Tiananmen is a word that still reverberates around the world, 35 years after tanks rolled onto Beijing’s streets. The Chinese military’s crackdown on student demonstrators in the early hours of June 4, 1989, killed hundreds of people at least, and wounded thousands more. The protesters had been calling for political reforms, and for a more open and less corrupt society, after decades of political upheaval under Mao Zedong’s leadership. What they got instead, from Deng Xiaoping’s government, was a brutal denial of political reform, but with a green light to instead focus on making money and growing China’s economy.

China’s Communist Party leaders insist to this day that China’s economic rise couldn’t have happened without the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Yet the Party has also tried to erase the crackdown from public memory in China, even as many Chinese remember the protests and what they stood for — with some still dedicating their lives to working toward those goals. My guest for this episode, Xiao Qiang, is one such person: a human rights activist and founder and editor-in-chief of China Digital Times (whose digital lexicon we excerpted). In this episode, Xiao talks about his life before, during and after the protests, recommends books to better understand the Tiananmen demonstrations, and discusses what the memory of it all still means, both in China and beyond:

Guest

June 4 is an unfinished event. In a way, it’s a future event, because it is still an unspoken subject in China.

Xiao Qiang

Recommended readings

• The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State, Fang Lizhi, tr. Perry Link (2016)
• I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo, Perry Link, Dazhi Wu (2023)
• The Tiananmen Papers, by Liang Zhang, Andrew J. Nathan, Perry Link, Orville Schell (2001)
• Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, Josh Chin, Liza Lin (2022)
• The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, Minxin Pei (2024)
Selected Poems of June 4th (六四詩選), Meng Lang (2014)

Transcript

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: It’s been 35 years since tanks rolled down the streets of Beijing, and Chinese troops shot thousands of Chinese people, killing at least hundreds.

This came after almost two months of protests in the spring of 1989 that brought more than a million people into Beijing’s streets, and filled Tiananmen Square. It’s a huge public square in the heart of China’s capital, where ordinary people once flew kites and studied under its lights back when they didn’t have electricity at home. But Tiananmen Square is also a center of power. It’s where Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and exhorted teenage Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s to root out enemies and smash old culture. It’s home to the red-roofed Forbidden City, where emperors once lived, and to the hulking, concrete Great Hall of the People – where Communist Party officials meet and make decisions.

The protesters wanted different kinds of decisions – those that would bring less corruption from officials, and more rights and opportunities for ordinary people. This was a call for change, that spread to other cities and inspired a nation weary of decades of political upheaval that claimed millions of civilian lives as collateral damage. The ‘80s had already brought significant change, economically, socially and politically.  But the protesters were impatient, and hopeful about the possibility of shaping a different kind of future. China’s leaders crushed that, even as they later made possible the prospect of economic prosperity without increased political freedoms. They’ve been trying ever since to erase the Tiananmen crackdown from public memory.

But Tiananmen reverberates, and this story isn’t over.

(Music up)

This is the China Books podcast, a companion of the China Books Review. I’m Mary Kay Magistad.

(02:33): The story of the Tiananmen protests has been told many times, in many ways – by the protesters themselves, by the student leaders who led them, by foreign journalists who were there, and gave vivid accounts of what they saw, by academics who offered historical and political context, by novelists, and poets, and artists, who conveyed the emotion behind the movement, and the crackdown that cleared the square.

But even after all that happened, Tiananmen changed lives, even of those who weren’t there for the protests themselves. One of those people is my guest on this episode:

(03:10): XIAO QIANG: Yeah, I’m Xiao Qiang. I’m a founder and chief editor of China Digital Times, a bilingual news website about China. I also am a faculty at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I do research on censorship, surveillance about China, and particularly actually focus on the Great Firewall.

(03:34): MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Xiao had been doing an astrophysics PhD when the Tiananmen protests broke out. The crackdown led to his mentor – astrophysicist and rights advocate Fang Lizhi, taking shelter for a year in the U.S. embassy in Beijing to avoid arrest. Because of what happened in Tiananmen, Xiao Qiang left astrophysics behind and became a rights advocate himself, including as Executive Director of the New York-based group Human Rights in China, and more recently as founder and chief editor of China Digital Times, which provides a window – in Chinese and English – into what’s happening on Chinese social media, and other media, and what efforts the Chinese government is making to control and censor it all.

Xiao has a few books to recommend that are meaningful to him about the Tiananmen protests, about their meaning and impact. But first, to understand why those protests mattered so much to so many Chinese people, it’s helpful to understand what led up to them – decades of political upheaval, including a politically caused mass famine that killed some 30 million Chinese people, attacks on intellectuals and their homes by teenage Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, persecution –and sometimes execution – of those who criticized the Communist Party, the breaking up offamilies – supposedly for the greater good. Xiao was a kid in the midst of much of  that. Here’s our conversation.

(05:02): XIAO QIANG: Well, as a younger kid, my parents were being sent to the countryside. I spent six years in the countryside, in the northeast, in Liaoning province, in some very remote village (that) only has 30 families, and no school whatsoever. In the 1970s, that was China,  many intellectuals being persecuted. But I was fortunate. When I finally came back to Beijing and finished high school, the university reopened. And then is  the 1980s, which was a more open and liberal period of time in China

(05:45): MARY KAY MAGISTAD: So before we talk about the ‘80s, because I do want to talk about those, what was it like for you where you were during the Cultural Revolution?

XIAO QIANG: Yeah, I was born in 1961. So 1966, 1967, when the Cultural Revolution started, I was six years old. (I) remember everything. I remember my grandparents being taken away by Red Guards. I remember that my parents could not come to see me. I’d been forced to foster at some workers family – for almost a year. I remember that I was for six years in this remote village, very lonely because I was very different than the country kids. I couldn’t really be part of their daily life. I had no friends. I had no school, essentially. So that’s the childhood.

(06:41): MARY KAY MAGISTAD So then by the time things started to open up, in ’79, that was a huge transformation, a huge opening of possibilities, compared to what you had known up until that point.

XIAO QIANG: Right, Well, opening (of) possibilities for the entire generation, for the entire country, of course. Well, it started from 1976, after Mao died – ‘77, ‘78, I was self- studying, mathematics or physics, whatsoever, the books I could grab.  Then the high school started to have mathematic competitions. Science (was) a very big focus. And I did well in those mathematic competitions, so I got into University of Science and Technology, which was at the time a very prestige(ious)university in China. I went to that university in 1979.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD So you were right at the, one of the first classes.

(07:40): XIAO QIANG: Yeah, directly from high school, after the Cultural Revolution, when Deng Xiaoping’s stepped in (to) power and reopening the system, basically, after being destroyed by Mao and Cultural Revolution. Later on, Fang Lizhi was the vice president of the university. He had a tremendous influence, actually, to the whole generation of youth, but at the time, on campus as well. And I was a physics student, so I was deeply influenced by him.

(08:12): MARY KAY MAGISTAD So – 1980s. You’re studying, but also China’s changing very quickly. How did that feel?

XIAO QIANG: Well, I was in a very remote part of China, a quite free of everything campus.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Remind me where that is?

XIAO QIANG: In Hefei. In Anhui, Hefei. Because somehow relative to other universities, the students at the time who studied at the University of Science and Technology didn’t have much instructions whatsoever. We were being kind of left alone, exploring whatever your interest is. So I was very deeply immersed into physics. But then I was also reading magazines, reading novels. And in the ‘80s, there is poetry, poets – Bei Dao, Yang Lian, Liang Xiaobin, Shu Ting, those people.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: And for people who aren’t familiar with them, who are they?

(09:07): XIAO QIANG: They are young poets, what we call the misty poets, in China. They wrote completely different new poems from the traditional socialist propaganda. For that generation of the Chinese youth, they were like The Beatles to the ‘60s.

Yeah. Everybody read their poems, because they speak some kind of truth about reality that nobody else do. So that’s the influence.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Why were they called the “misty poets”?

(09:44): XIAO QIANG: It’s because in socialist China, (in the) ‘70s (or) ‘60s, only one kind of literature style is allowed, which is Soviet version of socialist realism. When those poets, who actually (were) deeply being influenced by Western modernists, wrote their poems, they are not realistic at all. And so at the beginning, people say, we don’t understand what you’re writing about. So they call them misty poets. They’re like clouds.  Not very clear. Actually, they are very clear and loud. It’s just they don’t say the socialism realism type of propaganda poems. For example, one of the poets, Gu Cheng, he has a famous poem at the time. (It) only ha(s) two lines. It’s called Dark Eyes: “The black night gave me black eyes, and I use that to search for light.” Or, “The dark night gave me dark eyes. I use that to search light.” And that’s almost a statement of a generation. And that’s why, in addition to sort of physics, it’s that kind of a poem, and it’s a voice of like Fang Lizhi, who not only a very accomplished scientist, but his moral courage to speak about freedom of thought, freedom of expression and to pointing out where China should go, which are truly inspiration for our generation.

(11:13): MARY KAY MAGISTAD: And there were a lot of people thinking about that in the second half of the ‘80s, and talking about it in a way that probably hadn’t happened much before, other than maybe the 1920s  and ‘30s, and arguably hasn’t quite happened in the same way since. Although it’s not like the conversation has ended.

(11:32): XIAO QIANG: That’s right. And for people like me, who didn’t have any other– not aware, actually, (of) other history at the time, other than the Communist Party’s only propaganda, but also the real memory of Cultural Revolution and how the world really is. So this type of opening up and starting to read about foreign literatures, to see foreign movies, how people dress in Hong Kong and Japan and the United States, and see World Cups, how the whole world is celebrating a ceremony and competing in the sports. Everything is new. There is the hope that the more open China is, it will become closer to the rest of the world. So in a sense, that was a very hopeful period. It seemed the whole country was moving in that direction.

(12:32): MARY KAY MAGISTAD: What was giving your generation that hope? I mean, what were you seeing from the Chinese leadership that suggested to you that that kind of change was possible?

XIAO QIANG: I think at that time, when I was (in my) early 20s, mostly on campus, what we saw  was, for example, the encouragement of science, technology, market economy, and actually generally the word “modernization.” You know, to us, “modernization” probably also means everything else too, just like the societies in Japan and the United States or in Europe.  Then there’s the fact that people like Fang Lizhi, who’s, yeah, he was actually being suppressed, and carefully watched, but he still had his voice. He still had his prestige position in the Chinese university. Well, we are not aware at the time (that) there are other political prisoners in the prison. The society is actually still very oppressive. But as college youths, we thought we’re in the center of the world, we’re in the front of historyWe are the hope of China, and the hope is China becoming more and more modernized. So that is the sense of hope we have, right? Also, in a way, we didn’t really know what Chinese politics was like, what Chinese history is, who is really running the society and what that means. But compared with Mao’s China, we’re certainly moving towards embracing the world. That direction g(a)ve us hope.

(14:13): MARY KAY MAGISTAD Yeah. Were you aware in the ‘80s when you were thinking about all this, “hey, there’s this possibility we can move in this direction, that Deng had talked about the four modernizations, Wei Jingsheng wrote his big character call for a fifth modernization, for democracy. Was that something you knew about then?

(14:31): XIAO QIANG: Yes, because I was a high school student in Beijing. Actually, I went to Democracy Wall. And my parents’ friends around the family talked about that. I was very excited about it. And also, I heard the words of Wei Jingsheng too. However, I was not that politically minded at that (time). I just simply wanted to study physics. I wanted to come to America. And that political general picture was not actually not in my – how to say? Not in my world until June 4^th.

(15:07): MARY KAY MAGISTAD So let’s talk about the – what led up to June 4th. So there started to be student demonstrations from, what? Like ’85?

XIAO QIANG: ‘86. End of ‘86. It actually started from my university, University of Science and Technology. I was already in the United States. I came to the United States that year, in 1986, in August. Three months later, in my home university, students went on the street. Actually, I knew lots of them. I knew a lot of leaders of them. They are all my old friends. If I were there, I’ll be one of them. I was not taken by surprise, because we all felt like that. We all feel like China need(ed) more democracy and, we could do more to “wake up the society”, we called (it). And we all thought the society was moving in that direction anyway. It just needed a push. And that university students’ demonstration, political demonstration, became nationwide – Beijing, Shanghai, and other places. Because of that, there was the first round of crackdown, by suppressing any of those liberal tendency movements on campus, including removing Fang Lizhi – who was, at the time, seen as a sort of a mentor of students, particularly a  liberal mentor of students – from his position as university vice-president.

But actually, that first round of persecution was not that thorough, I guess. So the movement resurged again, three years later, in 1989. But those three years, I was in Notre Dame, studying physics.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD What was it like for you being at a distance watching this happen?

(16:50): XIAO QIANG: For me personally, I thought that was my past. China was my past. I thought my future is in the United States. So even in the spring of 1989 when, actually, a friend of mine came to tell me that, “do you know that students in Beijing went to Tiananmen Square to commemorate Hu Yaobang?”, the former general secretary of the Communist Party.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD Who had been very liberal and then, because he was so liberal, was removed from his position.

XIAO QIANG: Right. He was a relatively open-minded liberal leader of the Chinese Communist Party. But he went too far. Deng Xiaoping removed him.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD And replaced him with Zhao Ziyang, who was also liberal but maybe not quite as liberal.

(17:34): XIAO QIANG: Yeah, that’s right. But because of that persecution, actuallyhe was being removed from the position, he was beloved by students, and the more liberal intellectuals in general. So when he passed away in the spring of 1989, that triggered mourning from the students and intellectuals as part of (an) expression  of they wanted more freedom in the society. So that’s how the Tiananmen demonstration started, in 1989. But at the time I was doing my physics PhD thesis, actually doing an experiment to detect cosmic rays, in the middle of the woods,  away from the campus. I didn’t have a TV. I only came to campus like once or twice a week. And then when I heard this, I told myself that “well, you know, these are things that should have happened a long time ago. Of course the students should demonstrate. Of course, China should go for democracy. But that’s what’s happening there. I need to focus on my own world here.” So I didn’t even watch on TV until a few weeks later. That was me. But in China, those months, those weeks gradually became a massive historical event.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD Yeah, more than a million people were out at certain times, and –

(18:54): XIAO QIANG: Well, that’s the day I always remember, May 17^th, that – finally I talked to myself, say(ing) “just watch TV for once, just to see what they’re doing.” I kind of had a sense that if I watch it, I probably will be hooked to it. Then I went to the student center. I watched CNN. And that was the day millions of citizens, of Beijing residents, (were) on the street supporting students, hunger strikers. I’d never seen, I’m from that city, I’d never seen that many Chinese people. They were so happy. They were so free. They saw hope. They were inspired by students. And I just never saw Chinese people like that. I couldn’t stop crying. Actually I was, what, 27. I’m not some person (who) usually cry(s). But I cannot stop. That moment, from then on, of course, is how I felt: I’m still so much part of China, and Chinese people,and this movement. And that’s how I become, in my own way, to be part of it.

(20:14): MARY KAY MAGISTAD Yeah. It was only a few days after that, that martial law was declared.

XIAO QIANG: Yeah, and then massacre. When I heard that, the only decision I can make, the only thing I know I should do, is to go back to China. I want(ed) to be there, I want to be in the city, I want to be with people. So that’s how I get on the airplane, actually, (and) went back to China on June 6th.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD I’m guessing there weren’t a lot of people going in at that time.

(20:45): XIAO QIANG: No. At the last stop (as) I went back to China, there was only me and a Chinese delegation (coming) back from Hong Kong.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: So you’re back on June 6^th. What did you see?

(20:56): XIAO QIANG: My decision was to go to find families who their children being killed, to tell them that I’m with them. But it’s a completely individual effort. I was not with (any) organization. I didn’t have any particular other agenda. I just thought, that’s my own personal action, to do something. But at the time, it was a time of terror. When I arrived to China, actually I arrived in Guangzhou. And I was trying to take a train from Guangzhou to Beijing. But the train was stopped, because there was a nationwide demonstration, and the railway (was) being blocked by demonstrators who were trying to support the Beijing students and, at the time, expressed their anger  for the massacre. And then Deng Xiaoping came on the television, to shake hands of the martial law troops, to congratulate them, (and say they) did a good job. That’s June 9th. I always remember that. And the “Most Wanted” list (was) on the TV every night, arrested people. It took almost two weeks (until) the whole uprising finally calmed down. But everybody talked about it. Everybody worried about where the students and leaders are. Everybody was so traumatized and (angry). And also, when I got back to Beijing, the fear. I saw soldiers on the streets with their helmets – in summer, this is June, very hot in Beijing, a few days – with their guns, apparently had their bullets because their hand is right on the trigger. But what’s shocking to me is, they wear white gloves. I was like, “what? What’s this white gloves for? So fascist.” But it is a fascist-occupied city. It’s my city. And they’re showing their – this power. They sing a song, their hands on the trigger. They walked with their white gloves on to terrify the city, to send a message to everyone that who dare(s) to oppose them, they will shoot them down. Yeah, you can see that from their eyes, from their frightened, those soldiers’ young eyes. I can never forget those moments. Because I was trying to – went to Muxudi actually, where the killing started, trying to find evidence, because I heard that the bullets were shooting at the people’s level. So on the wall, you can see those bullets, at the low level. Yes, they were. Many. They were just being patched. You could see how many bullets were hitting at that level.

(23:40): That trip, of course, is the decisive moment of my life, that I need to continue to do something. I cannot just let the dream for freedom of my people being crushed by those bullets. And that’s why I finally made it back to the United States, and continued. I mean, I left school from ever since, and became an activist. (In) 1989, when I came back from China, at the time I joined a Chinese students organization called Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars in the United States, which (was)  headquartered in Washington, D.C. I was the full time staff. Two years later, from that organization, I joined Human Rights in China, which is, at the time, a much smaller organization, based in New York. So I became the executive director of Human Rights in China in 1991.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD Yeah, and I started talking to you about five years later, when I was in Beijing for NPR. And we’ve been talking ever since.

XIAO QIANG: Right. I remember those days that, yeah, collecting the names of political prisoners, speaking to the press, speaking at the UN Human Rights Commission, trying to be an advocate for the message of Chinese people continue to want human rights. Yeah, that’s what Human Rights in China is, a voice of Chinese people.

(25:10): MARY KAY MAGISTAD And did you feel that had an impact on the ground? Or was the important thing that at least the information was out; people were aware of what was happening?

(25:24): XIAO QIANG: (Chuckles) Well, if a historian or a political scientist or whoever asked me that question, ‘what is the impact?’, I couldn’t say, as a small organization, no matter how dedicated you are, how many press releases you put out, how many years you put your life in, make an impact in the sense of entire China direction, or even that – . We do, of course, interact with, for example, family of political prisoners. We do put the information out. Even some of the political prisoners (were) being released and as a – basically what I call human rights diplomacy hostage, being sent to United States. I met them in, at airports – Wei Jingsheng, Wang Dan, you know it, Wang Juntao. But I wouldn’t call that a human rights victory. I mean, in a very narrow level, our work was part of their releases. But in the bigger picture, of course, China has its own trajectory, right? There’s other decisive factors, profound forces at work. And ultimately, the power at the top, which is the Chinese Communist Party, whether it’s Deng Xiaoping, whether it’s Jiang Zemin, later on Hu Jintao, they’re all dictators. They may open society in some ways, but they certainly maintained the political regime as a Chinese Communist Party dictatorship. And in that sense, China didn’t have that political change, no matter how much we advocate(d). We did make the international society, we contribute(d) to the effort that the world be more aware of the human rights record of the Chinese government. (That) international advocacy , I do believe in the long term had some impact to Chinese society. But I wouldn’t say that made a difference in the macro level.

(27:24): MARY KAY MAGISTAD Let’s at this point talk about some books about Tiananmen, or about the legacy of Tiananmen, or the reverberations of Tiananmen that mean something to you.

XIAO QIANG: Sure. The first book I was thinking is Fang Lizhi’s autobiography. The reason – I was very close to him, not only when he was a physics professor and I was a physics student in the same university, but later when I was in New York, running Human Rights in China. I was the executive director, and he was the chairman of the board.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Now, by this time he was already in Tucson, at the University of Arizona, having already spent a year in the U.S. embassy, holed up, waiting to be able to get out safely?

(28:07): XIAO QIANG: That’s right. Yes, for today’s audience, I guess Fang Lizhi is – simply say he was China’s Sakharov. He was a human rights advocate, on top of he’s a very accomplished astrophysicist. Then, in 1989, he’s been labeled by the Chinese government as a so-called “black hand” behind the students. He actually never even went to Tiananmen Square. But regardless, he had to seek refugee (status) at the U.S. embassy, and the Chinese government surrounded that embassy for a year. After a lot of diplomatic exchanges, I guess, they let Fang Lizhi leave China, in exchange for something else from the United States. But after he became exiled in the United States, we became colleague(s). He’s the chairman of the board of Human Rights in China. Of course, he is a physics professor in Tucson until he died in 2012. But we remained very close relations. That’s why I took his book, autobiography. I think anyone (who) wants to understand China in a larger picture. (It) sounds like we’re talking about something 30-some years ago.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: 35 years ago.

XIAO QIANG: 35 years ago. But let me say, at least to me, June 4^th is an unfinished event. In a way, it’s a future event, because it is still an unspoken subject in China. But let me say, at least to me, June 4th is a unfinished event, in a way it’s a future event, in China. It is still yet to be illuminated, to be opened, and to see the real reality, what that make(s) to the Chinese people’s psyche. Fang Lizhi inspired a generation of Chinese youth at a time, (that) became that generation on Tiananmen. He also lived his life, the second half in the exile, and can never return to his homeland. But (he) is also a symbol. And together with another book I want to talk about, which is Liu Xiaobo’s book, (the) two of them became a symbol, to me, that Chinese people, not (just) for that generation, but for over a hundred years of that movement, that Chinese people want universal human rights and democracy for their own country.

What I put this way – I actually wrote to say about Liu Xiaobo’s book, I Have No Enemies, which –

MARY KAY MAGISTAD This is actually Perry Link’s book about Liu Xiaobo.

(30:44): XIAO QIANG: Yeah, that’s a biography, and Perry Link, Professor Link, with another of Liu Xiaobo’s friend, co-authored it. The reason I put them together is not because they’re the same person. They’re actually two very different people. But they’re both being labeled by the Chinese government. The Chinese government labeled them, saying these are the people advocating so-called “complete Westernization.” What do they mean by complete Westernization? That means that – it’s a negative word. It means that they betrayed their own culture and tradition, and trying to introduce something (that) doesn’t fit China’s reality. But in my way to say it, both Fang Lizhi and Liu Xiaobo are symbols, powerful symbols, of those type of Chinese people, (over the) last two centuries, when China became open and met the modern world, and asked itself the question, ‘what kind of society was China going to be?’ Yes, we’ll develop technology. Yes, we’ll develop (the) economy. But what about fundamental values and institutions? Are Chinese people also, as human beings, pursuing those fundamental values? Or it’s remained this autocratic system, autocracy over a thousand years, right? That is not Fang Lizhi alone. That is not Liu Xiaobo alone. That is millions, millions and generations of Chinese people (who) had that dream and desire, and are making the effort. The two of them in a way, in their own way, are the symbols, and martyrs, of this movement.

And this movement has not finished yet. That question has not completely been answered yet. Tiananmen was a stop. Yes, 35 years has passed. But since that event,  we’re still at the core of the legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party. It’s the same party who conducted the crackdown, who killed the people, are using the same argument, suppressing the Chinese society. So that question is an unanswered, yet to be answered question. If we want to understand where China will go and eventually will develop, we cannot overlook this genuine pursuit for modernity, not only on economics, but on a fundamental political institutional level, on a value level, what China is going to be in the future. So that’s why Fang Lizhi continues to be important, because of what he symbolized. And Liu Xiaobo also, who died in his prison, still symbolize(s) that powerful message.

(33:47): MARY KAY MAGISTAD And of course, Liu Xiaobo is also more directly connected to Tiananmen, because he came back during the protests. He was hunger striking

just before the crackdown. He was one of the people with the students in the square on the night of June 3rd going into June 4^th, and helped to negotiate so that the students could get – at least some of the students could get out safely.

(34:10): XIAO QIANG: Yes. He was intimately involved with the demonstrators all along, on Tiananmen Square, and especially in the night when the soldiers moved in (and) opened fire. And he and three other intellectuals,  who were the elders there, persuaded students to leave, and did a negotiation directly with the military leader commanders to avoid the bloodshed on Tiananmen Square, directly. Of course, there was bloodshed already in many different parts of the city.

(34:42): Liu Xiaobo is also a very different individual, if you read the biography. If you read Fang Lizhi’s autobiography, you’ll see he’s an intellectual, he’s a scientist. And Liu Xiaobo was a literature criticism scholar. And when he was younger, actually, Liu Xiaobo was a very unique person in that way, that he was very egotistic, very showy, very ego-centered, even when he was involved in this larger movement, I think that he went through a personal transformation after the massacre, after actually his second time in prison. And you can see he became a new kind of person, that he no more focus(es) on himself and how others look at himself, but rather, his position in Chinese society (is) to continue that spirit of Tiananmen. And he (was) dedicated for that for the rest of his life. He actually stayed in China, organized, became a key figure for what we call Charter ’08. He was immediately arrested because of that political manifesto.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Which called for?

(35:59): XIAO QIANG: Called for political reform. Called for constitutional democracy. Called for human rights. Called for rule of law, all these basic modern values. And it’s actually widely a consensus among many Chinese liberal intellectuals, but only the brave ones will sign their names, on that document, of course. But the most brave one is Liu Xiaobo himself, because you live in China, you all know that the Chinese state will crash down on this, no matter how mild you are, how reasonable you are, and you just sign a name on a peaceful document, which simply advocates those values. Someone’s going to be punished heavily (for) this. Whoever is the ones put their name first will be. And Liu Xiaobo voluntarily did that. When he did that, he’s ready to go (to) prison again. That was going to be his third time, for this message he’s associated with. And that’s what made him as a great person. Yeah.

(36:55): MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Charter ‘08, I believe, came out in December 2008. So he was sentenced about a year later.

XIAO QIANG: 11 years.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: And then in 2010, he was named a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

XIAO QIANG: Right. The Nobel Peace Prize was announced when he was in prison. Of course, he could not go to Oslo to receive it. So there was an empty chair for him at  the ceremony. “Empty chair”, the word itself, became an absolutely forbidden word on the Chinese internet, because that means Liu Xiaobo.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: And you know that from your current work with China Digital Times, where you keep track of what are the forbidden words, what are the things that are being censored.

(37:33): XIAO QIANG: Yes. In 2008 I was already at the School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and I started China Digital Times and following what’s being said on Chinese social media and also the censorship. But even a little bit before that, remember we were all hoping, or many of us were hoping that Beijing Olympics is an opportunity for China to be further merged with the rest of the world, become more part of the world, not only just economically become a trade partner of everyone, but politically starting to opening up and – Beijing Olympics will be a sort of a milestone of that. And that’s also at a time (the) Chinese government, the Communist Party was advocating that message, that China is becoming a part of the world and modernization, and look at the progress China made. Somehow, the whole world more or less bought that narrative.

And Liu Xiaobo and all the rest of the signatories and drafters of that Charter ‘08 document, (were) precisely looking at this historical moment to say, “this is a time where we put our voice to say, China also needs to open up politically, and embrace those values of constitutional democracy, universal  human rights, rule of law, freedom of speech, and that’s the Charter ‘08 they released in the end of 2008, a few months after the Olympics.

But the reaction from the Chinese state was to put him (Liu Xiaobo) in prison for 11 years (on the charge of) subversion, subverting state security. In other words, China’s politically not going there. Now you look back, yes, the Chinese Communist Party has never gave that vision or promise, really, to its people or to the world, that they were going to open it up.

(39:37): MARY KAY MAGISTAD Yeah, although interestingly at that time, certainly it wasn’t the Olympics that was doing it, but the internet in China was allowing a new kind of conversation to get going among Chinese people. It was censored, but people would play cat and mouse.  They’d come up with coded language.There were ways that people could at least  complain about some local officials and sometimes more. And you were tracking all of that.

(40:03): XIAO QIANG: That’s totally true. I think that embracing some kind of hope that the economic openness, economic growth in China in the ‘90s, now coupled with this new communication information technology, will really open up China and Chinese society. And that’s –  I don’t think at the time it was a false narrative. It was actually a genuine hope for a lot of people. For example, Liu Xiaobo himself, has written several articles to say that, “oh, the internet is a gift of God given the Chinese people, because now we can have some degree of freedom of information and freedom of expression.” And I’m also living their exile. But to see that this new technology can have this liberal impact on Chinese society, and also can be a way for me to have access to information about China, and do something to connect with China – that’s how the China Digital Times developed into such a project, amplifying those suppressed voices in Chinese society through internet technology. We all had that hope. Only another 10 years or 15 years later, we realized that was only part of the story. The other part is the internet is actually also a technology of control. The state actually came back to gain the control power, not only sort of catch up, by censorship suppressing it, but actually on top of it, can utilize that technology,  made China become a surveillance state, right?

(41:44): So two books I want to mention about China as a surveillance state. One (Surveillance State) is written by Josh Chin and Liza Lin, who are Wall Street Journal reporters. They both followed Chinese technology industry. And Josh had done some very good coverage on the technology being used in Xinjiang. And Liza followed some of the Chinese tech companies in Hangzhou (that) became global, but the type of technology in commercial use are also an integrated part of the surveillance tech. So it means China is not only using technology to control its own people, but (also) exporting those technologies to the rest of the world. That book is very well written. And then coupled  with this new book by Professor Pei Minxin, (Minxin Pei) The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China. (He’s a) UC Irvine professor, political scientist. But his access to Chinese surveillance-related information is through official documents. Many of them are publicly published documents of how the Chinese government built its network of informers – these are not technology, these are humans – through every corner of society. We’re talking about tens of millions of those people being organized, weaved into the surveillance net, in such a fabric that no one, actually,  in Chinese society can escape the Party’s eye.

So on top of that, if you read Josh Chin’s (and Liza Lin’s) Surveillance State, (on) the technology, then you realize this.

(43:32): There’s another theme, actually, I want to mention, which is, when China developed those technologies or those applications, whether for commercial use, for surveillance political control, it again, it’s on the same theme of over two centuries through China, that when a Chinese traditional autocracy met the rest of the world, what was the reaction? The reaction was, there’s one school of thinking called “Chinese learning as essence, Western learning for application.” Chinese learning? It’s Confucianism. It’s this hierarchical political order. And use the Western technology, adopt that, to empower, to stabilize that Chinese essence. Confucianism is the soft face, but how you really rule Chinese society, is ruthless. You just adopt those Western technologies, whatever they have, military or or commercial or railway or for that matter, internet today. It’s not for changing the essence of the political system. It’s for supporting it, right? To integrate into it. And that’s  (how) internet happens in China. Once you integrate into it, it becomes a powerful surveillance technology that enhances the authoritarian control of the society. That, we did not foresee, right? So I talk about this so-called complete Westernization, which the accusation (against) people like Fang Lizhi and Liu Xiaobo, if you read (those) two books, they’re not – they’re Chinese. They’re not advocating for whatever they call complete Westernization. What they are advocating is universal values. Pick those ones that are good for the Chinese people, Chinese society, and China should not be any different in that sense from the rest of the world. And then you see this is what the ruling class really wanted, which is using the Western technology to enhance its own power and control, which is the theme of China throughout the last 200 years.

And now we’re just looking at it in a new different level and different turn.

(45:56): MARY KAY MAGISTAD And in the midst of all that, circling back to Tiananmen, that was a moment when this yearning, at least in part of the population, to reach for more universal values met the Communist Party’s determination that they were going to proceed the way they had in mind, which was in a way that would keep them in power.

(46:15): XIAO QIANG: Yes, I think it’s (as) simple as that. When there is a political opening up, or opportunities, like in the ‘80s, even in the spring of 1989, and the desire for freedom surges and that’s what the 1989 student movement was. But it did meet the determination of the Chinese Communist Party at the time, the leader Deng Xiaoping, that absolutely crack(ed) down on those rebellions. They do not (care about) the future of China. They (care) about their position in power. And that is what ultimately  decide(d) the military force being used on Tiananmen Square. And also that ultimately decides where is China ready to go. Until today.

(47:11): MARY KAY MAGISTAD So, as you said, Tiananmen isn’t over. It’s still very much reverberating and living at least in some people’s memories. And for the younger generation that may not even be clear on what happened, there are limited books within China that have anything to do with Tiananmen. But there have been efforts outside of China to write down both the history and also emotional takes, personal takes on what happened. A couple of the attempts to just get the history down are a public television documentary, Gate of Heavenly Peace, three hours long, written by Geremie Barmé. Carma Hinton was involved, Orville Schell was involved for  part of it. And then also, The Tiananmen Papers, which was Perry Link, Andy Nathan, and Orville Schell. And you know something about how those papers came…?

(48:11): XIAO QIANG: Well, Tiananmen Papers. That was how many years ago? I’m trying to remember, 2001, I believe it was being published. But the two years even before that, when those documents secretly came to the United States and find their access to Professor Andy Nathan at Columbia University, at that time, I was executive director of Human Rights in China. And both Andy Nathan – all three authors, actually, Andy Nathan, Perry Link, who at the time was a professor at Princeton University, and Orville Schell, who at the time was the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. The three of them had access to that document, and together worked with the one who brought those.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD And just quickly, what were the documents?

(48:56): XIAO QIANG: These are internal Chinese Communist Party’s documents, actually several different sets during, in the spring of 1989, actually all the way to past the June 4^th (military crackdown), including later on, the punishment and imprisonment of others and how to control the narrative.  Many of them are meeting notes, minutes, actually, minutes of internal leadership level meetings, discuss(ing) what to do with the situation. That’s actually the most valuable part of the documents, which shows the divide of the leadership. It’s a confidential document, leaked by some internal people at that time, in order to basically express their opposition. But you can see on the record, there is a different position (among leaders regarding) attitude towards students’ demonstrations, towards the nationwide demand for political reform, and ultimately, most importantly, probably, is about who is going to decide on using the military force. There are the people who say no. There are the people who abstain. And there are the people who made a decision, which is Deng Xiaoping. So it’s rare to have a sort of glimpse of that internal mechanism through those leaked documents. And the compiler, the editor – he used a fake name called Zhang Liang – together worked with the three American scholars, (and) very carefully selected what to be translated, and how do you interpret or put in some context around those documents. Because I was very intimately working with them at the time, so I remember those days, how to assess the authenticity of the documents.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Did you help translate?

XIAO QIANG: No, I did not directly. But most importantly at the time was to access the authenticity of the documents, to read every one of them to see if this is, you know, for real.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: How could you tell?

(51:02): XIAO QIANG: It’s not (like) every document has a secret seal on it. It’s not like a watermark. It’s not like that. But you know, if you read enough of those Chinese Party’s documents…In my case, my own family came from that background. I’ve seen some of those internal documents before. 

What I want to say is, that’s of course a different kind of book. But it tells you the same thing. It tells you that the reason, not only the process, but the reason, rationale, behind the decision of a massacre, is pure and simple. It’s preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s that clear, even from this dry, official Chinese language. We already see the result of it. But from that internal document, like you can reach that conclusion, just clear as night and day.

(52:04): MARY KAY MAGISTAD So that’s getting the cold hard facts down.

XIAO QIANG: But I think the 35 years that since I came to back to China and came back, there’s something else that continues to be there about June 4th, which is the people continue to express themselves in a variety of different ways. Maybe the last book I want to mention is a Chinese book. It’s called Liu Si Shi Xuan, Selected Poems of June Fourth. It’s been put together by a Chinese poet,  I know him very well, Meng Lang, who later on lived in exile in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He passed away in 2018. He’s a very good friend of mine. He compiled poems written by the Chinese poets. Most of them are people still living in China, but some of them are living overseas, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. (The book was published) in 2014, the 25th year anniversary of Tiananmen, over 100 poets. And of course I read every single of those poems. It was him (Meng Lang who) said to me that June 4th is a future event. So I asked him, “why do you think it’s a future event?” Because, he said, like, we all know you, what you do, what I do, it’s a forbidden subject in China. It’s unspoken, so yet to be illuminated.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Yet for there to be a reckoning.

(53:37): XIAO QIANG: Yes. I cannot say… let me give you another example. This is not a book, a and I want to come back to his book, his poem. This is in 2019. I was invited by the U. S. Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate to testify on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen. I was preparing my speech, but I was also, at the time, I was traveling, and jet lag, and I was very exhausted, and didn’t know what to write down on the paper, what I was going to say at this occasion. And then on my social media, somebody sent me a link, which was a YouTube of an orchestra music, in Cleveland, a concert, called Long Night. It’s dedicated to Tiananmen. So I look it up and listen to the music. It’s extraordinary.

And I look it up to who the composer is. And the composer was in 1989, a young teacher in Beijing Central Music College. And so all of these are his memories and experience about Tiananmen. – And this music was within him and he brought it to the world, and connected with people like me and many, many others. It’s what I mean by, June 4^th is an unfinished event. It’s still living in people’s heart and people’s soul, and fundamentally shaping people’s lives, right? Yeah, there are other people (who have) written about June 4th. There’s other people that made the films. But there are also other people (who have) written about how, today, so many people don’t know about June 4th, young people (who have) never heard of it, right? That’s why it’s so important that 35 years later, that we are still not only accessing the memory, but to continue that voice. So in that sense, maybe I should read Meng Lang’s poem.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Please do.

(52:45): XIAO QIANG: Because when I was thinking about this book, and thinking about Meng Lang himself, that he has been writing about June 4^th for the rest of his life, for 25 years.

This is the poem, called “Commemoration”:

Their blood stopped there.
Our blood suddenly flows.
Oh, their blood flows silently on us
But our blood must rage for them.
Their voice vanished there.
Our voices go on shouting high.
Oh, it’s their voices that came from our throats.
Our voices, a loud and clear echo of theirs.
Here, there is no us. We are just them.
Here, without them, they are us.

(Music up)

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: That’s Xiao Qiang, reading the poem “Commemoration” by Meng Lang. The music is “Long Night,” composed by Wang Xiaoguang, and performed here, in its world premiere, by the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra in May 1993.

The books Xiao Qiang recommended are:

Fang Lizhi’s autobiography, The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State.

I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo, by Perry Link and Dazhi Wu.

The Tiananmen Papers, by Liang Zhang, edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, with an afterward by Orville Schell

Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, by Josh Chin and Liza Lin

The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, by Minxin Pei.

And the late poet Meng Lang’s Selected Poems of June 4^th (六四詩選), came out a decade ago, on the 25^th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, and features poetry from more than 100 poets in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I also mentioned the documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, directed by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon. If you haven’t seen it, and want to better understand what the Tiananmen protests were all about, and how those involved were thinking about them in the years immediately after the crackdown – I recommend it.

The China Books podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, an engaging deep dive into books and ideas of all kinds related to China. It’s at chinabooksreview.com, co-published by The Wire China, headed by David Barbosa, and Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, where Orville Schell is director, and I’m a senior fellow. If you’ve got ideas for China Books Review, contact editor Alec Ash at editor@chinabooksreview.com. And if you’ve got comments, questions, or ideas for this podcast, drop me a line at mmagistad@asiasociety.org. And if you like the podcast, tell a friend or two about it.

Thanks for listening. See you next time. ∎

Feature image: Chinese troops and tanks gather in Beijing, June 5 1989. (AP/Jeff Widener)

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