Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian (Chatto & Windus, £17.99)
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If the Tiananmen protests hadn’t failed in 1989,” Ma Jian tells me, “there wouldn’t be this book. I wanted through it to find out how such a huge democratic movement could collapse.” The book in question is Beijing Coma, a story that has taken ten years to write and another two to translate, which anatomises this most poignant of doomed revolutions with an attention to detail that is almost orchestral—a beautiful, bewildering cacophony of voices and deeds. “From the outside,” Ma says, “the protests looked like a mass movement. But in fact they were tiny, disconnected pockets of people.” Like Orwell’s Catalonia in 1937, the Beijing students in 1989 were a mess of competing committees and would-be leaders, with moderates shouted down by radicals, and organisers unable to channel the popular sympathy they received. And yet, armed with nothing more than slogans, the 100,000 students who gathered in Tiananmen Square shook the world’s largest autocratic regime to its core.
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