Deng Xiaoping, Democracy Wall, and the Dialetics of China — with Orville Schell
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Hello listeners, welcome to the Peking Hotel podcast. I'm your host Leo. This is a podcast about the personal history of people who worked on issues related to China. By tracing the personal stories of scholars, journalists, diplomats and business leaders dealing with China, I hope to preserve candid memories of China

and tell the story of an open China, one that we all miss and remains embedded in the Chinese society today. For this first episode of the podcast, I've selected an hour of conversation with Orville Schell,

Now, in my opinion, Orville is a legendary journalist and has had an amazing life engaging China. He studied Chinese history with John Fairbank at Harvard, met Chiang Kai-shek 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 the Tiananmen Massacre called Gates of Heavenly Peace, and so much more.

He has personally witnessed the whole process of engagement from the end of Mao Zedong to the rise of Xi Jinping, with deep personal ties to the Chinese civil society, most notably Fang Lizhi, one of China's most renowned physicists and dissident intellectuals. He has accompanied presidential trips from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, watching Chinese and American leaders at close range. Orville now runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society.

This conversation is selected from my 14-hour interview with Orville that traces his whole life of engaging China. I hope to publish other parts of our conversation in the future. In this talk, we focus on China in the 80s, a magical decade that continues to elicit nostalgia, despair, and hopefulness.

Orville would talk about his personal experience accompanying Deng Xiaoping's visit to America in 1979, China in the 80s, Zhao Ziyang's interview with the NBC, and the massacre in Tiananmen that abruptly ended that decade of incredible energy.

This episode was co-produced with China Books Review, a new digital magazine of commentary and listings on all things China and bookish, which you can explore at chinabooksreview.com. Tyler Nee assisted with editing. I hope you 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. It was near that time China got let in. So that was a start. But there are many in the United States Congress who are very reluctant just to kick Taiwan out and recognize China. So that didn't really happen until 1979 at Carter Memorial.

managed to arrange that and people like Mike Oxenberg, who was his National Security Counsel, 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. So I got to go on the whole trip. Did The New York Times call you up? Do you want to join our trip with Don't Help Me? 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. And then I went to Atlanta with them and Carter because it was Carter's home state and watched him there. And then we went to Texas and to the Johnson Space Center and then down to this rodeo. 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, 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 model suit and everything.

The second thing that impressed me was that this is 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. They had a lot of help from like CBS and NBC and doing satellite links and all of these things. Was this CCTV? 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 that were helping each other.

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 that, I don't know, the Americans were really helping the Chinese.

And it was very collaborative. 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 this rodeo and barbecue in Texas was the magical theatrical moment when, symbolically speaking, Deng Xiaoping accepted America by wearing the cowboy hat, the 10-gallon hat.

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. 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. Still helping study 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 landowner in a spot he wasn't an insecure man 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 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 he 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.

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 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 even scarier just because this person, you wouldn't expect him to do that?

The massacre was just awful. It's 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 center of the century, he couldn't follow it. And he had Gorbachev coming. He had to go to the airport and meet him. Couldn't do it, have proper ceremony in Tenement 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 as I have, the meeting he had with Brent Sconecroft a few days after the massacre when President Bush sent Sconecroft secretly to China. And that's Bush's national security advisor. Yes. And even Ambassador Ejana didn't know about this. Didn't know.

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 Skolkoff. And Skolkoff 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 the 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 me. It was a pretty incredible display to this man who'd flown all the way over to pusillanimously and almost humiliatingly, abjectly beg China to keep the relationship going. So you could see that even Dong, as strong as he was and as

as amazing, I think, as he was as a leader, was heard, 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, what, 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. Bless 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

The relationship with this other significant and great power that they'd spend a lot of time cultivating and trying to work things out with. Rightfully or wrongfully, I'd look at it more like a play where you have to understand the motivations of the characters. And Dung's was he was hurt deeply. Doesn't excuse it, but I understand it.

Nonetheless, after that, he went on his nanshun, 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 a crackdown of three, four, five years, went with Jiang Zemin, things did get warmer and more open.

But some lessons have been learned about how far you want to let a form 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. 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, it 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, then 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 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? Could this possibly be something real happening?" People were very uncertain.

And so it was during that period, 1979, the democracy wall erupted and that was a pretty extraordinary thing because this little unprepossessing wall around a municipal bus parking lot in Xidan, in the 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. He supported it because he needed to secure his own ability to become, in effect, the supreme leader. And he had to get Poirot-Fon off stage and a few other conservatives.

But then, of course, ultimately, democracy, well, and that whole movement went on for weeks and weeks, was not the kind of thing the 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 were looking at this and saying, what's happening here? And I remember it 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. The Jia Zeyang was trying to remove party control from the state-owned enterprises, experimenting in Sichuan and then making it national. Hu Yaobang was amazingly open, almost a little bit erratic, an unpredictable party general secretary.

and went off to Japan. I remember we wanted to bury the hatchet with Japan. And then of course they got rid of them because 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 Yaobang.

Strangely, it was only in retrospect that we really could see how experimental and open-minded Khuyabon 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. But it used to be everything was communized, all the nomads, the yak herds and sheep herds, and all of this was falling apart.

Huyao Long 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 the leadership absorbed that sort of thing.

When then student demonstrations began breaking out, both in Beijing and places like Hefei, the University of Technology there, I think that did alarm the party a lot. And so they got rid of Hui Abong. They instated Zhao Ziyang, who had been premier. But things continued.

But Zhao Ziyang was also a relatively open humanistic person. And I remember one occasion, we were very close friends with his daughter. 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 country going to China. 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 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 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. I remember vividly he had beside him a table. He had a bottle of beer on it. He was 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 Fonny Jure came up. And Fonny Jure was a very good friend of Bifong 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, 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 some of the activities Fang Nijiu was engaging in did not speak of him as being a really disciplined, loyal party member.

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. And I think they did take his vice chancellorship away. But they did give him a place in Beijing, and they put him in some institute. He could still see people and interact and go abroad, and he did.

And he wrote some wonderful essays as he was in Italy as 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. 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. And 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.

He had all these very interesting views. He said, I think he might have to go back and wrote about all of this stuff at the time, but that communism, he said, was like an old worn-out dress that you had to take off and get rid of. 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 up, 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's pretty incredible.

And there was a paper in Shanghai, I remember. Forget who was editor. It was the World Economic Herald. There 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.

It 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 local party-run department store. And 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.

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 shafang, the older people to the May 7th cadre schools all around the country, were let go. And they were pouring back into the cities. They had no jobs. There was no private companies to hire them.

There were only official Da Wens and they couldn't take them in. There was this name, they called them Da Yeh, 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 and they'd start a restaurant. They'd set up a little shop and find some little nook

And then state-owned enterprises began to think, ah, 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 maybe twice a week in a village or a town, a country town, and peasants from all around would come in with their donkey carts, sell their cabbages, sell their tools, whatever it was they had to sell.

And almost just like that, China gave birth to this spontaneous eruption of private, very small-scale entrepreneurial activity. It was an amazing sight to see, driving through the countryside or running into one of these private markets that was just people bartering, people haggling.

No matter where you looked, the country was coming alive again in a more open, free-spirited, entrepreneurial, even market-based way. And 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 excess space and they rented out to restaurants or private businesses or they'd rent the wall out for advertisements. And you got some of the most insanely incongruous advertisements going up around the country. All of these things were accessible.

The people like me and foreign journalists were led in, of course, for the first time in 1979. All of the major sort of media outlets got to send one or two people. And so suddenly Beijing had 30 foreign journalists that had never been there before. 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.

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. It came out as a book. I guess that was the To Get Rich is Glorious. Because there was this slogan, Fuyu Guangrou. And again, it struck me as the most incongruous slogan after all Mao's slogan about Da Di Guo Jiuyi, Da Min Ziban Jiuyi, all of these slogans about wanting to destroy. Right.

markets and destroy foreign intervention and all of these things. And the previous slogan was 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. I remember that 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 developing an entrepreneurial spirit, not just political spirit, which is, of course, what was the currency of the realm in the Cultural Revolution when there was a battle between red and expert.

experts were bad.

They were the intellectuals who knew something, read ideologically pure people were good. This is a complete reversal. I think when we look back at this period, people say it's still run by Leninist party was still in control. This was epiphenomenal on the surface. Nothing really had changed. Fair enough, but something had changed. 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.

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 would 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,

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.

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 Renmin Gongshe, 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. This whole thing that started in the countryside, very quietly, we didn't quite realize what was happening, where it was going to go, etc.

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 1980s and banks, credit card companies, investors started trooping in and Deng Xiaoping and his gang said, let's get together.

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 during the Cultural Revolution. Yeah, and had broken his back. Broken his legs.

Basically, he is spinal cord. Yeah, spinal cord. So he was in a wheelchair. He came over to America and I got a call. You get who it was from. I think the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored his trip. Maybe it was a committee on U.S.-China relations. I

And so they wanted to bring him out to the countryside in America. And I said, come on out to our ranch and we can go to the little country school and you can see this sat near it. Out comes Dung Poo Fong 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, had a barbecue, had

out on the porch. I have a vase. You see it? It's right up there. A little white vase. A little pingser. It's going to Pufang. What is it? The Foundation. He gave it to us. The All China Disability Foundation. Yeah.

So we had a nice barbecue and of course he wanted hot sauce. Being from, I guess he was... The tribe. The T'Chuant 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 there.

It was all organized, 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. Was this the 70s or 80s? Oh, this was probably, this was the 80s. I think I was just writing. I can't remember.

It was an emblem of the kind of openness and interaction that went on. And it was very hopeful. And I think it made everybody feel that particularly we Westerners, but perhaps also Chinese who had a beautiful notion of Marxism is based on Hegel, dialectical history moving towards a direction.

In Lawrence's case, it was towards revolution and socialism and paradise. The Western version was, 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 greater openness.

and a sort of higher stage of human activity. Perhaps also in the spirit of Francis Fukuyama. 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 aggressive 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, something else.

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 from abroad. 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 previously unthinkable.

Of course, this all culminated when Hu Yaobang, who actually I think people had properly appreciated as being quite open, 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 a classic Chinese tradition, you can't not memorialize and celebrate the death of some person.

So that's when people started flooding into Tiananmen Square. At that time, what was so strange was Bai Feng and I had organized with Tung Kai Ge and Hong Huang, who they were married at the time, and Bai Jianming 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. Mike Oxenberg and Andy Nathan came and Perry Link and...

I forget, did Ezra Vogel come? Maybe. Tom Gold from Berkeley. It was quite incredible. And I can't even remember the people, but who else, who did we have? Let's see. Von Leder 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 Huyaobong had died and people had started to go into Tiananmen Square.

Was there a Kong? Bei Dao. Bei Dao. Oh, you have it there. See, 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 was the filmmaker. Chen Kaige and Wu Tianming. Wu Tianming. He was there. Liu Bingyan. Liu Bingyan 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.

I was thinking all of these interesting people came out of the May 4th movement and they continued. The Commerce Party also came out of the May 4th movement. It did. But a variety of impulses and influences and movements came out of it. But I thought, let's get these people together.

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, the guy I wrote Wealth and Power with took the whole archive, all of the videos which we 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.

Oh, was Neil Chabot 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. Peter Tarnoff from the Council on Foreign Relations came out. It was sponsored by the New York Review of Books. Yeah, and Brunman, was he there? He wasn't there.

Trying to think who else is mostly academics, a few 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. This was in April. So the minute everybody jumped on a plane and went back to Beijing and we spent the whole time there.

It was, I think, one of the most extraordinary historical experiences that I will ever have a chance to watch and participate in because every day something happened. 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 and making up and saying, all is forgiven on the side of Soviet dispute. Let's be friends. And he's the first ever Soviet leader to visit China. Yes.

So they had a terrible dilemma. All these journalists had arrived and were arriving every day, and they had this mayhem in the square.

The square turned into this thing that was like a sound stage. It was 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 of the center, the biggest square in the world with the Great Hall of the People, with Zhongnanhai, Forbidden City, the Museum of History, all of these things.

which Mao built at first 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 on the trains from all over China. And 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,

Zhao Ziyang appeared in a bus with Wang Jiabao 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.

I hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you like what you just heard, do subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts and repost on your social media. We've also launched Substack newsletters in both Chinese and English with links below if you're interested. I've only just begun this new project, so any support is warmly appreciated. And once again, a shout out to our partner China Books Review, which co-produced this episode, and to my wonderful editor Tai Li. I'll see you next time.