Born and raised in China, Rowena Xiaoqing (何曉清) is best known for her research on the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement. In 2010, she created a freshman seminar at Harvard called “Rebels With a Cause: Tiananmen in History and Memory” and in 2014, she published Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China.
Last year, she joined the faculty of St Michael’s College in Vermont, where she continues to offer the seminar. While her work has won respect from fellow academics, it has made her a target of attacks by young “patriotic” Chinese. Her current research explores the development of such nationalistic sentiments in China after the military suppression of the protests on June 4, 1989.
Q: What prompted you to research the Tiananmen movement?
Illustration: Yusha
A: Our generation grew up in an atmosphere of idealism. In 1989, I joined students across the country and participated in demonstrations in Guangdong Province. We took to the streets not because of hatred and despair, but because of love and hope. The sense of historical responsibility and faith in reform among intellectuals in the 1980s were crushed overnight. June 4 remains a taboo banned from open discussions. We have been bearing this open wound up to the present. June 4 is a watershed and the root of major social problems in China, including cynicism, nationalism and materialism. It is impossible to understand today’s China without understanding the spring of 1989.
Q: What is the biggest challenge teaching Tiananmen?
A: As a result of the government’s cover-up, the history of 1989 has become obscured. However, the biggest challenge in my teaching experience was not just about facts, but values. The facts are relatively straightforward. However, swayed by the rationale that the crackdown was necessary to thwart a Western conspiracy to divide and weaken China and hence paved the way for China’s rise, many of the younger generation tend to identify with the government’s twisted reasoning. For most American students, the argument that human lives could be sacrificed for economic development and a strong nation is strange, but it has become accepted by many Chinese.
Q: How did you deal with this?
A: Presenting evidence. I tell my students that June 4 is like a puzzle. We need to put together the pieces to restore a true and complete picture. For example, it was argued that there was no Tiananmen “massacre” because no one was killed in Tiananmen Square. One student decided to let history speak for itself by translating a chapter in Ding Zilin’s (丁子霖) In Search of the Victims of June 4 about a victim being shot and killed by a flagpole in Tiananmen Square.
Of course, the massacre cannot be denied based on the number of casualties in the square. Just as the Tiananmen movement was not confined to Tiananmen Square, but instead a nationwide movement, the Tiananmen Massacre did not just take place within Tiananmen Square, but included killings throughout central Beijing. The two maps that we use — one pinpointing where victims were killed and the other where bodies were found — are self-evident.
Harvard’s Tiananmen archive has 28 boxes of material. When I asked the students whether they would like to open the box of bloodstained clothes, they first looked at the box with awe. Then they became very quiet. From the moment I opened the box and brought out the bloody clothes and translated the note that explained that the blood belonged to a wounded student who fell at Muxidi next to a Peking University graduate student, the students remained silent.
After a while, one asked: “Did he survive?” I said I did not know. I only knew that the person who smuggled the pants out must have run a great risk, hoping that someday, someone would take it seriously, that the world would remember this piece of history, so that the blood of Chinese would not have been shed in vain.
The archive contains boxes of photographs. Once, a usually conscientious student suddenly dropped the photographs and walked away. I was puzzled. Later, in his final paper, he explained his feelings on that day. He said in the first part of the photographs of student demonstrations, they were full of hope. Then he saw the pictures of the crackdown, a student with his face bloodied to a pulp, and he could not take it.
He said: “The students were as young as we are now.”
When students see such evidence, they are not satisfied with the excuse that the crackdown being necessary for economic development.
Q: Why do students take this course?
A: I always ask them that in the first class.
One student said they had been to China and the tour guide said there were three ‘T’s that should not be mentioned: Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen.
A Canadian-born Chinese student said he had heard the media talk about Tiananmen and June 4, but did not know what that was about until his parents took him to China. On the tour bus he saw tourists from Hong Kong and the Chinese tour guide heatedly debating June 4. He was confused. Both sides were supposed to be “Chinese,” but each side believed they knew the truth and neither was able to convince the other.
In addition, some US students had been to China and had the opportunity to live and study with their peers. Their questions were interesting.
One student said her friends in China were smart and well-educated, asking why did people say that Chinese were low-quality people and should not have democracy. Is that not racism?
Q: What is the reaction of Chinese students?
A: Some start by defending the government and some have never even heard of June 4.
In one summer school class, a student often questioned me and made clear that I should not expect to change her mind.
I said: “If you don’t believe me, why are you taking my course?”
She said that she and her friends had assumed it was an easy course.
The first time they were touched was after hearing the testimony of Fang Zheng (方政), whose legs were crushed by a tank. Toward the end of the semester, the student who did not believe me raised her hand. Instead of questioning me, she said she finally “pushed” her mother to tell the truth. Her mother had told her she did not know anything about 1989.
My student asked: “But you were in college then and my teacher said that students would know.”
It turned out that her mother had taken a train to Beijing and gone to Tiananmen Square. Her boyfriend at the time, who is now this student’s father, was locked at home by his own father and could not go. So her mother was in Tiananmen Square in 1989, but told her daughter that she did not know anything about it.
Another time, in a discussion about June 4, a student from Beijing burst into tears.
She said: “This is the city where I grew up. I have walked those streets from the time I was a child. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me something like this happened?”
Q: Because of your study of June 4, you have been attacked by some Chinese students. Why?
A: We are in a foreign land, using a foreign language to discuss an important event in our own country, but this event cannot be mentioned in China itself. The younger generation knows nothing about it, or defends the crackdown and attacks those who speak the truth.
In the 1980s, being critical of the government and pushing for reform were considered patriotic. How is it that patriotism has turned into defending the government and criticizing it is interpreted as treason? Where did the opposite understandings of “patriotism” come from? Those were the questions that prompted me to start my project on student nationalism in post-Tiananmen China.
Q: Why did “patriotic education” and nationalistic thinking appear after 1989?
A: After the June 4 crackdown, the state needed to re-establish its legitimacy. The “patriotic education” campaign, working within a historical vacuum, seems to have been effective.
However, it is precisely these values that hold that human life, human dignity and human rights can be sacrificed for prosperity and power that have turned post-1989 China into a society with no bottom line and no trust. The distortion of history is accompanied by distortions of all kinds — political, social, psychological. Such values, stopping at nothing for its goals, have not only affected China, but the world.
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