Volume 42, Number 20 · December 21, 1995
The Beginning of the End
By Ian Buruma
Moving the Mountain
a documentary film directed by Michael Apted, produced by Trudie Styler
The Gate of Heavenly Peace
a documentary film directed and produced by Carma Hinton, by Richard Gordon
Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China
by Craig Calhoun
University of California Press, 333 pp., $37.50
Failed rebellions are often like failed marriages: former partners and their friends blame the other side for what went wrong; old tensions are magnified; the past is rewritten; feuding camps are formed. This pretty much sums up the situation among the survivors of the Beijing Spring, which ended in the so-called Tiananmen Massacre of June 1989. 'Moderate' students and intellectuals blame other, more 'radical' students for the bloody conclusion. Veterans of the square, as the authentic 'freedom fighters' (their words), look down on those who were overseas at the time. Activists who stayed in China after June 1989—often in jail—dismiss the exiles. And the exiles, mostly in France and the US, have splintered into groups of reformists, cultural chauvinists, democrats, neo-Confucianists, soft-authoritarians, and so on. Some thrive in the West, making money, trading on fame; others, less adept in the ways of the marketplace, sulk in regret, chilled by the loneliness of freedom, and dream of returning to the stifling embrace of China.
Review, 4814 words
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