Yesterday’s New York Times evoked a very painful memory of China for me. I usually read The Week in Review section first, and this week I found that the entire op-ed page was devoted to memories of June, 1989 in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. When I then turned to the front section, however, I was confronted with a long article on the emergence of Shanghai as one of the world’s most prosperous and glamorous cities. The conjunction of the two articles was only in my mind, of course, since the newspaper editors clearly did not see any connection. Let me tell you why I was upset.
When I worked for the American Council of Learned Societies, one of my responsibilities was to sit on the board of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, the organization that organized most graduate student and faculty exchanges between the U.S. and the P.R.C. The CSCPRC maintained an office in the Friendship Hotel in Beijing, and from 1988 for many years I visited China once or twice a year. Like most American visitors in those days, I fell in love with the country and its people, and I looked for occasions to visit.
Such an opportunity arose in the spring of 1989, when I was asked to review American-studies programs in China. I planned a visit for late May, but when the democracy protestors took over Tiananmen Square, my wife became concerned that there might be violence and urged me to cancel the trip. We agreed that I should consult Fred Wakeman, who was both the president of SSRC and one of the greatest experts on China, before going ahead with the trip. But Fred assured us that nothing dramatic was going to happen, and I flew to Shanghai (via Tokyo) at the very end of May. Well, Fred (like me) was an historian, and everyone knows that historians cannot even predict the past, much less the future — and he could not have been more wrong.
I was on the campus of Fudan University in Shanghai on the Saturday in early June when the army moved into the Square in Beijing, and on the next morning I gave a lecture on “constitutionalism and individual rights” at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences — the President of the Academy insisted that I go through with the lecture despite the ongoing violence in Beijing. I never made it to Beijing, and indeed could not depart China until June 8. When our plane bound for Hong Kong left the runway in Shanghai, half the passengers were crying and half were applauding. I was crying.
And now it is 20 years later. China is a creditor nation and the United States is a debtor nation. The Chinese seem to agree with Mao that “getting rich is glorious,” and parts of China are as richly developed as any places in the world. The 2008 Olympics were a sort of coming-out party for the new, market socialist nation, in which perestroika has triumphed over glasnost. Some people are applauding and some are crying. I am crying.
