Almost a Revolution: The Story of a Chinese Student's Journey from Boyhood to Leadership in Tiananmen Square (Ann Arbor Paperbacks) | 
| Author: Tong Shen
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 309601
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 376
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0472085573
Dewey Decimal Number: 951.058
EAN: 9780472085576
ASIN: 0472085573
Publication Date: October 15, 1998
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Condition: 66 x library
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Product Description
In his groundbreaking memoir about China's democracy movement and the massacre at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, student leader Shen Tong offers us a rare look at a bold and daring new generation of Chinese citizens who tried to protest the restraints imposed by their country's government. An organizer of the "dialogue delegation," whose goal was to negotiate with the government, Shen provides an insider's record of the day-to-day decisions that led up to June 4th. Written with the help of journalist Marianne Yen, the result is both a powerful documentary and a sensitive account of growing up in contemporary China.
Now nearly ten years later as our fascination with post-Deng China continues to develop, Shen's story and the updated material he provides are weighted with increasing significance. Coupled with much of the recent analysis, Shen's firsthand account vividly contextualizes the Chinese government's opposition to democracy and offers meaningful insight into a country that promises to occupy an increasingly prominent position in the world.
"A cause for celebration . . . an important contribution to China's newly discovered historical memory." --New York Times Book Review
Shen Tong is a doctoral student in political sociology at Boston University and the founder of the Democracy for China Fund, which aims to support and publicize dissent networks in China. Marianne Yen is a former New York correspondent for the Washington Post.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Not Quite A Good Book January 6, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I read this book because I was very interested in the topic and event surrounding Tiananmen. I wanted to get an inside view, and in many ways did from the author. But this was more of a memoir with the democracy build up as a background. The author even talks about his first kiss in his hometown. And when he goes to university the protests are all around him, and he has friends who are putting themselves on the line, and he cares, but basically he is a distant observer. All in all, a thorough disappointment.
 An inside look at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests with a background of growing up in China during the 1970s and 80s April 2, 2007
2 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book presents a good inside look at the 1989 democracy movement from the viewpoint of a key student leader. The reader learns about some aspects of the movement that have not been widely publicized, including the trials and tribulations of one of the principal organizers of the movement.
Also, a good documentary film about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests is Carma Hinton's "The Gate of Heavenly Peace." A condensed version of this film was broadcast on PBS Frontline in 1996.
This is not Frontline April 21, 2006
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
I just watched the recent Frontline about Tank Man, the man who bravely defied the line of tanks in Beijing, and went to Amazon to find books about the subject. Up came this book, among others, and I remember almost throwing it across the room over ten years ago when I read it. You have a guy who escaped, knew a few people involved, and whose only personal involvement is from the outside. He had no balls, and never dared risk himself. Sure, he knows the figureheads, the history, and can write about what happened as if was there. But he was hiding in his room, making himself out to be a hero. If you want to read a book with the only suspense being whether to finish it or not, then this is the one.
"We only want the government to talk with us and to say that we are not traitors." August 28, 2005
So said one of the student leaders, as quoted by Shen Tong (himself a leader) in "Almost a Revolution." This is a very fluidly written, personal account of the events leading up to the killings of workers & students by Chinese soldiers in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on June 5 1989. Fortunately, with more recent events in Ukraine, "Soviet" Georgia, Tajikistan, even Lebanon (not forgetting Eastern Europe), we have seen how revolutions gain strength, often like tropical storms that develope into hurricanes with surprising rapidity. Meteorologically, we can explain such happening on the weather front ONCE THEY OCCUR, but we're rarely capable of predicting such developments until they are almost in our faces, so to speak. The event that sparked events in China was the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15th. "Hu Yaobang had become something of a hero since he had been made the scapegoat of the 1986 student movement and ousted as general secretary, and many of us," says the author, "had hoped that he would be brought back someday to lead China on the road to reform." Acknowledgment of his passing by many, however, soon began to be read by the government as a renewed call for reform. Thus began the chain of events that resulted in students' boycotting classes, printing flyers, and finally, camping out in Tiananmen Square. In the author's view, "there was clearly an internal struggle going on between Li Peng [a hardliner] and Zhao Ziyang [a Chinese leader who had declared on May 7th his openness to a dialogue with the students]." Evidence of such was the fact that "starting May 17, the press in China operated without censorship from the goverment for a few days." Mikhail Gorbachev had arrived for a visit 2 days earlier and the Chinese government was seemingly caught off-guard in the headlights of the world's media for a moment while it contemplated how to respond a mass protest in Beijing's central square. The one fault of this book (besides no index) is that the author has nothing to say about this visit by Gorbachev. He mentions the Soviet leader's arrival and departure, but literally nothing otherwise; no impressions or anything how such a visit affected events on the ground in Beijing, or within the corridors of the Chinese government. This was before the collapse of Eastern Europe, mind you, but I find it hard to believe that the issue of Gorbachev (glasnost/reform) wasn't a topic of discussion amongst at least some of the student leaders arrayed around Shen Tong. Back to events: Martial Law was declared on May 20. On May 21 word began to filter out that Zhao Ziyang had been removed as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (though it wasn't announced until May 26th). The crackdown came soon after, but the author wasn't as much a witness & participant to this aspect as he was in all the events leading up to it. He doesn't, consequently, write much about the tanks entering Beijing (or the famous photograph of the solitary man courageously standing his ground before one particular one), or what exactly happened that day---he doesn't even guess at how many Chinese were killed. But, this is nevertheless a remarkable story (that reads quickly & gives much interesting detail of the author's childhood, particularly as it relates to his coming to question things & the role his intellectual father had on his development). Cheers!
History from a personal POV March 27, 1999
1 out of 26 found this review helpful
Too many history books deal in dry facts. This book tells the story of China and what led up to the Tiananmen Square massacre from the point of view of one young student who was pulled, sometimes against his will, into the thick of the political arena. I found it fascinating!
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