Tiananmen at 30

Event Transcript

Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University May 8, 2019 https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/panel-discussion-tiananmen-at-30/

Speakers: Hao Jian, Professor, Film Academy Louisa Lim, Senior Lecturer, University of Melbourne; Author, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited Dan, Founder and Executive Director of Dialogue Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California Irvine

Moderator: Rowena Xiaoqing He, Current Member, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Author, : Voices of the Struggle for

[Michael Szonyi] - All right, good afternoon. Welcome to the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. My name's Michael Szonyi. I am the director of the Fairbank Center and it is my privilege to introduce today's session marking 30 years since the extraordinary events of May and June of 1989. While we have called today's session "Tiananmen at 30", of course these events occurred not just at or even just in Beijing, but in cities all over China. These events culminated, as we all know, on June 4th, 1989 in a act of military suppression that took place also not only, or even primarily in the square itself but throughout the city and beyond. Anyone could have predicted that this year, 2019, would be a sensitive year for anniversaries in China. As Jiayang Fan wrote in The New Yorker this week, for the CCP, "certain anniversaries teeter between "the emblematic and the problematic." As things have unfolded, the year proved far more sensitive for far more anniversaries than we had anticipated. Problematic definitely outweighed emblematic. Besides the 40th anniversary of the establishment of US-China relations, the 40th anniversary of the Relations Act, here at the Fairbank Center we've held events including a commemoration of 40 years of reform and opening up which we co-hosted and co-organized with the Unirule Institute of Economics and that event, we believe, proved to be one of the very last, if not the very last, public event for that very influential liberal think tank in China. We similarly commemorated the centenary of the May 4th Movement with a two-day conference organized by Professor David Wang. Some of you, like me, were at that conference and I think many of us who attended that conference were discouraged that, as one of our guests, Jeff Wasserstrom, pointed out in his long New York Times op-ed, a century after May 4th, a free and open discussion of that event and its significance remains impossible in China. As with May 4th, so too June 4th. But even in a year of sensitive anniversaries, there's something distinctive about the event we commemorate today because of course there are no commemorations at all of this event-- or no public commemorations of this event at all in China. This is an event that can only be spoken of outside of China. The Fairbank Center at Harvard is home for China studies in all forms, even, and in some ways especially when the topic is sensitive. We value our commitment to intellectual freedom to pursue questions and research that others might want us to avoid. It's our responsibility to hold events such as today's, both as an academic endeavor in the face of official suppression in China and as a mark of respect to those whose lives were taken or scarred by the events 30 years ago. The importance of our discussions on the CCP's relationship with the Chinese citizenry is only elevated by the context of other human rights crises that are unfolding in China today, in particular the current crisis in Xinjiang, reinforces the importance of our persistent pursuit of truth in the face of repression. Let me just say a couple of words about the ground rules for today's event. I will introduce our moderator in a moment and then ask her to introduce the panelists. Today's event is being recorded by the Fairbank Center for future broadcast. Please, for obvious reasons, we ask that there be no additional recording, no private recording on cell phones, and so on, and we will come and ask you to stop if we observe that happening. In a break from the usual Fairbank Center practice, we will not ask those who ask questions to identify themselves, so you are perfectly free to ask your questions anonymously and I should also add that whatever form the ultimate broadcast takes, only the speakers will be recorded for broader distribution so you need have no fears on that score. Let me now begin today's event by introducing our moderator, Professor Rowena He, currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, the author of a book, "Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China", a book which she completed while she was a postdoc here at the Fairbank Center. While also at the Fairbank Center, she created the freshman seminar, "Tiananmen in History and Memory", which was an extraordinarily successful and important course that she taught for five years, from 2010 to 2015. She is an old friend of the Fairbank Center. It's our honor to support Rowena's work. So please join me in welcoming Rowena.

- [Rowena] Thank you so much, Michael, and I would like to thank the Fairbank Center for organizing the event. What Michael said just now, I'm sure many of us here, like Professor Shi Ruiping in the audience, who had been in Tiananmen the whole time in 1989, and Eddie, who had been reporting for the Wall Street Journal in 1989, I'm sure it means a lot for us to be here today. Also, as Michael mentioned, we always have special rules when we organize events for the anniversary. All those years when I organized my student events I made that rule, and probably that's the reality we have to face: we care, we refuse to forget, but then we face all this fear even outside China, and that's a battle, a war against memory that we have been trying to fight against collectively, inside and outside China all these years. So I think that's exactly why it's so important for us to be here today. Before I introduce the speakers, I also would like to talk about someone who has been very important supporting this work all these years. He's my dear mentor, Professor Rod MacFarquhar, and every time he would be sitting at the front, supporting and encouraging. He's been a role model for so many of us as told Diana at the dinner just now. And now Rod is gone, but for those of us who are determined to follow his steps and his inspirations, we are going to pick up the job. It's hard, it's difficult, it's challenging, it's daunting but he always showed us that we should stand up for the principles and not just to understand the Chinese politics, to reconstruct history, but also care about the Chinese people, their lives and China's future. And when Rod, when I told him about this panel he wrote me: "Excellent news." "No longer will you have to do all the work "to remember Tiananmen." And I am saving this message to remind myself. I know that Rod is not sitting in the front today, but his spirit is with us in this room as always. So I would like to introduce our first speaker, Professor Hao Jian professor from the Beijing Film Academy. I'm sure it's particularly meaningful for Professor Hao Jian to be here today because five years ago, when he organized a private commemoration in his home in Beijing, right afterwards, five of them were detained and arrested and many of you, like Pu Ziqiang had lost his freedom after that event. So it's particularly meaningful for us to welcome him today, to speak for us, freely and openly on this campus for the first time since 1989. Let's welcome Professor Hao Jian.

- [Hao Jian] I'm so glad that Professor Michael Szonyi updated the Chinese situation for you. The first sentence of my speech is, after 30 years, this is the first time to commemorate the June 4th incident in public, for me. I give my sincere appreciation to Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Thank you for holding this open discussion. Thank you to all of you, the audience. Today, I'm happy to have the opportunity to communicate with you and exchange some ideas. The Tiananmen massacre of June 4th, 1989 was not only a vital milestone in Chinese history, but also a historical turning point for the end of the . The failure of the Communists was a tragic example to people from Eastern European Communist countries. It also made people from all over the world know more about the violent nature of the Communist totalitarian regime. After 1989, we Chinese people bore immense pressure in every aspect of our social life. Many countries are moving towards constitutional democracy and social justice, but China is not. The June 4th incident also changed my understanding of the Chinese regime and my personal life. I was at Tiananmen Square on June 3rd. Hearing the roar of armored trucks I worked out of Beijing Film Academy's tent. Later that night, a student was shot down 20 meters in front of me. When we escaped out of Chang'an Avenue, we were still chanting slogans and the whole street was permeated with smoke from smoke bombs. The morning of June 4th, I got a call telling me that my male cousin had not returned home. I immediately went to Fuxing Hospital and saw his name on the casualty list on the wall. There were dozens of corpses on the floor, but I failed to recognize him among those corpses. Maybe because people's faces change after death but more likely I did not want to recognize him among those corpses. In the following days I went to dozens of other hospitals, opened the refrigerators to check corpses. After half a month I returned to Fuxing Hospital and I found that his corpse at that time, his body had turned jet-black. After the June 4th crackdown China has suffered from terror. When I ordered this gravestone I did not dare to put the inscriptions on it. Only after six years did I hire a stone mason to write the name on it. also went through this process of walking away from fear. Because they each had family members killed on June 4th, they became targeted groups and they were often followed and harassed by the police. On the hearing stand, Zhang Xianling discovered a note. Zhang Xianling is the right one. She found a note saying, "I have the same destiny as you." This note was left by You Weijie They have worked there together ever since. Now You Weijie is the spokesperson of the Tiananmen Mothers. I have been trying my best to help Tiananmen Mothers to do something, such as attempting to contact and visit bereaved families. Intellectuals of 1989's generation such as wrote a lot of joint petitions and lots of articles. In 1995, Liu Xiaobo and the Tiananmen Mothers presented those petitions. I convinced my uncle and aunt to overcome their fear. They signed the joint petition of the Tiananmen Mothers. After that publication of , Liu Xiaobo was arrested by the Chinese authorities. We, his friends, suffered a tough crackdown. When we went to visit Liu Xiaobo's wife, we don't know what to say to her. In April 2009, we hesitated. Should we continue to speak up in this high-handed political environment? Eventually, we became firm in our decision to commemorate the June 4th incident and to speak for it. We thought, "This is the best support for Liu Xiaobo in prison." So, in April 2009, we secretly convened a June 4th seminar. We couldn't find a formal meeting place, so we used the meeting room in a restaurant. After the meeting, we published the information and the photos on the internet. Because of the government control, I made the seminar's banner in different stores. You see, I cut these banners... in spots, and pieced them together into one. During June 4th, during the early June that year I was followed by a policeman and my student... They find him: "Oh, you are the student of Hao Jian." "Okay, you don't follow Hao Jian." He was assigned to follow another professor in Beijing Film Academy, Cui Weiping. This commemoration, in 2009 you know, here it is so crowded, it's hard for you to find me because we got no place. We did this in Zhang Xianling's apartment. In 2014, a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of June 4th was held at my home. I eliminated this because He Xiaoqing has introduced it for you. These are the topics of that seminar in 2014. You see, after that seminar, Xu Youyu offered to take responsibility. He emphasized to the police that he was the only organizer of the seminar. Also, this is Pu Ziquiang, a very famous human rights lawyer, and also an intellectual, who kept us speaking up in public. He is one of the 1989 generation as Wang Dan, His life was dramatically changed by the June 4th incident. It was I who asked that Pu Ziquiang attend the June 4th seminar. I feel guilty about that. So I was very surprised that he sent his thanks to me for inviting him. He said that he had been investigated by the police and that it was just a matter of time before he would be sent to prison. He was willing to attend that June 4th seminar at the cost of imprisonment. He believed that he had the responsibility to speak for June 4th. He was proud to do so. Pu Zhiqiang got probation of three years during which time he had to wear a monitoring device. When I met with him, he was busy trying to find a power supply to recharge his GPS. I found this picture from the internet; it's not a real one. And Elder Hu Shigen who attended this meeting is still in jail. Because of the time limit, I cannot introduce many other individuals and their groups. For example: some people were labeled as thugs by the Chinese government after June 4th incident, some of whom were sentenced to death; some of whom were sent to prison for years. This is last year. We commemorate our relatives. You see a lot of policemen around here. Sometimes, there are more policemen than us. I will end this speech by showing a bamboo painting by a June 4th "thug", Wu Wenjian. He was sentenced to seven years in prison because of organizing and protesting in Beijing. Preserve the bloody memory. Prevent the tragedy from repeating itself. I must do what I should do. We must do what we should do. Thank you. Thank you for suffering through my broken English.

- [Rowena] Professor Hao Jian has published many books. He is eloquent and he knows his work, but when he found out that he would have a chance to speak today, I can't remember how many times we communicated and how much time he had worked for this 10 minute talk. Not because he tried to look good, not because he proves his English is good, not because he wants to show that he knows better but because he wanted to make sure that he used this 10 minutes for the first time in 30 years in his life that he can speak openly to our audience and to tell them what happened, as Michael eloquently spoke at the beginning, so that those voices that have been silenced, those memories that have been raised and those young lives who cannot speak for themselves would be heard and the memory would be remembered. And this would be a good time to introduce Louisa Lim, who had written this important book, "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited". As we all know how difficult it is to work on sensitive topics like Tiananmen so it's really courageous of her to pick up this topic and to write this book. In her important book, she also mentioned the crackdown in Sichuan, in Chengdu which had not been covered, so this is very important for us to know that, not just in Tiananmen, in Beijing that the killing happened but also in other places. So let's welcome Louisa.

- [Louisa] Thank you Rowena, thank you Michael and everyone at the Fairbank Center for organizing this. And, particularly, thank you Hao Jian for describing what the act of memory is like inside China today. I'm going to talk about Beijing's amnesia on June the 4th: how it's being enforced and exported. And I'm going to start with words written by Liu Xiaobo, China's Nobel Peace Laureate who died in police custody from cancer. As you probably know, he was one of those who helped broker the truce that allowed students to leave the square in 1989 and after that, every year he wrote an elegy to Tiananmen. These are words from his 2002 elegy, but I think they sum up Beijing's success in erasing Tiananmen from the collective memory and that was so well illustrated by Hao Jian's slides. He said, "All roadways are blocked. "All tears are under surveillance. "All fresh flowers are shadowed. "All memories are purged. "All tombstones are still blank." 17 years later, 17 years after he wrote those words they are still true and even more so than before, I think. The author Yan Lianke described amnesia in China as "a state-sponsored sport", and one of the most popular events in that sport is forgetting Tiananmen. I wrote in my book about how China's managed to erase the collective memory of June the fourth so successfully that, when I went around campuses asking students if they could identify a picture of only 15 out of 100 students were able, at that time, to identify the picture. And it really shows how memory has become so politicized, but I think since then, the control over history and memory has only tightened. We've seen history being legislated with new laws to protect heroes and martyrs and increasingly private remembrances are being penalized as Hao Jian illustrated. But I think what's really interesting is now we're also seeing attempts to export that amnesia and we're increasingly seeing Western corporations lured by the Chinese market that are doing Beijing's bidding and censoring content about Tiananmen but inside and outside China. So just a couple of examples that have happened in recent years: just in the last month we saw Apple removing Tiananmen-related songs by Canto pop stars, including Jacky Cheung from inside China, from the catalog there. Over the past few years, there's been a couple of incidents where LinkedIn has censored users outside China from posting content on June the 4th, and the spokesman even explained this by saying, "It was a move to create value for our members". And then we saw the China Quarterly, a scholarly journal being given a list of titles to take down, and out of the more than 300 titles the authorities asked the China Quarterly to remove from its website inside China, it's interesting that 10% of those had Tiananmen or June the 4th in their title. Another case, which is particularly interesting, was reported by the Wall Street Journal about a Chinese education company called VIP Kids, and they fired two American teachers for talking about Tiananmen and Taiwan in their online classes. The interesting thing about this is that the teachers were not in China. They were in America. They were teaching online to students in China. So, think about that: this is a company that employs 60,000 teachers in the U.S. and Canada, but mainly teaching Chinese kids. So in this way we're seeing those closed, discursive places of Chinese classrooms being exported overseas. And we're also seeing this sustained and coordinated campaign to influence Western reporting on the Tiananmen anniversary. So I'd recently done a survey of journalists' anniversary reporting and three- quarters of the respondents in my survey reported experiencing harassment of various types from the authorities. The most obvious type was being blocked from going to Tiananmen Square. That happened to 60% of respondents. And almost the same number had access to sources blocked, a fifth of journalists had their sources harassed or detained, and the same number also had complaints about their coverage. Even in the harassment there's all kinds of innovation. Recently there have been pictures that you've probably seen of Tiananmen Square increasingly being blanketed by security cameras, and often these sort of A.I. powered facial recognition cameras. But there are also very low-tech methods that are being used and in 2009, there was a particular year when the innovation was super low-tech. The security forces, plainclothes policemen, took to the square with umbrellas and they would literally stand between cameramen and the journalists to ruin their pieces to camera so they couldn't report from the square. So all of this is a coordinated campaign from different arms of the government which really, it limits the reporting and it limits the type of story that gets told, because access to those people who remember what happened, those memory-carriers, is limited. And so we are seeing in this way, the process of forgetting, the actual movement itself being accelerated and exported because journalists can only write one story: the story of oppression. They can't write any other stories. Philip Graham very famously said, "Journalists write the first draft of history", but here, through these kind of attempts, I think we're seeing a repressive state which is slowly and very patiently redacting and retroactively editing that draft of history so that we forget, in the West, we forget the movement, we only remember that act of oppression. So my book came out five years ago and in the time since then, I've talked in classrooms around the world, in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Germany, about Tiananmen, and it's been really interesting because I've seen in the questions that mainland students have asked almost a shift. At the beginning, students are often quite defensive and they would ask questions like, "All countries do things like this, "what makes China any different?" Or sometimes they would ask, "China's economic success today "is based on what the government did back then, "surely it was worth it." But recently I've seen another line of questioning which I think is very interesting and I'm going to read you a quote from a student who asked a question in Sydney who said, "Why do we have to look back to this time in history? "Why do you think it will be helpful to current "and nowadays China, "especially our young generation? "Do you think it could be harmful "to what the Chinese government calls the harmonious society?" Well, isn't that interesting? The Chinese government has succeeded in making knowledge dangerous. It's succeeded in seeding that idea that knowledge can have a price and that price could be too high. I think Liu Xiaobo's words are more true than ever today as we see these new methods of social control like the social credit system, and we see the price of memory becoming more and more concrete, and we see silence spreading through channels including Western ones. Recently, some of the most poignant acts of memory that we've seen emerging from China have actually been completely wordless. I don't know how many of you have seen it, but there's this astonishing 11- second video that emerged this year of a young man re-enacting the Tank Man photograph in the Beijing Military Museum. So he's standing in front of a real Chinese army tank, and he's holding two bags, one plastic bag in either hand. No words at all. On the 26th anniversary, an activist called Du Yanlin went to Tiananmen Square and he opened a black umbrella on the square and he was immediately detained for picking quarrels and stirring up trouble. I think it just shows that in a time when words have become dangerous, even the lack of words no longer offers any protection. And just as a final thought, I just wanted to underline one thing: I'm not an activist, I'm a journalist but I think the success of Beijing's state-imposed amnesia means that any public discussion of Tiananmen has become a challenge to Beijing's narrative. Because of this, there's not really any way to talk about Tiananmen and not challenge amnesia. So anyone who talks about Tiananmen, who remembers it publicly, who writes about it a lot, by default you become seen as an activist. And I would also like to point out that I think this reflects Beijing's success in setting the parameters of discussion, even well beyond its borders. Thank you.

- [Rowena] Thank you so much, Louisa. I think, as Louisa mentioned there's all these efforts to make sure that we forget, and we would no longer remember but the fact that so many of you are here today, your presence, already showed that we collectively refuse to forget and we still remember. I saw so many faces, people probably I only will see each time when there is a Tiananmen event and maybe for over a decade. And people often ask me, "How can you still continue after all this?" and I think it's these faces that I always remember when struggling in darkness because I know that I am not alone. So many people actually are doing the same thing in their own way to remember and to refuse to forget. And the beauty of today, I think, is today we are able to see so many of the people maybe in the past, you saw that they were struggling there, they were imprisoned, they were being harassed, they were being tortured and at that time we were not able to tell them how much we care. But today, we are in the same room, in the same space, shared space and our identities are defined as someone who refused to forget. And on this note I want to introduce our next speaker Dr. Wang Dan, who got his PhD from Harvard, here. Of course you all know that, in 1989, he topped the 21 most-wanted list and he was imprisoned and later exiled. I remember the first time I managed to go to Beijing and visit his mom, and she kept me for dinner and she told me that she always remembered the image when he was carrying his schoolbag and biking to school and she always wished that image would appear in the window again. That was more than a decade ago that she said that to me, and now, Wang Dan still cannot return to China but he's here with us today, and he's now the founder and the director for the Dialogue China. He's hoping that we can continue to engage in dialogues with China. Let's welcome Dr. Wang Dan. .

- [Dr. Wang] I need you to pardon me, to allow me to say that I'm not feeling very well and sitting here is making me more 'cause, for me, like going back to home. It's really great to go back to the Fairbank Center, where I grew up here, not physically but spiritually, and I thank Michael and Rowena to make this possible. It's very important to have this event, to remember what happened in 1989. I can still remember the 10th anniversary of 1989, also happened at Harvard. We had a much bigger event in the President's hall. With a bonus speaker, Nancy Pelosi and a video of Martin Luther King Jr. attended . After 20 years, so many institutions are making me speak, but I have to say something here. Due to the time limit, I will focus only on one question. This is a hypothetical question, which is: if the 1989 Democracy Movement had succeeded, what could China look like today? Also this question I think first requires us to define, what is success for the 1989 democracy? Because I think one of the biggest misunderstandings people have of the 1989 Democracy Movement is expressed by a question like this: "If you", the opponent to me, "if you take the power of the President of China, "would you have been better than "or Xi Jinping?" I think this is really the wrong question. I can't imagine I could be the leader of China, I even cannot control my classmates. So this is hard to challenge, it's in fact completely bogus. Because in 1989, the students never mentioned replacing the Communist Party or proposed taking power ourselves; and regardless of how the 1989 Democracy Movement would have developed, there was no possibility of student leaders becoming national leaders. Success in 1989, for us, means achieving our objectives. What were those? The political position of the 1989 Democracy Movement were first proposed in what we called The Seven Prongs Petition that student representatives, including me myself submitted to the leaders of the leaders of the CCP. Those Seven Prongs requirement included re-evaluation of the heroes and achievement of former General Secretary , and completely negating the campaign to, so-called eliminate spiritual pollution and the campaign against the bourgeois liberalization. And the publication of the salary and all other forms of income of state leaders, et cetera, et cetera. That was our goal. If we achieved those goals, that is success. So there's no category like being a national leader. However, I believe the success of the 1989 Democracy Movement should be measured against two very important conditions raised during the May 13th student hunger strike. Because the hunger strike turned from the whole student movement into a popular mass movement, or what we called Democracy movement. And from the full force of nationwide support, phone calls demanding that the government accept the demands of students in their hunger strike, this implies that, if the 1989 Democracy Movement had succeeded, the government would have automatically accepted these two demands by the hunger strike students. Some people criticized our student movement as very radical. Let's say, if these radical 3,000 students sacrificed their lives in Tiananmen Square only wanted two achievements, we only had two requirements-- if the government had taken those two requirements, of course we would withdraw from Tiananmen Square. And the two demands is one-week demand that the government promptly engage in a concrete dialogue on equal footing with the dialogue dedication of Beijing's university and other universities. This is a dialogue... that's why I called our new think-tank "Dialogue China", we still have this dream of dialogue. We're just asking for dialogue! We used our lives to ask for dialogue. Is this radical? And now, second demand is, we demand that the government fairly evaluate this student movement and affirm its as a patriotic and a democratic student movement, not criminal. We hoped that the government can change their tone in the April 26th editorial. Don't see us as a criminal, we are patriotic, we hope our country can be better. Is this requirement really radical? So when some, they criticized students of that time as radical, is that fair? You can think about it. Of course, I have my answers. But discussing the question of, "What if 1989 Democracy Movement had succeeded?" therefore demands discussing the effect on China's future if the government had begun a dialogue with the students and had affirmed the student movement as patriotic in nature. I feel it would have had the following three main effects if they accepted our demands. First, if 1989 Democracy Movement had succeeded, the reformist factions we see in the party represented by former General Secretary would certainly have been fortified. It's common knowledge that Zhao Ziyang was the senior CCP leader who was most inclined toward market economic reforms and also the most open-minded leader. If Zhao Ziyang had greater policymaking authority, I believe he would surely have lead China to undertake more profound market reforms in economic affairs. And this trend could be seen in the bankruptcy law initiated in 1988. In other words, if 1989 student movement had succeeded, China would not have fallen in social instability like has happened today. Rather, would have stepped up the pace of economic reform with even greater results. Secondly, if 1989 Democracy Movement had succeeded, the political reform which launched in 1988 would have been eased forward with the stronger support of the popular view especially the part of freedom of this press. That is to say, economic reform would have been promoted in a better environment of supervision by public opinions. Today, even the Chinese Communist Party acknowledged that expanding the power of supervision by public opinion is the only way to effectively contain the spread of corruption throughout the country. So if expansion of freedom speech had begun back in 1989, corruption would not have spread throughout the whole China system as it has today. Certainly, if 1989 Democracy Movement had succeeded, it would have created a model for the dialogue between state and society which is so important, not for the past, even for the future of China. In fact, the political report of CCP's 13th National Congress, drafted under another open-minded high-level official's, 's, leadership, established consultation and a dialogue always to the public as the focal orientation of political reform. And when the students called for dialogue, they were effectively echoing this demand for political reform. In today's China, the prospect of the government and the people being of one heart and mind has vanished, and the people have lost all confidence in the government. They are collectively giving up their responsibility for this country, and they think the government also gives up the responsibility for the country, too. This is the main reason why so many social conflicts automatically adopt a violent method. When reform becomes a game between government and a society, a dialogue between a state and society becomes a fundamental safeguard for social stability. Only then can the two sides make an effort to ensure a smooth and steady transformation. Taiwan's experience provided a biased reference of this. So if the 1989 Democracy Movement had succeeded, we can imagine that it would have provided a much, much better environment for reform for China. And I think this is the question I won't discuss due to the time limit-- just focus on this question, but before I stop I have something to say here: personally I want to say that what happened in 1989 had a critical effect on my personal life. Mainly manifested in the fact that having this history, there are some things not left entirely to my choice today, such as the ideal of promoting social progress or living up to certain expectations. As an ordinary student, I could have chosen a personal life or a public life, but now I have no choice but to live under the public eye. It's hard to say whether this is my good or bad fortune, but I feel I can only face and accept this. Furthermore, if the same thing were to happen again, I believe I would still not turn back because embracing social ideals when one is young is not a matter of a rational choice. It can almost be considered as an emotional necessity, a necessary choice. I have to say that this emotion is really good and also time-sensitive. When one is older-- as old as me-- it's very difficult to experience the passion of youth. Human life is really limited and I would not give up the opportunity to draw on my life experience to the future of my country, and my social ideals even if only temporarily. That's why I have absolutely no regret for the price I have paid, to have waited seven years in prison and now cannot go back to my country, probably forever. I think this is my own life choice, and I will continue to go forward without any hesitation. Thank you very much.

- [Rowena] I remember in those years when I was working on my book with Wang Dan and many of the exiles, one thing in our group discussion one day when we were having our shared discussion and we were saying being idealistic in China means you are very selfish because we chose what we have to do for our country but our family, my mom, his mom cannot choose not to be our family members. The price that you have to pay for your idealism. And Wang Dan made the very good point, important point earlier: in 1989 we students were not looking for revolution. We were not looking for regime change. Two best examples, Wang Dan mentioned the seven demands on the day of Hu Yaobang's funeral outside the People's Great Hall, the three students were kneeling the seven demands, kneeling down, begging the government to come out and listen to them. So that's one example. The second example, of course: the three men who threw paint on Mao's portrait and immediately afterwards they were taken to the police by the students. The students turned them in because they wanted to show that we are not trying to give you trouble, we are just your loyal kids hoping that you will listen to us. And I interviewed one of these men two months ago in Indianapolis. He had been beaten so badly he totally lost his mind, he's now mentally disabled, he doesn't hear. He only could say a few incomplete sentences but there's one sentence, he said it again and again and it was stuck in my mind. He kept repeating the same sentence: "This is not done by the people. "This is not done by the students." And I didn't understand what he was talking about so I went back to my archive materials. It turned out that there's a big photo in Tiananmen Square that they, when the students took them to return them to to the police, the students had a big banner in both Chinese and English: "This is not done by the students. "This is not done by the people." Meaning that these are troublemakers, but we are not. We are just your loyal kids. We are on the side of the government. If the students had known that just 10 days later 200,000 army soldiers equipped with AK-47 and tanks would be coming, maybe they would have changed their mind to turn these men in. But there's just two examples to show that they were not looking for revolution. Our next speaker, Professor Jeff Wasserstrom, he has been very supportive helping the younger generation and helping us to understand and do this work on China. He's of course an important professor in the field, a Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and also he had published this important book, "To Understand China in the 21st Century", that's the title of the book. Let's welcome Jeff. Thanks. .

- [Jeff] So this is also a homecoming for me, I got my Master's here at Harvard and was invited back the first time to give a public talk was right after finishing a dissertation at Berkeley on the history of student movements and to speak on 1989, an event with Wu'erkaixi, another of the student leaders then.. I feel very humbled and I find it difficult to think of how to speak after hearing these inspiring talks by people who've lived, and documented, and pushed back against memory so much. I'm going to try to take a different take on this through, of all things, some works of fiction. One of the events that has stayed with me a lot in thinking through 1989's meaning was in 2003, I was invited to speak at Heidelberg College, a liberal arts college that was having a bonding experience for the incoming freshmen. They were all watching the film "The Gate of Heavenly Peace", which is an inspiring film about 1989 that I had the privilege to be a consultant on. And they asked me if I would come and speak to the freshmen in a kind of orientation about that and I said yes immediately. Then they called me a week before the event and said, "By the way, "the students who are incoming class "are also reading a novel together "as a shared experience. "That novel is 'Brave New World', "I hope you can talk about that as well." And my first thought was, "Damn, "Why couldn't it have been 1984?" As we've heard, "1984" is the book that introduced the idea of a memory hole, which is where the Chinese Communist Party has sought to put Tiananmen Men. It's in Newspeak, all kinds of things about the control of memory. Orwell's 1984 described the rein of oppression being "the boot on the face over and over again." All of these things come to mind when we think about the suppression of 1989 and the official efforts to forget it, to make people forget it. But then I read "Brave New World", which I hadn't read since a teenager. I didn't remember anything about it from reading as a teenager except there was this drug called soma that made you feel good all the time. And there were these very distracting somewhat pornographic movies you watched called Feelies. But I reread it, and I thought about this and I thought about what had happened in China since 1989 and how the Chinese Communist Party in part had stayed in power. Orwell's vision was the boot on the face, Huxley's vision was rule by distraction and playing to peoples' pleasures and hedonism. And in many ways, since 1989 the Chinese Communist Party has stayed in power in part by a combination of these kinds of things, blended. I'm not the only one who's thought about these together, as far back as the 1950s, Huxley was saying, actually in some parts of the world you see a mix-and-match of these two techniques, of Orwell, his former student at Eton, and his own vision for that. So that changed my way of thinking about 1989 and post-1989, and I think it's still there the way in which, to some degree, people in China are kept in place. People resist in all kinds of interesting, daring ways, but when they don't some of it is distraction and hedonism, materialism, consumerism, as well as fear. Then, in 2014, I got wrapped up in and excited by the umbrella movement in Hong Kong and once again there was an Orwell book that was brought up. The students, when they were about to protest started reading an Orwell book. But not "1984", "Animal Farm". "Animal Farm", if you boil it down, it's often seen as a critique of Stalinism but actually what it is in many ways is an allegory about a case in which you have a revolution that's supposed to do away with old forms of oppression and then the new people in power are just like what the old people in power were. So in part, for Hong Kong, it was after the end of British colonialism, we had a new order and it actually seems very much like a new kind of colonialism, this time from Beijing rather than from London. I've been thinking about "Animal Farm" a lot since then. It wasn't one that was on my radar screen, and I've been thinking about it with 1989 and actually as far back as 1919 and I think about it with what's going on in China right now including the things that Michael brought up. Xinjian, I mean, one of the things that the Chinese Communist revolution was supposed to do was do away with the kind of imperialism that was associated with the Japanese invasion of China, in which the Japanese had said in Manchuria, "These people are backward, "to become modern, they need us to be civilizing them, "they need us to be remaking them, reforming them", and in many ways that's now what Beijing is saying to Xinjian and Tibet is what the Japanese empire was saying to parts of China and other parts of Asia at the time: "We want to remake you". So this is a case in which the Chinese Communist Party has become like the pigs who took over the farm in "Animal Farm", a mirror image, in some ways, of what the villains are, I've been thinking. In 1989 there was a strong element of that, as well, actually, even though it's not typically brought up. One of the posters the students brought up showed as a kind of empress-dowager figure operating from behind the scenes, controlling power. The suggestion was that's how the old China was supposed to be, the new China was not supposed to be like that. When I was on a 25th anniversary of Tiananmen panel with Wang Chaoba, another of the student leaders, like Wang Dan she said one thing that people don't always appreciate about what lead up to the protests of 1989 was the disgust that people felt when Deng Xiaoping purged or demoted Hu Yaobang. It's always thought Hu Yaobang had supported student movements, he was put down. She said part of it was he was saying, "I have a chosen successor, "but now I'm just changing that." That was a throwback to Mao, who kept changing his successors. Once again, this was supposed to be a new era but the rulers were acting surprisingly like the old era. Again, it was the kind of "Animal Farm" syndrome. You can go back as far-- this is the 100th anniversary of the May 4th movement. May 4th was about all kinds of things: it was a critique of imperialism, all kinds of things, but among other things it was also a sense that a revolution had taken place that was supposed to change everything, but in many ways the same patterns were recurring. The 1919 protests were what started the May 4th movement, but movements also often have precursors. Before 1989 there was 1986. Before the umbrella movement in 2014 there was a protest in 2012. Before the 1919 protest in China, there were 1915 protests in China. Those protests were in part about demands that Japan was making on the warlords and the warlords were giving in to. But it was also the year that Yuan Shikai (see if this sounds familiar to anybody thinking about today), Yuan Shikai, who was the President of a Republic of China that was supposed to be completely unlike the old order set himself up as an Emperor who could rule for life. So I think, if we think about some of the frustrations that show up in these many different stages, from 1919 up to 2019 when, at Tsinghua University, Xu Zhangrun come under attack for being a critical intellectual, talking in part about Xi Jinping replicating the patterns that were supposed to be part of an old era, including doing away with term limits, now most recently we have the talk of sending down youth, all of these things that seem throwbacks to a time that was supposed to be gone. It's kind of odd to say, "Well, "why am I only talking about books by "British writers who went to Eton "as ways of understanding China?" But you don't need to look outside, because "Animal Farm", by my lights, is the great novella of the 20th century that talks about politics written in English. The great novella written about politics written in Chinese was "The True Story of Ah Q" by Lu Xun, a person of the May 4th generation, a person that the students of 1989 sometimes cited, one Chinese writer who sometimes will still be cited in Hong Kong. And "The True Story of Ah Q", part of it is about a revolution that didn't end up changing things other than who exactly was bullying ordinary people. And so I think we can see in this kind of trend, and it's not just, of course, in China that you see this kind of frustration with a revolution that claims to be about creating something that's completely new but falls into these bad old patterns of that. You can think of this as a recurring cry of Chinese speaking out against a flaw in an order, often in an effort to be a loyal opposition but finding it impossible to have space for a little opposition from the days of Chen Duxiu and other founders of the New Culture movement on to Xu Zhangrun. Thank you for your attention.

- [Rowena] Thank you so much, Jeff. I think the worst thing is China is not just having all of these problems that are similar in history, but also the CCP has been exporting many of its values and influence and interference outside China with its so-called model, China model of governance, a hybrid of state capitalism and authoritarian control and it's more about money and power and nothing matters. Let's hope that we will not let that win over, and we will keep our intellectual freedom. So we would be able to, if any of you have any comments or any shorter questions, we can do that, otherwise, shall we open the floor? Because I see we have lots of very interesting people in the audience who would have questions. Shall we open the floor, or would anyone like to jump on each other? Okay, good. So let's open the floor for Q and A, then. As we mentioned earlier, no need to identify who you are. If you are sent by the CCP, yes, maybe . Yes.

- [Audience Member] Thank you all very much. So my question is about, could there be another student protest that happened in Tiananmen? Not so much talking about the massacre but could there even be a protest happening again thinking that, right now, the censorship technologies in China have become so advanced but, on the other hand, there are protests like the students protesting for labor rights... Yeah, so: could the Tiananmen protests happen again? Thank you.

- [Rowena] Yes, Jeff?

- [Jeff] Yeah, sure. So I think the Chinese Communist Party has developed very sophisticated methods to try to minimize the chance of that happening and particularly what they've tried to prevent is any kind of protest that spreads from one social group to another. There's been a clampdown very much on those students because, in part, they're trying to connect to workers. There are protests in China all the time, and the protests, some of them are tolerated if they're in one locale , if they're one social group . So there certainly are protests, but there's a very specific one. So we both need to think about the fact of the creativity that people do to get around censorship and other things. One thing we didn't mention, one kind of protest that's happened recently is feminist protest, including the Me Too movement, when you are not allowed to use the words "me too" on the web, they've started putting "rice"-"bunny", "me too". So there is this great... It's not that the desire to protest has gone away but the intensity with which things are stamped down upon whenever they seem to be spreading is something that, so far-- you never say never, because the one thing I've learned studying student movements is, before big student movements happen, people are often saying, "This group, "this generation wouldn't lead a protest movement". We saw that in America a year and a half ago: "this generation's a bunch of selfish "post-millennials just looking at their cellphones", and then we had the biggest youth-led protests in decades after the Parkland shootings. So never write off a generation but I think the odds are incredibly stacked against things right now.

- [Louisa] And I think there's also an economic argument against, that so many young Chinese are so focused on making enough money to get married, you know, finding a job, buying a house, and they realize that getting involved in politics is not going to help you achieve any of those goals. I think people even talk about it as a kind of economic stability maintenance, that everybody's energies are focused in this one direction and again, probably that's a lesson that the Communist Party really... It's managed to impose really well on young people that political mobilization and political protest really doesn't pay. So I think that also would be something that acts against another student movement anytime soon. And certainly, if you talk to, as I'm sure you have, young students in China, people just aren't that interested in politics. They're much more interested in buying the next iPhone or how to find a job, how to find an apartment, where to find a husband or wife. Those are the concerns that I think obsess people today.

- [Wang] I still have my hope on young generations, actually, because I believe democracy is now human nature. Also based on human nature of a young generation. When I taught in Taiwan, I had the chance to meet a lot of students coming from , and I realized that one thing is really interesting: everybody came to the first day, they grab a table, and they have access to the internet, they key in the keyword, "June 4th" or "Tiananmen massacre." I mean, there's one characteristic of younger generations which is curiosity. Well, curiosity always kills totalitarianism if you keep this kind of curiosity, you want to know the truth. That's the young generation's character. As old as me, I've lost all my curiosity I already know a lot of things, but the young generation? So I believe in the young generation's human nature. So I still have my hope.

- [Rowena] Hao Jian, do you have anything to add?

- [Hao] Yeah, if you talk about the demonstration on Tiananmen Square, I cannot find anything. In China, the surveillance is everywhere and with facial recognition system. But I believe that ordinary people want to keep their rights, keep their money, keep their freedom. In fact, I believe if you read some internet, or WeChat, or Weibo, I believe that civil movement happens every day. But not a demonstration. Not the movement as you imagine. Even in college or university there are some students, they want to make some union in the factory. They say, "Oh, I believe in Marxism". But their action has been forbidden. It's not about Marxism or capitalism. So I believe we should change our thinking: not so crowded a demonstration, maybe the ordinary people everywhere, even in China. And, by the way, we want to keep the memory about June 4th. A lot of people who talk about June 4th on internet or in WeChat use metaphors or ambiguous language. We've created a lot of or something like--

- [Rowena] May 35th.

- [Hao] So, I must emphasize fighting is happening everyday.

- [Rowena] I think the price... people are trying to, the price is higher and higher. It's not like we talk about '86 and '87, after '86, '87, the student movement after Hu Yaobang was ousted, then there's still another chance in '89 for students to come out. But the political environment is totally changed, you see all those Marxism study groups who try to support the workers, recently, in Beijing and they have been arrested. And the ordinary citizens who try to commemorate, for example, the four men who have the liquor labels and they also have been sentenced, so you have to pay a heavy price when you try to organize all kinds of events. And another thing is, I think that if they keep doing this, next time, if something like Tiananmen happens, it would not be out of love, out of hope, out of faith, but it would be out of anger, out of frustration, and out of grievances. Maybe that's something that would be really sad, if they-- yeah, sure.

- [Wang] Can I add one more thing? I think younger generation changes very quick. I know a lot of people feel disappointed about the young generation nowadays in China but think about what happened in 1989. In 1987, when I enrolled in Beijing University, a lot of my classmates just played cards, prepared for the English exam, wanted to go to the . Even me, I go to Beijing city to learn breaking dance. But then, 1989, everybody go to situation. That's the younger generation.

- [Rowena] I debated this with Wang Dan a long time ago, about this four things, playing Mahjong, trying to get tofu, and dancing in 1989. That's why he's--

- [Wang] Don't ask me to dance, I already forget.

- [Rowena] That's why he's always hopeful about the younger generation. But I think the region has learned a big lesson, too, after 1989. So in '89 when all the college doors were locked students still found a way to go out so then they tried to make sure the next time, when all the doors are open, they would still choose not to go out and protest. If they protest, it would be defending their government. So that's something that I think I would like to keep in mind, too, about the changing political context as well as the way the younger generation, the values they have. Even with that, I am still, long-term, optimistic. I agree with Jeff, every time when we see something big happen, big changes happen, the day before, people will say that it's impossible. But then when something big happens the next morning on the street, everybody is telling you that that's inevitable. I study history and I believe in history, and I think history is on our side. Eddie.

- [Eddie] You just blew my cover by saying my name.

- [Jeff] You don't look like a young Chinese student who might get in trouble.

- [Eddie] Yeah, I'm probably okay. So I have a question for Wang Dan. I first met you in 1988 when you were leading those amazing salons at with another person who is a hero of mine, , but you were doing an exercise, "if we had succeeded, what would that have looked like, what would have happened?" So I wanna ask a different question: if there had not been a crackdown on June 3rd, June 4th, what would have happened? My memory is that, by late May of that year there were fewer students, certainly from Beijing many students were going back to campus. Yes, there were students coming from outside of Beijing to have the experience in the capital but that the movement was losing steam... I remember, I was a foreign correspondent, many people including myself left China in late May finally, to get some vacation after covering the movement since the end of April because it seemed to be winding down, it seemed to be losing steam. Then the government sends in troops, unarmed first, that brings everyone in Beijing out to the streets, the next night they come in with the tanks. It almost seemed that they were trying to create a rebellion that could be suppressed in order to reconcile the power struggle that was happening. Anyway, I'm going on too long, but my question is: if there had not been the crackdown, what would have happened? What would the students have done? How long would it have gone on?

- [Wang Dan] Well, since you know me, you knew that in the end of May we already proposed withdrawing from Tiananmen Square. But, I have to say, in reality, even other student leaders like or or already accepted our proposal. I do not think we can really ask the students to withdraw from Tiananmen Square. It's really difficult. It's not about the students of Beijing. Most of the Beijing students were already back to campus, our home, but we had more and more students come from all over the country, other provinces. They did not want to withdraw from Tiananmen Square. They'd just arrived, their first day! A lot of students, just for the first day... So it's almost impossible. I don't think it's fair to criticize student leaders like Chai Ling liked to reject to withdraw because I know it's almost impossible. But, to answer your question, if we had this chance to withdraw from the Tiananmen Square, as our plan, we went back to campus to continue to do what we called campus democracy, or democracy in campus which means, for me myself, my only hope is that, if we came back to campus we will keep wide requirements that allow us to elect our own student's association leader. That's our requirement if we come back to the campus. But, again, I don't think students can be persuaded because the government, they never accepted our two requirements. I don't know if this answered your question? Just , democracy on campus, that's our next step if we can restore from campus grounds.

- [Rowena] Anyone would like to add? Okay, I think also there's also, I know, Eddie, we talk a lot when I invited you to my class and we mentioned that that's a possibility, if they had rejoined, what would have happened. But there's some recent discussions by Xu Xiaokang and Chen Xiaoya and then they said that, according to some of the unknown sources and documents, and actually Deng Xiaopeng had already made up his mind to have the crackdown as long as April, that's right after the April 26th editorial. So it really doesn't matter what the students were going to do, they were determined that the army was going to come in and I have been asking for sources, but of course they are not sure yet. But that could be another point that it really doesn't matter what they had decided to do, the students had decided to do, what would have changed, because it looks like Deng was very upset about what's going on, even as early as April.

- [Wang] I have one more opinion here, it's I think there will have been a crackdown anyway even if those students withdrew from Tiananmen Square. What is April 26th editorial? It's, back to that time, the government already made their mind to crack down so if we withdraw, maybe they're not so bloody but there must have been another crackdown.

- [Audience Member] Thank you very much. I have a question to Professor Hao Jian. I read of press written about you in Apple Daily in Hong Kong yesterday. I'm wondering when and where you got the interview with Hong Kong. And also today you made a speech about June 4th outside of China. Is this critical to Chinese government? And if you go back to China, do you have any trouble with the Chinese government? And, if yes, what kind of trouble will you have?

- [Hao] I'll answer your last question first. My answer for your last question, what kind of trouble I would have gotten. I don't know.

- [Wang] We know.

- [Hao] I will go back to China, I will. Here I am just a visiting scholar, and for your earlier question, I accepted the interview in the beginning of this year in Beijing, at my home. In fact, a lot of media prepared their reporters about this 30th anniversary. There are three foreign media that wanted to interview me. In fact, I accepted the interview in Beijing on purpose. In fact, I can't accept this interview in Hong Kong... In fact, the crew would go to America. But I felt, if I criticize the Chinese government and say something about the Chinese situation the most suitable place is in China. Thank you for caring about me my trouble.

- [Rowena] Do you want to speak Chinese, is that better?

- [Hao] If you could not understand my English I will speak Chinese.

- [Hao] I must say, I don't know because, as Michael Szonyi mentioned, the Chinese situation changes. Maybe in recent years, recent months, recent days, we don't know. Thank you.

- [Rowena] I think Professor Hao Jian is not so naive to think that he's not going to have any consequences. I think the reason that we respect people like him is because, for 30 years, they know that there will be consequences but they are still doing what they have been doing and for that reason, I think that's why he has all our respect. Yes, uh-huh.

- [Audience Member] I have two questions. The first question is for Professor Hao Jian. You just mentioned 3,000 students who had died in Tiananmen Square, and I wonder how--

- [Hao] I mentioned?

- [Audience Member] Or...

- [Hao] No, I never mentioned.

- [Rowena] Liu Xiaobo's book mentioned.

- [Audience Member] Oh yeah, sorry, sorry. Liu Xiaobo, he mentioned, and I wondered how they died. Are they directly shot by the military, or did they die by the missile device because in the interview between President and Wallace, our President directly announced that nobody directly got killed by the military during the Tiananmen Square event He personally made the announcement during the interview. So that's why I have the first question for you, and the second question is for Professor Wang Dan. I want to ask about the democracy, because as I know, China cannot be made into an U.S. democracy. What I mean is, we cannot just use the United States their democracy policies to our country's, because we have different cultures, we have different situations. And how do you define the democracy fitted to us, to our country? And you just mentioned, during campus square, students proposed many demands to push our country to be more democratic. I also see other people who experienced Tiananmen Square event. One person, he said that the government did accept some part of the requirements of the students, but they think that students became too radical, they lost control, they didn't want to withdraw from Tiananmen Square. That's when the come. I want to know the truth from you. Thank you, that's my two questions.

- [Jeff] Can I ask, quickly? If there's one thing Americans have learned, it's that presidents sometimes lie.

- [Wang] Especially United States, or...

- [Jeff] But seriously, I mean, there have been careful analyses of what happened late on the night of June 3rd and early in the morning of June 4th. There were many people killed, exact numbers are still hard to come by. At least hundreds, probably thousands. Many of them, in fact, the majority of them were not students, they were bystanders, ordinary , either had come out to support the protests or were bystanders. Most if not all of them were not killed on the square. That's one thing that's disputed: how many people, if any, were killed on Tiananmen Square, but on the streets near Tiananmen Square there really is no question that there were people fired upon by soldiers, who died. There's also no question that there were at least a couple of soldiers, or some soldiers who were killed, and in at least one case, burned alive in a vehicle. We can talk and we can argue, and there needs to be more investigation, all of us I think would like there to be a full investigation about it but there is no question that there was a massacre near Tiananmen Square in which many people, including some students, including many people who weren't students, died. That's all I'm gonna say.

- [Rowena] Hao Jian, do you have anything to add?

- [Hao] Would you please translate for me? Because I thank you very much for your question.

- [Wang] They do not need a translator.

- [Translator] So whether it's the Chinese government or whether it's the Chinese President or the Premier or me, one of us is lying, right?

- [Translator] So I can tell you what's based on my personal experience. I did witness one person being shot, and that night I also saw four or five bodies on a cart, they were bloody. And whether they were dead, I don't know for sure. Professor Wass... it's a difficult name

- [Rowena] Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.

- [Translator] So, just as the Professor Wasserstrom pointed out, the Chinese government was playing a game with words. Is Chang'an Avenue part of Tiananmen Square? Is that, particularly that section of Chang'an Avenue that is adjacent to Tiananmen Square, do you consider that part of Tiananmen Square?

- [Translator] For many years, I thought nobody was killed on Tiananmen Square and I also heard from other people saying that nobody was killed on Tiananmen Square, but as Tiananmen Mothers started their investigation and they started to look for truth, new information emerged.

- [Translator] I have evidence, you can continue.

- [Translator] I know, I've heard that three people were shot dead within Tiananmen Square. We're not including Chang'an Avenue, just Tiananmen Square proper.

- [Translator] So, again, back to my personal experience, I went to look for my cousin's body so I went to over 10 hospitals.

- [Translator] The bodies with bullets in, of course I can't count them specifically, I can't give you exact numbers--

- [Translators] ...but I saw 40 to 50 bodies with bullets in.

- [Translator] When I went to Fuxing Hospital, then at that time I did see my cousin's medical record. It didn't occur to me to take it back then and there's no way now for me to get it, but I do remember, on the medical record, it stated that the bullets went into his shoulder blade and after 20 minutes of rescue work, he died.

- [Translator] So I hope my memory did serve to answer your question.

- [Louisa] I just wanted to add a couple of extra words as well just to remind people that people didn't only die in Beijing, in Chengdu as well the government admitted that eight people were killed including two students and that was according to the government's own propaganda leaflets. But, interestingly, in the last couple of years some new documents have been emerging with other figures as well that would be well worth following up and in the last couple of years some British diplomatic cables have been released that put the figures much, much higher. So originally the Americans estimated that 300 people died in Chengdu, and the British cables that were released two years ago actually put the figures even higher. They estimate, altogether, 420 people killed, but they're very, very rough estimates. But it is worth, I think, noting that there were deaths in other places as well.

- [Rowena] So there has been evidence documented in Liu Xiaobo's book published by Harvard University Press. His data, of course, on page five and six in English so everyone can check. So, according to the information that the Tiananmen Mothers had collected. There were three people that were directly shot and killed inside Tiananmen Square and among them, the three, is a student name called Chen Renxin he's a student of Renmin Daxue, the People's University, and he was aged 25 years old. So again, he was shot and killed right next to the the flagpole in Tiananmen Square. So that's one example, and his family was actually devastated. After, his father died, his mom tried to hang herself in the early '90s, and then the grandchild saw the grandmother hanging and he used his shoulder to do this so that she would not... So she would keep until the adults came home. So that's one example, again: Chung Yuenshin, aged 25, shot and killed inside Tiananmen Square. But also in 2011, the China Daily did publish an article, "Tiananmen as a Myth", and then it claimed that, based on the Wikileaks, no one was shot and killed on Tiananmen Square so there's no such thing as called the Tiananmen Massacre. But, if you look at the information collected by the Tiananmen Mothers, there were two maps that had been created by volunteers according to this information of 202 victims, with specific locations where the bodies were found and specific locations where the victims were killed. So only when they have two locations we put them on the map. So Professor Hao Jian's cousin, Hao Zhijing, he was shot and killed in Wuxidi. That was one of the major locations where people were shot and killed in the area, and Hao Zhijing was shot there too. And then another major location is Liu Bukou, where the students were leaving back to Haidian after Tiananmen Square was clear and then they withdrew, the students were mainly crushed by tanks so those are one of the two major-- so it doesn't matter whether people were killed in Tiananmen Square, that's not the central question. The fact is, the massacre happened throughout central Beijing, that's because as Jeff Wasserstrom already mentioned, and Louisa mentioned, there are other places too. So there is a massacre in Tiananmen Square. We call it the Tiananmen Massacre exactly like we call it the Tiananmen Movement-- it doesn't mean it's happening in Tiananmen Square itself, it's a nationwide movement. Tiananmen Massacre doesn't mean that it only happened inside Tiananmen Square, but it's throughout central Beijing. And I hope that answered your question about whether there is a massacre or not.

- [Rowena] Oh, yeah, Wang Dan, sorry.

- [Wang] I have my job to do, I haven't finished. About democracy, I see you have a lot of hearsay I don't know where you got it. Hao Jian actually didn't say 3,000 people died in Tiananmen Square, and I didn't say I want to use America's democracy applied to China. I never said that! If you can give me some link, I would appreciate that. But I don't think that I said that because I don't know what is so-called United States democracy. I've been studying here at Harvard for 20 years and I've written once about United States democracy. I even feel more confused nowadays about democracy of United States, so I definitely would not apply United States democracy to China. And my definition for democracy is at the early state of of China is not to do something. I admit that might lead to some turmoil, but it's not to do something. I think the first stage of democratization, if the Chinese government wants to do it, is the stopping of doing something. Stop doing! That will not lead to the social turmoil, right? Stop putting somebody in jail just because he says something on internet. Even Chinese people can say it. That is my definition of a democracy, not United States.

- [Rowena] And the students in 1989, they actually had gotten this democracy that looks different from the one in New York and... yes.

- [Audience Member] Thank you guys for coming, first of all, especially for Wang Dan to be here. I want to ask you guys a question. I think that in the '80s we've seen that within the CCP there's a lot of struggle between the liberals and the conservatives and there is a short- lived period where the U.S. and China were very close and then there is liberal reforms going on in China with freedom of press, freedom of speech, again, short-lived. And I would imagine that those voices that were there to support the student movement at that time should still, somehow, exist within the CCP, right? We've seen leaders like Zhao Ziyang, Bao Tong, those are supposedly people who are sympathetic to the movement and I was wondering, what are the legacies of those leaders within the CCP now and are there points of history where they would be allowed to express those voices more strongly than they do now? Thank you.

- [Wang] About the legacy of those liberal leaders of CCP, I think maybe there's one I could see is... I've experienced the whole 1989s. At that time, those leaders including Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang and maybe Deng Xiaoping, they still can give some space to society. They let society conduct themselves to some degree. But now the situation has become worse and worse, and under the control of Xi Jinping, society lost their space. But that's why I think Xi Jinping's leaders lost the legacy of the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. I don't know what others...

- [Jeff] Playing on history, I just wanted to bring up one thing, because it can be a very depressing, it is a very depressing moment, thinking about China. But it's 30 years after a massacre and you can't talk about the event, things like that. There's a lot of oppression. 30 years after Er'erba in Taiwan, the 1947 massacre, 30 years after it there was martial law, you could not talk about it, you could not commemorate it. The leader of Taiwan at that point was Chiang Chingkuo, a dictator's son who had run the secret police. Not a sprouts of liberalization kind of leader. But, not that much longer because of shifts and all kinds of things you reached a point where there was acknowledgement. Now there's a park devoted to Er'erba. So I don't see the roots of anything like that in China. But I think it's important to not... The changes in authoritarian one-party states, the world has to change, unexpected things have to happen but it's important, I think, to not think, because you can't see them that there's no chance. I co-wrote a piece with Margaret Lewis on this, she studies Taiwan, and she had a really great line. She said, "the Communist Party has proved remarkably "resilient in recent years, "but Taiwan shows you even resilient objects break." So that's one kind of thing to hold on to. But we don't know when, and we don't know when somebody, a liberalizing figure could emerge.

- [Audience Member] Thanks so much. I have a question in regards to the mobilization during the movement. I'm trying to ask, why do you think the movement succeeded in mobilizing a large number of students into the collective action, which, you know, was risky, right? Some scholars argue that there's a dense distribution of colleges in Haidian district in Beijing, and that lowers the cost of communication and monitoring, and I was wondering what are your takes on this topic? Longest question.

- [Wang] So the question is how did we organize a large number of students?

- [Audience Member] Why do you think the movement succeeded in mobilizing a large number of students?

- [Wang] Oh, oh, . I don't know. Really, we had the very first parade which happened on April 17th, late night on April 17th. Nobody organized it. Somebody dropped a-- how do you say in English? what's a

- [Rowena] A basin, right?

- [Wang] A basin. Someone just dropped a basin in the restroom, anybody goes to the some location, then they gather and they go to Tiananmen Square. I don't know why that student did that, but... So I don't know how to... I mean, under some circumstance and under some atmosphere, that's why we always decide it's not an intentionally organized movement. A movement is just, depends on the willingness of the students themselves. We didn't organize them.

- [Hao] My opinion, the Tiananmen Massacre is the result of the 1980s. During the 10 years, that's the real reopening and the reform period of China. I believe, in 1989, the Communist totalitarian regime clashed with Western values. You know, we always talk about 1980s in China. Even now, we always talk about during the 10 years, we read a lot of foreign books, the two books you mentioned. And a lot of Hollywood movies, translated by Jiang Xin As Wang Dan said, because the collapse happened, we didn't need to move anyone. No one

- [Rowena] Mobilized.

- [Hao] Yeah, that happened. I believe the collapse, maybe that happened today.

- [Wang] I can give you a more serious answer. I mean, in the process of organization of such a mass movement, in 1989, self-discipline was very important. We as leaders were just fellow students. And all of those students had really high levels of self-discipline.

- [Rowena] Professor Cui Weiping

- [Translator] So Professor Hao Jian mentioned at the beginning that this is the first time that he can and is openly talking about June 4th. I actually shared that common memory with him.

- [Translator] So it was 10 years after the June 4th incident, it was only 1999 that Professor Hao Jian and I were able to start talking about June 4th even though we had been colleagues for many, many years we were also sort of distant relatives.

- [Translator] So 20 years ago, it was in a spring like this, flowers were all blooming, and I was having a sort of normal life and then Professor Hao Jian took me to a cemetery, that was the first time I saw all the tombstones of people who had died on June 4th.

- [Translator] It was after that we became good friends and the memory of June 4th has united us, has brought us very close. Memories can help save us.

- [Translator] Since then, on June 4th every year we would get together on that very day and since 2004, Hao Jian and I have together have joined public petitions and we have been both called by the university leaders to have a talk. From 2009 to 2014, we have been pushing, we have been organizing and participating in various events relating to June 4th.

- [Translator] Despite our close ties and our many years working together today was the very first time that I heard the story of Hao Zhijing, Hao Jian's cousin.

- [Translator] My question for Hao Jian is, after you had found Hao Zhijing, was it you who notified his parents? What was his parents' reactions? Did they come to Beijing? What were their lives like after they learned about their son's death.

- [Translator] We looked for Hao Zhijing for about half a month, and the more we looked the more we felt that probably the news wouldn't be good. So we actually got Hao Zhijing's father to Beijing first without even knowing for sure Hao Zhijing's whereabouts.

- [Translator] When we found him, his body actually was in a big freezer in Beijing, in Fuxing Hospital. There were also eight other bodies there.

- [Translator] The bodies were all jet-black because there were a lot of chemicals on them to prevent them from getting rot.

- [Translator] So it was only after we found the body that we got his mother to Beijing and we had a funeral.

- [Translator] Hao Zhijing was his parents' only son, only child.

- [Translator] Now his parents are both old and they're childless. That's one of the reasons I go back to China and I just told you guys that I will definitely be going back to China.

- [Translator] I'm very grateful to Professor Cui Ping for raising this question, for asking about the personal experience, asking the parents' personal experience instead of just focusing on big history, big trends.

- [Translator] So there's a little bit of a story, a little bit of information of about Professor Cui Ping, right? In our school, it's one policeman following one professor, but since the initial policeman that was assigned to follow me was my student, so they assigned him to follow Professor Cui.

- [Translator] Thank you, Professor Cui Ping.

- [Rowena] I know time's up, but I saw a lot of hands so are we supposed to leave on time, or... Okay, maybe in the back. The gentleman, yeah.

- [Audience Member] Hi, thanks for your presentations. I apologize if my questions are controversial. I'm very sorry for your losses and the tragedies that are caused by the Tiananmen event, but my question's more focused on the question that Wang Dan discussed, which was what would China be like if Tiananmen Square succeeded? But my question is, what would happen in China if Tiananmen Square did not happen? And we also know that, at the time, I think Deng Xiaoping was open to reforms. So do you think that the further eradicated the possibility of reform? I mean, if you just waited a few more years after 1989, would the reform happen? Basically, did Tiananmen Square cause the increased repression that the Chinese people are feeling now?

- [Wang] That's typically my question. I've discussed it many times. What happened in 1989, there are two things I think are big misunderstandings about what happened in 1989. We just called in June 4th. No, it's not only June 4th. There's two things that happened in 1989: one, there's the 1989 Democracy Movement. Two, the crackdown on June 4th by the government. That's two things. Yes, the progress stopped, but not by the student movement, by the crackdown by the government. Students have every right, on the constitution of China, to go to the street to express their opinion. There's nothing to criticize them, but the government had a choice. You can accept those two very moderate requirements and you can do a bloody crackdown and turn China to another way. So it was not students who take the responsibility, the government should take the responsibility.

- [Rowena] And also, in Zhao Ziyang's secret memoir that Eddie was one of the co-editors, he made it very clear: one of the three reasons the students participated in 1989, number three reason was because, after 1987 when Hu Yaobang and Fang Lizhi were ousted the reform had already come to a standstill and that was the reason the students thought that they should take to the streets and push for the political reform instead of the movement itself stopping the reform.

- [Jeff] You actually can't disentangle it quite that way because what happened after 1989 was also the unraveling of Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe, and the breakup of the Soviet Union, and a lot of the repression now is done in the name of preventing any possibility for the kind of changes that happened there. So there are more things involved than just internally with China. It's a really interesting question but I think there all kinds of ways that history can unfold.

- [Rowena] Okay, so I have to be... Oh, there's more. Okay, so our Communist Party leader is telling us to stop now-- Not Michael, just me, dictatorship. I appreciate all the enthusiasm, I see that you have more questions, I apologize, it's all my fault that we ran out of time now so you're welcome to come up and talk to our speakers. Thank you so much for coming today. Truth and reconciliation, without truth there will be no reconciliation. So China has to face its past in order to have a future and I'm sure that we will see change, if not in my lifetime as my late mentor, Professor MacFarquhar if it's not in my lifetime, than in yours-- the younger generations. Thank you.