With me, stephen sackur. Today, the bbc is running a series of programmes about democracy, the idea and the reality. Its a theme our guest today has reason to consider in great depth. Wuerkaixi was one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square Student Protest in beijing in 1989. He became one of the Chinese Governments most wanted men. He escaped, and he now lives in exile in taiwan. And today, hejoins me, and a hardtalk audience here in london. Applause. Wuer kaixi, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you very much. We could use more platforms like this to voice our ideas. Well, i want to talk to you all about your ideas. And i want to begin by taking you back to 1989. You made a stand as a Student Leader for freedom and for democracy. And looking back at it now, it has cost you your life as you knew it then in 1989. On a personal level, do you have any regrets . Well, i survived in a Great Movement and im proud to be part of it. But it ended up as a massacre. Regret can sometimes be an understat
the constitutional underpinnings of american government. what a pleasure. thank. you thank you poverty. so most of the history of humanity, of our species, people have lived under kings and queens and dictators and despots and belize and authoritarian system. democracy is very much the exception and the whole point of the constitution is to keep people in office from just doing whatever they want. it was the idea of lawless discretion in government officials that motivated the american revolutionaries to write a constitution that woodbine people in power. so we ve got to make democracy
a peaceful transfer of power, you don t have democracy. who is that from? tommy s fifth grade teacher. all right, i ll read it. we prevail, here we stand. looking out at a great wall. after we lost tommy, we got thousands and thousands of letters. a lot of them were coming from people who knew tommy, or people who were moved by tommy s poetry. it was just an overwhelming and affecting thing. my first act as president, i would ask you to join me in a moment of silent prayer to remember all those who we lost this past year, during the pandemic. we will honor them, come together as a people or nation. we know you can and should be. we were not the only family in that god-awful year to lose
i never thought the trump could turn out to be a good guy. i thought maybe all of this right-wing authoritarian populist stuff, all this mussolini stuff, which is fade away quickly when he got into office, that cooler heads would prevail, the conservative republican establishment would kind of take over and run things like a standard run-of-the-mill right-wing presidency. as opposed to an existential threat to constitutional democracy. [applause] donald trump today due to the rose garden to wave a white flag, a green two o reopen the government without funding for his border wall. i m proud to announce that we have reached a deal to end the shut down and reopen the federal government. i think he thought that he was going to practice extortion,
we are not unified by virtue of being one ethnicity or one ideology or one religion. we are unified by one constitution and one rule of law and in the values under our constitution. [applause] it is an aspiration, it s a challenge to us. the constitution shouldn t be some kind of fetish document. it should be the living commitment that we all have to make democracy work in the service of the common good. that is the constitution that comes out of the civil war and reconstruction. that is the constitution that we have been fighting for since then. and we ve got to keep fighting for it. [crowd chanting]