When We Talk About Tiananmen

Here we are, talking once again about what it was like to hear the zinging of bullets, the screaming of the wounded, the blaring of garbled Orwellian propaganda from public loudspeakers in and around Tiananmen Square. It's been 20 years now. Even as I recount the horrifying anecdotes I feel like a vampire, feeding off the blood that soaked the flagstones of that blighted place.

Do I dwell too much on the past, ignoring a dynamic, changing China that's morphed through a thousand lifetimes since those dark days in 1989 when Chinese soldiers opened fire on their own people? I hate the thought that I might talk too much about June 4, confident in the power of those traumatic images to mesmerize and impress. And I hate the thought that I might talk too little about it, seduced by the potent China story of today that's all about global muscle and financial clout.

The ghosts of Tiananmen still haunt Chinese politics, and, for many of us journalists who witnessed firsthand the tragedy of 1989, they've haunted nearly every subsequent story we've written about China. Back then, I directed NEWSWEEK's Beijing team of reporters and photographers that covered the protests and their suppression. A decade ago I returned to Beijing as bureau chief, convinced that the country had changed tremendously since 1989.  And indeed it has.

Yet when I see U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner visit Beijing—as he did this week to reassure China's money men about the safety of their vast investments in American T-bills—I think back to one morning in May 1989 when, on the edge of Tiananmen Square, I saw the 1930s-style Bank of China building at dawn with a huge white banner draped from one baroque pinnacle declaring DON'T BE A VAULT FOR CORRUPTION ANY LONGER. And I wonder how much more crooked China's bankers and planners would be today if public indignation over official corruption had not been one of the key grievances that sent protestors into the square.

When I hear Chinese authorities talk about the need to keep GDP growth rates above the magic number of 8 percent—because otherwise joblessness among new college grads reaches a tipping point and unrest could erupt—I think back to the university students in the square waving multicolored banners and signs with slogans such as I NEED FOOD BUT I'D RATHER DIE FOR DEMOCRACY. And I wonder if, despite all the effort the West invests in trying to understand the Chinese, we still underestimate their yearning for freedom just because it hasn't erupted in street protests for decades.

When I see Chinese blogs being shut down, access to foreign Web sites such as YouTube being blocked and Western television news crews being harassed while trying to film in Tiananmen Square, I think back to the delegations of Chinese journalists—some from state-run organs such as Xinhua, the government mouthpiece—that had marched on that very spot in May 1989 chanting "We want to tell the truth."

The truth has yet to come out about the Tiananmen Square bloodshed, and that's one important reason to keep talking about it. These days, even fashionable, Westernized young Chinese sometimes chide foreigners who bring up 1989. Look at Guantánamo, they say, and tell us American-style democracy is any better than the Chinese system.