of the Party.
Because you were there on the street, working many, many hours and filing reports, a young person, a lot of energy, but who spoke Chinese -- fate was with you to be there -- were you stung by how ugly things got, or had you experienced things before, as a student, that you weren't surprised by what you saw?
I had a sense that things would end badly, because too many people whom I respected kept on saying, "This is going to end badly." And so, that influenced my thinking, but once it began, I happened to be at Muxidi when the soldiers began firing to come into the city from the west on the night of June 3rd. Once that firing began and literally bullets were flying over my head, I had no idea what I was into. It was an experience that I'd never had. I'd never seen combat, I'd never heard gunfire in that type of an environment at all. I'd never seen a riot like this, and I'd never seen a bloody response, an armed response. I mean, I'd covered cop incidents in New York City but this was live, it was of a different, totally different, nature than that. So, yeah, I was pretty amazed.
You ultimately were thrown out of the country by the Chinese government.
Yes. There were two resident correspondents kicked out. I was one of the two resident correspondents expelled. My crimes were stealing state secrets and violating martial law provisions.
But what you were really guilty of is having had access to information that would be out shortly thereafter anyway.
Well, I think that was the essential problem.
After you left China you went to a number of hotspots all over the world. How did your later experience inform your attitude about the way you see Tiananmen now, as opposed to the way you saw it then?
My views on Tiananmen fundamentally haven't changed. There were a lot of innocent people who were killed that evening for no need. The Chinese shibboleth that if we'd listened to these people, if we hadn't killed these people, China would be in chaos -- I don't buy it. On the other hand, having seen the destruction of Bosnia and the collapse of Yugoslavia, having been for many weeks in Mobutu's Zaire and seen his fall, and literally seen the Gulf War, seen Afghanistan, seen Sri Lanka and its horrible, intractable civil war, you have to give the Chinese Communist Party some credit that their unity has at least stopped their country from falling apart into a destructive, unproductive, and bloody civil war. That's the last thing you'd want to wish on anybody, no matter their political affiliation. So, fundamentally my views haven't changed: it was a crackdown on innocent students and civilians done by a bunch of old men desperate to hold onto power; but what happened afterward, I think, is a testimony to Chinese creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that the country is so prominent and powerful today.
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