After the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, uncertain reports
of Chinese troops using force on students demonstrating for
governmental reforms have abounded. Reports included that tanks
crushed tents set up in Tiananmen Square, and that hundreds of
students were gunned down or arrested. Protests and demonstrations
erupted throughout China and the United States, and relations
between the two governments became strained.
The first week of this month marks the 16th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square incident. And while reports on what exactly
happened are still clouded in a haze of uncertainty, there is a
general consensus of experts on the region that Tiananmen is still
relevant to modern relations between China and the United States,
especially on a symbolic level.
The incident will be discussed on Thursday by Regents’
Lecturer Han Dongfang, a Chinese labor activist, in a talk hosted
by the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies. Richard Baum, political
science professor and the director of the center, said the lecture
will cover the need for greater working-class freedom and democracy
in China.
Dongfang, who led the workers spearheading the demonstration
movement in the Tiananmen Square movement, “symbolizes the
struggle for human rights in China,” Baum said.
The demonstration in which Dongfang participated planted its
roots in April 1989, when students went to Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a highly
respected political leader, said geography Professor Cindy Fan.
Paying respects turned into a demonstration for democratic
reforms, as students stayed in the square and protested for free
speech and citizens’ rights at a time when the central
government was very much in control.
Their requests were “mostly along the lines of a greater
openness and lessened political control,” Fan said.
Students camped out in tents in the square for a month or more,
joined by others from throughout China, and held hunger strikes in
protest of the government, Fan said. Top leaders also granted
meetings to the students who weren’t satisfied with the
results.
During this time, Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the then-Soviet
Union, was supposed to make an appearance at Tiananmen Square, but
couldn’t because of the vast number of people camped out and
demonstrating there, Fan said.
“It was an embarrassment to the Chinese leaders. So on
June 4, the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square,” Fan said.
“They sent the troops in and opened fire, and in the end, a
lot of people were killed.”
“Tanks rolled in and rolled over the tents,” said
Kenny Hong, a recent UCLA graduate who was growing up in Hong Kong
at the time.
“We went to a lot of demonstrations as a result of that
event,” Hong said. One demonstration he attended in Hong Kong
had over 200,000 participants.
“I think the impact was probably to show how bad human
rights were in China,” Hong said.
Leaders of the movement who survived the shootings found
themselves wanted by the government. Such was the case for Chao
Hua, a graduate student at UCLA who is writing her dissertation on
modern Chinese literature, and was in the center of the student
leadership at Tiananmen.
“My name was put on the most wanted list,” Hua
said.
Hua, who was in the hospital because of exhaustion caused by the
shootings, escaped to the United States as a political refugee.
Tiananmen was “the beginning of open suppression by force
of ordinary people’s discontent,” Hua said.
Demonstrations in protest of the Chinese government were
widespread throughout China and the United States. According to the
Daily Bruin archives, demonstrations were also evident at UCLA,
sponsored by the Association of Chinese Americans.
UCLA’s student protests were “small ones, but vocal
ones,” Baum said.
“We had a major conference at UCLA shortly after at which
we invited some of the student leaders at Tiananmen,” Baum
said.
Then-Chancellor Charles Young established the Chinese Democracy
Movement and Tiananmen Incident Archival Project that year as a
reaction to the incident.
“There was very much a change in image as a result of
Tiananmen,” Fan said.
Until that point, “China was thought of as a new
hope.” It was “exhibiting a bunch of new innovative
developments,” and suddenly people were reminded that it was
a communist country, Fan said.
“It said a lot about the rigidity and dogmatism of the
political system in China,” Baum said.
“What Tiananmen did to American students and scholars that
study China was to make us kind of rethink, if not on an
institutional level, on the visual level, what China is
like,” Fan said. “There were a lot of questions about
whether one could visit China, whether doing research in China was
going to be a problem.”
Baum was asked to go back to China to ascertain and advise
whether UCLA should continue its exchange programs with China,
which it ultimately did.
The shootings and demonstrations may be in the past, but this
doesn’t detract from their relevance to the current political
interaction between the two countries, Baum said.
As a result of the events at Tiananmen Square, relations between
the United States and China “were deeply frozen,” and
technological and economic sanctions were applied by the United
States to China, Baum said.
There was also a complete shutoff of military contacts and
sales.
“It’s been an up-and-down relationship. … I think
the jury is out,” Baum said about current relations between
the two countries.
“There’s some goodwill toward China, but it’s
not very deeply held.”