In Tiananmen square it was early morning, the sun rising above the marble-sculpted Heroes of the Revolution.
It was eerily silent, students and workers kept back by barricades along the Avenue of Eternal Peace. For once not even bicycle bells could be heard, and the silence transcended all, the hush broken only by the sound of General Cheng’s footsteps as he emerged, as instructed by Freeman, from the Forbidden City, the very monarchist refuge that the Party had always so decried. Passing through the archway across the algae-polluted moat under the shrapnel-slashed portrait of Chairman Mao on Tiananmen Gate, he continued to walk across the vast square, alone, toward Freeman.
In a propaganda stroke worthy of Mao, though he detested the policies of Mao, Freeman had arranged, via the captured all-China TV and radio headquarters, for all of China to see him now: General Douglas Freeman personally raising the flag, not that of the U.N. or the United States but of the goddess of democracy, above Tiananmen.
Tens of millions of Chinese were watching the scene, glued to their TVs, and they understood immediately. To underscore the point, Freeman then did what he would later refer to as a “Doug MacArthur.” When the two men saluted, Cheng bowed, all of it recorded meticulously by international linkup TV with CNN, Cheng presenting his sword to Freeman. Freeman, not using an interpreter, asked simply, if a little awkwardly, in Chinese, ‘Win shi wei renminfuwu ne, huan shi wei gongchandong fuwu?”—Are you willing to serve the people instead of the Communist party?
Cheng was stunned. At this point he had expected to be shot, or at least humiliated. There was a long silence — all over China and the world. “Upon your honor?” Freeman added in Chinese. All over China, chopsticks froze above rice bowls, the tension palpable, as millions awaited Cheng’s answer.
Cheng nodded. “I will serve the people.”
Freeman returned the sword to the general.
The silence was broken then by a sound like soft rain that soon became like that of a rushing train. It was the people, over a million of them, students and workers and children flooding out upon the enormous square, unstoppable in their joy. And those who had waited so long for the goddess of democracy to be resurrected from the flames of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 knew no end to their joy. It was deafeningly noisy, awe-inspiring, and frightening.
Cheng and Freeman ascended the steps in front of the Forbidden City to stand on the podium above Mao’s portrait, and they looked south over the square that was now a seething sea of people. Years before, in those few moments on the night of June 3–4, 1989, when the students and workers thought they had won against the tyranny of the Communist party, when the People’s Liberation Army had become the army of the party instead of of the people, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” had burst forth from the loudspeakers only to be silenced moments later by the machine guns of the Thirty-eighth Army. But now “Ode to Joy” boomed once more, together with the thunderous roaring of the crowd. It was Freeman’s finest hour.
Freeman’s stunningly chivalrous treatment of Cheng made it clear that the United States had no territorial aspiration in China, and this raised America’s prestige enormously overnight. All those Chinese spiritually and financially imprisoned by the stop-again, start-again inflexibility of dogmatic Chinese Communist ideology were swarming to the new leaders of China, who included Admiral Lin Kuang, who had also been surrounded by rapturous crowds on his triumphal march from Xiamen to Hangzhou, where he fulfilled his pledge and burned Mao’s villa to the ground.