CSUN Tries to Find U.S. Students in Beijing

Cal State Northridge officials said Tuesday they were trying to locate 16 students who may have traveled to Beijing last week after completing a student exchange program at a Chinese university several hundred miles south of the strife-ridden capital.

The students, part of an exchange group of 28, spent the spring semester studying at Shaanxi Teachers University in the city of Xian. Many of them planned to visit Beijing after the semester ended May 25, CSUN President James Cleary said.

“We are concerned about the students,” Cleary said. “We’ve been advised by the State Department to pull our people back.”

Cleary said that he has canceled all CSUN’s Chinese exchange programs because of the turmoil, ending for the moment the university’s ambitious 11-year effort to forge strong links with university students and faculty in China.

So far, only 12 students in the exchange group have been located, university officials said. Nine of them have left China and three remain in Xian, officials said.

Names Withheld

The names of the visiting students were being withheld by the university. Cleary asked that parents or friends of any of the students notify the university if they know a student’s whereabouts.

Cleary said that on Sunday he ordered 13 faculty members to cut short an academic visit to China and return to the United States. Those faculty members, who are from the departments of science, mathematics and social sciences, traveled to Hong Kong from China on Tuesday, he said.

Two other CSUN faculty members and a school librarian are also in China, but not on university business and the campus has not been in contact with them, officials said.

Although university officials have urged the visiting students to return, they cannot order them to do so because the exchange program officially ended last week, said program director Adele Juarez. Some of the students are from other campuses in the Cal State system.

One exchange student who has returned to the United States, Guy Horton, a 21-year-old junior from Cal State Long Beach, said he regrets doing so on May 29.

“I was planning to leave at that time, but I’m sorry I left,” said Horton, an Asian studies major who speaks Chinese. “I’d rather be in Xian. I feel really attached to it and to my Chinese friends and teachers. I feel so out of touch here.”

Horton said several thousand Chinese students in Xian began emulating their Beijing counterparts in early May, holding marches and rallies, as well as conducting hunger strikes. He said several hundred students from the university in Xian traveled to Beijing’s Tian An Men Square, which had been occupied by Chinese students until military forces cleared the square over the weekend.

Feared Ouster

Horton said he refrained from participating in the student demonstrations in Xian because he feared that he would be ousted from the country by local officials. He said he believes that he and his friends were followed by campus security agents.

“We were considered agitators because we were foreigners,” Horton said.

One of the programs CSUN canceled was a four-city exhibition tour by the school’s women’s volleyball team, Cleary said. The faculty members ordered home had been scheduled to give lectures and participate in a conference this month at the teachers university in Xian as well as the nearby Foreign Language Institute.

Besides fearing for the safety of students, Cleary said he was concerned that Chinese leaders may end what has been a tremendous growth in academic freedom over the last 10 years. During that time, Cleary and other CSUN officials and professors have visited China five times and established academic exchange programs with 17 universities there.

“On every trip, there has been evidence of more latitude by the government in intellectual expression,” said Cleary, who made his last of three trips in 1988. “I’d like to think that our work over the past several years has helped China in its educational reform by bringing over some of their younger, more talented educators and administrators.”

Cleary said that beginning in 1978, CSUN has worked to strengthen ties with Chinese scholars for cultural and economic reasons, such as China’s growing importance as a Pacific Rim trading partner with the United States.

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