Toki ga Nijimu Asa

Liang Haoyuan and Xie Zhiqiang, close friends since high school, enter the same prestigious university in 1988. Through debates with a young professor and their fellow students they begin to think hard about patriotism and democracy, and they join the democracy movement. After it is crushed by force in 1989, a brawl gets them jailed for three months and expelled. The novel follows the idealism and defeat of that generation, and Haoyuan’s later life in Japan, up to the eve of the Beijing Olympics.