The Middle Kingdom

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ALL OF BEIJING was blanketed with smoke and rumors. From midnight on Friday, when we first heard that soldiers were trying to jog down Changan Avenue, through the chaos of Saturday and the horrors of Sunday morning, those of us still on the Qinghua campus clustered around radios and televisions and ringing phones, relaying whatever we heard and trying frantically to understand what was going on. We heard that the soldiers were unarmed, armed, armed and pumped full of amphetamines. We heard they were crashing through Tiananmen Square, crushing the demonstrators and mowing them down with machine guns; then that workers were ambushing soldiers in the streets. Someone said a soldier had been disemboweled and hung from his burning truck. Someone said snipers had shot out the windows of the Beijing Hotel. Deng was dead, we heard. The army was in charge. Li Peng had been shot in the leg and the statue of the Goddess of Democracy was down. There were two armies, six armies, the armies were fighting each other. Deng was alive and the armies were under his control. Ten thousand people had been killed, someone said. A hundred. None. In the square, someone said, the soldiers were burning bodies with blowtorches and flamethrowers. The students had captured some of the soldiers’ guns and were shooting back. The soldiers were driving over the students’ tents.

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