“He was on hunger strike twice and force fed,” one source told Reuters, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. It was unclear how long the hunger strike lasted.

“He was not tortured, but fell ill and was taken to a hospital in Beijing for treatment,” the source said, declining to provide details of Bo’s condition and whereabouts which have been kept under wraps since his downfall.

[…] The recent lack of information about the case – Bo has not been seen in public since last March – harms the government’s credibility in the eyes of the people, said Bao Tong, the most senior official jailed over the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

“It’s not normal, too much time has past,” Bao told Reuters, referring to the lack of information from the government about the case.

“This is not good for the party’s image. They have not thought about this clearly. If they are able to properly deal with a big shot like Bo Xilai then they will increase people’s trust in the party,” he added.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Bao Tong, Bo Xilai, hunger strike, justice, rumors, Tiananmen, trials, trust
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NoVforMe: Call for Proof: This is Too Crazy–Pierre Haski, a reporter formerly based in Beijing for the French newspaper Libération, interviewed Mo Yan in 2004. During the interview, Mo Yan said that he is the child of a farmer. During the Great Leap Forward and Great Famine, he ate charcoal to keep from starving. He thanks the military and is still a Communist Party member–even though he’s lost his faith in the Party. When the reporter asked him when he lost his faith, he replied that from that year onward, he only retained his Party membership to avoid bringing on unnecessary trouble.

本人无V： 【求证：这个太猛了】法国解放报前驻京记者哈斯基04年走访了莫言 ，莫言在访谈中表示，他是一个农民的孩子，大跃进、大饥荒曾因饥饿难忍而吞食炭灰。他感谢军队，他依然是党员，尽管对党已经失去信心，记者询问何时失去信 心，莫言回答从那一年开始，他之所以继续保留党员证，是不想增添不必要的麻烦。

So far, the post has been commented on and reposted over 1550 times and remains untouched by both the author and the censors. Some have replied that @NoVforMe, and the public at large, should leave Mo Yan alone, while others redouble the call for verification of the interview. Still others are struck by the novelist’s courage and humanity, working within the Party system but not supporting it blindly. Indeed, many ordinary Chinese join the Party as a prerequisite to job promotion and for other non-political purposes. Party membership often has very little to do with an individual’s beliefs.

Some readers hang on Mo Yan’s mention of “that year,” a likely reference to 1989, the year of the Tiananmen protests. “That year” was blocked from Sina Weibo search results around the anniversary of the military crackdown this summer.

The following comments were selected by the CDT Chinese editors:

ZEDDD: He sure has the courage to speak.

ZEDDD：真敢说。

charlesxue: I want proof.

薛蛮子: 求证实

Hanjianggouxue: I just heard the same on Radio France Internationale.

寒江钓雪0529：刚也在法广上听到了

esrv: Even if this was proven true, what would you do about it?
esrv：就算证实了，你们又能怎样？

MrKeke: Don’t try to bring out all his dirty laundry just because he won a Nobel Prize. Let him be. Let us enjoy his work.

可可先生：得个诺奖，不要什么都掏出来吧。饶了莫言，让我们欣赏他的作品。

FattyCat: Go ahead and demand proof for this. This comes from a Pierre Haski interview. http://t.cn/zllX3De [link to Rue 89 article, in French]

猫大胖子：来，拿去求证吧。这来源于一个Pierre Haski的采访。http://t.cn/zllX3De

xiniuwangyue: Stop trying to take him down. What is there to prove?

夕牛望月V：别再害人家了，证实什么啊

hasange: You want proof for this thing? Isn’t this just someone speaking honestly?

哈三哥：这东西还要证实吗，这不是大实话吗？

chuguofuxing: Any normal person would say and do the same!

楚国复兴：是个正常的人都会这么说，这么做！

OceanBottomFish110: Even if he did say this, you can’t just bring it up to hurt the guy.

海底的鱼110：即使说过，也不能再提起而害人家了

shluyanling: Which year is that year?

鲁燕玲：那一年是指哪一年？

yogen: It’s definitely 1989.
国际游民林丹–致力室内环境净化：肯定是89年了

IndependentScholar2010: That year, the shadow of a “tractor.”
独立学者2010: 那一年，拖拉机的影子。

kingleiou: That year…
大藏布：那一年……

Wuhezizon: I feel the same way. @Dacangbu: That year…
乌合zizon：同感。//@大藏布: 那一年……

LoneWalker: It started from that year. That year was probably the most hopeless year of them all.
孤独漫步人：从那一年开始。那应该是最让人绝望的一年。

Limingqianye: China’s youngest, most courageous generation was trampled under the wheels of authoritarianism–history written in blood.
-黎明前夜：中国最年轻最勇敢的一代人倒在了专制的车轮下，血写的历史。

OldCowNight: With regards to the tragedy of ’89, I believe, anyone with a bit of a conscience would be like this. It’s nothing to boast about. That day, one of my teachers jotted down these four lines. They shake me to my core: “A night of thunderous turmoil. All were singing and dancing their praises. No one will speak of this again. Even the birds on the eaves make no sound.”
老牛之友: 89之难，我相信，任何稍有点良心良知的，均此，不值得夸耀。我一位老师，当日早上就写下四句，这才叫入骨的厉害：一夕雷霆勘动乱，万家歌舞颂英明。从此莫谈天下事，檐前鸦雀亦无声。

FieldHeart: Now I know why they gave him a Nobel Prize…
FieldHeart：终于明白为什么诺贝尔奖给他了。。。

IamWangFeiFeizhuliu: I never thought Old Mo and I would have the same awareness. But my feelings about this are particularly strong this year.
我是王妃非主流：没想到我跟老莫有着同样的觉悟，不过我这想法今年特别强烈

KneelLong: Chinese-style survival philosophy…
跪久了：中国式生存哲学……

baizhenxia: Authoritarian monarchs love smart elites who don’t cause any trouble!
尊严之子：这样聪明的不添麻烦的精英是每一个专制的君主都喜欢的人！

Xishanqingyu: Does this mean he has a conscience, or that he doesn’t have a conscience?
西山晴雨：他这是有良心呢？还是没良心呢？

PoisonTongue: Oh, so he’s talking about “that year”! Haha! That sensitive year!
毒舌列文 ：哦，原来是“那一年”啊，哈哈！敏感词的“那一年”！

FatLittleSoldier2012: Haha! Let’s all work hard to force Nobel Prize winners get out or go in.
胖胖小兵2012：哈哈，大家努力把大陆诺奖得主不是弄出去，就是弄进去

junjunq: That day during the press conference, whether it was intentional or not, Mo Yan conveyed a sense of his dissatisfaction with and disapproval of the Chinese Communist Party.
JunjunQian–大爱清尘：那天的新闻发布会上莫言其实也有意无意表达这个意思，对gcd的执政不满意，不认同

WuShen: No matter if this news is real or not, anyone who lived through that time period would have lost their faith in everything. And that’s for certain.
Wu申：无论真假，谁经历那样的年代，无论对什么都会失去信心，这是肯定的。

Jingxiguqiao: Mo Yan is probably very conflicted inside. To live within the system, he must compromise his writing.
荆溪孤樵：莫言内心应该很矛盾，要在体制内生活写作必须妥协

TianmahangkongV88: How many other Party members raise their right hands as they take the oath and don’t think it counts?
天马行空V88：还有多少高举右手，捏着拳头宣誓不算数的在党内的人？

JiafeimaoBrother: Now this guy is what I call smart!
加肥猫大哥：他才是聪明人~~

OceanStone1981: Mo Yan wins a prize, and now everything is being dug up. Sigh. It’s tough to become famous in China–even dangerous.
海石1981：莫言获个奖，什么都被挖出来了，唉，在中国出名难，出名还危险

DanGirl61: I believe Mo Yan would say something like this. You can feel the weight of the Chinese people by reading his work.
丹娘61：我相信莫言会说这样的话，从他的作品中能读出中国人的沉重..

USAPrincePerv: Telling it like it is…
USA君子好色：实话实说 、、、

InteriorDesigner: Disaster comes from the mouth, Mo Yan!
装饰装修设计师：祸从口出啊，莫言！

Feichi: If it’s true, it would make people really admire him. On the one hand, he has thoughts like these. On the other, he was able to become the vice chairman of the China Writers’ Association.
廢癡：如果是真的，確實很讓人佩服啊，一方面有這樣的想法，一方面還爬到作協副主席的位置。

FeisiLi: Now I understand that Mo Yan is sick at heart. His name is attributed to all kinds of ideologies and philosophies. That has to be overwhelming. Who knows if one day while he’s asleep he’ll get shot. Show a little caring. Give him some love, and stop tormenting him.
菲斯李：我现在理解莫言的忧心忡忡了，各种思想观点都打着他的名号，让他不堪重负，说不定躺着哪天也被中枪了。保留一点爱心，给他一份关爱，别折腾他了。

GCDCoronationDay: Not wanting to create unnecessary trouble–there are many people who think the same way.
GCD登基纪念日：不想增加不必要的麻烦，也是很多人的想法。

TianmaxingkongV88: So the oath he took under the Party flag doesn’t count?
天马行空V88：在党旗下宣誓不算数？

Huajiuduoduo: You have to swear an oath to enter the Party. But if you wish to leave, it’s not that easy. Especially when your children enter school and look for work, you’re finished.
花酒多多V：入档都是需要赌咒发誓的，要是敢退档，可不是株连九族那么简单的事情，最现实的是在子女入学就业等方面有你好果子吃

EyeOfChild: If this is true, he’s nothing but an opportunist!
童眼稚翁：如果这是真的，那么他就是一个投机分子！

NoHKinHeart: I don’t care about this. The important thing is that he won an award.
心中无股HK：这个别太在意。重在的是他获奖了。

minchaow: It’s not everyday that a Chinese person wins a Nobel Prize. Whatever you do, don’t stop him from going to accept it.
天城云扬：咱中国出个诺奖获奖的不容易，千万别让他去领不了奖。

TianjinLiuTong: It makes sense, not wanting to add unnecessary trouble.
天津刘彤：这个说法靠谱，不想增添不必要的麻烦。

an4001_5lb: When will we be able to remove our masks and speak the truth?
an4001_5lb：什么时候可以摘掉面具公开说实话？

Translation by Little Bluegill.

“Netizen Voices” is an original CDT series. If you would like to reuse this content, please follow the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 agreement.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, 1989 protests, gao xingjian, great leap forward, literature, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan, Netizen Voices, Nobel Prize, Tiananmen
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Original text here.

That Year, I was twelve years old and in the fifth grade. The happiest part of my day: I would come home from school, turn on our battered black-and-white TV and listen to my older brother, who was a student at the local teacher’s college, passionately detail the day’s happenings in Beijing. Scenes of waving flags, young faces and screeching ambulances flashed across the screen, brimming with energy and a feeling of meaning and weight.

That Year, the summer was especially hot.

After school, my friends and I walked through the pockmarked roads of our village. We no longer goofed around like before. By that time, a few of us buddies had started to talk about the big affairs of the country. “Let’s write a letter to Zhao Ziyang,” I suggested.  My friends replied, “You write it. Your essays are very well written.” But I had no idea what I should write. I just had this vague notion that we should do something.

My father came home from our county seat. He said that someone had tried to hand him a flyer as he was riding his bike down the street. He didn’t take it. It was not long before he had peddled away.

Father was the principal of the village elementary school. In the past, he had never been admitted to the Party because of his poor family background. He cried loudly about this in the past. He was afraid.

Later, the youthful energy on TV became a bloody scream.

July was torrid. My older brother, who had graduated by then, hadn’t come home.  Father became worried and went to the school to look for him.

As Father stepped off the bus, the head of my brother’s department was there waiting for him. The department head’s first words when they met were, “Your son was sent to be re-educated.”  When he heard this, Father collapsed on the ground, foaming at the mouth.

Holding my father in his arms, the department said over and over, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

When Father came home, he told the family that my brother was a student leader and had taken students to protest in the streets. Five students from his college were sent to be re-educated, and my brother was one of them. He would probably not receive his diploma and wouldn’t get a work assignment.

I had a vague sense of pride for my brother, but the despair in Father’s voice troubled me.

A month later, my brother came home. He wasn’t the cheerful person he once was. Rather, he was silent. Everyday he would wander around the village fields, brooding with a furrowed brow. No one knew what he was thinking about.

Father forced my brother to go to the County Board of Education every day to inquire about work assignments. My brother was the first person from our village to attend college, and Father had endured many hardships. Father wanted my brother to leave the village and get a job.

My brother often quarreled with Father. Later on, my brother was finally assigned a job and went to town to be a middle school teacher. Eventually he tested into graduate school, got his doctorate and became an assistant professor at a prestigious university.

Some time later, as my brother and I were reminiscing about the past, he told me that during the protests, they were passing a military district. Many of the students wanted to rush in, but as student leader my brother did everything in his power to stop them.

Perhaps it is because of this that he was eventually assigned a job.

By chance, I once ran into the head of my brother’s department. He told me, “Your father is a good person. Your brother and the others are hot-blooded youth.”

That summer, something took root in the heart of a twelve-year-old boy.

The memories of that year influenced the rest of my life.

One day in 1995 when I was at university, I ran into an old classmate and started talking about Tiananmen. He mentioned he had a whole batch of photos from that time, all taken by his brother. I was excited and asked him to bring them for me to see. I saw the Goddess of Democracy standing gloriously aloft the square, and a sea of people wearing white bandanas. “These pictures are treasures. You must take good care of them,” I implored my classmate. He didn’t seem to feel the same way. “If you like them, take them.” I hurriedly stored them away, as if I had discovered rare jewels.

After graduation, I was assigned to be an elementary school teacher back home. Once, as my colleagues and I were chatting about the events of That Year, a female colleague noticed how impassioned I was on the subject. She snorted, “You’re so excited. You know, in ’89 I was a senior in high school. None of us could take the college entrance exams because of the student protests. I went back home to work on the farm. Now I’m just a private tutor.”

I was speechless. It was only then I realized the events of that year had altered her entire life.

It was also at that time I began spending entire nights listening to the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. I heard many more Tiananmen stories. I also began reading books like He Qinglian’s The Trap of Modernization and the Liu Junning’s edited volume Public Forum. I became a liberal.

In 1998 my younger brother opened a bookstore. He sold pirated books from Hong Kong and Taiwan that he bought at a market in Wuhan, including titles like The Real June Fourth, Tiananmen and the memoirs of people like Wang Dan and Feng Congde. Those books sold like crazy. Most of the people buying them were retired workers from state-owned enterprises. They never haggled. My younger brother was quite brazen about it too, strutting about as he put those books on the shelves. Eventually, a teacher reported our store in a letter to the Hubei Daily, saying we were selling vast numbers of reactionary books.

People from the cultural center stormed in holding copies of the Hubei Daily and confiscated all of these books.

Since we couldn’t sell them in the open, we started selling them discreetly. In the winter, my younger brother and I hid copies of the illegal books in our thick cotton coats. Whenever an old worker would come asking about them, we would slide the books out of our coats make a sales pitch. We sold many books this way, and my younger brother was very pleased with the money he was earning.

It wasn’t long before my brother came back from a trip to Wuhan looking very dejected. The book market had been shut down for selling pornography. We had no way to bring in new copies.

Our store never sold those books again.

Around the dinner table one day, we were discussing June Fourth when my brother-in-law, who worked as a local government official, said, “You read those reactionary books every day, crying out for justice, but do you ever think about what it would be like if the crackdown never happened? What about this decade of economic growth and the life our family enjoys today? Stability trumps all!”

I left the table, furious.

On June 4, 1999, I fasted and wrote an essay titled “Thoughts on the Tenth Anniversary of June Fourth.” This marked my passage into spiritual maturity.

In 2000 I moved to Hangzhou. Living in a dormitory at Zhejiang University, I took the graduate school exams. On the school web forum, students were downloading a documentary titled Tiananmen, which had gone viral.

In Hangzhou I met Fu Guoyong. In his simple apartment, I listened to him recall his story. That Year, he joined the student movement. He gave a public speech on Tiananmen Square. He met his wife. Then he was arrested, put on a train, shackled from hand to foot, thrown in jail. His mother went gray overnight. His wife, who was a top student at Beijing Normal University, never gained recognition at school because of her anti-revolutionary family. He showed me pictures of his wife and child visiting him in jail, the three of them with pure, resplendent smiles on their faces.

It was the most beautiful photo I had ever seen.

One day in 2002, a friend arranged for me to visit the student leader Wang Youcai. Wang was sent to jail for organizing the Democratic Party of China. His wife, Hu Jiangxia, was at home. Making wide detours to avoid being followed, my friend and I wound our way to Wang Youcai’s house in Hangzhou’s Emerald Garden neighborhood. At last we met Hu Jiangxia and had a  lively conversation. Not long afterwards, I heard Wang and Hu filed for divorce. Some time after that, Wang was sent to the United States through negotiations between the Chinese and American governments. Eventually, Hu Jiangxia also made her way to the U.S.. I heard that they remarried.

In Hangzhou, there was a boss of a large company who asked to borrow my copy of Wang Dan’s prison memoirs. He kept it for a long time. Only later did I realize that in That Year he had been the chairmen of Zhejiang University’s autonomous student council. The summer of That Year, one of his toes was broken off. He changed course and went on to become a successful businessman.

In 2003 my friend and I began hosting an academic salon at Sanlian Bookstore in Hangzhou. According to Fu Guoyong, this was the first time since the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement that an open, grassroots activity was publically hosted in Hangzhou. We invited Fu Guoyong to give a lecture. That was the first time he spoke at a public gathering since leaving prison.

In 2005, I started graduate school in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. During class one day, the teacher suddenly began speaking to us dozen or so students about June Fourth. He said some of the events of That Year were perfectly pure, others extremely foul. Our teacher was a graduate student in Beijing at the time of the crackdown. He personally experienced all that happened that summer. I was shocked to hear this. He wasn’t merely a professor. He was the principal of the school—a bona fide official. This was the first time I heard someone from inside the system speak openly about June Fourth in a classroom.

After class, I excitedly shared my own June Fourth story with several classmates. A few female students born in the 80s listened to me wide-eyed, as if they were listening to fantastical stories from some strange, far-off land. “Is it true, what he’s saying?” they asked the class monitor, who had been standing nearby listening. He nodded his head. “It’s true. It’s all true. I was there at Tiananmen at the time. I even slept there a few nights.” Our class monitor was born in 1968. He had taken part in June Fourth.

Still, those young classmates couldn’t believe it. “How come we never knew anything about this before?” they asked with a sigh.

My roommate Old Yang was a graduate student in the Fine Arts Department. He was born in the 70s, a party member and a university lecturer. One night, as we lay awake talking, he told me about a student from his village who went to Tsinghua University. During June Fourth he disappeared. Twenty years had passed, and no one knew anything about what had happened to him. If he was alive, no one had seen his face; if he was dead, no one had viewed the body. He was the only student from that village to ever attend a prestigious university. “I hate the Communist Party,” Old Yang spat.

That Year, a professor from my department supported the student protesters in Yunnan. He shared with me what happened when he lead the students. They scaled the university walls and took to the streets, shouting protest slogans. After the June Fourth Massacre, the professor organized Yunnan Province’s first protest march. As autumn came, his actions caught up with him. He was suspended from teaching and put under investigation. With documents piled before him, his investigators demanded he admit his crimes. His students protected him, saying they marched of their own volition, without any encouragement from their teacher. He kept his job, but he began to fall in love with one female student after another. He divorced several times, becoming dissolute. Although he should have been made department head long ago, he was never promoted. Once, at a banquet, he berated the Party in front of all the university leaders. “The Chinese Communist Party should have collapsed back in 1989! They should have died out a long time ago, damn it!”

The room fell silent.

The other professors say he turned into a different person after June Fourth, cursing the Communist Party and womanizing his students.

My graduate adviser was an old professor and a member of the Democratic Party. After June Fourth, the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee organized a forum with democracy advocates. “I’ve never understood how June Fourth was handled,” he said in a speech there. “Why did the government have to do what it did?” Twenty years on, he still couldn’t make sense of it.

In 2009, I graduated and stuck around campus to take the university’s employment test. I received the top score. The Yunnan Security Agency opened a political investigation on me because I had previously published a few articles on foreign websites. That was the first time I ever dealt with security officials, and it filled me with dread.

A deputy director from the security agency asked me, “What are your thoughts on June Fourth?” I paused, then said, “June Fourth doesn’t concern my generation. It’s very complicated.” He stared at me for a long time, then retorted, “You mean you don’t think the decisive action taken by the Party in that year was the reason for our prosperity and success today?”

I remembered the argument with my brother-in-law. They had the same logic—the same inhumane logic. I stayed silent. I didn’t dare refute him, afraid of losing my chance at a teaching position.

Regardless, I failed to pass my political investigation. The university Party committee rejected my application on the grounds that I “did not fervently love my country and socialism.”

To this day, I still feel guilty for the cowardice I showed when confronted by the stability maintenance system. June Fourth is not just a matter for the generation that came to age in 1989. It’s a matter that relates to every person on Chinese soil. It is blood spilled by tyranny. It is an open wound on the body of this nation that will never close. Whatever you think of June Fourth, you cannot have a muddled opinion on it, you cannot make haphazard excuses for it. You must say no to atrocity, you must say no to the truth written in blood and the lies written in ink. One’s opinion of June Fourth is the most basic measure of the morality of every Chinese person, the touchstone that torments every Chinese person’s conscience and humanity. Any action or expression that crosses that bottom line is an injustice that violates one’s very conscience.

After my expulsion from the university in 2009, I made my way to Beijing. Since then, I have met many teachers and friends, and I heard even more stories of Tiananmen.

When I first arrived in Beijing, I became a reporter for a Party-affiliated magazine. One day, an older female colleague recounted a story from her university years. It was the early 90s and a soldier had an eye for her, was courting her, but she had no feelings for him. One day, as they were walking together, the soldier asked her, “Do you college students still hate us soldiers?” She didn’t respond. The soldier continued, “I didn’t fire my gun.”

Another female colleague of mine, born in the 80s, held an advanced degree from Wuhan University. Her boyfriend was an army officer. One day she heard some of us chatting about June Fourth and was shocked. When she got home that night she asked her boyfriend about it. He told her that the guns were not loaded that day. She called me late that night and yelled, “Did people really die or not? Who should I believe?” I answered her question with a question of my own. “If there were no bullets in their guns, how did all those students and ordinary citizens die?” After arguing for half an hour she still didn’t know if she should trust her boyfriend or me.

She broke up with her boyfriend. I don’t know the reason why.

In a restaurant in Beijing’s Haidian District, professor Yu Shuo, who had arrived in Beijing from Hong Kong, shared with me her own June Fourth story. At that time she was a young lecturer in Renmin University’s sociology department. She and Liu Xiaobo came from the same hometown and were friends. That whole summer, she carried a camera and tape recorder around Tiananmen Square, interviewing students, intellectuals and city residents. She wanted a record of everything. On the night of June 3, she was preparing to evacuate the square with the last wave of students. Liu Xiaobo had told her his bag was left at a corner of the Monument to the People’s Heros, with his money and his passport that he would need to travel to the U.S. still inside. While the students were retreating, Yu Shuo ran over to the monument to retrieve the bag, but a student patrol grabbed her and threw her to the ground, yelling, “Do you want to die?” After she returned back to campus, she showed her photos to a leader from her department. One of the photos showed the body of a student who had been beaten to death near the gate of China University of Political Science, his brains spilling onto the ground. The department leader began to wail. He grabbed a pile of blank letterhead and stamped them all with his official seal. He gave them to Yu Shuo, saying, “Child, run away, quickly. This is all I can do to help you.” Yu told me she’d always remember that department leader, who risked a great deal to help her. It’s ordinary people like him whose souls shine.

With these letters in hand, she scrambled her way to Guangdong and then Shekou, preparing to look for Yuan Geng. She hid on and island for half a month, then went to Hong Kong as the first person rescued through Operation Yellowbird. She later moved to France, where she married a French citizen. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and became a professor. Today, she works to facilitate academic exchange between China and Europe.

While visiting his home in the Beijing suburb of Songzhuang, Yu Jianrong shared his own story with me. During June Fourth, Yu was in his hometown of Hengyang in Hunan Province, where he worked as a secretary for the municipal government. Yu had a classmate, the child of high-ranking cadres, who was a flag bearer on Tiananmen Square. After June Fourth his classmate fled home and Yu found him a place to stay. Finally, security officials found Yu. His classmate was left unscathed, but they investigated Yu. The investigation scared Yu enough for him to quit his job and become a businessman. He went on to earn over two million yuan, after which he moved to Taiwan and became an academic, earning his doctorate. He eventually became a well-known scholar. June Fourth changed his entire life.

Late one night in a Beijing bar, the artist Gao Huijun shared his June Fourth story with me. He was a college student at the time. On the night of June 3, Gao and his classmates were on Changan Avenue, bullets screeching past their ears. Suddenly, a stray bullet bounced off the ground and struck one of his classmates in the chest. He died at the scene. He collapsed to the ground, then crawled for a few hundred meters before falling still. Old Gao spoke breathlessly, as if it were transpiring before him. A crystal teardrop flickered from behind his thick eyeglasses.

Once during a banquet at a restaurant near West Fourth Ring Road in Beijing, my good friend Wen Kejian introduced me to a middle-aged man sitting at the table. “That’s Ma Shaofang,” Wen said. Stunned, I asked, “You’re Ma Shaofang from the June Fourth wanted list?” Ma, nodding his head, replied, “I never thought, after twenty years, there would still be young people like you who remember me.” I immediately took up my glass and toasted him, saying, “There are certain people and certain things that are unforgettable.”

Ma Shaofang was the first student leader I had ever met. After his release from prison, Ma became a businessman. He is staunchly determined never to leave China.

In Tianjin’s TEDA Arts Center, I once conversed with the renowned collector Ma Huidong over drinks. As the wine warmed us up, Mr. Ma told me that after he graduated from China University of Political Science in the late 80s, he entered a re-education center. After he’d been washed clean, he escaped from the center and began doing business. Twenty years after June Fourth, he’s still never been back to Tiananmen Square. Whenever he’s about to pass it in his car, he takes a detour. “After the gunfire of June Fourth, reform died,” Mr. Ma said.

The famous philosopher Li Ming is my good friend, despite our age difference. In the 80s, before his hair had turned gray, he was already known for his work on the editorial board of the Walking Towards the Future series. He told me he was the research director of Youth Political College during June Fourth. After the crackdown, he was fired from his job, then arrested. In all these years, he never received a single penny from the Communist Party. His pay suspended, Li Ming scraped by with translation and writing.

At the artists village in Songzhuang, I once shared drinks and conversation with the renowned poet Mang Ke. He told me how he returned to Beijing from abroad in early 1989 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Today magazine. Along with Bei Dao and others like him, he added his name to an open letter calling for the release of Wei Jingsheng. After June Fourth, Mang Ke was detained at his home. A black bag was placed over his head and he was taken to a place he didn’t know. After two days, he was released. The people who took him said he was detained for his own safety. Afterwards, Mang Ke relied on painting to make a living.

Once at a teahouse, I spoke with a middle-aged businessman who had served twenty years in the army. When the topic of June Fourth came up, he couldn’t stop talking. At that time, he worked in the basement of the Tiananmen Square command center. He was in charge of intelligence collection. Hundreds of informants were sent out from the center every day. Every avenue and alley of Beijing was closely monitored. He said during that time, Mayor Chen Xitong would visit the command center almost daily.

Mr. Yu, a publisher in Beijing, is a friend from my hometown. He also told his June Fourth story to me.  That Year, he was teaching middle school in a remote village in Hubei Province. He was extremely depressed. During his time there, he wrote an essay titled “Where China Is Going?” He made ten mimeographed copies and gave them to his classmates and friends. As a result, he was reported to the authorities and arrested. He spent a year in a detention center before being released without ever having stood trial. “China’s detention centers are the cruelest places on earth,” he told me. “I crawled out of there.” After he left, he learned his grandmother, whom he loved dearly, passed away the very day he was detained. Some time later, his wife divorced him. He began to wander aimlessly.

The author Li Jianmang lives in Europe. I once met him during one of his trips back to Beijing. During June Fourth, a classmate of his, He Zhijing, who also happened to be the cousin of Beijing Film Academy professor He Jian, went missing. Later at the hospital, Li was saw He Zhijing’s body. He had been beaten to death. Li Jianmang said before all this his father wrote him a letter. “Don’t be a hero. When you hear the guns, hit the ground,” his father wrote. “My son, you do not know their ruthlessness.”

After the advent of Weibo I made many new friends online, some famous and some not. One of them is a Beijing girl named Keke who maintains a government website. She told me that during June Fourth she was in second grade. Keke’s birthday happens to fall on June 3. That Year on June 3, her family celebrated her birthday at her grandmother’s house. Afterward she walked from Hujialou to Gongzhufen. On the road, she saw buses on fire, roadblocks, twisted bicycle frames and pedestrians navigating their way through the carnage. It was a terrifying, unforgettable scene. Memories of June Fourth have lingered in her mind ever since. After getting on Weibo, she frequently posted images and documents from June Fourth. Her account was quickly shut down. She is reincarnated all the time.

My friend Hai Tao is a writer from the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou. He recalled to me that after June Fourth, the older men and women of town were sent to downtown Beijing everyday to dance and sing patriotic songs. When they became tired they wanted to buy popsicles, but the streets peddlers wouldn’t let them buy any. “You have no conscience,” the peddlers would say.

*                    *                    *

There are still many stories of Tiananmen to tell.

That year, the author Ye Fu worked as a police officer in Hainan. Facing the massacre, he cast away his uniform, submitted his resignation letter and bid farewell to the system forever. Then he was reported to the authorities in Wuhan and imprisoned. Then his mother drowned herself in the Yangtze River. Then he wrote his famous work, My Mother on the Yangtze…

That year, my friend Du Daobin left his hometown for the provincial capital of Wuhan to participate in the protests. Then he published some critical political commentary online. Then he was arrested. Then he became a famous dissident…

That year, many parents couldn’t find their children, many families lost their loved ones. That year, many talented people left the country, many people died away from home, never to return. That year, China became a broken world, a world of life and death, a watershed. That year, China’s twentieth century came to an end.

One afternoon in Spring 2010, I passed through the heart of Beijing on the subway, traveling from the eastern suburbs to the western neighborhood of Muxidi. Sitting on the side of the road in Muxidi, I thought about all the blood and tears shed some twenty years ago right there. I thought about the Tiananmen Mothers. I thought about the countrymen we lost forever. For a very, very long time, with a heavy heart, choking back tears, silently, I sat there until dusk. That afternoon, I quietly wrote this poem:

 

At Muxidi, Thinking of Someone
—for the Mother Ding Zilin

Today, I am at Muxidi
Thinking of someone
I don’t know him
But I will remember him forever
At this moment, I miss him
Like I would miss a long lost brother
That was twenty-one years ago
Right here, at Muxidi
An unforgettable place

That merciless summer
A single bullet
Passed through his body
His sixteen-year-old body
He let out his final scream
And then bid farewell to this world
This evil, gory and lie-filled world

He left
This sixteen-year-old youth
This eternal youth
He’ll never grow up
But we, in this world without him
Grow older by the day
Until the present

All these years
Seem like a century
No, many centuries
We watch ourselves grow old
But are powerless
We tell ourselves, we are alive
We need to live
And we tell ourselves we need to make peace with this world
But we know
We are not fated to make peace with this world

For no other reason
Only because of this young man
He will never grow up
So we must grow old
To grow old, is really to die

Today, at Muxidi
I am thinking of someone

I miss him
Like I would miss a long lost brother
A brother lost twenty-one years ago
I miss him
This eternal youth
I want to cry, but I cannot
I know we have no more tears

Even worse than having no tears
We don’t even have any blood
Our souls were hollowed long ago
In the gunfire, among the bullets
In twisted, hidden history
All we can still do
Is come here

Thinking of this youth
Like missing a long lost brother
A brother lost for 21 years
He never left
But we’ll never have him back

 

Time is like a murderer. Twenty-three years have flashed by. Countless countrymen have forgotten, countless others have remembered. I am from the post-June Fourth generation. On this twenty-third anniversary, I earnestly write this record, like putting my heart on an altar of blood. I do this for nothing more than the justice we are yet to receive. I believe blood was not spilt in vain. Judgment will surely come.

June 4, 2012, on the banks of the Xiang River, Hunan

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, 1989 protests, Bei Dao, Chen Xitong, Ding Zilin, Feng Congde, fu guoyong, June 4th, Li Ming, Liu Xiaobo, Ma Huidong, Operation Yellowbird, re-education through labor, Renmin University, stability maintenance, student protests, Tiananmen, Tsinghua University, wang dan, wang youcai, Wei Jingsheng, weibo, Yu Jianrong, Zhao Ziyang
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On June 3, 1989, Deng, chair of the Military Commission of the Communist Party of China, ordered tanks from Chinese field armies into Beijing to suppress students who were demonstrating peacefully at Tiananmen Square. On the night of June 5, Raymond Burghardt, political counselor in the US embassy in Beijing, came to the hotel where my wife, Li Shuxian, and I were temporarily staying and invited us to “take refuge” in the embassy as “guests of President Bush.” He said we could stay as long as we needed. The matter soon became a point of contention in US–China relations.

About five months later, on November 9, Deng received, as he described him, his “old friend” Henry Kissinger and brought up “the Fang Lizhi case.” Deng told Kissinger that he was prepared to release the Fang family, expelling them from China “if the American side required Fang to write a confession.” Kissinger replied that if Fang were later to say that the American government had forced him to confess, things would be worse than if he had not confessed.

The American ambassador, James Lilley, relayed the gist of this Deng–Kissinger exchange to Li Shuxian and me, inside the embassy. Lilley, referring to the confession as “one of” Deng’s conditions, made it clear that he was only transmitting the message, not asking for a confession. We were “the guests of Bush”; what kind of host asks a guest to confess? I felt a bit sorry for the ambassador, who clearly was caught in a dilemma: he could not ask for a confession, and could not meet Deng’s condition, either. I told him to relax—Deng’s condition would not be all that hard to satisfy. I knew things about Chinese Communist “confession culture” that Lilley and Kissinger probably did not understand.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, dissidents, Fang Lizhi, Henry Kissinger
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Power Politics, Institutions and Historical Tragedy
Reading Li Peng’s Tiananmen Diary

By Wu Guoguang

Li Peng’s Psychology

Li Peng’s diary presents us with two important questions:
1- What were the factors that brought Li Peng so quickly to his position towards the student demonstrations?
2 – When and how did Premier Li Peng’s approach win out over the approach of General Secretary Zhao Ziyang to become the officially adopted approach of the government?

What Li Peng has written in this diary reveals his tendency to view social political situations in a pre-determined way and to act as though he were in a constant state of combat.

For the last half of the 20th century, the government used a battle mentality and military terms in its approach to criticism or expressions of dissatisfaction with the government. Critics were enemies, and as enemies were to be attacked. If criticism moved beyond words into action, for example by taking the form of a public protest or petition, it was viewed as a “combat charge” {April 18}

This diary reveals that, to Li Peng, even dialogue with the students was a form of struggle. { April 28} Students shouting slogans like “Support the Communist Party” were considered “incendiary ” {April 27} Along with this combat mentality towards public demands, Li Peng has also revealed that he was constantly on the alert for enemy activity in his political life. In his diary, he describes visiting Hu Yaobang’s family to express his condolences. {April 18th} When Hu’s widow Li Zhao expressed a wish to allow a public viewing of her husband’s remains, Li Peng immediately saw this opening an opportunity for “bad people” and thus found Li Zhao’s wishes incomprehensible, and herself suspicious.
When Zhao Ziyang went to North Korea as planned, Li saw it as Zhao dumping the mess on him and immediately suspected ulterior motives.
(...)
Read the rest of Wu Guoguang (吴国光): Power Politics, Institutions and Historical Tragedy: Reading Li Peng’s Tiananmen Diary (1,733 words)

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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Deng Xiaoping, June 4th, Li Peng
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/wu-guoguang-%e5%90%b4%e5%9b%bd%e5%85%89-power-politics-institutions-and-historical-tragedy-reading-li-pengs-tiananmen-diary/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/exclusive-publication-of-china-crackdown-memoirs-halted/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/exclusive-publication-of-china-crackdown-memoirs-halted/#comments Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:57:45 +0000 Sophie Beach http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=79518 Read more]]> From Reuters:

About 20,000 Chinese-language copies of “The Tiananmen Diary of Li Peng” had initially been scheduled to go on sale in Hong Kong on June 22, but Bao Pu, of New Century Press, stopped the presses on Friday because he did not have copyright ownership.

Reuters obtained an advance copy of the memoirs in which Li reveals that China’s revered reformist leader, Deng Xiaoping, said the government had to “spill some blood” to quell the June 4, 1989, protests.

A source with ties to the leadership in Beijing who requested anonymity said Li had never consented to Bao publishing his memoirs, written in 2004 but suppressed by current Chinese leaders who seek to erase from public memory images of troops and tanks crushing the student-led movement.

“Relevant institutions provided information related to copyright (ownership) before publication. According to Hong Kong copyright laws, we have no choice but to scrap our original publication plans,” Bao told Reuters by telephone from the former British colony on Saturday.

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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, copyright, June 4th, Li Peng
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/exclusive-publication-of-china-crackdown-memoirs-halted/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/04/behind-the-great-firewall-2/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/04/behind-the-great-firewall-2/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 04:19:26 +0000 Sophie Beach http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=56924 Read more]]> For U.C. Berkeley’s California Magazine, Andrew Moss writes about his visit to Beijing during the 20th anniversary of the 1989 student movement, how those events are perceived today in China, and information control by the Chinese government:

Today, television and the print media are controlled and “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” “June 4,” and “Chinese democracy movement” are all censored terms on the Chinese Internet. The government has shut down many local websites. “We have designated June 3 to June 6 as the national server maintenance days,” it piously explains, “This move is widely supported by the public.” Meanwhile, foreign sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr have been blocked. Public discussion of what happened in 1989 is off limits, pushed behind the Great Firewall.

For a Westerner studying Mandarin at language school, the tight governmental control is a weird experience. And can it work in a country with 300 million Internet users? Three Beijing experts offered some surprising opinions.

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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Great Firewall, Internet control, June 4th, Liu Xiaobiao
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/04/behind-the-great-firewall-2/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/illness-of-neutrality/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/illness-of-neutrality/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:04:07 +0000 Xiao Qiang http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=52209 Read more]]> The following post has been repeatedly deleted and reposted on various online forums, including the student social networking site Renren. The author is using deliberately vague and metaphorical language to express an opinion apparently about June 4th and the documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace by Carma Hinton. Despite the fact that university online forums are among the most heavily-censored, the repeated reposting of this comment shows that some students are still actively finding ways to discuss political topics. Translated by CDT:

Illness of Neutrality

In the past, an incident occurred. It was too sensitive to allow people to talk about it.

An American, who grew up in China, falls ill of neutralism. She thought: I should make a film about it. So she directed a film. She believes Duan Qirui* is wrong, yet Liu Hezhen** may not be good. All in all, she should stay neutral. People in Mainland China manage to download the film despite all difficulties. So they watched it. Duan Qirui was very evil, and so was Liu Hezhen.

He thinks, since the film was made by an American, it must be in favor of Liu Hezhen, so I should stay neutral between the film and Duan Qirui.

Therefore he’s more in favor of Duan Qirui, and often blames Liu Hezhen for inciting the students.

Some smart guy read his blog, thinking, he has watched the film made by an American, then he’s certainly in favor of Liu Hezhen. No. I should stay neutral between him and Duan Qirui. He even suspects that Liu Hezhen conspired.

Afterward many smart people learned about this sensitive incident. The version they all agree upon is: kind-hearted Duan Qirui was deceived by Liu Hezhen, and Liu Hezhen ended up being killed, going out for wool and coming home shorn.

However, people in Hong Kong don’t think so.

So people throughout China deride those in Hong Kong as idiots.

* Duan Qirui was a warlord and the Premier of China under the Nationalists in the 1920s. On March 18, 1926, Duan dispatched troops against student protesters, killing 47. This incident is known as the March 18 massacre.

** Liu Hezhen was one of the students killed in the March 18 massacre, and the subject of an essay by Lu Xun.

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© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, carma hinton, gate of heavenly peace, history, June 4th, renren, students
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/illness-of-neutrality/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/u-s-ambassador-to-china-served-during-crackdown-at-tiananmen-square/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/u-s-ambassador-to-china-served-during-crackdown-at-tiananmen-square/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:30:15 +0000 Sophie Beach http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=47420 Read more]]> In the Washington Post, John Pomfret writes an obituary for James Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China:

James R. Lilley, 81, a longtime CIA operative in Asia who served as ambassador to China during the Tiananmen Square crackdown and was regarded as one of the most pragmatic voices on the modern Sino-American relationship, died Nov. 12 at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He had complications related to prostate cancer.

Mr. Lilley, born in China, the son of an oilman and a schoolteacher, had a storied career as an intelligence officer in Asia. Gruff with a no-nonsense manner and a keen eye for detail that peppered his reports from the field, Mr. Lilley was singular in the fractious world of China-watching in that he was respected by both Communist China and Taiwan and across the political spectrum at home. Alone among U.S. officials, Mr. Lilley served as a U.S. ambassador to China and as the top American representative to Taiwan.

“Because he was raised in China, Jim Lilley had the ability to view China as an ordinary country with no romanticism about his views,” said J. Stapleton Roy, who succeeded him as ambassador to China in 1991. “On the one hand, he could be very critical of China. On the other hand, he could weigh in when you weren’t expecting it with a defense of our relationship with China.”

For more on Lilley’s life, see a blog post by Atlantic’s James Fallows.

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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, diplomacy, James Lilley, U.S. relations
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/u-s-ambassador-to-china-served-during-crackdown-at-tiananmen-square/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/jeffrey-wasserstrom-the-german-wall-that-fell-and-the-chinese-regime-that-didnt/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/jeffrey-wasserstrom-the-german-wall-that-fell-and-the-chinese-regime-that-didnt/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:23:41 +0000 Sophie Beach http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=47165 Read more]]> For the Huffington Post, Jeffrey Wasserstrom reviews David Shambaugh’s China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation in light of commemorations of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

Written by a high-profile political scientist and published in hard cover in 2008 and then in a paperback edition this year, Shambaugh’s book is a very fitting one to turn to just now, as the media is filled with retrospective looks at the last days of the Berlin Wall. Why? Because the destruction of that great Cold War symbol, more than any of the other wondrous events of 1989, inspired the erroneous belief that the days of all Communist Party regimes were about to end (they live on not just in China but also Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea). And because Shambaugh provides one of the best accounts yet of the post-1989 reinvention of the Chinese Communist Party that has kept China a Leninist country during what many assumed would be a post-Leninist era — not just for Europe, but for the world. He sheds important light, in other words, on why, when speaking of China, we need to think not of a Leninist Extinction but rather a Leninist Mutation.

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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Berlin Wall, political reform
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/11/jeffrey-wasserstrom-the-german-wall-that-fell-and-the-chinese-regime-that-didnt/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/08/diane-wei-liang-a-life-in-china/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/08/diane-wei-liang-a-life-in-china/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:23:32 +0000 Sophie Beach http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=44029 Read more]]> The World has posted a lengthy interview with Diane Wei Liang, author of Lake with No Name: A True Story of Love and Conflict in Modern China. Listen to it here:

Diane Wei Liang has lived a life framed by events in China’s recent history. She was born in 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution.
And as a student at Beijing University, she took part in the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. She’s written a memoir about her experiences. It’s called “Lake with No Name: A true story of Love and Conflict in Modern China,” and it’s just come out in paperback. Anchor Katy Clark heard from Liang that the suffering of her parents’ generation in the Cultural Revolution had a powerful effect on her generation.

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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, authors, Cultural Revolution, literature, memoirs
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/08/diane-wei-liang-a-life-in-china/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/jiang-wenran-tiananmen-20-years-later-the-withering-of-ideologies/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/jiang-wenran-tiananmen-20-years-later-the-withering-of-ideologies/#comments Sun, 07 Jun 2009 08:11:18 +0000 Xiao Qiang http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=40255 Read more]]> Wenran Jiang is associate professor of political science and Mactaggart Research Chair of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, Canada. From thestar.com:

Many young people who participated in the student demonstrations now live affluent middle-class lives, with their own apartments, cars and other modern gadgets, enjoying China’s new urban prosperity.

They look back at 1989 with mixed feelings of nostalgia and realism. “It was an exciting moment in Chinese history, and my heart is always with those students,” a friend told me recently in Beijing, “but I won’t go to Tiananmen now if the same thing happens again, and I won’t donate money and time as I did last time.”

“Why?” I pressed further.

“Well, I have benefited a lot from the reforms since then, and there is so much to lose if there are dramatic changes.”

Indeed, the Chinese government has made providing economic benefits to most citizens its top priority for the past two decades. As Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who ordered the bloody crackdown, put it: “Economic development is the core.”

This doctrine is based on three pragmatic calculations.

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© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, 1989 20 years, Deng Xiaoping
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]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/jiang-wenran-tiananmen-20-years-later-the-withering-of-ideologies/feed/ 1 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/andrew-roche-a-night-with-chinas-secret-police-in-1989/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/andrew-roche-a-night-with-chinas-secret-police-in-1989/#comments Sun, 31 May 2009 06:25:27 +0000 Xiao Qiang http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=39764 Read more]]> From the Reuters:

“When men speak of the future, the gods laugh,” runs an old Chinese proverb.

In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China’s policy of “reform and opening” seemed to many to be in peril. Conventional wisdom was that it and much of the communist world were retreating into isolation, threatening a new Cold War.

But within months the Berlin Wall fell, and soon the Soviet Union evaporated. And China changed at the speed of light.

A country where phones were rare 20 years ago now has more internet users than any other. City skylines have morphed from grim barracks into glittering skyscrapers and a still officially Marxist society has become one of the most unequal on earth.

After 1989 China produced perhaps the biggest economic boom in history, until it could even lend America enough cash to ruin itself. In June 1989, all that would have seemed mad fantasy.

Then, the pundits had misunderstood what was happening. The democracy or human rights demanded by the 1989 student rebels were out of the question, but economic reform would forge ahead.

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© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, 1989 20 years, secret police
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