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considerable political and economic consequences. I will only attempt now to raise the questions:
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Will Shanghai's students feel an obligation to be leaders in China's next attempt to seize truth and freedom?
Will Shanghai's leaders feel better able to resist the national Government's fiscal demands, especially if these are seen to be funding the modernisation of the People's Liberation Army?
Will Shanghai join other provincial areas (such as Guangdong) which depend for their planned growth on overseas investment, in trying to quarantine Peking politically? (The reduced traffic on flights from Shanghai to Peking and the hushed tones in which travellers from Peking are questioned, are mirror images of the way Shanghai was treated as a plague city by Peking residents during last year's hepatitis epidemic here).
What will be the extent of the damage to Shanghai's economy? (My US colleague's off-the-cuff estimate is that Shanghai will get US $250 million less investment from the US in the next year or
so than would have been the case with no massacre. However, a banker told me today of a US company quite ready to put new money into an existing joint venture admittedly one that will fill a current shortage since the products could include water-cannons!)
One question I can answer. The Big Lies about the massacre and life being "back to normal" are not believed here even if it is politic for politicians and private citizens to repeat them with varying degrees of superficial conviction. (One Russian legacy in China is the method school of acting). Everyone knows the media are back in the business of social realism: not life as it is but as it ought to be. This means that specific details of the truth may not be known and that rumours (supposedly inventions of domestic counter-revolutionaries and international agitators such as the BBC and VOA) abound. But what is published with an official imprimatur is known to be false in spirit and often literally untrue as well. There is a China-watching point here. Some pre-massacre commentators misread the "People's Daily" and "China Daily" as reflecting the official line when for a short period they carried a diversity of views bordering on press freedom (though no doubt also reflecting accurately the absence of strong unified political control).
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The coverage of events by the international media was effective but also biased. The bias came partly from Chinese restrictions on travel by foreign journalists outside Peking without 10 days prior notice. Nevertheless, the Peking-based view of events in China as a whole was often misleading. I noted one BBC World Service statement that
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/ "Many