What I Learned Leading the Tiananmen Protests

I paid a hefty price for the demonstrations three decades ago. So did China.
By Wang Dan

Protesters on an armored vehicle just outside of Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989.

I learned that I was China’s most wanted criminal while having my hair cut aboard a crowded, decrepit steamboat on the Yangtze River.
The P.A. system suddenly blared that the Beijing Public Security Bureau had ordered the arrest of 21 students who were charged with instigating “counterrevolutionary riots” in Tiananmen Square.
My name topped the list.
It was June of 1989, nine days after government troops and armored personnel carriers rolled into central Beijing and brutally crushed the seven-week-long student-led pro-democracy demonstrations.
The announcement on the boat rattled me.
As one of the chief organizers of the protests, I was running away from the authorities in the capital.
I had not expected Beijing’s terror to reach this far.
It all started on the evening of April 17, 1989, when students at Beijing University gathered to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party chief who had been ousted for advocating Western-style reforms.
Some classmates prodded me to give a speech because I had organized a “Democracy Salon” during my freshman year.
As I began talking about problems facing the country, my inhibitions fell away.
I suggested that we march the 10 miles to Tiananmen Square, using Hu’s death as a moment to protest government corruption and push for democratic reforms.
Hundreds of us left the campus late that night and occupied Tiananmen Square.
Students from other universities joined us, and later, many others from across Beijing society.
At a time when China was transitioning from the Mao era, the movement gave hope to people who craved change.
The protest spread to other cities.

The author in Tiananmen Square on May 27, 1989.

During the sit-in, I was elected to the Beijing Student Autonomous Federation, which attempted to engage in dialogue with the government.
The senior leaders dismissed our requests, and seeing that our protest could undermine Communist Party rule, they declared martial law.
Troops surrounded the capital.
On June 3, after my proposal to retreat from the square had been overruled by other student leaders, I went back to my university dorm to rest.
Friends phoned me late that night with the news that soldiers had opened fire on protesters, and I fell into a state of shock.
We never believed that the leadership would use force, because we had been pushing for the Communist Party to improve itself, not to surrender power.
During my weeks in hiding, I watched on television as my fellow activists were captured one by one. I decided to go back to Beijing, knowing that I, too, would be caught.
The police found me on July 2, and arrested me after a car chase.
“Little Wang has been caught!” one officer phoned his boss in excitement.
I spent three years and seven months in prison.
My heart was often laden with guilt and sorrow.
A large number of students and Beijing residents had died during the bloody crackdown.
I felt partly responsible.
In 1993, when China made its first bid to host the Olympics, I was released in a show of political relaxation.
I was arrested again two years later, and sentenced to 11 years, for work in support of political prisoners and for signing a petition calling on the government to apologize for the Tiananmen massacre.
I was again released early, in 1998, in another moment of political thawing, just before President Bill Clinton’s visit to China.
After that, I came to the United States, and I have been shut out of my native China ever since.
Our movement failed 30 years ago because we lacked support and experience in promoting democratic change.
Many of us had pinned our hopes on the liberal factions of the Communist Party leadership to initiate changes from within the system, but we underestimated the power of the party elders.
The massacre shattered our illusions, helping us see the brutality of China’s one-party rule.
We students were not the only naïve ones.
Within a few years of the Tiananmen massacre, many Western governments lifted their sanctions against China.
The West’s engagement policy — based on the hope that trade and investment would bring about democratic changes in China — prevailed.
But instead of instigating liberalization, Western capital fattened the pockets of the Communist Party leaders, giving them the power to prolong their rule by silencing dissent at home and expanding the country’s global clout.
Despite our failure, I believe that we protesters made a difference.
CNN reported live on what happened in Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese government realized that it could no longer butcher its citizens with the whole world watching.
We raised the public’s awareness of democracy; many of the lawyers and human rights activists who have challenged the legitimacy of the Communist Party in the years since the massacre were participants in or supporters of the 1989 movement.
And today, the West has finally recognized the dangers of China’s totalitarian regime.
My desire to bring democracy to China, a seemingly far-off dream, remains strong.
The Chinese government has erased the Tiananmen massacre from its history books.
Any mention of it on social media is considered subversive.
Yet I try to reach out to younger people, sharing my experiences and keeping the memories alive.
Young people in China today, nearly all of whom grow up in one-child families, are more pragmatic than we were in the 1980s.
And despite the government’s brainwashing, they know how to use technology and obtain information from the outside.
They understand more about the West than we did.
Unlike students of my generation who held false hopes for the party, members of today’s younger generation are more cynical and realistic.
Once opportunities arise, they’ll rise up as we did 30 years ago.
As the United States-China trade war unfolds, I see a tremendous opportunity to make political reform a part of the negotiations.
In the 1990s, when Washington linked the granting of China’s most favorable trading status with human rights, the Chinese government bowed to the pressure by relaxing its political control and releasing me and several other dissidents.
But once trade and human rights were delinked, the situation there deteriorated drastically.
Today, dissidents are being imprisoned and forced to confess on national TV.
The government monitors and censors the political views of students studying abroad.
In a perverse way, President Trump’s tough stance against Beijing, despite its unpredictability, is proving effective.
Through this trade war, I hope Washington will show the Chinese leadership that the West will not tolerate the use of technology for spying and controlling ordinary citizens.
Thirty years ago, a short-lived movement catapulted me into the public eye, turning me from a shy, bookish student of history into a passionate and idealistic leader of several million protesters.
For that, I paid a hefty price.
In addition to spending a better part of my youth in prison, I am not allowed to return to my native country, where my ailing parents live.
Yet, as painful as this is, I don’t regret my choices.

Rogue Nation

China’s law-enforcers are going global but their methods are far from orthodox

The Economist

LAST year’s big blockbuster in China, “Wolf Warrior 2”, assured citizens not to fear running into trouble abroad: “Remember, the strength of China always has your back!” 

That is doubtless a comfort to patriots. 

But for those who seek to escape the government’s clutches, its growing willingness to project its authority beyond its borders is a source of alarm. 

In pursuit of fugitives, the Chinese authorities are increasingly willing to challenge the sovereignty of foreign governments and to seek the help of international agencies, even on spurious grounds.
Fugitives from China used to be mainly dissidents. 

The government was happy to have them out of the country, assuming they could do less harm there. But since Xi Jinping came to office in 2012 and launched a sweeping campaign against corruption, another type of fugitive has increased in number: those wanted for graft. 

Though they do not preach democracy, they pose a greater threat to the regime. 

Most are officials or well-connected business folk, insiders familiar with the workings of government. And in the internet age it is far easier for exiles to maintain ties with people back home.
So China has changed its stance, and started to hunt fugitives down. 

It has managed to repatriate nearly 4,000 suspects from some 90 countries. 

It has also recovered about 9.6bn yuan ($1.5bn). 

Still, nearly 1,000 remain on the run, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, China’s anti-graft watchdog
The problem is that only 36 countries have ratified extradition treaties with China. 

France, Italy, Spain and South Korea are among them, but few other rich democracies. 

It is easy for Chinese suspects seeking refuge abroad to argue that they will not get a fair trial if returned home, since the government does not believe that courts should be independent. 

Last year the country’s top judge denounced the very idea as a “false Western ideal”. 

What is more, China has thousands of political prisoners. 

Torture is endemic.

The hard way
These failings have forced the Chinese authorities to resort to less-straightforward methods to bring suspects home. 

Typically, they send agents, often travelling unofficially, to press exiles to return. 

The tactics involved are similar to ones used at home to induce people to do the Communist Party’s bidding. 

Many are subjected to persistent surveillance, intimidation and violence. 

Occasionally, Chinese agents attempt to kidnap suspects abroad and bring them home by force.
If runaways have family in China, those left behind are often subject to threats and harassment. 

In an interview in 2014 a member of Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau said that “a fugitive is like a flying kite: even though he is abroad, the string is in China.” 

Exiles are told that their adult relatives will lose their jobs and that their children will be kicked out of school if they do not return. 

Police pressed Guo Xin, one of China’s 100 most-wanted officials, to return from America by preventing her elderly mother and her sister from leaving China, and barring a brother living in Canada from entering the country, among other restrictions. 

In the end she gave in and went home.
In countries with closer ties to China, agents have occasionally dispensed with such pressures in favour of more resolute action. 

Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, says that he and other exiled dissidents have long avoided Cambodia, Thailand and other countries seen as friendly to China for fear of being detained by Chinese agents. 

The case of Gui Minhai, a Swede who had renounced his Chinese citizenship, suggests they are right to do so. 

He was kidnapped by Chinese officials in Thailand in 2015 and taken to the mainland. 

In a seemingly forced confession broadcast on Chinese television, he admitted to a driving offence over a decade earlier.
Many countries, naturally, are upset about covert actions by Chinese operatives on their soil. 

In 2015 the New York Times reported that the American authorities had complained to the Chinese government about agents working illegally in America, often entering the country on tourist or trade visas. 

Foreign diplomats note that officials from China’s Ministry of Public Security travel as delegates of trade and tourism missions from individual provinces. 

Chinese police were caught in Australia in 2015 pursuing a tour-bus driver accused of bribery. Though France has an extradition treaty with China, French officials found out about the repatriation of Zheng Ning, a businessman seeking refuge there, only when China’s own anti-graft website put a notice up saying police had successfully “persuaded” him to return to China. 

The French authorities had not received a request for his extradition.
This pattern is especially disturbing since the anti-corruption campaign is used as an excuse to pursue people for actions that would not be considered crimes in the countries where they have taken refuge—including political dissent. 

It beggars belief that the Chinese authorities would have worked so hard to capture Mr Gui, the kidnapped Swede, just to answer for a driving offence. 

His real crime was to have published books in Hong Kong about the Chinese leadership. 

By the same token, last year the Chinese embassy in Bangkok reportedly asked the Thai government to detain the wife of a civil-rights lawyer after she escaped over China’s south-western border. 

Her only known offence was to have married a man who had the cheek to defend Chinese citizens against the state.
Increasingly, China is trying to use Interpol, an international body for police co-operation, to give its cross-border forays a veneer of respectability. 

Interpol has no power to order countries to arrest individuals, but many democratic states frequently respond to the agency’s “red notices” requesting a detention as a precursor to extradition. 

In 2015 China’s government asked Interpol to issue red notices for 100 of its most-wanted officials. To date, the government says half of those on the list have returned, one way or another. 

Small wonder that Xi Jinping has said he wants the agency to “play an even more important role in global security governance”.
Since 2016 Interpol has been headed by Meng Hongwei, who is also China’s vice-minister of public security. 

That year alone China issued 612 red notices. 

The worry is that China may have misrepresented its reasons for seeking arrests abroad. 

Miles Kwok, also known as Guo Wengui, a businessman who fled China in 2015, stands accused of bribery. 

But it was only when he was poised to give an interview last summer in which he had threatened to expose the misdeeds of the ruling elite that China asked Interpol to help secure his arrest. 

When America refused to send him home, the Chinese government requested a second red notice, accusing Mr Kwok of rape.
China’s covert extraterritorial activity suggests that foreign governments are right to be cautious about deepening ties in law-enforcement. 

If nothing else, the fate of those who do return provides grounds for concern. 

Although few would shed any tears for corrupt tycoons or crooked officials, the chances of any of them getting a genuine opportunity to prove their innocence are all but zero. 

Nearly half of the repatriated officials who were subject to red notices have been sentenced to life in prison; the other half have not yet been tried. 

Chinese courts have an astonishingly high conviction rate. 

In 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, it was 99.9%.

Rogue Nation: Beijing Hinders Free Speech Abroad

Through a campaign of fear and intimidation, Beijing is hindering free speech in the United States and in other Western countries.
China Digital Times

At The New York Times, Wang Dan, a former leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, looks at the growing reach of Chinese censors on American college campuses as Beijing attempts to export its political control beyond its borders. 

Chinese international students studying in the U.S. were discouraged from attending Wang’s forums on Chinese politics due to fear of reprisal.
[…O]ver the past three months, my efforts on American campuses have been stymied. 

The Chinese Communist Party is extending its surveillance of critics abroad, reaching into Western academic communities and silencing visiting Chinese students. 

Through a campaign of fear and intimidation, Beijing is hindering free speech in the United States and in other Western countries.
The Chinese government, and people sympathetic to it, encourage like-minded Chinese students and scholars in the West to report on Chinese students who participate in politically sensitive activities — like my salons, but also other public forums and protests against Beijing. 

Members of the China Students and Scholars Association, which has chapters at many American universities, maintain ties with the Chinese consulates and keep tabs on “unpatriotic” people and activities on campuses. 

Agents or sympathizers of the Chinese government show up at public events videotaping and snapping pictures of speakers, participants and organizers.
Chinese students who are seen with political dissidents like me or dare to publicly challenge Chinese government policies can be put on a blacklist. 

Their families in China can be threatened or punished.
When these students return to China, members of the public security bureau may “invite” them to “tea,” where they are interrogated and sometimes threatened. 

Their passport may not be renewed. 

One student told me that during one of his home visits to China he was pressured to spy on others in the United States. [Source]
Australia has also recently been confronted with Chinese government influence on its academic and publishing sectors. 

Publisher Allen & Unwin announced plans to postpone the release of Clive Hamilton’s book on Chinese influence in Australia for fear of possible legal action from Beijing. 

The book’s delay has sparked widespread criticism as the country grapples with its economic dependence on China and the consequent growth of Beijing’s interference in its domestic affairs. From Jacqueline Williams at The New York Times:
The decision this month to delay the book, “Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia into a Puppet State,” has set off a national uproar, highlighting the tensions between Australia’s growing economic dependence on China and its fears of falling under the political control of the rising Asian superpower.
Critics have drawn parallels to decisions this year by high-profile academic publishers in Europe to withhold articles from readers in China that might anger the Communist Party.
But the case has struck a particularly sensitive nerve in Australia, where the book’s delay is the latest in a series of incidents that have raised concerns about what many here see as the threat from China to freedom of expression. [Source]
Allen & Unwin is not the only major Western publisher that has succumbed to pressure from Beijing to censor material critical of China. 

The book’s delay is the latest in a series of incidents that have raised concerns about Chinese attack on freedom of expression. 

Last month, scientific publishing company Springer Nature caved in to Chinese government request and blocked hundreds of articles on its Chinese website that touched on sensitive political topics. 

In August, Cambridge University Press withheld more than 300 articles from the Chinese website of China Quarterly, before reversing the decision in response to widespread criticism.
In Ghana, artist Bright Tetteh Ackwerh has published a series of cartoons criticizing Chinese influence in the country. 

He has continued to use art to speak out against controversial Chinese government activities in the country despite protests from Beijing. 

Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu at Quartz reports:
In the image, Xi Jinping is pouring a sludge of brown water from a Ming dynasty vase into bowls held by Ghana’s president and the minister of natural resource. 

Next to Xi, China’s ambassador to Ghana happily clutches a gold bar.
The Chinese embassy was reportedly infuriated by the cartoon and issued a complaint to the Ghanaian government on media coverage of the arrests of several Chinese miners involved in illegal mining, which is known locally as “galamsey”. 

While Ghanaian miners were also arrested, much of the public’s focus has been on the Chinese. Ghana is the second largest gold producer in Africa after South Africa.
[…A]ckwerh, who cites Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei as one of his inspirations, wasn’t done. 

In August, he published another cartoon titled “Occupation,” where the presidents of Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal are arguing over a plate of jollof rice. 

It’s reference to the so-called jollof wars, a mostly fun debate between West African countries over who makes the best version of the dish.
[…] “I hope my example has given other artists the courage to also contribute to this and things like this. 

There are things we have the power to do that even governments can’t,” he said. [Source]
Meanwhile, more direct efforts to gain support for the Communist Party abroad have been stymied. 

A group of visiting Chinese scholars at the University of California, Davis disbanded a Chinese Communist Party branch that they set up at the university after realizing they may have violated U.S. laws. 

Nectar Gan and Zhuang Pinghui at South China Morning Post report:
Mu Xingsen, secretary of the party branch, confirmed its establishment when contacted by the South China Morning Post on Sunday but said it had already been dissolved.
“It is because we have later learned that this [establishing a party branch] does not comply with the local laws,” Mu said. 

“Of course we should respect the local laws when we’re here.”
The US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires all individuals and groups acting under the direction or control of a foreign government or political party to register with the Department of Justice in advance and regularly report their activities.
[…] The branch, which planned to meet every two weeks, had tasked its members with promoting the organisation to their colleagues or neighbours who were coming to the US, it said, and to absorb party members into the organisation. [Source]

Political Murder

Nobel laureate's supporters call for inquiry into prison treatment.
http://www.aljazeera.com
Prison officials said Liu is being treated at a hospital in Shenyang city.
A growing chorus of Chinese human-rights lawyers and activists are calling for Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Liu Xiaobo's unconditional release after he was granted medical parole to undergo treatment for late-stage liver cancer.
The US also added its voice on Tuesday urging China to give Liu and his wife, Liu Xia, freedom to move and choose his own doctors.
A brief video has emerged of Liu Xia tearfully telling a friend that no treatment -- surgery, radiation or chemotherapy -- would work for her husband at this point.
"[They] cannot perform surgery, cannot perform radiotherapy, cannot perform chemotherapy," Liu Xia, who has been under effective house arrest since 2010, says in the video.
The news has shocked and angered supporters and human-rights campaigners, who questioned if the democracy advocate had received adequate care or whether the Chinese government had deliberately allowed him to wither in prison.
Liu was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power" after he helped write a petition known as "Charter 08" calling for sweeping political reforms.
China has criticised calls for Liu's release as "irresponsible" and interference in its internal affairs.
Hundreds of Chinese lawyers, activists and friends have signed a petition calling on authorities to give Liu "complete freedom" and allow his wife to "have contact with the outside world".
They also called on authorities to carry out a "thorough investigation" into the circumstances that led to the deterioration of his health.

'Deliberately sentenced'
Prison officials said Liu is being treated by "eight renowned Chinese oncologists" at a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang. 

Friends of the couple told AFP news agency that Liu Xia has been allowed to visit him there.
Wu'er Kaixi and Wang Dan, former student leaders at the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests who now live overseas, posted a joint statement on Twitter saying China had "deliberately sentenced him to death".
In Hong Kong, about 70 supporters of Liu took to the streets to demand his immediate release on Tuesday, chanting slogans denouncing the Chinese government as a "murderer".

Dozens protested in Hong Kong on Tuesday over Liu's treatment in prison.
Human rights campaigners also demanded to know whether Liu received any medical treatment while he was in jail and why he was not given parole earlier.
"It's very difficult to understand why his illness is only being treated at the last stage," said Amnesty International's Patrick Poon.
Human Rights Watch's Sophie Richardson, citing two other cases of critics who died in detention, said the government "needs to be held to account for permitting yet another peaceful critic to fall gravely ill while unjustly detained".
She said China had a history of allowing "peaceful critics to become gravely ill and die in detention".
Among them are Tibetan monk Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, who was 13 years into a life sentence for terrorism and separatism when he died in prison in July 2015.
Cao Shunli, a Chinese dissident, died in custody in March 2014 after being denied medical treatment for months.
Some said Liu's treatment heightened concerns over lesser-known activists still languishing in prison.
Liu's medical parole was not a humanitarian gesture, but rather a cynical attempt by authorities to avoid a backlash for allowing such a well-known rights defender to die behind bars.
Chen Guangcheng, a human-rights lawyer who fled to the US in 2012, said: "If Liu died in prison this would arouse the anger of the people and accelerate the demise of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]."