BBC News Online: World: From Our Own Correspondent

Tiananmen revisited

Everything seems the same, and yet everything is entirely different.

A couple of days ago, I found myself at Beijing University, standing on exactly the spot where, back in May 1989, I saw the students crowding round to read the latest posters denouncing Deng Xiaoping and calling for all sorts of wonderful things - democracy, freedom, love and universal harmony.

A day or so later, these same students trooped off to Tiananmen Square. And exactly a month after that, some of them were gunned down by the Chinese army.

Now the sun was just as bright, and the humidity as intense and the crowds round the notice board just as interested.

From Marx & Engels to Procter & Gamble

The difference was, these posters were not about politics - they were about jobs.

"Procter and Gamble seek graduates with good grades for six-month training scheme" - that kind of thing. All sorts of big international corporations were advertising here.

I spoke to some of the students, just as I had nine years ago. Then, they had talked about democracy and freedom, though they did not understand much about either.

Now they talked about jobs and money, and they understood everything. And the young Communists among them were even keener than the rest. Forget Marx and Engels; it is Procter and Gamble who are the social prophets in today's China.

The following day, I went down the road the students took in May 1989 to Tiananmen Square. My colleagues and I were hoping to do a spot of filming.

It is not easy in the normal way: the Chinese authorities know that only one subject takes Western camera crews there, and that is the massacre which, officially speaking, did not exist.

'Incident' or `tragedy'?

Nowadays, liberals in China talk about the Tiananmen tragedy. Middle of the roaders talk about the Tiananmen incident, and hard-liners deny that any massacre took place at all. It was, they say, invented by people like me and the international media, who actually watched it happen.

I was in the square on one other occasion since 1989.

It was about 18 months ago and we were not allowed anywhere near the monument in the middle, where the worst of the massacre took place. A very nice, very good-looking policewoman came over and said, yes, she had seen me on the BBC but even so we could not film there.

This time, though, no one tried to stop us. A couple of uniformed policemen came up, looked at our passes and hurried off as thought they might catch something.

Then, as we headed for the monument, a couple of young characters danced around taking joking pictures of us. I would have laughed, too, if I had not remembered that this was exactly the way the secret police did it here.

Finally a man in a T-shirt stretched over his fat gut strutted over and asked for our papers. When I asked for his, he flourished his walkie-talkie. That made him a secret policeman, too.

History re-written

But even he did not stop us, and we were free to film all the things I have so often thought about in the last nine years: The monument's plinth, where the students huddled for shelter that hot night. The steps leading up to it, which ran with blood.

The marble relief around the base, which was smashed by bullets and has been replaced entirely now. There was not a bullet-hole in sight; you could never tell now that anything had happened there.

The hard-liners have managed to rewrite history.

The reason we were allowed so close was that President Clinton was due in the Square the following morning, and the police did not want any trouble.

Clinton and Tiananmen

Mr Clinton is, I have got no doubt, a man to whom human rights means a great deal. But he also has a country to run and at the moment his country needs a better relationship with China.

By standing in Tiananmen Square and reviewing the guard of honour he is saying, in effect, "it is merely a big ceremonial area and there is no reason why I should not stand in it."

Maybe diplomatically, that is right. But as far as I could make out the place where he would have to stand, was where a couple of armoured personnel carriers drove over a line of student tents on the night of the massacre. And the tents had students in them.

I had spoken to some of those students a short while before, and I remember them very well; their fear, their gentleness, and how thin and feeble they looked.

I particularly remember how one young boy and girl clung to each other and stared emptily out into the darkness.

To the best of my knowledge the armoured personnel carriers drove over them too.

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