Jottings from the Granite Studio

Back in Beijing, pipes frozen and busted.  Ayi broke the lock on the front door. Plants are dead.  Cats are in a state of vexation.  Good to be home, though.

Part personal memoir, part history, Eddie Cheng’s Standoff at Τiananmen is a straightforward chronological retelling of the events which led up the 1989 student demonstrations and crackdown in Τiananmen Square.

Eddie Cheng was a student at Peking University in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the first half of the book reads like a personal memoir of those turbulent and exciting times. It is here the book makes its greatest contribution: While the stories of 1989 have been oft told, the critical events of the early 1980s, which gave shape to the ideas and actions of the students in the square, are too often shunted off as a mere prologue or a quick bit of expository background before getting to the truly dramatic images from the “Beijing Spring.”

Cheng’s book clearly chronicles the student agitation at Bei Da and other universities in the early 1980s.  Student demands in the handbills posted in Peking University’s famous “Triangle,” or the speeches by Fαng Lizhi and others seem brazen by 2010 standards.  Cheng even spares a moment for the absurd, including a story of how then Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin responded to student hecklers by reciting a part of the Gettysburg Address