Wu'er Kaixi, who was a student leader in 1989 and has been in exile ever since, recalls how in the late 80s, as a student at Beijing Normal University, he and other students beat the system that was intent on stopping them talking. They used to have 'reclining discussion groups'.
'At 11pm sharp every night, electricity was cut to the university dormitories, plunging them into darkness,' he says. 'This was a ruling that had been introduced in the early 1980s in order to prevent students from forming after-hours groupings.'
But it was hardly a success. In student dormitories throughout the capital, sleepless students sprawled in their beds, six to a room, 'filling the darkness with conversation on everything from sex to politics'.
In those years, Wu'er Kaixi says, special economic zones had been formed and Deng Xiaoping had announced 'to get rich was glorious', but 'as we students and many other Chinese saw it, the only people getting rich were party officials and their hangers-on'.
With every step in the reform process, he says, personal freedoms were curtailed. 'By the time I was at university, the latest campaign was against bourgeois liberalisation. We hated it. All it did was to give party busy-bodies the right to confiscate tapes of pop music and separate girls and boys walking too close.' Wu'er Kaixi first heard about the death of former Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989, 'the way we heard about all important events in China - through rumours'.
Hu had been forced to resign from his post for 'laxness' but was popularly regarded as a force for political reform.