China and the ghosts of Tiananmen

In May 1989, I was a 20-year-old history student at Beijing University. By June 13 of that year, my name was at the top of the list of the 21 "most wanted" student leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement. I was arrested and spent nearly four years in jail, was rearrested in 1995, and then exiled to the United States in 1998.

I believed then and I believe now that the reforms that my fellow students and I were advocating -- for democracy, workers' rights and free speech, and against corruption -- are the central challenges that will shape China's destiny.

Secret memoirs by Zhao Ziyang, former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, have just been released. They reveal his conviction that our demands for economic and human rights reform were not only reasonable but could have accelerated China's modernization. Zhao lost a power struggle with hard-liners in 1989 -- after his last public appearance, meeting with students in Tiananmen Square -- and died under house arrest in 2005.

In the 20 years since our landmark demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, economic reforms have allowed millions of Chinese people to lift their families out of poverty, and many in China find their lives changed for the better.

But the central causes that the Tiananmen generation -- students and citizens alike -- took up remain unresolved. Today in China, corruption is endemic because the Chinese Communist Party and its vast network of officials remain above the law. Workers still face rights abuses, a problem likely to grow as the global economic downturn affects factories, sending home many millions of migrant laborers. The Chinese government's censorship of free speech is a central concern as the Internet gives voice to young people and critics.

China's economic growth has not led to liberty, a free press or democracy. On the contrary, like his predecessors, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, Chinese President Hu Jintao has invoked economic development to justify suppressing the Tiananmen protests and maintaining one-party rule.

Riddled with corruption, the system has benefited a privileged few, with local party secretaries becoming capitalists overnight and using their political power to accumulate huge sums of money from the profits of state-owned enterprises.