Li swung the Jeep hard left, honking his horn and driving like a man possessed. They swept past Mao’s mausoleum on their left, and the great expanse of Tiananmen Square opened up before them, the orange-tiled roof of the Gate of Heavenly Peace shimmering in the hazy middle distance. “Don’t start,” he said. Hours of listening to his uncle debating world politics with his cronies had given him a good grasp of events over the past thirty years. “You’ll be telling me next how the United States had no part in supporting the murderous regime of the Shah of Iran, or in the downfall of the democratically elected president of Chile. That the United States was justified in dropping Agent Orange and napalm on innocent women and children in Vietnam, or in supporting tinpot dictators who were bleeding their people dry, because it suited US strategic policy.”

“What about the thousands of political prisoners held in Chinese jails without trial?”

“That’s history. Myth.”

“Oh yes?” She waved her hand out of the window at the square. “And I suppose it’s a myth that your government sent armed soldiers and tanks into this very square to mow down hundreds of unarmed students engaged in peaceful demonstration. Or is that just ‘history’ as well?”

“It’s as much history as the National Guardsmen who gunned down protesting students on campus at Kent State University in Ohio, in ’70. The only difference is one of scale.” He breathed deeply in frustration and banged his open hands down on top of the steering wheel. “Dammit, I’m not trying to justify Tiananmen, but the Western view of it is a romantic fiction. Peace-loving students demonstrating for freedom and democracy? Hah! Your cameras never covered the gangs of armed youths roaming the suburbs, attacking and murdering soldiers and police who were under orders not to harm them, and then stealing their weapons. What would your government have done if it had seen its very existence threatened by a million ranting students in the streets of Washington demanding that the President and the Congress explain their policies to them in person, and then abusing and humiliating them on live TV? If gangs of thugs were beating police officers to death, and the seeds of insurrection were being sown throughout the fifty states, do you think they would just have stood by and done nothing?”