The Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolt

By Perry Link on June 29, 1989

The Beijing revolt of 1989 has caught the world’s attention, but the malaise that led to the emergency is broader and deeper than any of its conspicuous slogans can suggest. For foreigners like myself who live in Beijing, it was already clear nine months ago, as one listened to the complaints of intellectuals, students, and ordinary citizens outside official life, that yet another modern Chinese crisis was looming. People were angry, depressed, and confused.

China’s Spring

By Orville Schell on June 29, 1989

To stand, in early May, atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which guards the entrance to the Forbidden City, and look across the vast crowd of people jammed into Tiananmen Square was to have a historically new sense of what Mao called “the broad masses.” It was to this ancient gate that Mao himself came on October 1, 1949, almost forty years before, to greet the adoring “broad masses” upon the defeat of the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and the founding of “new China.” Just the day before, in a declaration for the first plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conferenc

The Incredible Shrinking Man

By Jonathan Mirsky on June 29, 1989

Just before the recent demonstrations in Beijing and other cities, which shook the Party to its foundations, a rumor ran through the capital: Mao Zedong’s body, embalmed and mounted in the ugly Memorial Hall which disfigures Tiananmen Square opposite the Forbidden City, was shrinking. The woman doctor who headed the team of experts that performed the taxidermy on the Chairman soon after his death in late 1976, conducted because the Party was afraid to follow the practice of cremating even its greatest heroes, issued reassurances that the body remained precisely the same as it always was.