A kite being flown in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

“let’s go fly a kite,

up to the highest height”

One of the many wonderful experiences I had in China was causing a bit of a fuss by flying a kite in Tiananmen Square.

As I’ve mentioned before, in 1991 I spent some time working in China, mainly in Shanghai, but did have the odd week working here and there out in the sticks. But my first job in that country was to attend various sales meetings in Beijing as a technical expert.

To be honest with you the meetings weren’t that arduous, in fact it didn’t seem like work at all. A typical day consisted of:

• being picked up from the hotel to get to the offices by about 10am.
• answer various questions until about 12.30pm, when we broke for lunch.
• start again in the afternoon about 2pm.
• back at the hotel by 4pm.

So in the four weeks of meetings we had lots of time to explore Beijing as well as being taken on various day trips by our hosts.

Day trip to Badaling to see the Great Wall.

Day trip to the Forbidden City

The hotel was only about 20 minutes walk from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City (or the Palace Museum as it’s known in China). Because it was so close it became the destination for evening constitutionals. One of the things that struck me about the square, after it’s size, was the amount of families there having picnics. And quite a lot of people were flying the most amazing kites of all sizes and designs. The picture at the head of this post isn’t that great on detail but is of a kite in the design of Confucius.

Anyhow, during one of the many breaks in the meetings I was chatting to one of the translators and just mentioned the kites in passing and said how impressed and amazed I was with them. I didn’t think anything more of it until a couple of days later when, much to my surprise, I was given one as a present. Well that was it, what little we had to do that day was furthest from my mind as all I could think of was to get to Tiananmen Square and try the kite out!

So that evening I skip the evening meal and go straight to the square. With excitement I open the box and start to assemble the kite; the design is of a dragon-fly. Alas, I don’t have a picture of that kite (taking selfies and videos on your phone hadn’t been invented yet!) The kite got lost during the various house moves since then, but I do remember it being it being quite big once assembled maybe about 3ft across and about 4ft in height. Anyway, I get the kite assembled and attach the line and, with a little trepidation, I launch it into the sky to catch the wind and soar above my head. But, much to the amusement of the crowd that had now gathered around me to watch the foreigner try and fly a kite, instead it catches the wind and promptly does a few uncontrolled circles before ‘soaring’ in to the ground.

I gather up the kite and, with a round of applause from the crowd, try again. And get the exact same result. This time a few of the ‘experts’ in the crowd come over and start explaining something to me. I have no idea what they said, as I don’t speak Chinese, but with lots of gesturing, and made-up-on-the-spot sign-language, between us we figure out that I’d attached the line incorrectly and it was causing the kite to pull to one side and circle straight in to the ground.

My memory of the rest of the evening is of a very pleasant time flying kites with the Chinese people. Though we didn’t speak each other’s language we communicated, in a fashion, with more of that made-up-on-the-spot sign-language.

That memory is made all the more poignant for me by the fact that three years earlier people had been occupying the square for several weeks, protesting against their government and wanting more freedom, when that government sent in the military on the night of the 3rd June, and the morning of 4th, and brought the protests to a brutal bloody end. Depending on where you get the information from the estimates of the people killed when the troops opened fire are anywhere between hundreds and thousands, with many more injured.

When I was there I was only vaguely aware of a memory of seeing ‘something on the news’ about ‘something or other’ but didn’t make four from two and two until after I got back to the UK and wanted to know more about China, it’s history, and it’s people. I remember being struck speechless seeing pictures from the ‘June 4th incident’ as the Chinese government refer to it, if they refer to it at all.

I hope that the Chinese government of today is not as cold-blooded as that of the late ’80s; but I suspect not.

I found the above video on YouTube when doing a search for a copy of that picture I could use.