Just hours before the tanks and armored personnel carriers clattered and blasted their way down Changan Avenue and into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, loudspeakers in the square crackled into life, and, as in Auden's "The Shield of Achilles," a "voice without a face" began repeatedly to declare, "in tones as dry and level as the place":

Go home and save your life. You will fail. You are not behaving in the correct Chinese manner. This is not the West, it is China. You should behave like good Chinese. Go home and save your life. Go home and save your life.

According to British journalist John Simpson, whose translator rendered these Big Brotherly remarks into English, "it was a voice the people of China had been listening to for forty years, and continued listening to...." Only this time, "no one moved." And the rest, as the vulgar saying goes, is history.

Both the disembodied voice of authority and Simpson himself make keenly interesting assumptions that help to