Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (88 page)

Major world events, including the revolutions and upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, are reported.

Between 1983 and 1989, I went back to visit my mother every year, and each time I was overwhelmed by the dramatic diminution of the one thing that had most characterized life under Mao: fear.

In spring 1989 I traveled around China researching this book.  I saw the buildup of demonstrations from Chengdu to Tiananmen Square.  It struck me that fear had been forgotten to such an extent that few of the millions of demonstrators perceived danger.  Most seemed to be taken by surprise when the army opened fire.  Back in London, I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the killing on television.  Was it really ordered by the same man who had been to me and to so many others a liberator?

Fear made a tentative comeback, but without the all pervasive and crushing force of the Maoist days.  In political meetings today, people openly criticize Party leaders by name.  The course of liberalization is irreversible.  Yet Mao's face still stares down on Tiananmen Square.

The economic reforms of the 1980s brought an unprecedented rise in the standard of living, partly thanks to foreign trade and investment Everywhere in China officials and citizens greet businessmen from abroad with overflowing eagerness.  In 1988, on a trip to Jinzhou, my mother was staying at Yu-lin's small, dark, primitive apartment, which was next to a rubbish dump.  Across the street stands the best hotel in Jinzhou, where lavish feasts are laid on every day for potential investors from overseas.

One day, my mother spotted one such visitor coming out of a banquet, surrounded by a flattering crowd to whom he was showing off photographs of his luxury house and cars in Taiwan.  It was Yao-han, the Kuomintang political supervisor at her school who, forty years earlier, had been responsible for her arrest.

May 1991