Mao to Now

But that summer, rather than covering the Games, I had to fly to Rangoon, where I was reminded that the people didn't always win. Riding in the back of a rattletrap pickup truck en route to the Strand Hotel, jittery Burmese acquaintances told how amid the chaos of ongoing and massive pro-democracy protests, demonstrators had seized rifles and ammunition from soldiers. I felt sick, knowing the junta would react violently. In the morning my photographer and I dodged potholes and bullets to visit an ancient city hospital, whose wards were like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Piles of feces lay in the hallways. The worst part was counting mangled bodies in the morgue, including the corpse of a young teenager missing most of his head.

I flew to Beijing the next year thinking the biggest trouble I'd encounter would be staying awake through Foreign Ministry briefings. Mikhail Gorbachev was due in town on May 15, 1989, after 30 years of Sino-Soviet hostility. But as I neared Tiananmen Square in a taxi on May 3, I was startled to see a human chain of four or five bicyclists, some with white headbands across their foreheads, pedaling side by side, their arms linked. Their rolling protest blocked an entire lane of traffic. I marveled at their audacity. Student activists were still mourning one of their biggest heroes, Politburo member Hu Yaobang, more than two weeks after his death from a heart attack. He had earned their loyalty two years earlier, when Deng forced him to step down as Communist Party chief for being too soft on campus unrest.

After his death, memorial wreaths and portraits of Hu began materializing in Tiananmen Square. A shrill editorial in the People's Daily accused the mourners of creating "social turmoil" and of plotting to overthrow the party leadership—but the day I got to town, the editorial was publicly criticized as "too strident" by the then party chief Zhao Ziyang. I asked a diplomat friend about the conflicting signals coming from the regime, and his answer chilled me: "There's an unholy power struggle going on."

A lot of people think Tiananmen was all about democracy. They're wrong. Economics also had a big role. After a decade of impressive but halting economic reforms, inflation was running wild, and although farmers were making money for once, city dwellers were lagging—especially on university campuses, where labs and classrooms were as decrepit as the housing. Still, idealism was a driving force. Since long before the time of the communists, students have acted as society's conscience in China. My father taught me that. In the 1930s he led a student delegation to plead with China's then leader, Chiang Kai-shek, to take a tougher stand against Japanese aggression. Now I was watching a drama straight out of classical Beijing opera: righteous students, willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, were challenging an aging emperor who had become brutal and corrupt.

Gorbachev's impending visit scared me. I figured authorities had to clear out the protesters before the summit or lose huge face. On the eve of the Soviet leader's arrival, I stayed the night with hunger-strikers in the square. Moonlight illuminated a patchwork of multicolored protest flags and banners fluttering in the breeze. I NEED FOOD BUT I'D RATHER DIE FOR DEMOCRACY, read one in English. Another, in Cyrillic, read, WE NEED OPENNESS. IN the square that night, 21-year-old student Tian Hong began riffing on democracy: "Our country is opening up!" he told me. "We understand the failure of autocracy over the past few years." With memories of Burma still fresh, my eyes welled with tears. The next day Gorbachev's Chinese hosts had to sneak him into the Great Hall of the People through a back door.

Inspired by the students, people kept pouring into the streets all over the city even after martial law was declared on May 19. In many neighborhoods they built barricades, disrupting military traffic. I saw things I could scarcely have imagined possible. Fifty soldiers holding Kalashnikovs sat on the ground, listening intently as students with megaphones lectured them about democracy and fed them Popsicles. In another neighborhood a soldier emerged from his blocked convoy to shout: "We're soldiers of the people! We would never suppress you!" as the crowd roared its appreciation. One morning before dawn another convoy tried to cross the city secretly, transporting dozens of tarp-covered missiles—totally unrelated to the protests—and was trapped by a swarm of civilians. The crowd oohed and aahed over the weaponry while the helpless soldiers sulked.