Tiananmen Square

On my return from the meeting with Dr Fry, I spent some time walking about Tiananmen Square and took some photographs. Though I had not seen any wall posters there, I did notice six large portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hua. In the middle of Tiananmen Square there were several small open air photography stalls around which people were queuing up to have themselves photographed at the great revolutionary centre.

The situation had its parallels to the one that developed in China that year: one might not be in the mood to talk with that country's leaders after Tiananmen Square, but if you really wanted to move them in the direction of democracy, and get them to restore the very rights they had trampled on, you were better off talking to them than driving them into hard-headed isolation.