In A Cruel Country

By Jonathan Mirsky on April 26, 1990

In her disturbing memoir of three and half years in Beijing, Bette Bao Lord, the author of the novel Spring Moon and wife of Winston Lord, the American ambassador until just before the Beijing killings, retells a traditional story which is wholly appropriate to Party rule in China:

Once a sage passed by a cemetery where a white-haired woman was wailing. “What tragedy has befallen you?” the sage asked.

The Last Days of Hong Kong

By Ian Buruma on April 12, 1990

May 1983: It was exactly seven months after Mrs. Thatcher stumbled and fell on the steps of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing that I arrived in Hong Kong to take up a job. The prime ministerial fall; which preceded a fierce quarrel with Deng Xiaoping about the future of the British colony, was regarded in Hong Kong as a dark omen: a few days later the stock market crashed and the Hong Kong dollar slumped to a point not seen since the riots of 1956.