The political retrospectives of 1989 rolled in during the last few months of the 2009, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breaching of the totalitarian dam in Russia’s European empire taking, reasonably enough, pride of place. In what we like to call “our part of the world” the memories of the dark days in Beijing in June 1989 were to some extent overshadowed by those other anniversaries and of course by the goose-stepping, missile-towing, and mass ribbon-waving celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the communist victory in China in 1949—a reminder that at least the remnants of big-time…