Twenty years ago this spring, after finishing my last round of final exams as a college student, I was enjoying a civilized custom called “senior week,” a break of approximately seven days in length between finals and commencement. The campus had largely cleared of students who were not seniors, and suddenly we had time to relax and enjoy our beautiful campus before it was time to move on and become adults (or some close approximation).
One of those afternoons during senior week, I was out on the deck on the roof of my dorm, sunbathing (because 21-year-olds care not about incremental increases in skin cancer risk) and reading Newsweek.
The article that grabbed my attention that late May day focused on the growing pro-democracy movement in China, and the central role of Chinese college students in asking for a more open, participatory system, and for political freedoms more generally. I had just taken a history course called “China in Revolution” that year, so the prospects for democracy in China struck me as a very happy outcome after the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.
And, reading about students taking such an important stand, with such commitment, made me think hard about my responsibilities to my own country. But it also made me optimistic about what a group of committed individuals might accomplish together.
The next week, I graduated. I said goodbye to college friends and professors, packed my stuff into the van my parents had driven up from New Jersey, closed the book on one chapter of my life, and started to shift gears to prepare for the next chapter.
On the drive back to New Jersey, on the car radio, twenty years ago today, we heard the news coverage as the pro-democracy movement was crushed in Tiananmen Square. It’s hard to put into words what kind of blow that was to my hope for the future.
In the intervening decades, China has developed a capitalist economic system. For a lot of people in China, this had made the conditions of everyday life better than they were in 1989.
But political freedom isn’t something you can turn out of a well-run factory. Not everyone in China has given up hope of someday achieving democratic reforms.
I want to believe that some day it will happen. I hope it doesn’t take another twenty years.
Twenty years ago, on 4th June 1989, we had first free elections in Poland (well, almost free – but communists got only the seats which were assigned for them before election).
I was 14 years old, starting high school and so excited about all the changes. We were so full of hope then. I remember we thought Tiananmen would be a start, not an end. And it put our new freedom in a bigger perspective.
Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (not capitalism) began at least 10 years before Tiananmen, not after.
GB