Talking to the ghosts of Tiananmen Square

Twenty-five years ago, Rowena Xiaoqing He, then a schoolgirl, was participating in the Tiananmen-supporting demonstrations in Canton. Far from the capital, this was one of several hundred cities that rose up during that Chinese spring. Following the Tiananmen killings on 3–4 June 1989, she was warned by her teacher to remove the black mourning band she wore on her sleeve. After some years working in Canton she moved to Canada, where she secured advanced degrees; she now teaches an undergraduate course on Tiananmen at Harvard.

Tiananmen Exiles is a brave book. It concentrates on the testimonies of three of the student leaders in Beijing and Canton, two of whom are still barred from their homeland. Rowena He shows, after meticulous interviews conducted over long periods, how these men were brought up, how their views of what they intended and accomplished in 1989 differ, and, fascinatingly, how their memories and opinions have changed over the years. She adds considerable analysis of her own brief time as an adolescent dissident in China, which, together with her experiences and investigations abroad, have led her to publish a book that may imperil her if she ever tries to return home.

Writing eloquently, with controlled passion, she asks probing questions of the three men — which they occasionally dodge — and reaches conclusions that will enlighten many, like myself, who were either in Tiananmen Square at the time or have read much about it since. Of these, the most rewarding insight is that

the exiled students were ‘patriots’, betrayed by the Beijing regime: they did what they had been taught — to sacrifice for the good of the country — but ironically they were punished by the very system that had instilled in them these values, and they were abandoned by the country for which they had made sacrifices.

This explains what to foreign observers seemed so strange: that the students and workers in Tiananmen Square, and elsewhere in China, who had been brought up on films, books and operas about sacrificing their lives for their country, sang the ‘Internationale’ during the first weeks of the demonstrations and only later began to call for the resignations of Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping and even for the end of the Party.