Dissident At Large http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=2c272570-fc85-4240-96b6-... Dissident At Large Communist Party princess. Ballistic-missile engineer. Spy. Freedom fighter. Death-row dissident. Award-winning environmentalist. BY THE OTTAWA CITIZEN MAY 7, 2006 Communist Party princess. Ballistic-missile engineer. Spy. Freedom fighter. Death-row dissident. Award-winning environmentalist. Those are just some of the moments in the extraordinary life of Dai Qing, whose roller-coaster career reads like the script of an epic movie. Daughter of a Communist-Party star, Dai Qing was so loyal she once said she would have died for Mao Zedong, the father of Communist China. After serving the party as a weapons expert and later as a spy, she eventually became deeply disillusioned, forsaking a life of privilege and power to fight for reform as a journalist. One of China's most outspoken writers in the 1980s, she landed in prison for her role in the 1989 pro-democracy uprising in Tiananmen Square. Now she is an acclaimed environmentalist, and has won a raft of prestigious international awards for her work. And yet, as she sits demurely in a bustling Toronto cafe during a recent trip to North America, it would be easy to take her for just another middle-aged worker on a lunch break, with her faded orange sweatshirt, sensible shoes and practical soup-bowl haircut. 1 of 10 17/11/2011 4:28 PM Dissident At Large http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=2c272570-fc85-4240-96b6-... Until she opens her mouth, that is. "Once I wrote to Deng Xiaoping, you know," she says, referring to Mao's successor, who effectively ran China from the 1970s through the 1990s. "I was still a very loyal party member then. But I thought the party should do more for the people. "I told him everyone in the party should cut their salary by three levels!" she chortles, her eyes alight with mischief. At 65, Dai Qing is still a spitfire, taking on the authorities with withering wit and breath-taking nerve. This is a woman who tried to sue the Chinese secret police for detaining her (no lawyer would accept her case). She remains a handful for the government spooks who still routinely detain and question her. "Once, I was on my way to meet someone, and the secret police detained me," Dai Qing recalls over a glass of green tea. "They made me come to their office and talk and talk for about two hours. "Finally, I told them, 'I won't talk to you any more.' And I started doing Falun Gong (meditative exercises that are forbidden in China). I don't even know how to do Falun Gong," she giggles. "I just wanted to annoy them." As a journalist, Ms. Dai became famous for fearlessly tackling sensitive political and environmental issues. Writing for the prestigious Enlightenment Daily newspaper in the 1980s, Dai became the first Chinese journalist to profile prominent dissidents such as astrophysicist Fang Lizhi. Dispatched in 1982 to cover the Sino-Vietnamese War, she filed blistering critiques of the conflict and questioned China's involvement. And in 1989, she defied a media gag order to publish Yangtze! Yangtze!, a collection of essays by Chinese scientists exposing flaws in the government-backed Three Gorges hydroelectric project, which will dam China's legendary Yangtze River, forcing the resettlement of more than two million people. Her book stirred up so much opposition the government was temporarily forced to postpone the project. Dai's writings have been banned in China ever since, but she has continued to publish in the international media and, with the aid of foreign environmental organizations, helps other Chinese activists organize and find funding. That is what has brought her to Toronto on this windswept spring day: For 15 years, Dai Qing has worked with the Toronto-based environmental group Probe International on projects such as training programs for Chinese environmentalists. She is here for a week to plan future projects, although she keeps details to herself, so disapproving officials won't get wind of them. n In her own words, Dai Qing has long been "a thorn in the side" of Chinese authorities. But she is no darling of the democracy camp, either. 2 of 10 17/11/2011 4:28 PM Dissident At Large http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=2c272570-fc85-4240-96b6-... On the contrary, she has savage words for the leaders of the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square revolt of 1989, and anyone else who would like to see a pro-democracy revolution sweep China. A quick transition to democracy was only possible in countries such as Poland and East Germany because the conditions there were ripe for the change, she explains. But in China, an "overnight revolution" would only mean a bloodbath, Dai argues, accusing the leaders of the 1989 uprising of being "extremist and simplistic" zealots. Dai is a reformer, not a revolutionary: She favours a gradual transition from totalitarianism. The Tiananmen revolt started at the end of April 1989, when hundreds of thousands of people staged a series of protests to denounce government corruption and demand democracy. By May, thousands of students, as well as some disaffected workers, were occupying the central square in Beijing; as many as 1,000 went on a hunger strike. On June 3 and 4, tanks rolled into Beijing as the army mounted a crackdown in which 2,600 people were killed and 30,000 injured, according to the Chinese Red Cross. The student leaders could have prevented the massacre if they had called a stop to the protest after the first week, Dai says, arguing they were "shallow, rash" grandstanders who wanted to force a showdown. Leaders such as Wang Dan, who became an instant celebrity in the West, "wanted the situation to get more exciting so that they could have even more fun," Dai wrote in her controversial prison memoirs, Tiananmen Follies, published last fall by New York-based EastBridge Books. What do the former protesters think of that? "They think I am a running dog of the government, a spy for the Communist Party!" wheezes Dai, bent double with laughter at the idea. Then she draws herself up straight, her expression turning sober for a minute. "If you ask, 'What is courage?' I'll tell you," she says, in her emphatic, heavily accented English. "Courage is standing up to the government, and saying what you think. "But it is also standing up to the other side, and saying what you really think, even if they call you a traitor. "That is real courage. It is not easy. You must be very strong inside." As a prominent journalist and reformer, Dai was quickly embroiled in the Tiananmen standoff. Along with more than 1,000 other journalists, she signed a petition demanding the government negotiate with the protesters. On May 10, she gave a speech at People's University praising the students' demand for social justice, but also urging them to disperse. Along with 12 leading scholars, she signed an "urgent appeal" to the government to acknowledge the protest as a democratic movement and to legalize it. She twice led delegations of prominent citizens for talks with the students, each time urging them to disperse. 3 of 10 17/11/2011 4:28 PM Dissident At Large http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=2c272570-fc85-4240-96b6-... Six weeks after the army had retaken Tiananmen, Dai Qing was thrown into the notorious Qincheng prison for political prisoners, near Beijing. She was held without charge for 10 months, six of them in solitary confinement, and at one point was told she was on the list of six people to be executed for their role in the uprising. Dai says she and 200 other prisoners were eventually freed in a "political exchange" with the World Bank, which had suspended loans to China after the massacre: Loans were resumed the same day she and the others were released. But more than 15 years later, some 200 people are still in prison for participating in the unrest -- part of a decades-long backslide in political reform that Dai blames on the Tiananmen standoff. Before the uprising, liberal-minded officials such as party chief Zhao Ziyang had been successfully pushing for political reform, Dai says. After the revolt, Zhao and his allies were purged, and "China went back to the warlord era," with party cadres wielding absolute power, she says. That's exactly what the hardliners were hoping for when the revolt broke out, says Dai, arguing that they deliberately let the conflict escalate in order to justify a massive crackdown that would crush the reform movement for good. Which brings us to one of Dai's most controversial arguments: The army should have stepped in much earlier, before a major crackdown became inevitable. The democracy movement could never have won out anyway, she adds, arguing the students didn't really know the meaning of democracy. For example, she says, at Tiananmen Square they were just as autocratic as the communists. "The leaders themselves didn't act in a democratic way," she says, explaining that many students wanted to disperse, but the radicals wouldn't let them. Besides, maybe western-style democracy is not what China needs, she reflects. "Every nation in Asia is different. Maybe we would have a half-socialist, half-democratic government. "Since the 1970s, China has opened up more trade with the West. But you can't just import democracy the way you import the latest fashions. "It's easy to shout, 'Democracy! Democracy!' as a slogan," she argues, punching the air in a parody of the protesters.