My brush with Chinese rebellion (From Echo)

My brush with Chinese rebellion

5:00pm Thursday 4th June 2009 in

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EARLY in 1989, footloose, 40-year-old, Clive Leatherdale accepted a short-term job as a lecturer in British history.

He was amply qualified, having taken his doctorate in the subject. The venue was immaterial to him. He just wanted out.

“I’d have been happy to go anywhere, from Harare to Osaka,” he says. In fact, the job happened to be in Shanghai. So Clive headed for the Chinese city.

He was also, unwittingly, headed for a collision course with history. Twenty years ago on this day, June 4, 1989, Chinese police and military began a bloody crackdown on the student and worker protest movement that had gripped the country, in the wake of the collapse of Communist governments around the world.

Tanks moved into the epicentre of the protest, and the name Tiananmen Square became forever etched on the world’s consciousness.

Thousands of people are believed to have been killed. Foreign journalists were expelled and the world’s most populous country lurched back into the darkness of repression and secrecy from which it had only recently started to emerge.

Clive, as a university lecturer, was granted a bystander’s view of the convulsions. “I only went to China for 100 days,” he says. “But in terms of history, it was just about the most momentous 100 days I could have chosen.”

Realising he had been a witness to world-shaking events, Clive set his experiences down in a book, The Virgin Whore, covering his experiences as a teacher and his travels through China during this time of turmoil.

Twenty years on, and now the owner of a Southend publishing company, Clive has reissued the book under his own Desert Island imprint.

Secure in his home overlooking the estuary, he has also taken time to reread the words written by his younger self, one third of a lifetime ago.

They were written after he had emerged, shaken and stirred, from the terrifying convulsions as Chinese society threatened to shake itself to pieces.

His conclusion is: “On the surface China has changed a great deal, but I still think this snapshot of Chinese life 20 years ago has something to tell us about China in 2009.”

The mood of this vast country began to change in mid April 1989, following the death of the reformist leader Hu Yaobang.

Around the world, the old communist order had crumbled, and this particular event acted as a trigger in China.

Millions of students backed by others such as railway workers, took to the streets in a broad protest against corruption and the old order.

The political dramas that had been played out in other places, such as Berlin, were now being replayed in the East, but, given China’s huge population, on a far vaster scale.

Clive’s university, Shanghai, alone mustered 200,000 student protesters.

Suddenly, that Shanghai university campus was no longer such a quiet backwater.

“This,” recalls Clive, “was my first experience of massed Chinese.”

He describes the spectacle as “not unlike a macabre pop concert”. As a westerner, cycling through these tense throngs, Clive became an object of intense curiosity.

Some elements of the crowd even started to follow him around. Unnervingly, the eyes of revolutionary Shanghai were briefly focused on one lone Essex man.

“I wondered if the traditional Chinese phobia towards foreigners was about to be unleashed on me,” he recalls.

The students never got as far as issuing specific proposals for reform.

Protest took the shape of a more generalised cry for freedom and democracy.

Many of the placards in cosmopolitan Shanghai were daubed in English, and borrowed phrases from great democratic thinkers such as Abraham Lincoln – We want a government of the people, for the people, by the people.

One even read, all too presciently, “We are dying for democracy.”

While the international press corps was observing events from the security of hotel balconies, Clive installed himself among the crowds, picking up on the latest mood.

He observed vivid details, such as the man on a bicycle with a 12ft model of the Statue of Liberty strapped to the back, or the bus driver who had attached a notice to his vehicle’s radiator reading “City people support students.”

Alongside this, Clive’s regular job, the teaching of British history, continued in an ever more surreal way.

As the protests peaked into tragedy, he was engaged in a role-playing mock-up of House of Commons procedure with his students, complete with courteous references to “the honourable member.”

As with many a true Brit abroad, obsession with sport also overrode any concerns about geopolitics.

On one occasion, Clive describes a hectic cycle ride back to his quarters through the seething crowds.

“Revolution was in the air, but this Englishman’s one concern was to get home in time to watch the FA Wembley Cup Final match on TV.

On June 4 the peaceful protests turned into a bloodbath in Beijing. Shanghai looked set to erupt in a similar manner.

Clive was advised to take the first available plane out of China, “but I had no intention of doing so,” he says.

“I experienced a perverse sensation that now was a good time to be in China.

“My heart yearned to stay there and to travel.”

So instead of heading home, Clive headed inland.

There he encountered some of the remarkable people who live in the remoter parts of China, tried his hand at supplementing his lecturer’s salary by gold-panning in the Mekong River.

While the bloody events of Tiananmen Square shook the world, old China continued on its immemorial way.

At the end, though, like so many other explorers of Chinese society, his main impression was not of revelation, but of deepening mystery.

China and the Chinese really are inscrutable.

“I never did manage to fathom how China works,” he says.

Nevertheless, China had granted Clive Leatherdale a glimpse of herself on one of those rare occasions when her people shook off their reserve and displayed a trait not always associated with the Chinese – passion.

Clive has never returned to China, though he stays in touch with some of his former students, now mostly teachers themselves.

“I do feel there was a touch of destiny about my time there,” he says.

“I had no aspirations to go to China. I didn’t choose to go there. China called me.”

THE VIRGIN WHORE Tiananmen, Travels and Traumas by Clive Leatherdale is published by Desert Island Books @ £11.99 ISBN 978 - 1 - 905328 - 60 -1