This is all I know about June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square:
(1) A lot of students died when the tanks were sent into the square. (Actually I don't know this - strictly, all I know is that there were deaths.)
(2) There's a book by a American (or British?) sociologist, who happened to be in China at the time working on something else, and went down to Tiananmen to interview students. We don't want your democracy, they told him; we want Rousseau's democracy. I think about that from time to time. What did they mean?
(3) I wasn't in Oxford the weekend Wang Dan came to speak.
But it seems important anyway not to forget the day - to acknowledge that it happened. Tiananmen wasn't my first impression of China, but it was my first political impression? of China - and one of my first political memories, I think - in the sense of a memory of politics happening somewhere in the world. Five months later, the Berlin Wall came down. I was TFing for a class on democracy last semester, and it occurred to me that all of the students in the class - who were all sophomores - had been born after 1989. They have no sense - however vague and inchoate - of a world in which Communism was still a force to be reckoned with.
This isn't a political post, really; just - marking time.
