Beijing-based writer Ma Bo, better known as Lao Gui, remembers taking his six-year-old son to the heart of the Chinese capital and hoisting the child on his shoulders to get a better view. In the spring of 1989, crowds of students had poured into Tiananmen Square to demand greater accountability from the government.
Ma, then a journalist and an active participant in the movement, was keen for himself and his son to witness history unfold. Then the tanks rolled through the square in a bloody crackdown in which hundreds of people, perhaps more than 1,000, died. “I never thought they [the government] would really launch a rampage,” he said.
