The 12-hour train ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai gave me time to read a new book that, despite some flaws, I found extraordinary. Red China Blues is a sort-of memoir by Globe & Mail correspondent Jan Wong. Actually, the first two thirds are a memoir, chronicling Wong's experience as a Canadian-born ethnic Chinese taking part in the Cultural Revolution as a Maoist in 1972; the rest of the book focuses in relative detail on some aspect of China post-Cultural Revolution, most notably the Tiananmen Square massacre, which Wong was "lucky" enough to witness for herself, as well as the phenomenon of Chinese women sold or kidnapped to be wife-slaves in remote villages.

Way back in January I wrote that there are only a handful of topics that move me to tears simply by thinking of them. Yes, I know I am a sentimental fool, but when it comes to these subjects, the lump in the throat and the fighting back of tears are nearly automatic. The image of the New York City firefighters receiving last rites before they raced to their doom to save the lives of innocents during the 911 attack on the World Trade Center is one. Another is the Oskar Schindler creating the list that saved more than a thousand Jewish lives.

And then, most poignant to me --and I can't say exactly why -- was the young man standing off against the tank shortly before the People's Liberation Army, on direct orders of then Chairman Deng Xiaoping, shot to death thousands of innocent Chinese citizens, mainly young students, in the streets around Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989. Maybe it is because I actually "saw" (via television at least) the young man dancing with the tank, that this image has remained so fresh and vivid. It was fourteen years ago, and I still can't overcome the flood of emotion I experience at any reference to it.

Jan Wong's revelations of what it was actually like to be a part of the Cultural Revolution in all of its glory, in all of its insanity, is gripping and immensely informative. It certainly enriched my insight into why the Chinese are the people they are today. At times it made me furious, while often I simply had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. But ultimately there is little to laugh about; countless innocents lost their lives, and the same dogmatic brutality that brought us those ten years of hell also brought us the slaughter of the students in 1989.

I am grateful to Wong for shattering some of the myths we have (or that I have, anyway) about Tiananmen Square. The students weren't always noble. There was a lot of grandstanding and made-for-TV melodrama, and most ironically, the students in the square had set up their own little dictatorship and circles of authority that mirrored those of their oppressors. They were also gathering firearms. That said, it remains one of the most ruthless and bloody misdeeds of the second half of the century.

Wong brings us right into the midst of the holocaust. She describes moment by moment how the protests started and evolved, bringing the world's greatest plutocracy to the brink of civil war. Most shocking is the utter wickedness of Deng & Co. as they decided to commit cold-blooded mass murder. The oppressive heat was wearing down the students' momentum. Many on their own accord were leaving or getting ready to leave. Most horrifying to me was reading of how the troops opened fire on groups of students and civilians who were already in the process of leaving. The troops used machine guns and AK-47s and fired into the stampeding crowds again and again and again and again. It was sheer butchery. Wong takes us to her balcony in the Beijing Hotel overlooking the square, and you can almost hear the gunfire as she describes the volleys and their effects in excruciating detail. Finally, tanks came in and intentionally crushed students alive.

It has been confirmed that at least 2,600 citizens were wiped out on the dawn on June 4, though Wong says the final number is certainly far higher. (The government claims it was only a few hundred, and they were only shot after they started shooting the soldiers.)

I always wondered why there wasn't more outrage about the massacre. I remember hearing a political analyst shortly afterward saying that anyone who understood the history and the mentality of the Chinese Communist Party knew that the massacre was inevitable. There was simply no way that they could deal with such a challenge to their one-party, iron-fisted rule. Deng Xiaoping's ending of the Cultural Revolution and opening of China's markets might seem to us to be "good deeds," but in reality his goals were not that different from Mao's -- to strengthen the central government's control over its people and ensure the party's endurance. Deng realized China and its leadership would fall apart if it didn't have a body of educated citizens to compete in the modern world. The Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four had turned the nation's bastions of higher learning into travesties, mass-producing little miniature Maos at best, and thuggish zealots at worst. Deng knew he had no choice; the Cultural Revolution was ended. It was certainly the right thing to do, but it was first anjd foremost a practical decision; I don't believe it was inspired by any sense of altruism or humanity.

Wong goes on to describe many other sins of her once beloved Central Party. She describes impoverished peasants in Gansu province eating dirt, and families selling their daughters into slavery. She also describes the bullet-paced growth of China's economy in recent years, and how it just might create enough of a middle class to break the country out of its 4,000-year-old feudal system. Toward the end she writes:

My disillusion with the workers' paradise has not made me more cynical, just less patient. Having been there myself, I can no longer tolerate dogma in any form. I am suspicious of anything that is too theoretically tidy, too black and white. If I adhere to any creed today, it's the belief in human dignity and strength. Anything I do believe in today has to stand up to reason -- and be explainable to my five-year-old son.

So back to my sentimental reaction to the young man facing the tank. It was simply so brave, so beautiful, so...magnificent. The evil machinery of the Chinese Communist Party was being brought to a halt -- being brought to its knees -- by a young anonymous man who showed the courage to stand up to that evil machinery. And he disappeared and was never heard from again. (Wong believes he is alive and in hiding.) The poignancy of this moment, when the entire world held its breath and the Last Evil Empire quivered, can never be forgotten, just as the Tiananmen Massacre can never be forgiven. And I want anyone who happens to stumble onto my site and who actually has the patience (masochism?) to read such over-long posts as this to remember that the leadership in China today is basically the same as it was then. A little more relaxed, a little more open, and Jiang Zemin looks adorable when he smiles on TV. But as the SARS scandal drove home so vividly, they still exist to protect their privileged position and to stifle any and all criticism. Their key strategy is to keep China's citizenry as ignorant and as powerless as possible. Those who speak up are still imprisoned. And if students were to gather again in Tiananmen Square, they would be slaughtered as heartlessly today as they were 14 years ago.

More posts about Tiananmen Square:
Tiananmen Square re-revisited
The story behind the Tiananmen Square "tank man" photo
Reappraising Tiananmen Square