She who dares

TWENTY years after she went, as a BBC correspondent, to report on the extraordinary events taking place in Beijing, Kate Adie has returned to Tianenmen Square.

Students had been gathering in “the spiritual home of the nation” for weeks, demanding a more just society and an end to government corruption. What she witnessed, both in the square and on the streets, was the brutal massacre of hundreds of people by the army 20 years ago this week.

Sunderland-born Adie returns to China and Tianenmen Square for a BBC2 documentary tomorrow. She hears from those who led the protest and those who survived – many of whom live in exile.

The assignment is not without difficulty. In 1989, getting into China from Hong Kong was easy enough – all it took was paying 50 dollars to a back-street travel agent for a tourist visa.

This time Adie encounters more difficulty.

She’s been allowed back into China twice in the past two decades. but on this occasion the embassy hasn’t issued her and the team with journalists’ visas. Their only option is to travel as tourists. “Effectively undercover,” she says.

In theory, western journalists are free to report anywhere in the wake of the Beijing Olympics, but she recognises that filming isn’t going to be easy. The local police, she says with masterful understatement, seem to have limited understanding of openness.

Within hours of arriving, she notes it’s obvious the filming team has company. They’re being followed by the secret police. It’s the first but not the last time they come under surveillance during their visit.

Another time, she and her colleagues pose as “harmless organic farming enthusiasts” (her words) to fool the occupants of a car trailing them as they drive to interview a former prisoner, jailed for four years for writing a poem, Slaughter, about the massacre.

Her observations of the build up, the killings and the aftermath provide the core of the documentary.

Beijing today is unrecognisable from 1989, she says. “From bicycle heaven to consumerdriven machine sporting Olympic trophy buildings.”

The camera crew, with its heavy equipment, moved around by rickshaw as thousands of students gathered in the square closely observed by troops.

Tianenmen Square appears to have changed little. In this massive public space, the public is still suspect, says Adie. It’s said that those selling postcards are plain clothes police.

No memorial or hint of what happened 20 years ago exists. No plaque or statue to honour the dead. The massacre has been airbrushed from the history books. Many of today’s students are unaware of what happened.

Filming in a hotel room overlooking the square – the same building in which she stayed while covering events – she recalls the events, memory jogged by a BBC diary she hasn’t read for 20 years. This is a woman who has reported from trouble spots around the world, but what she witnessed affected her more deeply than usual.

Usually calm and collected under fire, she recalls being in her room, unable to stop crying or thinking about the couple she’d seen in one of the tiny traditional houses down an alleyway in Beijing.

“The man tugged at me – I’d been on the pavement watching troops going by – and he pulled me in. There lying in front of the TV was his wife with a bullet in her,” she recalls.

“The bullet had come through the wall from hundreds of yards away. He was beyond emotion, he was stunned. And so was I.”

She felt the need to stay on the streets as long as possible to cover the escalating situation. “I went way beyond the boundaries that I would normally set about how dangerous it was getting.

I decided to stay and get the pictures. Lots of things going on,” she says.

Not all the deaths occurred in the square. A lot of people came out of their houses in response to the shooting by the army. At four in the morning, after four hours of killing, thousands of people were still on the streets.

Adie was among them.

GOING beyond her usual reporting boundaries, she was involved in taking a woman who had been shot in her house for medical treatment. The scene in the hospital was carnage. The floor was deep in blood. “You waded through it,” she says. “They were flinging bodies on the floor – people who’d died or been brought in dead – because they had so many injured to deal with.”

She also reminds us of the extraordinary moment when a lone man, holding a carrier bag, confronted the line of tanks rolling along the road. When the tank swerved to avoid him, he moved back in front of it.

Adie is keen to see what became of some of those involved in the protests and whether their hopes were fulfilled. One of the original student leaders, Wuer Kaixi, says the feeling across Beijing University was that they wanted change, and they wanted it now. He anticipated maybe 1,000 people turning up in the square, never imagining that 60,000 students would join the protest.

Some, like Han Dongfan, became involved accidentally. The railway worker was on a bus passing the square, saw people gathering and decided to get off to see what was happening.

“I never thought I would become a dissident,”

he says.

Construction worker Qi Zhiyons crossed the square to get home in the evening. Curious on hearing the roar of the tanks, he saw protestors link arms to try to stop the army, only to have the tanks drive straight at them and over them. “Just ordinary unarmed civilians, they just crushed the bodies,” he says.

Adie reflects that 20 years on the number of people killed remains unknown. There was a series of show trials, while other protestors disappeared, presumed dead. She acknowledges there has been some political reform in the past 20 years but China remains a tightly controlled society, at times a police state.

■ Kate Adie Returns to Tiananmen Square: tomorrow, BBC2, 9pm.