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This is a podcast about personal stories related to China. The host, Leo, interviews people who have dedicated their careers to China. In the first episode, Leo talks to Orville Schell, a journalist who has reported on China for many years. Orville has had an amazing life, studying Chinese history, meeting important figures in China, reporting on the Vietnam War, and producing a documentary on the Tiananmen Massacre. He has witnessed the U.S.-China relationship evolve over the years and has personal connections to Chinese civil society. In this episode, they discuss Deng Xiaoping's visit to America in 1979 and the events of the 1980s in China, including the Tiananmen Massacre. Orville describes the trip and the positive atmosphere surrounding it, as well as his observations about Deng Xiaoping's leadership. He also reflects on the tragic events of Tiananmen Square and suggests that Deng Xiaoping may have been deeply wounded by them. Hello listeners, welcome to the China Memoir Podcast. I'm your host Leo. This is a podcast about personal history of people who worked on issues related to China. Over the years I've been fortunate to be able to connect with people who dedicated their whole careers to China, whether in academia, journalism, diplomacy, or business, and heard stories I never imagined possible, stories that I wish to preserve and communicate to a wiser audience. So through the podcast, I hope to share those personal stories with you. For this first episode, I've selected an hour of conversation with Orville Schell. Now Orville is a legendary journalist reporting on China. He comes from a distinguished lawyer family. His father was the president of the New York Bar Association and the co-founder of Helsinki Watch, the predecessor to Human Rights Watch. I think Orville has had an amazing life engaging China. He studied Chinese history with John Fairbank at Harvard for his undergrad, met Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei in his early 20s, got chased out of Indonesia by the Indonesian Communist Party, reported on the Vietnam War, wrote about China for publications such as the New Yorker, New York Times, New York Review of Books, helped produce the definitive documentary on Tiananmen Massacre called The Gates of Heavenly Peace, and so much more. Over the past decade, Orville has personally witnessed the whole process of U.S.-China engagement from the end of Mao Zedong to the rise of Xi Jinping, with deep personal ties to the Chinese civil society, most notably with Fang Lijun, one of China's most renowned physicists and dissident intellectuals. Orville has accompanied presidential trips from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, watching both Chinese and American leaders at close range. He now runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. This conversation is selected from my 14-hour interview with Orville that traces his whole life of working on issues related to China. I hope to publish other parts of our conversation in the future. In this episode, we focus on China in the 80s, a magical decade that continues to elicit nostalgia, despair, and hopefulness. Orville will talk about his personal experience in accompanying Deng Xiaoping's visit to America in 1979, China in the 80s, Zhao Ziyang's interview with NBC, and the massacre in Tiananmen that put an end to the decade of incredible openness. I hope you will enjoy the conversation. Hello, Orville. Let's pull ourselves all the way back to 1979, when Deng Xiaoping came to America. Now, he was the first CCP leader to visit America, with China itself at a turning point in history after Mao died. Amazingly, you were personally present on that trip as a journalist. Could you describe Deng's trip for us? That was an incredible moment. It happened because in 1972, Kissinger and Nixon went to China, and they had an accord with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and they both committed at some point to normalize relations. But actually, I think while they were there, as I recall, Taiwan got expelled from the United Nations, or was near that time, China got let in. So that was a start. But there were many in the United States Congress who were very reluctant just to kick Taiwan out and recognize China. So that didn't really happen until 1979, and Carter managed to arrange that, and people like Mike Oxenberg, who was in the National Security Council, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and people like that. And so they invited Deng Xiaoping to come, and I just happened to be writing for the New York Times magazine. You were working for multiple publications at the time. Yeah, I worked for whoever. Now I can't remember why I didn't do it for the New Yorker, but I did it for the New York Times. And so I got to go on the whole trip. How did the New York Times, did they just call you up, hey Orville, do you want to join our trip with Deng Xiaoping? No, I think, I don't know whether I called him up, or he called me up, or someone called someone up, or what, but they gave me the assignment. So that meant that I could get into everything. What was everything? I could go to the White House, go to the banquet, go to the whole thing at the White, in Washington when he came, and then I went to Atlanta with them and Carter, because that was Carter's home state, and watched him there. And then we went to Texas, and to the Johnson Space Center, and then out to this rodeo. So I got to watch all of this, and the thing that most impressed me about it was a couple of things. One was the friendliness of it, that when he got to Washington, even though China had been Red China, and most of Washington despised the Communists, when Deng Xiaoping arrived, they just lost their minds. Overnight? Overnight. Everybody wanted to go to the event, and meet Deng Xiaoping, and go to the banquet, and go to the National Gallery, they had a big thing there, and all the corporate leaders were gathered, and everybody wanted to wear a Mao suit. And the second thing that impressed me was that this was the first time Chinese television had done anything live from another country. So they covered the whole trip, but they didn't really know what they were doing. So they had a lot of help from, like, CBS and NBC, and doing the satellite links, and all of these things. Was this CCTV? Yeah, yeah. But they had no experience doing a thing like this. But they did it, and they created a great sense of camaraderie between all of the television networks. They were all helping each other. And so this is the first time that anything to do with China and the U.S. was broadcast live in both countries. On the back of cooperation between CCTV and CNN? They were teamed up, I don't remember all the complexities of it, using the same studios and satellites, and I don't know. The Americans were really helping the Chinese. It was very collaborative. And the fact that Deng Xiaoping had given them permission, and of course his trip just added to that fund of permission, not only to the crews and the government, the TV crews, and everybody, but of course it gave everyone in China permission to loosen up in America. And it gave everybody in America a chance to see China in a pretty friendly light, consorting with all these people in Washington, and then the rodeo and barbecue in Texas was the magical, theatrical moment when, symbolically speaking, Deng Xiaoping accepted America by wearing the cowboy hat, the ten-gallon hat. And it was a very well-staged, symbolic message. And probably one of the greatest pieces of political theatricals in the 20th century. I think so. I don't know how intentional it was, but I remember just sitting there behind him and his team, I forget who I was sitting with, some Chinese person, and everyone was just laughing. And it was very touching in a way, because it was as if at last, after having been strangled for decades, these two countries were breathing together, and enjoying each other a little bit, and feeling hopeful and optimistic. And this is a kind of an attribute in the relationship that I think Xi Jinping is just strangled. He has no conception of how to do that. Why? Probably because, unlike Deng Xiaoping, he actually sees America as the enemy. And I don't think Deng Xiaoping saw it that way. In fact, when he came, I remember, he came to the UN before this trip with Carter. I think he stopped in Paris, and he set out for some croissant to be brought on the plane. So he had a little experience in France. Deng Xiaoping studied in France. And he worked in France. I think he did more work than study, and then he went off to Russia, to the Soviet Union. But there was something in him that was not ideological. I'm sure he's a good Leninist, but he wasn't an insecure man. And I think he was five foot, four feet high, was it? He was very short. Very short. But he was not insecure. He had an amazing air of sovereignty that he radiated when he was, despite his diminutive stature. And I think this is the kind of thing we really have missed in other leaders, Hu Jintao, and certainly in Xi Jinping, who, as far as I can see, must be deeply insecure and papers it all over with ceremony and ritual and bravado and trying to be a big shot. Whereas I don't think that was Deng Xiaoping's issue. And I remember he gave an interview with, what was her name? Oriana Falaci, the Italian journalist. It was a wonderful interview. He felt like we were talking to a human being. And she was Italian, and we got him going. But those are the kind of things that aren't imaginable now. Do you find it, the fact that Deng Xiaoping was such a human being, such a person that you felt you could talk to, so down to earth, so open, so ready to try anything that's put to him, the fact that such a normal human being would later order a massacre, do you find that an even scarier, just because this person, you wouldn't expect him to do that? The massacre was just awful. Probably one of the worst things in modern history that's happened to China, the worst thing. I think, while Deng Xiaoping was a man of confidence, sovereignty, and I don't think an insecure man, I think, and I don't know whether this is just, this is a particularly uniquely Chinese issue or just a human issue. I felt he was so deeply wounded and humiliated by what happened in Tiananmen Square. His own sacred Feser of the Feser, he couldn't control it. And he had Gorbachev coming, and he had to go to the airport and meet him, couldn't do a proper ceremony in Tiananmen Square. I think all of these things made him feel deeply rebuked, spurned, disesteemed, and humiliated. And I think the sign of that is, if you read the transcripts that I have of the meeting he had with Brent Scowcroft a few days after the massacre when President Bush sent Scowcroft secretly to China. And that's Bush's national security advisor. Yes. And even the ambassador in China didn't know about it. Didn't know. And if you look at the transcript of that meeting, you get a sense of how deeply wounded Deng was. He was blaming America every sentence of the way. Every sentence he was blaming Scowcroft. And Scowcroft was down on his knees begging him, saying, please, you don't understand. President Bush thinks of you as his friend. He does not want this friendship to be broken, or relations with China to be broken, even though this is a horrible thing that happened. And Deng Xiaoping said, it's your fault. You caused it. You're the one who should pay for it. You're the one who should make restitution, not make a pretty incredible display of, to this man who had fallen all the way over to China, and almost humiliatingly, abjectly begged China to keep the relationship going. So you could see that even Deng, as strong as he was, and as amazing as I think he was as a leader, was hurt, very human, understandable in a way. And a master at political manipulation. Yes, he must have been. I didn't know him, but he was vice premier. He was never party general secretary or president, and he presided until his death. He rose three times, fell three times. He's a legend. Ten years ago, 1979, he came to America begging the Americans to cooperate with the Chinese. Only in ten years, when the Chinese economy was still worth a tenth, a hundredth of American economy, I don't know the exact figure, he had the Americans came back begging after when he caused the massacre. The Americans were begging for forgiveness. Well, it's America then for trying not to just let everything crash and burn. I thought it was too excessive when I read that transcript. I said, wow. But what that showed me was that America was trying not to rupture the relationship with this other significant and great power that they'd spent a lot of time cultivating and trying to work things out with, rightfully or wrongfully. I look at it more as a, again, like a play where you have to understand the motivations of the characters. And Deng's was, he was hurt deeply. I don't, doesn't excuse it, but I understand it. So, nonetheless, after that, he went on his nanshan, went down south, and he did start up, said reform had to go on, maybe not political reform, and did continue certain kinds of reforms, and there did continue to be a period of, after the crackdown of three, four, five years, when with Jiang Zemin, things did get warmer and more open. But some lessons have been learned about how far you want to let reform go. I don't know what the lessons of the 80s are. History does change, has inflection points, and no society is one thing constantly for forever. But there is no society, in my view, in a big nation that's more unresolved than that of China. And of course, the 80s, as much as it ended in gunshots, blood, massacre, it was such a period of hopefulness. Many look back upon it with romanticism and nostalgia. Could you describe the 80s for us in your own eyes? Were they the best years for you, or were they overrated? I think what characterizes them perhaps best is the comparison between the 1980s and the preceding decade, when Mao was still alive and the Cultural Revolution still continued up until his death in 76, and then things began to turn in 77, 78. And that was very striking, because I think what most of us who were in China during the Mao era thought was, this is China. This is the way it is. This is the way it's going to be. And there was not one suggestion, although after the fact, looking back, you could see occasional little signs of things popping up around the country, but they were very modest. There was no sign that within China lay the capacity for anything much different than what we'd experienced over the past, what was really the 50s, 60s, 70s. It was three decades almost. And so when the changes began to happen, Mao died, Deng was re-elevated, and he was cashiered again, and Hua Guofeng was deputized to be the Party General Secretary. But then the Gang of Four got arrested. It was stunning. And Zhou Enlai died, and Tiananmen Square was filled with hundreds of thousands of people, an expression of their opposition to what had been happening. And then when Deng Xiaoping came back again the second time, at the end of 1978, and began to enunciate his reform and opening program, everybody was wondering, what's going on here? Is this just more smoke and mirrors, or could this possibly be something real happening? People were very uncertain. And so it was during that period, 1979, that Democracy Wall erupted, and that was in a pretty extraordinary thing, because this little un-prepossessing wall around a municipal bus parking lot on Shidan and Avenue of Eternal Peace, suddenly started being festooned with posters and statements, and people started arriving to have debates and talk and read. It was like an outdoor contemporary library. And strangely, at that very time, Deng Xiaoping actually supported it. And he supported it because he needed to secure his own ability to become, in effect, the supreme leader. And he had to get Hua Guofeng off stage, and a few other conservatives. But then, of course, ultimately, Democracy Wall and that whole movement went on for weeks and weeks, was not the kind of thing that Chinese Communist Party, good Leninist Party, wants to have to embrace, because it's too uncertain. It's too self-generating, spontaneous. And then people like Wei Jingsheng began attacking Deng himself, saying he wasn't a real reformer, he was really just another dictator, and he called for his fifth modernization, democracy. It's a pretty amazing thing he wrote. So, all of us who have been peering into China, we're looking at this and saying, what's happening here? And I remember myself, and we talked a little about this yesterday, when I was back there, suddenly finding doors opening, people willing to talk, eager to talk, interested in what was going on abroad. And so began this very interesting decade, from 1979 to 1989, when every year there were new and extraordinary things going on. Zhao Lijiang was trying to remove party control from the state-owned enterprises, and experimenting in Sichuan, and then making it national. Hu Yibang was an amazingly open, almost a little bit erratic, and unpredictable party general secretary, and went off to Japan, I remember, and wanted to bury the hatchet with Japan. And then, of course, they got rid of him, because there started to be this snowball got rolling. First of all, they allowed things like village elections and local elections. It was pretty extraordinary, because people could go and actually run for lower-level positions. And then students started protesting in 1986 and 1987, and that, I think, really put the scare in the party. And it was sufficiently alarming to them that the more conservative elements got rid of Hu Yibang. And strangely, it was only in retrospect that we really could see how experimental and open-minded Hu Yibang was. For instance, in Tibet, I went up to Tibetan ethnic areas and spent almost six weeks in 1981. And I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It used to be everything was communized, all the nomads, and their yak herds, and sheep herds, and all of this was falling apart. And Hu Yibang had basically pulled all of the Chinese cadres out of Tibet and said the Tibetans ought to manage themselves. It was pretty extraordinary. He even let the Dalai Lama's brother and sister go back to Qinghai, where the Dalai Lama was born, outside of Xining, the capital of Qinghai. And, of course, they were mobbed by Tibetan believers, Buddhists. But they, the leadership absorbed that sort of thing. So when then student demonstrations began breaking out, both in Beijing and places like Hefei, the Institute of Technology, the University of Technology there, I think that did alarm the party a lot. And so they got rid of Hu Yibang. They instated Zhao Ziyang, who had been premier. But things continued. But Zhao Ziyang was also a very, a relatively open humanistic person. And I remember one occasion, we were very close friends with his daughter. And my wife and I, I was friends with Tom Brokaw, the anchorman at NBC. And they decided they would take the whole network to China in 1986, go to Shanghai and Beijing. They took the Today Show, the Nightly News, and several other shows. It was like a giant, like a country going to China. So I introduced Brokaw to my wife, Liu Baifang, and so she became their kind of fixer in China, because she'd grown up in Beijing. I remember we were seeking an interview with Zhao Ziyang. And then he agreed to do it. But Tom Brokaw had just been to India and just interviewed the Dalai Lama there. And of course, that's a very sensitive topic. So he said, I'll interview, I'll give an interview to Brokaw, but I want to see the tape of what he did with the Dalai Lama. So we got the tape. We gave it to him. He watched it, and he said, okay. And then he sat down with Brokaw for two hours. He was sitting there, and I remember vividly, he had beside him a table, and he had a bottle of beer on it. He's drinking the beer, talking to Tom Brokaw, like a normal human being, about everything under the sun, smiling, laughing. And at one point, the subject of Fang Lijie came up. And Fang Lijie was a very good friend of Baifang and me. And he had just been kicked out of the party. He'd been Vice Chancellor of the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, in Anhui. And Brokaw asked Zhao Ziyang, he was saying, that's a bad example of you persecuting intellectuals who you don't agree with. And to my astonishment, Zhao Ziyang said, he said the activities, some of the activities Fang Lijie was engaging in did not speak of him as being a really disciplined, loyal party member. So he's being expelled from the party, but nothing else will happen to him. That was a pretty moderate, reasonable response. You don't want to play at our party? Okay, you're out. But we're not going to put you in jail. We're not going to, and I think they did take his vice chancellorship away. But they did give him a place in Beijing, and they put him at some institute. And so he could still see people, and interact, and go abroad. And he did. And he wrote some wonderful essays, as he was in Italy, an astrophysicist, studying red ferns, and I don't know, that's beyond my pay grade, this astrophysics, but to try to determine the age of the universe. But he, as he went around Europe, he was writing about it in a very humanistic way. He was looking at art, looking at how the Italians had preserved buildings, hadn't just destroyed the old. There were wonderful, sort of short, reflective ruminations, the likes of which China had not had, by a man who was not only smart, but he was a rationalist. He was an empiricist, because he was a scientist. So he had all these very interesting views that, and he said, I think you might have to go back, and I wrote about all of this stuff at the time, that communism, he said, was like an old, worn out dress that you had to take off and get rid of. So he was saying some very bold things. And again, this is pretty hard for the party to take, but they did. And of course, there were many other manifestations of that kind of activity, of publishing companies that were starting, of people doing investigative journalism, like Liu Bingyan in the People's Daily, was doing all of these long, long investigative articles about people who had engaged in corruption or malfeasance in office, party officials. And the People's Daily was publishing it. It was pretty incredible. And then there was a paper in Shanghai, I remember, I guess it was editor, it was the World Economic Herald. And it was almost like a normal newspaper. That decade did give rise to an awful lot of phenomenon that made people feel hopeful. And it gave birth to this whole idea of flexible authoritarianism, that China was loosening up, it was going to pull the party back from controlling everything in the life of Chinese people. And then, of course, all these private industries began to spring up. But the first manifestations that we saw in the early 80s were suddenly the streets were filled with people selling stuff. You couldn't, there was nothing in the street before when I was first there in the 70s. You hardly could buy anything anywhere. You had to go to the sort of local party-run department store. And then suddenly, everybody poured into the streets. They were selling everything, clothes, CDs, Chinese medicine. You could almost buy anything in the streets, get your shoes fixed, get your shoes shined, get your watch fixed. And, of course, at that time also, one of the interesting things that was happening was that all of the educated youth and the people who had been xia fang, the older people, to the May 7th cadre schools all around the country, were let go. And they were pouring back into the cities. And they had no jobs. And there was no private companies to hire them. There were only official daiwans, and they couldn't take them in. These people, there was this name, we spoke of it yesterday, they called them dai ye, waiting for employment. They didn't call them unemployed, because that would have looked bad. But what they did was they gave these people the invitation to start a little private hustle, a little private business. So people would find a little place in some courtyard where they could put a roof up, 12 by 12, and they'd start a restaurant. They'd cook in the kitchen. They'd set up a little shop and find some little nook. And then state-owned enterprises began to think, oh, we can make some money renting space, space that was just used to store things or empty. And so you began to get this recrudescence of private business on the micro level everywhere. And when you went to the countryside, I've never seen anything like it. Suddenly there were markets that would form, like, maybe twice a week in a village or a town, a country town. And peasants would all around would come in with their donkey carts, sell their cabbages, sell their tools, whatever it was they had to sell. And in almost just like that, China gave birth to this spontaneous eruption of private, very small-scale entrepreneurial activity. And it was an amazing sight to see, to be driving through the countryside and running into one of these private markets that was just people bartering, people haggling, people. So no matter where you look, the country was coming alive again in a more open, free-spirited, entrepreneurial, even market-based way. And then it wasn't very long before these eruptions of small-scale enterprise started making some money and started growing. And the next thing you knew, they were renting bigger spaces. And the state-owned enterprises, these dreary places that could hardly make anything, had all these people to employ and were not efficient. They took all of their sort of excess space and they rented out to restaurants or private businesses, or they rent the wall out for advertisements. And you've got some of the most insanely incongruous advertisements going up around the country. I think it's, isn't it turned off? Yeah. One second. I noticed there's a clock somewhere that's ticking. Oh, maybe over there. Do you think you can hear it? Yeah. Yeah. Is it possible to put it? Yeah, put it in. Yeah, put it here. I mean, put it on that counter, that little chest here. All of these things were accessible to people like me and journalists who had been, foreign journalists were led in, of course, for the first time in 1979. All of the major media outlets got to send one or two people. And so suddenly, Beijing had 30 foreign journalists that had never been there before. And they too could see these things manifestly. They didn't need to talk to anybody. They didn't need to have secret documents. They didn't need to do anything but just look. And so that was a very exciting period. I was still writing for the New Yorker then. And I wrote this whole series about just what I was seeing. And it only came out, it was a book, I guess that was the, To Get Rich is Glorious. Yeah. Because there was this slogan, and it struck me as the most incongruous slogan after all of Mao's slogan about 打帝国主义,打资本主义, all of these slogans about, it was wanting to destroy markets and destroy foreign intervention and all of these things. And the previous slogan was 劳动最高人, labor was glorious. Now it's the opposite, being a capitalist was glorious. And then Deng Xiaoping himself said, it's okay for some people to get rich first. And I remember the People's Daily had an article about a chicken farmer outside of Beijing, a woman who bought a Volvo. She got so rich, because suddenly all these restaurants and private markets could take somebody's private produce or chickens or pigs or whatever you could bring to market, and you could get a good price for it. But the fact that the People's Daily was lionizing these kinds of people who were doing an entrepreneurial spirit, not just political spirit, which is, of course, what was the currency of the realm of the Cultural Revolution, when there was a battle between red and experts. Experts were bad. They were the intellectuals who knew something. Red, ideologically pure people were good. So this is a complete reversal. So I think when we look back at this period, the People's Daily was still run by Leninists. The party was still in control. This was epiphenomenal on the surface. Nothing really had changed. Fair enough, but something had changed. And the party understood it, too, because they knew, they could see, oh my God, what have we unleashed here? If this goes too far, we're going to get overturned. And so there's a constant sort of struggle between these forces and between the conservative old sort of Maoist Leninists and the people who wanted to start private businesses and build private houses. That was the other thing. You go to the countryside, and peasants were building these incredible houses, because they made a lot of money in these private markets. And actually, the government supported them, small and medium-sized enterprises, because this was a new economic engine. And I think Deng Xiaoping realized that China was dead in the water. It just continued with its big, clunky state-owned enterprises that really, they were just not very innovative, not very energetic. People just taking their salaries and doing a minimum. So that was an incredible period, and very exciting to be there and to watch it and to see the excitement and the optimism amongst, it wasn't just Chinese intellectuals and professionals. You have to remember that these reforms really started in the countryside. The first thing they did, unthinkable. They dismantled the Renminggongxue, the people's communes. That seemed like a forbidden city. That was going to be there forever. That was Mao's keystone reorganizational offering to China. And that was what you wrote about as potentially what America could learn from China. Yes. So this whole thing that started in the countryside very quietly, and we didn't quite realize what was happening, where it was going to go, what we should do about it, also encouraged this whole notion that Kissinger and Nixon had started in 72, which was, let's get together somehow. Then it was against Russia. But now, suddenly people from the New York Stock Exchange started trooping in the 1980s, and banks, credit card companies, investors started trooping in, and Deng Xiaoping and his gang said, let's get together. And I remember, I can't remember what year it was, but it was during this period. One of Deng Xiaoping's sons, Deng Pufang, had either jumped or been thrown out a window. I think it was at Peking University. The Korean Cultural Revolution. Yeah, and had broken his back. Broken his legs. I think his, basically his spinal cord. Yes, spinal cord. So he was in a wheelchair. He came over to America, and I got a call. I forget who it was from. I think the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored his trip. And maybe it was a committee on U.S.-China relations, and they said they wanted to bring him out to the countryside in America. And I said, come on out to our ranch, and we could go to the little country school, and we could see this, that, and the other. Out comes Deng Pufang in a giant Cadillac limousine with highway patrol blazing sirens behind him, and he visited this little school where my son went out in the West Marin, and then went up to our ranch, and had a barbecue out on the porch. Where was this? I have a vase. You see it? It's right up there. You know the little white vase? Yeah. The left of the black box. He gave it to us. The Old China Disability Foundation. Yeah. So we had a nice barbecue, and of course he wanted hot sauce. I guess he was Sichuan-like, and it was very nice. He was out there on a deck looking out over the Pacific Ocean in his wheelchair. Not a typical peasant. That was a kind of an interaction, which is unthinkable now. And it was all organized by, not by government, the Chinese government obviously was involved, but it was organized by foundations and civil society, and I forget what I was doing then, 70s, what was I doing? I can't even remember. The 70s or 80s? Oh, this was probably, this was the 80s. I think I was just writing. I can't remember. It didn't matter. It was an emblem of the kind of openness and interaction that went on, and it was very helpful, and I think it made everybody feel that, that particularly we Westerners, but perhaps also Chinese who had a beautiful notion of Marxism, is based on Hegel's dialectical history moving towards a direction, and in Marx's case it was towards revolution and socialism and paradise. The Western version was that the history is going, as Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends towards justice. There was a kind of a simple notion that Hegel's teleology was a history that was heading towards progressing, towards a more greater openness, and a sort of higher stage of human activity. Perhaps also in the spirit of Francis Fukuyama, who argued for the end of history. Very much, he came out of that the end of history, that the history had a direction, and this was demonstration to us that even China was now being influenced by it, and we are all forgiven for maybe having an excess of hopefulness and optimism. I still wrote repeatedly about the regressive tendencies I saw there, wondering just how far it could go, and whether it could be allowed to progress to the point where the party might become not a one-party state, but something else. And anyway, there's much more that could be said about the 1980s. If you go sector by sector, like the publishing industry exploded, all kinds of translations of books were brought, you could write almost anything, and private companies started publishing. So it wasn't just state owned, it wasn't just Xinhua, but all kinds of other people came on board. Magazines started, newspapers, all sorts of things that were previously unthinkable. And, of course, this all culminated in when Hu Yabong, who actually I think people had properly appreciated as being quite open, and when he got kicked out of office, nobody could really do anything about it, because there's no easy way to protest. But when he died, in classic Chinese tradition, you can't not memorialize and celebrate the death of some person. So that's when people start flooding into Tiananmen Square. And at that time, what was so strange was I had organized, Bai Feng and I had organized with Chen Kaige and Hong Huang, who, they were married at the time, and Bai Jinming of Jeremy Barme in Australia. We were so taken by the openness of everything, we got some money from the Rockefeller family to have a conference of Chinese artists, intellectuals, and filmmakers by our ranch out in West Marin. There was this little wonderful conference center sitting on the cliff looking out over the ocean. So we invited 20 people from China, and we had about equal number from here. And Mike Oxenberg and Andy Nathan came, and Perry Link, and I forget, did Ezra Vogel come? Maybe. Tom Gold from Berkeley. So it was quite incredible, and I can't even remember the people, but who did we have? Let's see. Fang Lijun could not make it, but he phoned in a couple of nights and reported on what was happening, because at that very time was when Hu Yaobang had died and people had started to go into Tiananmen Square. Was there a call? Beidao. Beidao. Oh, you have it there. It's written somewhere. Yeah, it's written. You have a whole archive on this stuff. Wang Ruoshui. Wang Ruoshui. Who was the filmmaker? Chen Kaige. Chen Kaige and Wu Tianming. Wu Tianming. He was there. Liu Binyan. Liu Binyan was there. These are cornerstones of Chinese liberal intellectual community in the 80s and to some extent today. And there were others, I can't think of now. But the reason why we wanted to do it, or at least why I wanted to do it, was because I was thinking back to the May 4th Movement, and I was thinking all of these interesting people came out of the May 4th Movement, and they continued. Liu Xun. The Communist Party also came out of the May 4th Movement. It did. But many, a variety of impulses and influences and movements came out. But I thought, okay, maybe the 80s are like that. Let's get these people together and see what they're thinking, what they make of it. So we videoed the whole damn thing. I have it all someplace, I think it's in New York. And actually, one of my, this guy I wrote Wealth and Power with, took the whole archive, all of the videos which we'd transcribed. And he had a course on it, and they put it all together and made a little more sense out of it. So it's all sitting there for someone to look at. But that was so strange, because while this was beginning in 1989, we were sitting out here on the cliffs in Northern California. Oh, was Neil Shalvo there? I think he was. Oh, no, I think he was going to come, was on his way here, and then decided he had to go right back to Beijing. He was at Columbia. And I don't, you can find the list, there are a whole bunch of others who were there. I think Peter Tarnoff from the Council on Foreign Relations came out. It was sponsored by the New York Review of Books. Yeah, Bruno, was he there? He wasn't there. I'm trying to think who else. I think it's mostly academics, two journalists. Anyway, so there we were. And this thing was breaking loose in Beijing. We're getting these calls at night from finally telling us what was happening. We're all sitting there listening. And this was in April. So the minute everybody jumped on a plane and went back to Beijing, and then we spent the whole time there. And it was, I think, one of the most sort of extraordinary historical experiences that I will ever have a chance to watch and participate in. Because every day something happened. And it was like a television series. And to make matters worse for the party, Gorbachev was coming. And so the Chinese Communist Party had invited every media outlet in the world to come and cover Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping kissing, making up, and saying, all is forgiven on the sign of Soviet dispute. Let's be friends. And he's the first ever Soviet leader to visit China. Yes. So this was, so they had a terrible dilemma. All these journalists had arrived, and were arriving every day. And they had this mayhem in the square. And the square turned into this thing that was like a soundstage. It was just the worst possible nightmare for the party. And it wasn't just any square. It was the square at the very heart of the republic. The center of the center, the biggest square in the world, with a great hall of the people, with Zhongnanhai, Forbidden City, the Museum of History, all of these things. Which Mao built, as far as, exactly for the purpose of mass gathering. And Mao's mausoleum was there too. And Mao's portrait was there. And Mao's portrait was there, which did get splattered with ink at one point, and was considered an incredible insult. There it was. Every day we'd get up and go down, and oh my god, I wrote a couple of pieces on that. But it was just extraordinary to watch that unfold. To watch the different people pouring in. First of all, students and professionals, and then came the workers, and then came people from, on the trains from all over China. And that, we won't have to go into that in great detail, because people do know that story, and it ended, of course, very sadly. And, of course, before it ended, Zhang Ziyang appeared in a bus with Wang Jiabao, and lamenting that the party had come too late, and that he had tried to find some way. He had been in North Korea for a while, so he wasn't there when some of the big decisions got made. And that was a fatal error. And that was the last we saw of him.