Seventeen years ago I was in Nanjing, finishing up a year of teaching.  My students, Chinese graduate students from various places but many from Beijing, had been drawn into the massive demonstrations that had swept across our city.  We all kept close watch on what was going on in the capital.

     When we awoke on the morning of the 4th, the TV was blacked out.  Every so often an announcement that a "counter-revolutionary riot" had broken out in  Beijing scrolled across the darkened screen.  Then, an old ping-pong match came on.  From VOA and BBC we came to learn what had happened: perhaps the worst single military action against unarmed civilians in the history of the PRC.  It was, plain and simple, a massacre.

    The Nanjing students continued to protest for 2-3 days.  They started a "long march" to Beijing, in solidarity of the citizens there who had been gunned down.  But, while there was no mass violence in Nanjing, the arrests began and the protests ground to a halt.  My students dejectedly retreated from the streets.  We did not have final exams or papers; we were all too depressed and exhausted.  My wife and I left China two weeks later, sobered by what we had seen and heard and lived.

     Seventeen years ago the ruling group of the PRC, after pushing aside their colleagues who were trying to maintain peace, made a decision for violence.  They – and especially Deng Xiaoping – are responsible for a terrible act of inhumanity.  Deng may have achieved great results with his single-minded commitment to economic reform but, in the end, he chose death for the citizens of Beijing.  He did not have to.  It was entirely possible to find a solution that would have maintained the hegemony of the CCP without killing hundreds and hundreds of people that day.  Perhaps he would have had to yield a tiny fraction of the Party’s power and recognize an autonomous student union; but he could have chosen a peaceful way out and still have protected the overwhelming political power of the Party and the momentum of economic reform.

     Yes, the students may have made tactical errors in how they carried out the protests.  But we should not blame them for the ultimate violence that killed so many Beijing citizens.  Deng and the Party elders killed those people, and they did not have to.

     The silence on June 4th, imposed by Party censors, is just another sad example of a government too fearful to let its own people know their history.  The CCP reproduces national ignorance.  It hides the truth of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and June 4th, and sulks behind the sickly smile of Chairman Mao at Tiananmen.