A novel of China’s crushed democracy movement

The year 1989 was a watershed year in China, as it was in communist Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall fell that November and the Solidarity movement won Poland‘s first free elections since the end of World War II. In China, there was the massive student-led uprising against the Communist Party-controlled government at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and its environs during the spring of 1989. A 33-foot-tall papier-mache statue dubbed the Goddess of Democracy and resembling the Statue of Liberty with her upraised torch appeared in the square.