Tiananmen天安门Like others, I consider 4 June 1989 to symbolize an important missed opportunity in China's path towards democracy, but not in the sense others usually meant: I thought it was the demonstrators who should have done things differently.

On 4 June Zhao Ziyang went to Tiananmen and warned to students, in tears, that military force was about to be used to clear the square. Later that day the various leaders, in particular Cai Ling and Wuer Kaixi, decided to make their escape. They had a great deal of cash on hand, mostly donations from sympathetic organizations in Hongkong and Taiwan (some of which were presumably CIA fronts, though I dont consider this to be a significant issue - their influence on events was limited, relative to the dynamics of the events themselves), and took most of it with them. They did not advise their followers to leave, however, and instead encouraged them to remain and continue the stand, thus condemning many of them to death, injury and arrest, not a good record to leave behind as democratic revolutionaries.

Suppose the leaders did the reverse: asking the followers to leave when there was still time, but they themselves remained in the tent, waiting for the troops to come and arrest them later that night? They would have gone down in history as heroic figures, and provided inspiration to all those who wish to promote Chinese democracy. The risk involved would have been very low: many officials and journalists were sympathetic, including Zhao Ziyang himself, and the retaliation they might have suffered would have been low. Further, as China subsequently opened up, they would have been symbols, even leaders, of the new way of life, and there was a good chance that the party system would absorb them and make them high officials - accepting rebels and warlords as nominally subservient followers is a well established method in Chinese history.

Instead, Cai Ling and Wuer Kaixi, by getting help from relatives and bribing officials, escaped to USA, and thoroughly discredited themselves by living as celebrities. Their subsequent contribution towards the democracy movement was negligible. Others such as Wang Dan were less lucky, and languished in prison for a number of years before being allowed to go overseas, but they too failed to revive the movement.

But in other ways, the effect of their failure was even more disastrous: Zhao Ziyang was blamed for weakness, in not suppressing the Tiananmen occupation in May while it could have been done without military force, thus allowing the matter to blow up beyond control, and in failing to go along with the 4/6 suppression. Moderates were discredited and hardliners like Yang Shangqun rose in influence. If the students had dispersed peacefully, the moderates could save face by pointing to China's tolerance and openness, and though some would have gone down anyway, at least some would have survived better.

Before Tiananmen, there was some real chance that Hongkong and Taiwan could be able to play a part in helping China to modernize and democratize; afterwards, the Party was much more suspicious and took much harder lines towards the two territories. This was partly responsible for the catastrophic turn of Taiwan politics since then, while Hongkong gave up all attempts to be assertive towards Beijing, in part because the 1997 Asian financial crisis caused a great loss of self confidence and Hongkong was in need of economic concessions, such as allowing mainland tourists to visit the territory.

In China itself, the failure of the previously promising idealistic, tolerant spirit meant that, when the opening up actually came, it was purely commercial, and the whole of Chinese culture, in politics, business, education, research, entertainment, literature, and just about anything else, went down before crass commercialism.

Like the officials they struggled against so briefly and so pathetically, the student leaders were products of the same system. They knew little about democracy and liberty and were ill equipped to fight for them. Both at Tiananmen Square and in China or elsewhere afterwards, they failed to build up organizations and movements that followed democratic practices, but instead ran little self-centred shows that were, even at their best, ineffective against the collosal and historical Chinese system of authoritarianism.

I pity those still trying hard to overturn the verdict of 4 June: they did not learn the right lessons and blame the right participants.