UCI Students Rally for Chinese : Hundreds Join in Protesting Crackdown

Like the Chinese students who demonstrated in Tian An Men Square, Zining Mu would rather be in the classroom. But like those students, many of whom were his former classmates at Beijing University, the UC Irvine doctoral candidate said he was driven to speak out in anger and anguish.

“Thousands of Beijing students have been killed and many more have disappeared,” Mu told the UCI students who overflowed the university’s Gateway Plaza, surrounding steps and balconies during an emotional memorial Wednesday for the Chinese protesters massacred by troops in recent days. “In all of history, the true numbers may never be known.

“Tell all the world, the Chinese people love freedom, love democracy,” he implored, his voice cracking.

Beijing’s martyred students were remembered in Chinese and English, by Asians and non-Asians alike, during a noontime service that drew hundreds to the campus’s central plaza. The strong turnout surprised even organizers of the service at UCI, where one out of three undergraduates is of Asian heritage. A crowd estimated at more than 700 attended a candlelight vigil held in the plaza Wednesday night.

During the noon gathering, the crowd shouted and clapped when a symbolic coffin was carried onto the plaza, as well as when speakers called for the overthrow of China’s hard-line leaders. Most in the crowd wore black armbands passed out early in the memorial. Many cried.

And in a moving climax, more than 100 students and faculty joined Chinese language professor Richard Liao to sing, in Chinese, a song of patriotism and empowerment. Behind the singers, clusters of black and white helium balloons were released into the smudged gray sky.

“Help me sing it!” Liao called to the crowd. “Help the people of China!”

UCI’s second-in-command, Executive Vice Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, was one of the impromptu singers. Tien, whose family fled Shanghai literally hours before the Communist takeover in 1949, said Wednesday, “Everything that happens in China is very close to me.”

Tien said he did not anticipate “the depth of feeling and emotion that I saw from all the young people” at the Gateway Plaza service. “They were very, very supportive. They can really help in terms of world opinion.”

Television footage of protesters shot, burned and crushed by military tanks has been a powerful link to China for the students of UCI. Many, such as Alicia Malone, a junior from West Covina, expressed shock at the sudden military violence in a country they had believed was moving toward Western ideals of freedom.

“I’ve shed a few tears for those students in Tian An Men Square,” she said. “I came to the memorial today to show my support. I hope the students and the people will win in the end.”

Joseph Deck, who wore a black armband and carried a book-filled backpack, called the service “our statement.”

“I think it’s important that people voice their disapproval of what has happened in China,” said the UCI mathematics and economics student from Irvine. “We care a lot about what’s going on there.”

Standing amid protest signs and banners of support for the students of Beijing, Jeff Huang held an effigy--a stuffed turtle, actually--intended to represent Deng Xiao-ping, the 84-year-old Chinese leader who is rumored to be dead or dying.

“People wonder where Deng is,” said Huang, whose family fled China for Taiwan 40 years ago. “I’ve got him right here.”

In a tattered brown paper bag, Huang also carried more than $200 in donations collected from fellow UCI students, money he said will be donated to the Red Cross to assist injured Chinese.

“Even though I was born in Taiwan, we all came from China,” Huang explained. “If China can become a democratic country, every Chinese would go there. That is the hope of every Chinese in the world.”

Passers-by dropped dollars into another donations box carried through the Gateway Plaza crowd by Yi-Juan Zheng, who is one of 45 students and 20 scholars from mainland China now at UCI. Tears streaming down her cheeks, Zheng accepted a tissue from one of the strangers.

Zheng, who is working toward a Ph.D. in economics, was an instructor at Xiaman University near Hong Kong until 1987. She has not returned to China in two years, but the distance has never seemed as far as in the last several days, she said.

Each evening she has watched television reports of the violence in Beijing and other Chinese cities. On Wednesday, in a telephone call from her mother, Zheng said she learned that two of her former students had been killed in Tian An Men Square.

“They are my favorite students,” Zheng said. “I would like to be there for all the people who die. But my mother says, ‘Stay there. It will be safer for you.’

“I’m so sick,” she cried. “I can’t go home.”