“I think there are two Tiananmen Squares,” says Shen Tong, one of the student leaders of China’s near revolution in the spring of 1989. He’s speaking at a private club to a small group of Chicago academics, businesspeople, and foundation representatives as part of a two-and-a-half-week tour to promote his recent autobiography, which he wrote last spring as a full-time student at Brandeis University.
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He tells the audience that he was uncomfortable about the idea of writing an autobiography, but decided that telling his story might make the differences between his generation and his parents’ clearer. “We are the product of ten years of reform–a whole young generation, new in terms of ideology, sociology. We are still a transitional generation. We didn’t suffer the Cultural Revolution, though we still experienced the aftermath of it. But we knew enough to carry forward.”
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the early 1980s opened China a little to the West, he says. “The two were merging–the old system and the new. And deepening. So we have the new ideology of individualism, the psychological foundation of the new society.” He mentions Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles as influences, then quickly adds Cui Jian, whom he describes as the John Lennon of China. It was not merely that China was being westernized, he says. “My own culture has a liberal tradition that has been reemerging.”
How much did the workers support the students?
“You want to turn this into a book-reading exercise?” he chides, laughing. But he obliges with a summary, then adds, “I really don’t consider me a hero. I always have hesitation–if others don’t care, why should I?” Later he says, “A lot of people think the students were too emotional, too irrational. They said we screwed up. To some extent we did. A lot of reformers in government lost power. But when the movement started, it was like a broken dike–the water just rushed out. People called me a traitor because I tried to push it back for a while.”
He leans toward the foundation representative, explaining rapidly–she can only stay ten minutes–why the Democracy for China Fund needs money for computers and modems to transmit material to China. After she leaves, he sinks back into his chair for a moment. The executive director of the fund, who is with him on the tour, asks the waitress for something from the bar for Shen Tong to eat. She comes back with a bowl of nuts and raisins, but he doesn’t have time to eat many before he has to leave for his interview.
“The movement keeps going,” Shen Tong answers patiently.
