Beads of perspiration stood out on Li’s forehead. His eyes burned with a curious fervour. “It was a nightmare. I know, I was there.” And the bloody images swam before his eyes, like the tears he had spilled during those four fateful June days, for the dead, for his country, for the devastating, wasteful futility of it all. “But I can look at China today,” he said, “and I see people with money in their pockets, roofs over the heads, food in their bellies, education for their children, an economy growing at ten per cent a year. And I look at what is happening in the former Soviet Union, or in Yugoslavia, in the name of freedom, and democracy. I see economic ruin, people going hungry, children dying of disease; I see war and rising crime and death and destruction in the streets. I don’t believe there are many Chinese who would swap what they have for that. You may not like communism, because you’ve been indoctrinated in the West by prejudice and preconception. But in China, for all its faults, it has brought stability and peace, and a population that is healthier, wealthier and better fed than at any time in its history.”

They had turned now into East Chang’an Avenue, Tiananmen Square receding behind them. Margaret glanced back, and tried to imagine the tanks rolling down the streets, the square jammed with a hundred thousand students. She recalled vividly the images that had flashed around the world of the student standing before a tank, refusing to let it past, and the tank driver’s attempts to get around him without hurting him. What bitter tears must have been spilled with the blood. She had heard the passion in Li’s voice, and understood perhaps for the first time the dreadful dichotomy inherent in those images. The wounds clearly still ran deep, and she wondered how it might have been if similar circumstances had presented themselves in the US. There had been rioting in the sixties and seventies over civil rights and Vietnam, divisions that had split the country down the middle. Only now, thirty years on, were some of those scars beginning to heal. Others were still raw.

She shook her head. “This is stupid,” she said. “We’re doing what people do that makes them go to war—arguing over their differences. When it’s our differences that make us . . .” She searched for the right words. “. . . human, unique.” He said nothing, and they drove in silence along the length of Jianguomennei Avenue past the CITIC building and the World Trade Centre and up the ramp on to the third ring road. Eventually she said, “Where are we going?” She needed a response from him. Any kind of response, to anything.

He said, “The Hard Rock Café.” But that was all. The atmosphere between them remained sour.