Almost a Revolution is an autobiography by Shen Tong (), one of the student leaders during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in Beijing, China, written with former The Washington Post writer Marianne Yen. Genre Published in 1990 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Almost A Revolution is a memoir categorized under China, History, Tiananmen Square Incident, 1989. (cloth). Synopsis Shen Tong was born on July 30, 1968 on an army base in Zhangjiakou, a small town northwest of Beijing. His parents worked for the People's Liberation Army. Shen's father taught Korean, and his mother worked as a medic in the army hospital. They moved to Beijing right after Shen was born. Their house was located in an alley near the corner of Xidan and Changan Avenue, which was only a fifteen-minute walk from Tiananmen Square. The first half of the book, "Beginnings," describes Shen's life from childhood until his first year at Peking University (Beida). As the child of two intellectuals, Shen was exposed to political activities at an early age. He remembered how his parents avoided getting caught by destroying the Big-character posters (dazibao) they copied from Tiananmen Square in 1976 after Premier Zhou Enlai died. He also experienced the Democracy Wall Movement in the winter of 1978-79 during which his father often took him to visit the Democracy Wall. Near the end of high school, Shen spent few weeks at Beida campus with his sister and her boyfriend to read dazibao. Shen claims that he paid the most attention to the posters that urged political as well as economic reform. Shen attended the Peking University in the fall of 1986. According to Shen, he felt proud of being a Beida student because Beida students are known for their outspokenness and for the role they played in student movements over the past century. The second half of the book, "Movement," provides an inside view of the 1989 student movement from the beginning to the final crackdown. Shen's first involvement in the movement was putting together a news center in a Beida dormitory on April 22. He wrote that he want the broadcast station could "help the movement without being too visible." On May 3, Shen was elected as the general secretary of the official Dialogue Delegation. According to Shen, the responsibility for putting the students' demands before government leaders fell on the "Dialogue Delegation" because the student movement was