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The Chinese leadership hoped that the world would soon forget the Tiananmen Square massacre. Our job in Congress is to ensure that we never forget those who lost their lives in Tiananmen Square that day or the pro-democracy cause for which they fought.

Right after September 11, 2001, there weren't really any blogs in China, but there were a lot of Chinese chatrooms - and there were a lot of conversations in which Chinese netizens were saying things like, 'served them right.' That was definitely not the official Chinese government policy - which condemned the terrorists.

Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing - at least sometimes - without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major political power struggles and scandals are no longer kept within elite circles.

After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.

Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

There are significant human rights abuses in China. In some areas, the situation is worse today than in the past. In other areas, there have been improvements. We will recognize the latter, and be critical of the former.

We should not underestimate that: the Chinese people's ignorance. Thousands of years of despotism had been such a poison that their understanding of modern politics is even inferior to that of the black slaves and other immigrants.

In 1975, the collapse of a cascade of Chinese dams during a flood killed a hundred and seventy-one thousand people, but the event is rarely discussed, and the names of the victims are largely unrecorded today.

I haven't heard of any cases of anti-American blog posts being censored or bloggers encountering consequences for anti-American speech on the web in China.