China Rising: The Meaning of Tiananmen

Feigon, director of East Asian studies at Colby College in Maine, who was living in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre, here provides a richly informative if controversial eyewitness account of the student movement and its brutal suppression. Tracing other student movements in Chinese history, he shows that they have invariably proved counterproductive: ``Each of their protest movements has created a new organization just as inimical to student ideas as the one they helped destroy.'' In the 1989 struggle, argues Feigon, students were more occupied establishing that they were not counterrevolutionaries than in planning how to reform the Communist party. The author's harsh judgment will startle readers. (May)