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This explains what to foreign observers seemed so strange: that the students and workers in Tiananmen Square, and elsewhere in China, who had been brought up on films, books and operas about sacrificing their lives for their country, sang the ‘Internationale’ during the first weeks of the demonstrations and only later began to call for the resignations of Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping and even for the end of the Party.
Two of this book’s main subjects are well known and have been interviewed in the past: Wang Dan is the most famous, and became, after that fateful 4 June, the most wanted man in China until he was finally arrested and imprisoned. Shen Tong, who fled to the United States six days after the killings, has been condemned in certain dissident circles for subsequently returning to China (where he was detained for 54 days) and doing business there. But the third figure, Yi Danxuan, is almost unknown, even to keen scholars of Tiananmen, having been a student leader in Canton — where he was detained and imprisoned before moving to the US in 1992.
Admirably, Rowena He does not criticise these by now middle-aged men for any contradictions in what they have said or done, or for their continued reticence on certain matters. She rightly says:
It is unfair to criticise their efforts because some of the leaders have fallen short of public expectations. It is also unreasonable to credit one single individual for any accomplishment achieved as a result of the movement’s efforts.
Instead, she lets them speak for themselves, presenting
the complexities, confusions and complications in the lives of these young men [there is barely a mention of Chai Ling, an important and now hugely controversial woman leader] who distinguished themselves as leaders of the Tiananmen movement.
And she gently notes the sufferings which have resulted from their courage and continuing dissidence, when many others have fallen silent.
Where I disagree is when He says that the
1989 Tiananmen movement was the most serious open conflict between the communist regime and the Chinese people since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949.
God knows it was ghastly enough, but the first years of the communist period, when Mao’s bloodthirstiness was encouraged by Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai, witnessed the executions of at least two million souls; and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 many more millions died, including those killed by the army.
He’s own parents suffered during those years, but like so many Chinese they scarcely mentioned the horrors of the past to their children; so that even though He is well-versed in her country’s history, that earlier period hasn’t touched her in the way Tiananmen has.
Its few factual errors do not detract from this book’s masterly narrative and analysis. Apart for being told off about her black armband, Rowena He emerged unscathed from the convulsions of Tiananmen. But in her mind and heart she is devoted to keeping the movement’s significance alive, and her often profound book is an unmistakable sign of her devotion to that cause.
Because you read about book review
Also by Jonathan Mirsky
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