Where Brightness Ends

Bei Dao’s nostalgia for a pre-liberalisation Beijing / LITERATURE.

- Ratik Asokan

ON 28 MAY 1989, Lijia Zhang, a twenty-something factory worker, addressed a political rally in the Chinese city of Nanjing. This was unusual for her. A high-school dropout, Lijia had up until then been largely apolitical. But the pro-democracy student demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—going five weeks strong, and days away from massacre—had captured the public imagination. Like many workers, she had followed the events on the radio for weeks. Learning of a nearby demonstration that day, she impulsively decided to attend.

At the rally, Lijia somehow found herself on the podium. Speaking without preparation, through tears, she began modestly enough, expressing solidarity with the students at Tiananmen. The crowd egged her on. Emboldened, she went on to denounce the People’s Republic of China as a “dictatorship,” and even led a chant for democracy. She then ended with these lines by the poet Bei Dao:

Let me tell you, world

I—do—not—believe!

If a thousand challenges lie at your feet,

Count me as number one thousand and one.

The event, recounted in Lijia’s charming memoir Socialism is Great!, is emblematic of the intense and unlikely coming together of poetry and politics during the era of reforms that followed Mao’s death in 1976. It is made unlikelier still by the sort of poet Bei Dao is.

Born in 1949, Bei Dao, whose real name is Zhao Zhenkhai, grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood in Beijing, and studied at an elite boarding school. In 1967, a year into Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he, like millions of other urban youth, was sent to the countryside, where he worked at construction sites and smithies for the next 11 years. By day he mixed cement and cast iron; in the evenings he read and wrote.