Young is 19 years old, the kind of bright young face who gets picked for glossy campus brochures. He attends Peking University, the top university in China. He is studying chemistry, out of a desire to help solve his country’s struggles with energy and the environment. He is a curious mind who scours Wikipedia for information, even on subjects outside the strictures of approved Chinese thought – such as what happened on June 4, 1989.
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Hundreds, perhaps thousands died that day alongside their dreams of a society where speech is free, government is not corrupt and people have the right to choose their own thoughts and destinies.
Perhaps nowhere is the demise of those dreams more striking than at Peking University, a place that 25 years ago was one of the hearts of the student movement.
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“Stability is what enables everyone to live a happy life,” he explains, echoing the central tenet of China’s Communist Party, which used the tanks of Tiananmen to cement its unyielding grip on the country. Even the real tally of how many died is obscured by China’s bid to delete the event from the memory of its people.
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Ten years after Tiananmen, a group of China’s top students told The Globe and Mail they did not believe any students died at Tiananmen.
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Many of those protesters once inhabited the very campus Young, and a new generation of very different students, now stroll. Had he been in charge he would have ordered them shot himself, he says.
“I would probably have chosen to do the same,” says Young.
-The Globe and Mail.
