Chinese Students Protest in Beijing

When I was in Beijing in 1984 attending one of the conferences that broke down the barriers between Chinese and Western science, one of our hosts referred to the Cultural Revolution as the “counterrevolution.” Suspecting a Freudian slip, I inquired further and found my informant to be dead serious--the Red Guards had been deliberately unleashed to apply a death blow to the ideals of the Chinese Revolution.

Happily, as the present generation of Chinese youth demonstrates, decades of thought control have failed to crush the irrepressible spirit of human liberation. Cynical and patronizing Western commentators may tell us that the Chinese students don’t really understand the “democracy” that they are shouting about.

On the contrary, they understand it all too well for the comfort of the power elites throughout the world. They may be unwilling to settle for the mercenary, corporate, bureaucratic brand of democracy that we accept with such docility. Perhaps that is why the Western governments respond with such pathetic ambivalence to the momentous events that represent China’s latest contribution to world civilization.

GILBERT DEWART

Pasadena