Introduction

JOBNAME: Chen PAGE: 1 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 8 09:27:34 2019 Introduction This project studies the overseas Chinese democracy movement (OCDM) or haiwai minyun formed by Chinese political dissidents in exile. The main chapters assess its fluctuating trajectory, shifting operational envir- onment and diversified activities, and characterize its distinct features in a comparison with other national experiences of exile politics. This introduction defines the fluid movement, reviews the literature, highlights the contribution of the study, explains the research approach, and presents the chapter structure. THE MOVEMENT: A BROAD AND LOOSE DEFINITION The genesis of the OCDM started with the inauguration of China Spring magazine in 1982 and founding of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy (CAD) in 1983, both in New York. Wang Bingzhang, a Chinese graduate studying for a PhD degree in pathology at McGill University (Canada), led the charge to give birth to both the magazine and China’s first overseas political opposition organization since 1949. His followers were mostly fellow Chinese students and secondarily migrants. These early activists were inspired by the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing during 1978–9, when many social activists and citizens in Beijing put posters on, and held protest rallies before, a long brick wall in downtown Xidan Street, urging political reform. This brief period of liberalization was quickly suppressed by the post-Mao leadership, with mass arrests and imprisonment of the leading participants. The overseas movement snowballed after the Tiananmen event, which took place in Tiananmen Square in downtown Beijing during May–June 1989, when hundreds of thousands of students, intellectuals, workers and common citizens gathered to protest the lack of political freedom and other flaws in the party-state system. It led to a massacre of demonstra- tors by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on 4 June that year. The violent crackdown caused a mass exodus of student leaders and liberal intellectuals not just from Beijing but also the various provinces who rallied in their own localities to support the campaigns in the national capital. Ranks of the OCDM were simultaneously inflated by a large 1 Jie Chen - 9781784711030 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/02/2021 06:59:15PM via free access Columns Design XML Ltd / Job: Chen-The_Overseas_Chinese_Democracy_Movement / Division: 01-Intro /Pg. Position: 1 / Date: 30/9 JOBNAME: Chen PAGE: 2 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 8 09:27:34 2019 2 The overseas Chinese democracy movement number of Chinese students and visitors who had gone to Western countries previously and stayed on due to the Beijing massacre. After the mid-1990s, a few prominent Democracy Wall veterans, again from various provinces as well as Beijing, joined the overseas dissident community, mainly because they were expelled by the Chinese govern- ment in the name of medical parole as a diplomatic trade-off with the United States (US). In the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of human rights’ defenders and dissident intellectuals have left China to join the exiles, particularly during the repressive administration of Xi Jinping (2012–). It is a challenge to define the exile movement with precision. The above narrative is merely a part attempt to highlight the types of leading activists. It should be clarified that the term “exiles” is used as a broad reference for active participants in the OCDM in general. They include not just those well-known dissidents who fled China from various rounds of persecution or were involuntarily sent abroad by the authorities. They also include those elements that, regardless of how and when they left China, chose to become proactive in the overseas political opposition. Some came to the West as students (like Wang Bingzhang), some as migrants, and some even members of official delegations. In this sense, “exile” mainly indicates that all leading activists have been barred from re-entry to their homeland due to their “anti-China” activities abroad. Another challenge to defining a precise overarching definition of the OCDM at this point is that the movement overall has not always been expanding – in fact the opposite is true due to deteriorating operational environments and intra-movement disunity. Many prominent dissidents have long left the struggle. The rank and file has been shrinking for most organizations. At present, dissident exiles have different backgrounds and permeate diverse walks of life in their host societies. After decades of chequered development and changing campaign tactics, the movement has become fragmented with a proliferation of different organizations. One generic definition of the movement should be that it consists of the organizations, networks and campaigns of those mainland Chinese political activists in exile, mostly in the West but particularly in the US. Through lobbying, publicity, conferencing, training, protests and many other contentious activities, they advocate liberal democratic values to systematically expose the fundamental flaws and human rights abuses in the party-state system of China and struggle to bring it to an end. This loose definition of the movement does not imply consistent coordination or unity among the activists and organizations. The above can also be seen as a narrow definition because over the years the boundaries of the exile community have become nebulous. A Jie Chen - 9781784711030 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/02/2021 06:59:15PM via free access Columns Design XML Ltd / Job: Chen-The_Overseas_Chinese_Democracy_Movement / Division: 01-Intro /Pg. Position: 2 / Date: 30/9 JOBNAME: Chen PAGE: 3 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 8 09:27:34 2019 Introduction 3 broadly defined OCDM would include people who share the core dissidents’ goals and occasionally participate in their activities but may not want to be seen to associate with the movement, let alone join any dissident organization. This hesitation is caused by concerns with career and business interests in China, or the poor reputation of some exile organizations and dissidents. Nebulous boundaries are also exemplified by the existence of those organizations that work closely with the OCDM because their membership comprises many political exiles (such as Independent Chinese PEN Centre), or those organizations that are mainstream rights groups but with prominent Chinese exiles playing leadership roles over the years (though one can only think of one major case, namely Human Rights in China based in New York). EXILE POLITICS: A CHINESE AND INTERNATIONAL TRADITION Activism by exiles of various ideological and religious strands has been a salient mover and shaper of political life in the modern world, if not since ancient times. Some were defined by revolutionary violence, but some were more peaceful; some were social movements, but some were governments in exile. Prominent cases of overseas political activities against repressive home regimes in the twentieth century include: anti- Fascist movements and governments in exile in Western Europe, post- Second World War exiles in Latin America, Southern Europe, Africa and East Asia, and exiles and dissidents from the Soviet bloc states.1 China is no exception to this historical pattern, though the OCDM is the first of its kind in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) if one excludes the struggle of the Tibetan exiles which took off with the Dalai Lama’s exit to India in 1959. One historical case that contemporary exiles like to celebrate is the Republican Revolution of 1911, which received strong support from overseas Chinese communities and created Asia’s first republic, namely the Republic of China (ROC). Its leader Sun Yat-sen famously declared “Huaqiao [overseas Chinese migrants] are the mother of revolution” in acknowledgement of the fact that the campaign was waged and supported by overseas Chinese 1 For a summary of exile politics in history, see Shain, Yossi (2005a), ‘Introduction’, in The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 1–6. Jie Chen - 9781784711030 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/02/2021 06:59:15PM via free access Columns Design XML Ltd / Job: Chen-The_Overseas_Chinese_Democracy_Movement / Division: 01-Intro /Pg. Position: 3 / Date: 30/9 JOBNAME: Chen PAGE: 4 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 8 09:27:34 2019 4 The overseas Chinese democracy movement communities under the leadership of experienced exiles like himself.2 In fact exile struggle is also part of the ideological upbringing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its classic narrative of the world communist movement dutifully refers to the original prophet, the famous German exile Karl Marx, and the legend of the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin plotting the Russian October Revolution in exile. Broadly, the CCP’s pre-1949 development also benefited from overseas experiences in Europe and the Soviet Union. Li Haifeng, former director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of State Council, emphasized that many renowned party leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De all “went to Europe, the birthplace of Marxism, to pursue truth in order to save the nation and people”. He claimed that “precisely during the years of residing in Europe, many of them completed the trans- formation from young students pursuing revolutionary truth to mature professional revolutionists”.3 This historical background may partly explain Beijing’s fear of “young students pursuing revolutionary truth” abroad today. It should also be mentioned that the PRC hosted communist exiles from many South East Asian countries until the late 1980s.4 In short, the OCDM is part of a long political tradition, both Chinese and international. STUDY OF EXILE POLITICS Works covering exile politics are voluminous, mostly historical narratives based on individual national cases either as origins or hosts.5 However, study of the OCDM has been intermittent or sporadic, mirroring the wax and wane of the movement. The historic founding of China Spring and CAD’s growth has attracted little academic interest despite wide coverage by Western and overseas Chinese media.

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