In the summer of 1991, I graduated from high school and was headed for Peking University, one of the hotbeds of the pro-democratic movement which had led to the Tiananmen Square protest two years earlier. But after the bloodshed in June 1989, the government had decided, as a precaution, to send all students entering Peking University to the army for a year of disciplining or “political re-education.” This programme lasted until the university had “changed blood” – meaning that younger students would no longer have direct contact with the troublemakers of Tiananmen.

We arrived at the army camp in Xinyang, a grey city in central China plagued by pickpockets and hepatitis A, in September 1991. The Soviet Union had just collapsed and, for the first three days, we were put into emergency ideological training. China was now sole leader of the communist world and we were to keep extra vigilant. On the way to our barracks, we sang a Soviet marching song. We also sang a Polish marching song, with the refrain, “Go Warsaw, let’s go forward bravely,” though, of course, Poland had also fallen by the wayside.

How, I have long since wondered, did China stay red amid the turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s? The country was opening and closing at the same time. Unlike North Korea and Cuba – both isolated and tightly controlled by dictators – China, since the early 1980s, had decided to welcome capitalist investment and western influences. In 1980, when I was seven, our neighbours purchased our building’s first television set. As if this event was not wondrous enough in itself, it was then announced that the main government television channel would broadcast a British drama series. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening at 8pm, the kids in the building turned up at the neighbours’ apartment for a programme called David Copperfield, which was said to be good for children. I vividly recall the crowded room in which we sat in rows, all eyes fixed on the nine-inch, black and white set. The story of David Copperfield, dark and frightening and beyond my understanding, depressed me. But my parents would not let me skip the bi-weekly television show – it was an opportunity they could not have dreamed of when they were young. Later that year, Madame Mao was publicly tried as a counter-revolutionary. The trial was broadcast and many adults joined the children in our neighbours’ apartment. Even though my parents told me how important it was, I nodded off right after Madame Mao was escorted into the court, and slept through the most significant event of the year.

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