( CNN ) -- On June 4 this year , it will have been 20 years since I have seen Beijing , the city in which I spent much of my youth and attended university . It will have been 20 years since I saw my parents . My parents are older . I hear their health is not what it was , but it is something they take pains not to trouble me with . I hear Beijing is much changed . I hear China is much changed . Wu'er Kaixi has been living in exile outside of China since 1989 . One thing has not changed . Many of us are still in exile and can not go home . This is an odd thing , if you really think about it . Last year , amid much pomp and ceremony , China held the 2008 Olympics . In the same year , China conducted its first space walk . In the same year , it overhauled its property laws , allowing far greater rights of ownership than China has seen since the communist revolution . This year , amid a financial crisis of the kind the world has not seen since the Great Depression of 1929 , the world looks to China as the motor of possible economic revival . Yet China -- unlike other nations that aspire to international recognition and respect -- still imprisons and exiles those with dissenting views . The pity of this for me is that dissenting opinions have been behind every step of China 's long journey to the place it now prides itself on occupying . Sacrifices were made to bring about the end of the Qing imperial dynasty and usher in a nationalist government in 1911 . The student movement of May 4 , 1919 , against the Treaty of Versailles , which ceded German rights to Shandong province to Japan , initiated the nationalist , populist movement that arguably led to the rise of the Communist Party and the liberation of China from foreign control . Equally , it was internal pressure within China that compelled the ruling Chinese Communist Party to move from a position of insularity to what it is today - a voice that has authority in the international arena . China has seen enormous changes since May and June of 1989 , when the students of Beijing stood up and called on the Beijing government to make changes . The movement emerged largely out of a sense of frustration with a system amid unique circumstances - the death of a politician who was seen as more sympathetic to reform than most and ahead of a historic visit by then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev . It was a movement that was born out of a yearning for an end to official corruption and a stifling system that provided no opportunities to the country 's best educated . But it became a wider call for change , when workers ' unions and common people joined it . Five months after the Tiananmen student movement was put down with live ammunition in Beijing on June 4 , 1989 , the Berlin Wall fell . Two years later , the Soviet Union collapsed . Early the following year -- in 1992 -- Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping embarked on what is now known as the Southern Tour . In the relatively freewheeling Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen , he reiterated a dormant catchphrase of the 1980s , `` To get rich is glorious , '' and effectively initiated a new era for China . This new China is the only China that most foreigners who do business with the world 's potentially biggest market know . But the only China I truly know is the one I was exiled from - and it was a China where you could not buy Nike or have a quiet drink in a bar , it was a China of empty department stores and streets thronging with people in drab Mao suits . To this day , I believe that the people who sacrificed their lives in Beijing in June 1989 had a huge role in transforming the China of my youth into the place it is today , the place that today the world recognizes as China - and hopes will help revive the global economy . I am proud of what China has achieved . I simply wish it had achieved more . It is a personal tragedy for me that , after 20 years , I can not see my parents or my homeland . But I think it is a far greater tragedy for China that , after 20 years , it can not openly discuss its recent history , and let its people decide for themselves how and why the world 's most populous nation has come to occupy the place it rightfully deserves . To me this says that China may have appeared to have stood up , but in reality it is still sitting down .
Author was a student activist in Beijing in 1989 . Wu'er Kaixi has been living in exile outside of China since the events at Tiananmen . China : Dissent has fueled historical events in China .