This is the first time I am writing about Tiananmen Square. I am telling my story now because 20 years later—the anniversary is June 4—two facts have become more apparent. The first is that the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests amounted to a one-time release of the Chinese people’s political passions, later replaced by a zeal for making money. The second is that after the summer of 1989, the incident vanished from the Chinese media. As a result, few young Chinese know anything about it.

But most important of all, I realise that the spring of 1989 was the only time I fully understood the words “the people.” Those words have little meaning in China today.

“The people,” or renmin, is one of the first phrases I learned to read and write. I knew our country was called ‘the People’s Republic of China’. Chairman Mao told us to “serve the people”. The most important paper was People’s Daily. “Since 1949, the people are the masters,” we learned to say.

In China today, only officials have “the people” on their lips. New vocabulary has sprouted up—netizens, stock traders, fund holders, celebrity fans, migrant laborers and so on—slicing into smaller pieces the already faded concept of “the people.” But in 1989, my 30th year, those words were not just an empty phrase.

Protests were spreading across the country, and in Beijing, where I was studying, the police suddenly disappeared from the streets. You could take the subway or a bus without paying, and everyone was smiling at one another. Students who had poured into Beijing from other parts of the country stood in the square or on a street corner, giving speeches day after day until their throats grew hoarse and they lost their voices. Their audience—whether wizened old men or mothers with babies in their arms—nodded repeatedly and applauded warmly.

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