even though many times on meager rations. Before Doug Merwin
came along, I had collected quite a few rejection slips.

Oh yes, there was the students' demonstration at Tiananmen.

Since China: A Macro History was published only months before
the bloodletting, and I was in China in 1987, a reviewer for Chinese-
American Forum of Maryland charged me for being "insensitive" to-
ward the students who had been making demands on and off for some
time. What was unknown to him was that by then convinced that
China's revolution was running in the right course and the fulfillment
of its objective was in sight, I indeed had not paid much attention to
the sporadic demonstrations prior to 1989. But the events at Tianan-
men did disturb me.

I was afraid that a mass demonstration at this point, with neither a
specific aim nor a clearly defined platform, would do more harm than
good. Furthermore, having some knowledge of the public psychology
of the Chinese, I had to fight the premonition that the students were
courting disaster when their holdout on the square extended over
weeks. In mid-May I finally wrote an appeal of 7,000 words, urging
the demonstrators to narrow down their aim and to seek an early settle-
ment. After I conferred with Liang Heng, the publisher of The Chinese
Intellectual in New York, the article was mailed to Dai Qing of the
Guangming Daily in Beijing on May 17, in the hope that she might be
able to publish it. But before we ever heard from her, there came the
stacatto blasts of machineguns and tongues of flame on troop carriers,
transmitted on every TV set. As a result, the Sino-American relation-
ship was strained for years.

We knew that Dai Qing did go to the Square to ask the hunger-strik-
ers to return to their campuses. We knew that regardless, she was
imprisoned afterward. For some time Liang Heng and I were afraid
that my unsolicited manuscript might have caused her trouble. But to
my surprise she came to my home for a visit three years ago, express-
ing no displeasure for my sending her the suspicious message at an
inopportune moment. I could never claim that she and I agree on
everything, yet she was gracious enough to read both China: A Macro
History and my book on capitalism and tried to place them with main-
land Chinese publishers, as if she still owed me something for
distributing my writing to Chinese readers. (As it turned out, my pub-
lisher in Taipei had made a prior arrangement with another house.)

Indeed, compared with the sacrifices of others, the few bruises I suf-

-xv-