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SCMP Reporter

The golden arches of McDonald's were virtually unknown on the mainland when Chen Ziming   was sent to jail in 1991 as one of the 'black hands' behind the 1989 pro-democracy movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
His wife, Wang Zhihong ,  took him his first burger when she visited him in prison - McDonald's opened in Beijing in 1992, two years after the mainland's first McDonald's opened in Shenzhen.
Since then, the market economy has flourished, something Mr Chen predicted before the bloody end to the protests sent the nation into a brief but profound period of chaos.
Despite 11 years of imprisonment and the end to a successful career, the 56-year-old intellectual and former entrepreneur said he felt lucky that, unlike most of his fellow colleagues and friends, he still lived in China.
'I am still very confident in this country and China's democratisation. The pace of development is just what I imaged,' he said.
Mr Chen turned down offers to go into exile, one immediately after the June 4 crackdown and another before his first release in 1994 as part of a political deal between Beijing and then US president Bill Clinton.
'I am Chinese; why should I live in another country? If I went away, I wouldn't have been able to come back for another 20 years,' he said.
Born and raised in a time of turbulence, Mr Chen said he began developing his political knowledge at the age of 14, at the  beginning of the Cultural Revolution. A co-founder of the mainland's first private think-tank and an activist in earlier political movements, Mr Chen was sentenced to 13 years' prison in 1991, together with his colleague and friend, Wang Juntao .  The verdict was brief: they were the 'black hands', the instigators behind the movement.
'We were just providing advice for the students when they came to us.'
The Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute  that Mr Chen and Mr Wang established in 1981 was shut down soon after 1989.
'We [the institute] actually held a vote on whether we should get involved in this movement, and I voted against it because I knew this would get us in trouble,' Mr Chen said.
'But when they [the students] came to us for some advice, we just had to give them some.'
His participation led to the loss of his freedom until October 2002, loss of political rights until 2006, and constant police harassment of his family.
After a brief release in 1994, Mr Chen was sent back to prison in 1995 after the  Taiwanese president at the time, Lee Teng-hui,  visited the US. He was released on medical parole in 1996 suffering from cancer, but served the rest of his sentence at home until preparations for the visit by then president Jiang Zemin   to the US in 2002.
His involvement in the movement also came at the cost of the closure of pioneering enterprises  under the institute's umbrella, such as two private tertiary institutes offering degrees unheard of on the mainland at the time, and a newspaper not administered by any government department. A website called Reform and Construction  that Mr Chen set up in 2004 was also shut down after gaining popularity among mainland intellectuals.
But it came as no surprise to Mr Chen that other private enterprises thrived even more quickly after 1989.
'Because blood was shed, the Communist Party's legitimacy waned. Deng Xiaoping  had to do something aggressive,' he said.
'Otherwise the process [of the transition to a market economy] would have been slower.'
But while many around the world are amazed by how the  combination of market economics and communist politics has made China the fastest  developing country in the world, Mr Chen said the 30-year-old reform model should be ended because it  has failed to bring social cohesion.
'The reform is becoming less appealing to society ... back then, people could still hope it would bring changes such as some people getting rich first and the others later. But now, people have lost interest in reforms,' he said.
'Take the recent rural land reform. The government should establish new agreements with the people. As a government, you should be responsible to the people and honour your words.
'In the 1980s, the government would attach importance to common people's opinions and take them into consideration. But now, nobody is listening to the people.'



'Black hand' is confident about the future