Tiananmen Could Happen Again

What we too often forget about Tiananmen Square is the joy. It seems almost unseemly to mention it, in light of how many people died and how many lives were ruined by the crackdown that came later. But in those heady, early days when Mikhail Gorbachev’s historic visit made the students bolder than ever, this was the fizziest, most exuberant story I’d ever covered in China.

I had been a correspondent in Beijing for two years in the mid-80’s and landed in Moscow just as Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were getting really interesting. My Newsweek editors, in their infinite wisdom, were evidently reckoning that I’d covered one big, nasty, Communist country and could be trusted to cover another. In fact, the two were mirror images of each other: China’s economic reforms were vibrant and its politics dull, while Russia’s economy was gasping for breath and its political class couldn’t stop babbling.

Now Chinese politics had come alive. The weather was great and the square was thronged. The students sang The Internationale and really meant it (“Masses, slaves, arise, arise”); they erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty without a trace of irony. We cynical old hacks scratched our heads and pinched ourselves. Or as the correspondent for the London Observer put it on a brilliantly sunny day in May, turning his beaming face to me as we strolled through the square, “We’re getting paid to do this!”

The demonstrations felt especially meaningful to those of us who had listened, over the years, to countless endless lectures about how happy and satisfied the Chinese people really were. They didn’t want political freedom. They were satisfied with economic progress. Chinese officials were intent on purveying this explanation for their country’s political quiescence compared to, say, the Soviet Union at the time. And, absent any real manifestation of political engagement from the Chinese people, some of us had begun to believe it.

The size of the demonstrations grew and grew. The elite students were joined by office workers, factory workers, and even government bureaucrats. Together they put the lie to the Chinese government’s Big Lie. Chinese people had quite a few grievances, as it turned out, both economic and political, and they wasted no time in seizing this unprecedented moment to express them. This was a story that we correspondents always knew was percolating quietly below the surface. To put it on the cover of Newsweek magazine, week after week, was to vindicate not only the hopes and desires of the Chinese people, but also our own convictions about the truth about their country.

You have to remember how closed China was then, and how scared most people were. Foreigners were still a jaw-dropping rarity. We correspondents had no freedom of movement around the country – every trip outside of Beijing required special dispensation from the Foreign Ministry. Ordinary Chinese could get in huge trouble just for having unauthorized contact with foreigners. Our ability to know what was really happening in China was pathetically limited.

Tiananmen burst all those strictures. Suddenly, Chinese people were babbling about politics (just like Russians! it seemed to me). Their feelings and opinions were emblazoned on placards for all the world to see. Those few weeks of freedom were heaven for frustrated correspondents who felt they’d never really gotten the full story.

That the story ended in violence surprised no one, even while it shocked us all. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, either, that twenty years later, the Big Lie has taken hold again. Chinese people just aren’t interested in politics. Economic progress has left them satisfied.

Don’t believe it for a minute. Yes, personal freedoms are much more extensive and yes, people are pleased with the country’s economic success. They are also prouder of their country now than they were then, I think. But still, not far below the surface, China simmers with political discontent. The issues that sparked Tiananmen -- corruption, labor exploitation, the lack of free speech – still plague China today. It wouldn’t take much to bring about some kind of mass protest again. I’ve seen it happen before, and seeing it once made me surer than ever that it could happen again.