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