A journalist merges family history with his own experience in Beijing to provide a fascinating insight into Chinese life and politics

It’s hard to think of a country that has changed as fundamentally as China without altering its basic political system. When I first visited Beijing, three weeks before the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, the main avenues of the city were rivers of bicycles. The very few cars you saw were official ones, with senior party figures sitting stiffly in the back. In the street, you’d be surrounded by staring, smiling people who had never seen a European before. When I jotted things in my notebook, they would crane their necks to see the strange, barbaric signs I was making. If you asked the students in Tiananmen Square what they wanted, they invariably said “democracy”; yet scarcely any of them had the slightest idea what that meant.

Deng Xiaoping, who ultimately gave the order to open fire on the demonstrators, was responsible for the extraordinary enrichment of ordinary Chinese people, eventually lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. It’s conventional to say that modern China is based on a compromise: we’ll make you rich, if you don’t ask for political change. But that makes it sound as though it’s an open choice. In fact, the Chinese Communist party decided after 1989 that even the slightest letup in its fierce control over society might lead to a new Tiananmen, or to the kind of collapse which happened to the Soviet Union. There’s very little ideology in today’s Chinese system, as anyone who has had to plough through the basic documents of “Xi Jinping Thought” can attest. It’s all about keeping control.