China Beijing Spring

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The night before the march, Jia Guangxi and his five roommates at Peking University toasted one another with farewell glasses of wine. "Some of us even wrote last wills," recalled Jia, 18, an economics major from Inner Mongolia. And why not? Chinese officials, having tolerated eleven days of protests by tens of thousands of students, were darkly warning of a crackdown that would put an end to the demonstrations once and for all.

On Thursday morning Jia rose early, grabbed a megaphone and headed for the headquarters of the student organizing committee. As his classmates poured out of their dormitories, Jia held up his megaphone and shouted quotations from the constitution. "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration!" he bellowed. School officials blasted a threatening countermessage over loudspeakers: "Go back to your classes! Don't give in to pressure from your fellow students! Beware of the consequences to yourself and your family!"

Just outside the university gates was a sight to give even the most determined demonstrator pause: row upon row of uniformed policemen. What happened next will be remembered for years to come. As more than 50,000 striking university students flooded the streets in defiance of government warnings, some 250,000 ordinary citizens joined them, supporting their demands for more democracy.

The outpouring of discontent, and the authorities' decision not to stop it, represented an unprecedented humiliation for Deng Xiaoping and his government. Wisely deciding not to use force to end the march, the Chinese government acceded to demands for a dialogue with the students. "The demonstration marks the raising of democratic consciousness of the people," triumphantly said a graduate student of philosophy from Peking University.

The festive event lasted 16 hours, as students from 32 colleges paraded 25 miles from the university belt in northwestern Beijing to Tiananmen Square in the city's center. It was the latest and by far the largest in a series of protests that began when students gathered on April 16 to mourn the death of former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, whose tolerance of demonstrations two years ago precipitated his downfall. The marchers, divided into well-organized ranks according to their school, chanted and waved red and white banners. When they tired of singing the Internationale and the national anthem, the students launched into homemade ditties. To the tune of the French song Frere Jacques, they warbled in Chinese, "Lying to the people, lying to the people, very strange, very strange."

Along the way battalions of unarmed police halfheartedly tried to block the protesters' path. Again and again the police were pushed aside by students who sometimes reached out to shake the hands of the startled men. "The People's Police love the people," the marchers chanted, "and the people love the People's Police!" One protester playfully snatched an officer's hat, and another threw it about like a Frisbee.