Backbeat in China

A hundred days ago Wu'er Kaixi was a fugitive.... Yesterday, before an audience of 800 Americans and Chinese at Brandeis University, he showed what brought a 21-year-old Beijing Normal School student to the head of an earth-shaking movement.
      He sang a song about a wolf.
And he told people who had listened to two days of often-ponderous analysis of the student movement that Chinese rock music composers Qin Qi of Taiwan and Cui Jian of mainland China were more important to the students than the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi...
      The auditorium buzzed with the gasps and whispers of delighted students and their bewildered elders.
            (Boston Globe, September 18, 1989)

John Sebastian's famous lyric about the impossibility of "trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll" notwithstanding, it was a special moment indeed when Wu'er Kaixi--the flamboyant Tiananmen student leader--attempted to do just that. I know. I was one of the strangers who heard him sing Qin Qi's "Wolf From the North" and explain what its celebration of individualism meant to his generation. The students agreed with senior dissidents that institutions must change, he said, but what they yearned for most was to live in a freer society. (The anniversary of the Beijing massacre recently passed, on June 4.)

When I witnessed Wu'er's performance, even though I was no longer a student and even though I had misgivings about any single activist claiming to speak for the Tiananmen generation, I was definitely in the "delighted" camp. One reason was that I was in Shanghai in 1986 when demonstrations occurred that helped lay the groundwork for those of 1989. I was struck then by the Western media's tendency to overstate the dissident Fang Lizhi's impact. Students found his speeches inspiring, but other things also triggered protests: complaints about compulsory calisthenics, for example, and a scuffle at--of all things--a Jan and Dean concert.

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