Funerary Rites and the Undercurrents of Authoritarianism

Practically every unit of every trade and profession in Beijing organized street demonstrations to support the students' hunger-strike petition in mid-May 1989. I was marching and shouting slogans along Chang'an Boulevard one day with a group from the Central Ministry of Radio and Television when a number of trucks filled with supporters drove up beside us. Judging from their work clothes they were from a suburban factory. I looked up and was suddenly confronted by two familiar images—the portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai fluttering on two one-meter-square wooden boards. The two faces had been out of circulation for quite some time. My immediate reaction was to avoid looking at them. I wished they would vanish, or that nobody would see them. But the people around me made no comment about the reappearance of Mao and Zhou amid the demonstrators. The truck bearing the portraits rolled slowly down the crowded street

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