I got a call last year from the publisher of a collection of essays about the state of the struggle for democracy called Will China Democratize? Turns out they wanted to use one of my sculptures. On the cover is featured my bronze of "China Peace", which I created for a Tiananmen Sq. massacre memorial in 1989. It also turns out– very strangely– that part of the editing team was Larry Diamond, the very professor from whom I was at the time taking a fabulous Stanford course called Democratic Development. (And no, there was no direct connection– it's another example of the inexplicable synchronistic alignment of the universe like I posted about recently!)The course was a really great overview of the structure and health of democracy and I recommend it for anyone interested in democracy or politics or the future (free and online!)
The sales of "China Peace" helped fund a movement to get the truth back into China since the Chinese government was trying to keep the massacre a secret (today few Chinese know of this crucial moment in their history). Narratives of the events, illustrated with photos, were faxed to random numbers all over China for weeks as a kind of underground news service. On Wikipedia this is listed as the "first FAX revolution in history."
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