Nice piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Mara Hvistendahl on “The Great Forgetting: 20 Years After Tiananmen Square”, via Arts & Letters. Seen largely through the eyes of Kang Zhengguo, author of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, who participated in the famous demonstrations, the article describes how the Chinese government dealt with the great crisis of twenty years past with a mixture of oppression and finesse, rather as the Nixon Administration dealt with the student protests of the Vietnam era—though Nixon, it must be said, didn’t kill a lot of people, in the U.S., at least, not to mention the fact that he was actually toppled from power.
Kang, revisiting China, finds the country much richer and marginally freer. One of the things the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square demanded was the right to wear Nikes. Well, now they’ve got them, and a lot of other things too. What they don’t have, of course, is the sort of political and intellectual freedom that we enjoy here. The Sixties generation in the U.S. never achieved the political power they dreamed of either, until now. Western-style freedom will be a long time coming to China. The country seems to be where continental Europe was following the revolutions of 1848. Let’s hope they skip the disasters of World Wars I & II and go straight to the post-Sixties consumerist ennui that Europe enjoys in the present day. Things could be so much worse.
