By mid-May, factory workers began setting up their tents in a separate "village" in the square. They fraternised little with the students. It was a sign of the class difference between the students and the workers, who had little to do with each other. But we didn't foresee that when the possibility of a student-worker union arose, a phenomenon of eastern Europe, Deng would act. When the tanks roared into the square, they first rolled over the workers' empty tents. On the night of the killings, a vision and pandemonium of Hell that few had expected, Deng didn't care about the watching press. Nor did he care about the massacre, the next morning, of hundreds of screaming parents and other relatives of the students, at the edge of the square, demanding to see the killed or wounded. They were shot down, further Hell, and when doctors and nurses arrived from the nearby Beijing Union Medical School (where my father worked in 1935), I saw them shot down, too.

Deng was right to expect little condemnation from the West. The following December, when President George H. W. Bush's National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, met Deng in Beijing, he was heard to say, "My president wants you to know he is your friend forever." Deng reportedly told Scowcroft, "China will persist in punishing those instigators of the rebellion and its behind-the-scenes bosses in accordance with Chinese laws. China will by no means waver in its resolution of this kind. Otherwise, how can the country continue to exist?" There was an international show of indignation until August 1991, when Prime Minister John Major flew to Beijing to sign a memorandum of understanding to build the new Hong Kong airport, a task usually delegated to a junior minister. Mr Major had checked with President Bush that such a visit, the first by a European leader to China since Tiananmen, would receive American approval. It did. In Beijing Mr Major assured us that he had pressed Li Peng about political prisoners and human rights. I was later informed by a senior Hong Kong civil servant, Anson Chan, who had been in the room, that no such discussion had taken place.

The Chinese regime has got away with it. Young students in the best Chinese universities, if they have heard of Tiananmen at all, remark that it was some sort of disorder which the regime did well to put down. When the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, visited Beijing in April 2006, he was asked by reporters in Tiananmen Square if he would mention what happened there in 1989 to his Beijing counterpart. Mr Livingstone replied, "We have had some interesting riots in Trafalgar Square — only 20 years ago the poll tax riots, and the flames licking up. If you go back to some of the earlier incidents, you will find many occasions when lots of innocent protesters were hacked to pieces with sabres."