Diane Wei Liang Visits Seattle to Explain Tiananmen Square

The protests at Tiananmen Square started as a student response to the death of Hu Yaobang, the head of the Communist Party. Yaobang was known as a liberalizer, both economically and politically, and in the mid-Eighties, as Liang records, free political debate was widely tolerated at China's premier universities. Yaobang's main adversary, and the real center of power in post-Mao China, was Deng Xiaoping, the main driving force behind China's economic liberalization. He was also deeply opposed to social or political liberalization.

As a young student at Beijing (Peking) University, Liang first became politically engaged through "democracy salons," smoke-filled rooms of ardent young students debating the future of their nation. Early on in Lake With No Name, Liang portrays the various perspectives of her peers; one future protester even starts as an opponent of liberalization, echoing the widely-held view that "China is too big a country to be set running freely--it will be like a runaway train." (In April, action star Jackie Chan set off a firestorm of controversy for saying the same thing.) For them, the issue was less outright hostility to Communism than it was one of balancing. "How can you make the government more accountable if there is no democracy?" asks Dong Yi early on.

When Yaobang died on April 15, students began demanding the right to publicly mourn their benefactor. Officials resisted, and students took to Tiananmen Square, the heart of Beijing and abutting the central government offices. By April 17, several thousand were already marching on the Square. By April 21, the day before Yaobang's state funeral, there were over 100,000.

The day of the funeral, some students presented their demands to Central Party leaders, escalating the situation. The Party responded on April 26 through the official newspaper, declaring the students "anarchists." From there, the situation spiraled out of control. Enjoying massive popular support, the students dared a hunger strike on May 14, two days before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived for a state visit. Martial law was declared on May 19, and although the students were able to hold off the army for a while (Liang recounts joining a blockade herself), by June 3, soldiers had infiltrated buildings surrounding the Square in preparation for their assault.

The one thing Liang doesn't address is the aftermath. Her story winds down after she leaves for the U.S. in the summer of 1989. Since then, China has emerged as a global economic powerhouse, but the endemic corruption as evidenced by tainted food scandals and myriad other ills shows that the intentions of Liang and her fellow protesters were right-minded. What's more problematic is the question of their tactics; Liang makes clear that decisions were made in the student movement to escalate the situation, and as sympathetic as their cause is, the aftermath deprived China of an entire generation of reform-minded young leaders. It's therefore fitting that Lake With No Name winds down to an anti-climactic close more than a decade after the Tiananmen Square Massacre; romantic idealism has to eventually confront cold, hard reality, and contemporary China, even if it doesn't know it, has been shaped by that distant event.