It’s now twenty years since the Tiananmen Square massacre. While Tiananmen was hovering in the background to the 2008 Olympics, and all the calls for boycotts, many of today’s Chinese students were babies at the time, and have grown up in an entirely different environment.

Here’s a great interview Yu Hua, a Chinese novelist, gave with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of Switzerland. It’s in German, but signandsight.com has translated a key paragraph:

In an interview with Andreas Breitenstein, Chinese author Yu Hua, whose epic novel "Brothers" comes out in German in August, talks about how "sensitivities" in China have changed since 1989.

"You shouldn't forget that the freedom-loving students of the 80s had all lived through the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution. They knew what a life of poverty meant, and they recognized that the lack of freedom in which they were forced to live was the reason for this poverty. Today's student generation has grown up in a boom era. They have no idea about poverty, and they delight in absolute personal freedom... China is a strange country. On one hand we are still living under the dictatorship of a party that can control everything with administrative measures. On the other, we are much more free than the West. We can bad-mouth anybody or anything to our heart's content and with impunity. You just can't criticize the government."

The NZZ accompanies the interview with the nice collage above right: the same street in 1989 and today: attacking tanks have been replaced with teeming personal automobiles—or: untold wealth driving upon the stones where a crushed democracy movement once marched. But, Yu claims, personal freedom in China is not lacking.