Bao Tong arrived late for his interview with the US television crew in Beijing's Purple Bamboo Park last weekend. The former Chinese Communist Party official is under constant police surveillance which means he cannot guarantee to turn up on time for meetings he is not supposed to be having.
However, he appeared to have shaken off his minder by coming to Purple Bamboo Park with his wife, his daughter and his nine-year-old granddaughter as if out for an afternoon stroll.
Mr Bao, who was secretary to the Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang, at the time of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, was imprisoned until recently for his support for the pro-democracy students. He is officially barred from talking to foreign correspondents and was told that foreign reporters who talked to him without permission would be punished and "in turn my life and health would be affected".
But he stood before the CBS camera and said bravely: "According to the constitution I have freedom of speech. Let's see if I get into trouble after your interview with me today." He went on to praise President Clinton for coming to China and to call on the Chinese leadership to admit that the bloodshed on June 4th, 1989, was wrong, as Chinese people "know in their hearts".
Mr Bao was testing his rights in the new atmosphere of freedom which has taken a Small Leap Forward with the visit of the US President. Much has been written about the sensational impact of the joint press conference held by Mr Clinton and President Jiang Zemin last Saturday.
Those Chinese who tuned in by chance and put up with a patchy translation provided by the US side heard live on television and radio the most important visitor in a decade tell their President, politely and firmly, that the Tiananmen action was wrong, and that it was time Beijing talked to the exiled Dalai Lama.
This must have an important impact on internal Chinese politics. The hard-line verdict on 1989 - that the bloodshed was justified by the need to restore stability and promote economic progress - and the notalks policy towards the Dalai Lama, are closely associated with Mr Li Peng, the chairman of the People's Congress and ranking No 2 in the Chinese Communist Party leadership.
Long-term observers in Beijing believe the Clinton visit has been used by reformers and President Jiang, whose once-bland persona has blossomed since escaping from the shadow of Deng Xiaoping last year, as an instrument in diminishing the authority of those who hold Mr Li Peng's views.
Another sign of Mr Li's decline is his loss of the chairmanship of the committee running his beloved Three Gorges Dam project, the world's biggest engineering scheme, which is now controlled by premier Zhu Rongji. He was also missing from the handful of leaders who formally welcomed Mr Clinton in Tiananmen Square, though this could be put down to protocol.
The ever-smiling Mr Li did meet Mr Clinton at a state banquet on Saturday night and seemed unwilling to let go when they shook hands. One of the crucial encounters of the Clinton visit was a private dinner on Sunday evening at Mr Jiang's modest Beijing home.
At some point that evening, the Chinese leader evidently decided to place his trust in Mr Clinton and allow his debate with students at Beijing University next day also to be broadcast live. Up to the last minute the US side did not know if such permission would be given.
Many who watched the debate felt that Mr Clinton performed weakly, missing several chances to highlight forcefully the lack of rights and freedoms in China, but long-time observers in Beijing argued afterwards that it was a masterly performance in that it got across the importance of individual freedoms while not causing the Chinese leadership loss of face and not subverting the student body.
The fact that Mr Clinton spoke in confessional terms about human-rights lapses in the US "was important in terms of rites as much as rights," remarked Jaime FlorCruz of Time magazine, who has spent most of his professional life in China. "It's the Chinese way of doing things," said an Asian diplomat, "just as when a Chinese manager wants to fire someone he will apologise first and blame himself."
Old habits die hard and the state-controlled newspapers failed to publish Mr Clinton's remarks that Tiananmen was wrong or that dialogue should begin with the Dalai Lama.
The White House Asian affairs director, Jeff Bader, acknowledged to journalists that forces in China were using Mr Clinton for their own purposes, when he said that the decision to broadcast was not something done primarily for Mr Clinton but made with an eye to "domestic result and domestic impact". Mr Clinton expressed the hope that "it will lead to more open discussions here".
The tenor of the trip was that of a lecture tour, with seminars on such topics as "Shaping China for the 21st Century" and how to do better on such issues as human rights, the law and the environment. The Chinese tolerated this morally superior approach (imagine President Jiang chairing a seminar in Chicago on how to reduce gun-related crimes in the US) because they want a strategic partnership with the US to raise their own standing as a regional power.
They also want American technology. Some at the top want to move towards liberalisation without themselves losing face. The reverberations will play out when Mr Clinton has long gone. For example, on the basis that Mr Jiang used the press conference to enunciate a more conciliatory approach on Tibet, the Dalai Lama predicted it could have an immediate political effect on Chinese officials in Lhasa.
The White House was happy to promote the idea that the presidential visit did play a role in the struggle between conservatives and reformers in Beijing. It has "triggered some type of discussion with the body politic of China," said White House spokesman Mike McCurry.
It "could likely have some profound impact on the way the political culture of China adapts to the changes that are under way here. What it leads to or what it amounts to or what additional things might happen as a result of that type of opening is something that's not entirely clear to us. Maybe it's not even clear to the Chinese authorities themselves but, having made a conscious decision to be open, it sometimes becomes hard to reverse decisions like that."
Without mentioning any Chinese leader by name, he speculated that "there are no doubt within the ruling elite people who question some of the decisions and, as in any political environment, people will try to calculate their own opportunities, and so we obviously want to help the good guys as much as we can."
This is central to Mr Clinton's foreign policy - evident in his approach to Northern Ireland - that if the US engages everyone, the bad guys eventually succumb to the common good. He believes such exchanges as that between himself and Mr Jiang can "both clarify and narrow our differences".
The question is: can fundamental moral disagreements be reduced to mere differences, as one critic put it? One of the ways of measuring how much the differences have been narrowed after the Clinton caravan has gone is what happens to Mr Bao Tong and other reformers, democrats and dissidents who are now speaking out in China with increasing frequency and boldness.