Tiananmen Square Protests 25 years later. I was there.

I was
wrong

J une 4th, 2014

-
Twenty-five years ago on the evening on J une 3, 1989, I was standing in the northeast corner of
Tiananmen Square as Chinese soldiers emerged in large numbers from inside the National
History Museum a short distance away. From loudspeakers came instructions that all those
gathered in the square should leave in an orderly way. The Tiananmen Square Protest, begun
seven weeks earlier, was entering its final and most brutal phase.
It would be another seven hours or so on the morning of J une 4th before the last of the
demonstrators would be led unharmed out of the Square. The violence that night occurred
elsewhere. Chinese troops entering the city by road encountered stiff resistance, particularly to
the west and south of the square. I witnessed some of this at close quarters the mayhem and
loss of life. I was a reporter at the time. I dont reflect often on these events, and this is also the
first time Ive written about what I saw there.
Most of what I and so many others thought was true and inevitable at that time turned out to be
wrong. There was no civil war, no fracturing of the country, no return to Maoism, no retreat into
bitter isolation, no dying of the universal hope here for a better life.
China today is an infinitely better, fairer, richer, more open and freer place than it was in 1989.
This is the reality that too many in the West are unable or unwilling to see. Their views about
China were cast in concrete that awful night in J une 1989. All they often choose to see are ghosts
of repression and despotism.
So what I have learned these twenty-five years? Chinas long history, for all its stunning
achievements and millennia of global weight and prestige, is also etched with pain from war,
famine, civil discord. No single cataclysm could possibly define its destiny or determine the
countrys future. Not Tiananmen. Not the Cultural Revolution. Not the civil war that brought the
Communists to power in 1949. Not the J apanese conquest of the 1930s, nor the Taiping
Rebellion eighty years earlier in which perhaps 30 million Chinese perished.
Amnesia is what some Western commentators and authors now choose to call it. I prefer to
think of it as a deep, practical and praiseworthy resiliency. China is where it is today, at a
moment of prosperity and bright prospects unprecedented in its history, because most, if not all,
of the country of 1.3 billion willed it there. Through toil. Through self-reliance and self-
improvement. Through an unshifting focus on bettering their own lives, and those of their
families. And, also through knowing when and how to bury the past.
Was this made easier because no news about the Tiananmen protests circulates in official media,
and nothing is taught in schools? Quite likely. But, by itself, the impact of this was negligible on
Chinas transformation since 1989. The country is now thirteen times larger, in per capita gdp
terms, than it was then. The improvement in peoples lives goes beyond the scale of numerical
measurement. It is the largest, most complete and most rapid uplift in human history.
Yes, some problems from 1989 still remain. China has polluted air and water, as it did in 1989. It
has corrupt officials. As it did in 1989. Its politics are now and were then opaque and closed in
most parts to public scrutiny. Then, as now, China confounds and sometimes infuriates those
who visit it, study it, admire it, or seek to trade with it.
I left Beijing on J une 15
th
1989, together with my oldest and closest friend, who was expelled as
an Associated Press journalist due to alleged links with student ringleaders. We met as two of
a handful of American students in Nanjing in 1981, when food was still rationed and China was
as poor, per capita, as India and poorer than just about everywhere in Africa.
I stayed away for many years, moving back almost five years ago. That friend is also back now
in China, raising his three children in Beijing. He and I dont see eye to eye on China. Our
interpretations are quite different on what happened in Tiananmen that night, and the impact it
exerts over todays China. We speak about it rarely. Hes writing a history book now on the
many ties that bind the US and China together. He is more fixated on politics, with intrigues and
policy shifts in Beijing. I care little about that, and far more about what happens here financially
and economically.
We both feel grateful to live in China now, and in our own ways, grateful also to hold onto a few
memories of China as it was 33 years ago, and also on that night in 1989. No amnesia. Some late
middle-aged forgetfulness for sure.
China is not at all like the sad place we expected it to become when we left Beijing together in
1989. It is our home. It provides us both with opportunity, friendship, purpose, careers, happiness,
love, occasional frustrations and, when we remember to take note, a sense of astonishment at all
weve witnessed, and how much farther China has come than we ever dared imagine.