Many of us who had spent years reporting on China watched with a feeling of slow-motion tragedy the unfolding of events in the Chinese capital in the spring of 1989, when student-led democracy protests started in Beijing and then across the country. Ultimately, it ended two months later in brutal suppression of the protest by the Chinese Army.

Chai Ling in Tiananmen Square, June 3, 1989

Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images

Some of us predicted that it would end very badly. How come? First, the Chinese Communist party had achieved power and secured it through violence. Second, China’s number-two leader at the time, Li Peng, had made it clear he was enraged by the challenge to his premiership posed by the students. Third, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, had not hesitated to do Mao’s bidding when he was asked in 1958 to crack down brutally on the political dissent seeded by the “100 Flowers” movement that had begun a year earlier.

The Chinese students themselves, however, and some in the foreign press corps, didn’t share these misgivings. In her remarkably frank—and indeed vulnerable—account of the student leadership discussions, Chai Ling, elected the movement’s “commander in chief,” makes it clear what a thorough job China’s Communist propaganda gusher had done in brainwashing China’s young people. Many, perhaps most, of them believed the slogan that “the army loves the people,” and simply couldn’t imagine that the military might turn against the youths who had idolized them from childhood if the political leadership gave them the orders to do so.