"The People Will Not Forgive You!"

Sometime after 7:00 on the night of June 3^rd Beijing television broadcast an announcement from the troops enforcing martial law, warning the citizens of the city to remain at home – they were not to be permitted on the street, or they would be taking responsibility for the safety of their lives into their own hands. When I saw this absurd thing happen again on the television I couldn’t restrain myself from laughing. I immediately called my friend on the phone, hoping to borrow his bicycle and rush to Tiananmen Square.

I broke my collar bone in a bike accident on June 3^rd, 1989. That was a problem, because I had big plans for the following week. On June 6^th, I was scheduled to fly from San Francisco to Taipei, where my primary goal was to finalize a divorce. Then I was going to make my way to Beijing, and cover the ongoing Tiananmen protests. At the time, I was in a joint masters program in Asian Studies and Journalism at U.C. Berkeley. I’d been studying Chinese for almost ten years. I felt very strongly that the trajectory of my life required me to be a witness to what was happening at Tiananmen Square. But as I fell asleep that night, assisted by painkillers, my last thought was that I going to have call the travel agent and delay my flight by at least a week.

The next morning, I woke up, turned on the TV to watch some French Open tennis, and instead witnessed CNN broadcasting footage of tanks rolling through the streets of Beijing.

I often wonder what would have happened if Deng Xiaoping had followed the example of Taiwan’s Chiang Ching-kuo and bequeathed to his people a path to democratization and liberty, instead of consolidating a one-party dictatorship with the blood of young men and women. Imagine a world where the PRC celebrated basic human rights with the same fervor as so many of its neighbors. Taiwan has shown repeatedly – as recently as this past week! – that protest movements are the living fiber of a healthy society. Meanwhile the PRC’s rulers have repeatedly demonstrated that they live in fear of their own citizens freely expressing themselves. On every June 4^th, we are reminded of this tragedy.

I didn’t make it to Beijing that summer. But that fall, one of my thesis advisors asked me to translate a personal eyewitness account of the massacre: “Demons Among Men, A Historical Tragedy: What I Saw At The Beijing Massacre.” I still have the notebook in which I worked out the first draft of my translation, and what strikes me most re-reading the account 35 years later is the pervading sense of disbelief. This couldn’t be happening!

I think that at that time those people on the street and I all had the same thought. If only there were enough us, we would be able to stop the soldiers and protect the students on the square. The prerequisite for this hope was as follows: if there were many people the soldiers would not dare to shoot.

What chills me most on this June 4^th is that I don’t think anybody underestimates the willingness of the current regime to use lethal force against dissent. Such is Deng Xiaoping’s legacy.

At this time, from all four sides came shouts from the residents of the surrounding buildings: “Overthrow the fascists! “The devil is in the village!” One young man fiercely screamed at the soldiers: “You running dogs, don’t die for Deng Xiaoping! Don’t think you can use death to intimidate the masses! The people will not forgive you!” In return to these shouts, the soldiers just replied with sprays of gunfire.