YANG Jianli’s speech at Southern Utah University, Sept.22, 2009
Good morning. I want to thank you for inviting me to be with you here today. I’d like to begin by talking about an event that I experienced when I was not much older than you are now. It was an event that changed my life and the lives of many others; and it is an event that I believe will ultimately change the future of China.
In the spring of 1989, college students in China led a pro-democracy movement which called for freedom, democracy, more transparency, and less corruption from China’s Communist leaders. Their protest was peaceful and non-violent; the protesters were unarmed.
The students gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and erected a statue that resembled the Statue of Liberty. Their version was dubbed the Goddess of Democracy.
Their protest soon gained widespread support, attracting intellectuals, journalists, and labor leaders. Millions of people in Beijing joined them, and almost all classes of Chinese society—including many high ranking officials—were on their side. These supporters were not just in Beijing; people from all over China sympathized with the protests.
In the middle of May, 1989, fellow Chinese students at the University of California at Berkeley selected me to go back to China to join with the students of Tiananmen. I went back as a representative of the overseas Chinese students and fought side by side with the student leaders there.
On the night of June 3, 1989, the communist leaders decided to crack down on the student movement. Chinese tanks and troops swept into the square and opened fire on students and civilians. I was among those who last left the square.
Thousands of people were killed throughout China; and many more were wounded.
But after the massacre, the Chinese government claimed that no students or civilians had been killed by the army; no massacre had happened in Tiananmen Square. It was the “mob” that had blood on its hands; they had killed Chinese soldiers.
Even today, the peaceful pro-democracy movement is still officially described as a “riot” by the Communist government.
I was lucky. I managed to avoid arrest and return to the United States where I finished my studies in Mathematics at Berkeley. Tiananmen taught me that freedom is not free. We must work for it and continuously protect it. If not, we will surely lose it. So I have committed my life to the promotion of a peaceful transition to democracy in China, a China that will not ride roughshod over the fundamental human rights of its people.
After the massacre, the hope that the demonstrations had engendered appeared retrospectively naive to some around the world. Their apparent failure was seen merely as a tragic inevitability—as doomed as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Prague Spring of 1968.
But the demonstrations of 1989 were not a discrete anomaly in the otherwise tyrannical history of China. Instead they were a manifestation of a spirit that has always been present in the Chinese people—indeed, a spirit that has always been present in all of humanity. The desire for individual and collective freedoms, and the protection of those freedoms (most successfully embodied in our own times by constitutional democracy), is a fundamental human want—as basic as the need for dignity, respect, and love.
So while we mourn the fallen of June 4, let us also honor them by remembering that theirs was not a hopeless, romantic errand. Indeed, the iconic image we have all seen so many times of one nameless man standing down a column of tanks is too often viewed only as a symbol of individual bravery, and ultimate defeat, in the face of overwhelming odds; instead it should remind us of the dogged practicality of ordinary people in the face of illegitimate authority’s hopeless goals.
The democracy movement of 1989 was not confined to students in Beijing. It included millions—millions—of supporters from across China. And even in Beijing, one must remember that at least one quarter, and maybe as many as one third, of officials joined the protestors. And many of those who did not join were sympathetic to some of the demands of the student demonstrators.
Numbers are important to keep in mind when talking about the desire for democracy in China. We have often heard the lie from Chinese dictators that the Chinese people don’t much care about enjoying fundamental human rights, and over the years this lie has frequently been explicitly or tacitly accepted by many Western governments, businesses, and ordinary citizens. And yet, consider that not too long after the excesses and bloodletting of the Cultural Revolution, a democracy movement appeared that included millions of Chinese among its supporters and only ended after the merciless and bloody June 4 crackdown that momentarily quelled dissent and chilled debate.
Not long after the massacre of the Prague Spring of 1968, Czech writer Milan Kundera gave voice to the hope of those who would remember history: “Before long the nation will forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
By that measure, the struggle that began in Tiananmen Square more over 20 years ago continues today. It lives in memory and in legacy. It gave birth to an era of protest and the rise of a human rights consciousness among the Chinese people. For the first time in history, the Chinese government faced massive international criticism for its human rights record. Pressure from abroad and rising dissent at home have together helped bring about significant developments in the area of human rights, though much work remains to be done.
Today, with the massacre of June 4 still serving as a reminder of the lengths to which China’s autocratic, illegitimate, and violent regime will go to suppress dissent, 303 Chinese intellectuals recently published Charter 08, whose signatories now number nearly 10,000.
Charter 08 is a remarkable document which begins, “A hundred years have passed since the writing of China’s first constitution. 2008 also mark[ed] the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of [the] Democracy Wall in Beijing, and the tenth of China’s signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. […] The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who clearly see that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.”
Charter 08’s signatories remind us that the Chinese people’s desire for freedom cannot be eliminated by even the most violent and repressive measures. In spite of the ruthless control that is exerted by the Communist Party over Chinese society, the people’s longing for democracy regularly manifests itself—even though it is so often answered with violence. And the Chinese Government recognizes this—which is why they are now Communists in name only.
I said earlier that the nameless hero who bravely stood in front of a column of tanks was acting in the service of practical ends, and not hopelessness, and I want to talk a little bit more about that. You see, today we are in a situation that is both more dire and more hopeful than that faced by the brave demonstrators of 1989. On the one hand, the Chinese government has adjusted to new realities in order to maintain their hold on power. They have responded to pressure because they know that, in the long-term, their rule will be impossible to sustain. Thus, they have willingly jettisoned their ideology and allowed a distinctly undemocratic capitalism to supplant undemocratic communism in hopes that individual wealth will end demands for individual freedoms. But it will not. It cannot, because the desire for freedom is too great; it is too deeply rooted in all of the peoples who make up our common humanity. Violence, repression, coercion, and propaganda are tyrant’s tools utilized in a desperate—and ultimately hopeless—quest to maintain autocracy.
Consider the numbers of people who engage in activities the Chinese government, with all of the resources at its disposal, aims to prevent—or actually crack down on once they have begun. “Mass incidents” is the term the Chinese government uses to describe protests in which 100 or more people participate. Even underneath the ever-ready tyrant’s baton, the number of these “incidents” has risen to 100,000 per year—which means that, on average, a new, large protest against the government’s policies takes place every four or five minutes. Is it not logical to infer from this fact that no amount of violence or propaganda can ever suppress the desire for freedom? One may as well attempt to outlaw love, friendship, or rain.
I am often asked by American friends: “What you say is all well and good, and I am myself convinced about the universality of democracy and freedom, but other than that, why should we care about whether, and how fast, China becomes democratic?”
My answer is simple. If China continues its path of economic development under a one-party dictatorship, it will pose a serious threat to our democratic way of life in the United States. China will serve as a model for dictators and juntas. In fact, it is already a model and a leading supporter of these regimes. Pick a dictator anywhere on the globe—from North Korea to Sudan, from Burma to Zimbabwe, from Cuba to Iran—and you’ll almost certainly find that the Chinese regime is supporting it today.
In the United States today, the Chinese government takes advantage of our freedom and democracy to solidify its position at home. It, or its surrogates, has wide access to our universities, think tanks, and media through which they can advance their opinions and rationalize their actions.
The Chinese government has co-opted numerous American businessmen and academics by providing them with favorable business opportunities and all manner of privileges; in turn, they serve the purposes and interests of the Chinese government back in America as lobbyists for favorable policies towards China. Indeed, are not many of our opinions on China clouded by what has been the “business-first” priorities of our China policy which has benefited neither working-class Americans nor ordinary Chinese?
Make no mistake, the expansion of China’s military power is also a significant and alarming development. Throughout the past decade, China’s defense budget has increased at an annual rate double that of its GDP growth. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is acquiring more than enough power to intimidate surrounding East Asian countries, some of them America’s allies. It seems clear that at present, China wants to minimize military confrontation with the United States and seeks instead to concentrate on developing its economy. Yet this could well be a temporary strategy, aimed at delaying conflict with the United States while giving China the time it needs to develop a more powerful military. Who can say what grandiose dreams and ambitions Chinese leaders may harbor 20 or 30 years hence if their regime is richer and stronger?
History and a well-developed body of political theory show that established democracies rarely go to war with one another. If this is true, then the United States has a clear national security stake in whether China becomes an established democracy.
But what leverage do we have with the Chinese government to push for positive change in China in the field of political rights? Some—even those who want to restore human rights as a centerpiece of foreign policy—will say that we have little leverage to effect meaningful change.
Exactly the opposite is true. But a detailed list of effective policies can emerge only after we rid ourselves of the delusions and false assumptions upon which our China policy has long been based. Above all, we must understand democracy in China is homegrown and not imposed by outside world as many have suggested and many others would worry it would be. But this does not mean that we must sit back and wait for democracy to bloom. Instead, it means engaging with and nurturing democratic forces already at work in China. People often talk about prerequisites for democratization; for me, the most important of all is that there must be democratic forces in Chinese society and I believe today more than ever that a visionary part of the U.S. engagement policy with China is to openly and systematically engage with the Chinese democratic forces and to nurture their growth.
More than this, we need political leaders who will call attention to the fact that trade has not yet brought, and will never alone bring, an end to political repression or the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power. America has been carrying out a policy that benefits business interests in both the United States and China far more than it helps ordinary people in either country. It is time for change.
To that end, I want to offer the idea of Reciprocity as a foreign policy platform.
In 1997, Harvard University invited Jiang Zeming, then President of China, to speak at the campus. In response to this invitation, I organized a student demonstration which became the largest campus protest at Harvard since the Vietnam War. Those in favor of Jiang’s visit argued for it on the basis of freedom of speech. Our protest argued against it on the grounds of Reciprocity.
The lack of reciprocity gives the Chinese government a huge advantage in the field of world opinion, and in tamping down internal dissent. By insisting on reciprocity, the United States and the rest of the world’s democracies can showcase their own freedoms while forcing the Chinese government into an untenable position with respect to its denial of basic rights to its citizenry.
As I said earlier tonight, in the United States today, the Chinese government and its surrogates have wide access to our universities, think tanks, and media outlets through which they can advance their opinions and rationalize their actions.
When U.S. government officials travel to China, their movements, their contacts, and their communications are tightly controlled. If officials give a speech it is not typically broadcast to the Chinese people. Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey reported that on his last trip to China, his meetings with reform-minded Chinese citizens were suddenly cancelled and that he could not access his own website on the Internet. Even Presidents Bush and Clinton had their speeches to Chinese citizens blocked when they visited China. Virtually all American media are blocked or jammed in China. Here in the United States, China can freely broadcast. In fact it is estimated that over 90% of the Chinese-language media in the U.S. are Chinese-government controlled. The Chinese government exploits our freedoms to extend its influence with Chinese communities in the United States.
In short, there exists no reciprocity between China and the democratic world.
It is fair and appropriate to ask the Chinese government for the same freedoms for its people that we ourselves enjoy; the same access to the Chinese people for our officials and delegations; the same open discussion and exchange of ideas that we extend to the Chinese government here in the United States. This idea of Reciprocity will allow us to directly and indirectly infuse the issue of human rights into all sectors of our dialogue with China in a way that would make it very difficult for the Chinese government to refuse. It would give the United States, and the other democracies of the world, further leverage in their discussions with China and help to restore the moral compass of the United States as it navigates the choppy seas of world diplomacy.
The United States was founded on the principles of freedom, democracy, and certain inalienable rights. But the desire to meet short-term interests tends to compromise faithfulness to these principles. That inconsistency weakens American credibility. But the United States remains a great country, and its people a great people. I have an incurable confidence in American democracy, knowing as I do that its structure always makes it possible for its citizens to correct past mistakes. At present, isolationism is not the solution to the problem of a tarnished international image. Promoting democracy and freedom around the world will panic dictators and gain the interest of even those who have been hoodwinked by their rulers. We should always remember Reverend Martin Luther King’s admonition that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.
The most practical, and moral, course to follow, in other words, is one which supports and stands together with those many, many nameless individuals in China who bravely put themselves forward as obstacles against the forces of autocracy. Their fight is our fight, and we need only repay their courage with our love, support, and unified and consistent engagement to see their victory through to its rightful end: a just and democratic China.