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The China Paradox: From Tiananmen to McDonald's
October 27, 1997
Web posted at: 4:21 p.m. EST (2121 GMT)CNN Hong Kong bureau chief Mike Chinoy spent many years as the network's first Beijing correspondent. The following is excerpted from his recently-published book, "China Live: Two Decades in the Heart of The Dragon."
By Mike Chinoy
This book is the story of my personal journey, the education of a foreign correspondent caught up in some of the most momentous events of the 20th century. China's turbulent transformation from Maoist poverty and isolation to rising superpower, wrought by the greatest economic boom of modern times but stained by the blood of Tiananmen Square, plays a central role in my narrative. However, the China story shares top billing with a profoundly important development of a different kind -- the emergence of global satellite TV news, with its power to transmit human experience in real time across vast distances, crucially influencing political decisions, economic relations, and social trends.
For most of my adult life, I have been in the unusual and sometimes uncomfortable position of straddling both these powerful forces, watching as they interacted and sometimes collided. My experiences in the television revolution and the Chinese revolution -- eight years as a Hong Kong-based China-watcher, nearly five years as a London-based roving reporter, and another eight years as CNN's Beijing bureau chief -- form the heart of this book.
The People's Republic is a paradox -- arguably both the best and worst country in the world in which to be a TV reporter. China's colorful people, breathtaking landscape, and rich history are a cameraperson's dream. Its historic changes make the People's Republic during the last quarter of the 20th century one of the most compelling news stories ever. Yet its politics remain steeped in secrecy, its leaders hostile to reporters with cameras, and its entire culture imbued with a deep suspicion of foreigners. Deciphering its complexities and contradictions -- let alone translating them into a medium that favors action, drama, and confrontation over ideas, subtlety, and contemplation-proved to be a daunting, at times overpowering, task.
How ironic, then, that it was China during the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989 that provided the setting for one of the defining moments of the Information Age: the first time a popular uprising in an authoritarian state was broadcast live around the world. The images from that time -- the Goddess of Democracy and the man who stopped the tank -- have taken their place as enduring symbols of protest. Even today they retain the power to stir emotions, so much so that they have somewhat distorted international understanding of the dramatic changes in China since Tiananmen. By the early 1990s, there was a vast gap between conventional Western perceptions of China as a one-dimensional police state, and the reality of a booming, vibrant, increasingly open and more loosely controlled society. I found myself in the curious position of feeling compelled to try, in my reporting, to undo the impact of images I had helped broadcast in 1989.
On the morning of June 4, 1995, I took a taxi and returned to Tiananmen Square for a last look before my departure. The weather was the same as on the day of the massacre: hot, sunny, and muggy. Driving along Changan Street, I passed the corner at Wangfujing where the young man had so bravely stopped the tank. It was now the site of largest McDonald's in the world.
Another sign of the changing times: across from the Beijing Hotel was a huge billboard promoting an anti-corruption conference.
I got out near the East Gate of the Great Hall of the People, where the protesting students had gathered on the day of Hu Yaobang's funeral in 1989 to demand dialogue with the government. Walking into the square, I passed scores of plainclothes policemen whose identity was obvious from their walkie-talkies, earpieces, and handycams. One of them was surreptitiously taking pictures of me. At the base of the Monument to the Heroes of the Revolution, I saw five teenagers dressed in white shirts and red pants, two of them solemnly holding a red flag. The crowds were sparse this day. Most people had apparently heeded the by-now annual warnings from the government to stay away from the square.
It was unnaturally quiet. Yet when I shut my eyes, my mind was swept by images from that magical, terrible time. I could almost feel the crush of bodies, the excitement, the tension, and I could hear echoes of the chants and songs. I could also feel the ghosts from the night of June 4, an almost palpable presence.
I stared across the street at Tiananmen rostrum, with its giant portrait of Chairman Mao. Even now, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, so imposing and full of history -- such a potent symbol of my own long China journey -- held the power to move me. I had been drawn to China because, at a time of tumult in my own country, I believed the Chinese revolution offered hope and inspiration to a troubled world. That had been one of the first of my youthful illusions to go. Yet as I prepared to return to the United States 22 years after I first set foot in the People's Republic, I had to admit I still found it hard to get a handle on a country I had learned was far more complicated and difficult to understand than I had ever imagined. In 1973, the veneer of Maoist political conformity and the all-pervasive sense of revolutionary mission had masked the tensions, conflicts, and human dramas just below the surface of Chinese society. In the partly open China of the mid-1990s, it was possible to identify and even report on many of these once-hidden complexities. But I remained unsure what to make of them.
From a nation of certainties, China now seemed to me a country of paradoxes, which could not be reduced either to the ideological simplicities of my youth or the journalistic simplicities that so often characterized foreign reporting from Beijing. There were so many questions. How did one reconcile a society bursting with new forms of wealth and entrepreneurial energy, in which tens of millions of people had been lifted out of poverty in perhaps the greatest economic miracle of modern times, with one rotted by corruption and despotism, where those who dared to speak out were ruthlessly suppressed? In spite of the repression, was the Chinese Communist Party really in charge? Or was it like a hard crust clamped over a seething, boiling mass that threatened to crack its authority -- to the point that it could well become a marginalized force in the China of the next century?
I did not know the answers, and there were times I still felt like the character in Zhuangzi's fable -- not sure if I was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. But I did know that watching the Chinese come alive in the years after Mao, living through and telling the world about their achievements and disasters for the better part of a decade, taught me more about heroism and cruelty, wisdom and folly, truth and falsehood -- in short the human condition -- than anything else I could have ever imagined. China was a hard school, and none of what I learned there came easily. But I had no regrets that this ancient, tumultuous country had consumed almost a quarter-century of my life.
As I turned to leave the square, a man walked by me. When I saw his T-shirt, I did a double take. It read "Live Free or Die." I looked more closely. It was the motto of New Hampshire, emblazoned on the state's license plate. In smaller letters, I read: Souvenir of USA.
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