It was twenty years ago today...

A beautiful, doomed experiment came to an end...

Leaving images of hopeless, despairing courage...

And of horror.

And yet the still-evolving China that exists today is not the China of 20 years ago. To my surprise, looking back on the quiet despair I felt over the massacre, I find that those young people who died in Tienanmen Square didn't lose their battle, after all. They won. They didn't win in any glorious, immediate, startling way. But they did win, and they're still winning. Trends of 70 years, already in collapse before they began their protests, have continued to reverse themselves and have accelerated their reverse. It's possible none of what we see in China today would have happened, if not for Tienanmen Square.

China isn't Libertopia, and probably never will be. But it's not the same China in which Mao's "cultural revolution" was possible, either. And that's not nothing. The people of the April/May/June 1989 protests, which sprung up in hundreds of cities across China though we only remember one, won their fight. They didn't win it all, but they won a lot. Good for them.