It was exactly 35 years ago: on June 4, 1989, in Beijing, Deng Xiaoping sent tanks to Tiananmen Square to bloodily suppress the movement of freedom-loving students who had been demonstrating throughout the country for more than a month. Even today, a heavy weight of lead hangs over this massacre – an absolute taboo for the communist regime. Including, now, in Hong Kong, long a high place of memory, where any commemoration of terrible events is now severely punished by the national security law which came into force in 2020. Far from Beijing, Taiwan is the last bastion of the Chinese-speaking world to be able to publicly honor the memory of the victims.
More than three decades after the events, the ghosts of Tiananmen continue to haunt veterans of the pro-democracy movement, some of whom have found refuge abroad. Among many tragedies, one story in particular does not pass by: that of the three young men, Yu Dongyue, Yu Zhijian and Lu Decheng, aged around twenty at the time of the demonstrations, who, in May 1989, were killed. extreme audacity to throw eggs saturated with ink at the immense portrait of Mao Zedong adorning the gate of the Forbidden City.
The sacrilege, still dizzying 13 years after the death of the founder of the People’s Republic of China, amazes the students of Tiananmen Square. So much so that they dissociated themselves from it and handed the rebels over to the police themselves – proof that the demonstrators did not want the fall of the regime. The response from the communist authorities will be merciless against this trio of friends who arrived from their distant province of Hunan (the one from which Mao also came), and who dreamed of making a place for themselves in the great democratic movement of their generation.
“He kept kneeling”
For a handful of eggs on the portrait of the Great Helmsman, Yu Zhijian, who had resigned from his post as a teacher a year earlier, was sentenced to life in prison, Yu Dongyue (an art critic) to 20 years , and Lu Decheng (bus driver), at 16. Despite some reduced sentences, the three young men emerged broken from their years of imprisonment. In 2006, Yu Dongyue was the last to be released, at age 39, after 17 years of incarceration, where he constantly endured physical and psychological torture. He is also the one who comes out the most affected, in the state of a “vegetable”, note those close to him.
Xian Gui-e, the wife of Yu Zhijian, the ex-teacher, her voice breaks when she talks about the reunion between her husband and Yu Dongyue, who once considered themselves brothers. “When he found us, his first movement was to kneel in front of us, as if he did not know my husband, given that he was obliged to do so in prison every time he was in our presence of a guard”, she testifies to L’Express, on video from Indiana, United States. The former journalist no longer recognizes those close to him, makes incoherent comments: “He is evasive. If we ask him a question, he answers with something else,” continues Xian Gui-e. He seems to have fallen back into early childhood. “When he came out of prison, when my husband took him for a walk in the street, at the slightest sight of a police car, he was seized with fear and he kept kneeling down, remembers this kind friend. When we were at the table, if the food fell on the floor, he picked it up to eat it.
Later, we learn of the inhumane treatment that Yu Dongue suffered in prison. In a magazine linked to the Falun Gong religious movement, a fellow prisoner said: “I went to see the political prisoner Yu Dongyue: the place where he lived was frightening, worse than a pigsty, a vision of horror.” Yu Zhijian’s wife describes several of the abuses suffered, recounted by other former prisoners, in particular the so-called “small cell” torture, a widespread practice in Chinese prisons which consists of locking the prisoner in a room in the the size of a coffin where he can neither stand nor lie down. The latter would have endured this ordeal for several months. “When I try to talk to him about what happened in that small cell, he immediately changes the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about it,” said Xian Gui-e, whose husband, Yu Zhijian, was subjected to to the same punishment. Other witnesses also say that he was tied to an electrical pole and left under the sun for several days. In despair, he attempted suicide by throwing himself head first from his bunk.
Flight to the United States
In a disastrous psychological state, Yu Dongyue is taken care of once released by his sister and his friend Yu Zhijian. After a few years, they decided to flee to the United States, where care would be more appropriate for their friend. Their companion Lu Decheng has already managed to find refuge, not without difficulty, in Canada. This is how they set up an escape plan with Yu Dongyue’s little sister who, to keep the secret until the end, will leave China without even informing her husband. In 2008, the four fugitives left by bus to Thailand where they waited, four of them cloistered in a very small room, for the United States to grant them asylum. They will have to wait more than a year.
Twenty years after the denunciation of the Tiananmen Square students, they met for the first time in San Francisco, one of their former leaders, Zhou Fengsuo. “I felt partly responsible because I was a representative of the students,” he told us by videoconference from New York. “I apologized to them for what they had experienced. I was especially touched by Yu Dongyue . It’s heartbreaking to see that such an idealistic person had lost his mind after being tortured.”
In a final restorative gesture, Zhou Fengsuo’s association, Humanitarian China, will take full charge of Yu Zhijian’s funeral, upon his death in 2017. Yu Dongyue, whom the latter had taken care of all his life, is alive today in a rest home. Xian Gui-e continues to visit him regularly. Although his situation has improved slightly, his condition continues to sadden him: “Before prison, he knew how to speak English, Russian, and Japanese. He was very intelligent. How could such a brilliant man- Could he have lost his mind?” Only the Chinese Communist Party knows the whole answer.
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