Chapter One

Exile from Tiananmen Square

We will never know how many people were killed during that sticky night of June 3 and the early hours of June 4, 1989. A stink of burning vehicles, gunfire, and stale sweat hung heavily on Tiananmen Square; thousands of tired bodies huddled in fear around the Monument to the People’s Heroes, with its carved images of earlier rebels: the Taiping, the Boxers, the Communists of course, and also the student demonstrators of May 4, 1919, who saw “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” as the twin solutions to China’s political problems. The huge, rosy face of Chairman Mao stared from the wall of the Forbidden City across three or four dead bodies lying where his outsize shoes would have been had his portrait stretched that far. Tracer bullets and flaming cars lit up the sky in bursts of pale orange. Loudspeakers barked orders to leave the square immediately, or else. Spotlights were switched off and then on again. And over the din of machine-gun fire, breaking glass, stamping army boots, screaming people, wailing sirens, and rumbling APCs, young voices, hoarse from exhaustion, sang the “Internationale,” followed by the patriotic hit song of the year, “Descendants of the Dragon”:

In the ancient East there is a dragon;

China is its name.

In the ancient East there lives a people,

The dragon’s heirs every one.

Under the claws of this mighty dragon I grew up

And its descendant I have become.

Like it or not—

Once and fore