They Followed Our Lessons, Our Belief in Progress, to the End of the Earth

Jammed into a seminar room at Harvard, about 30 of us China scholars listened with almost hypnotic concentration to Huang Jing, a Harvard political science graduate student who had just the day before returned from Beijing. He had been on the edge of Tian An Men Square on Saturday night when the killing started.

He drew a map of the scene, described how, first, in the middle of the night all the lights in the square went dark and then immensely bright lights shone into the square from all sides, revealing soldiers standing all around the perimeter. After that the soldiers systematically moved in, firing machine guns into the students standing in the middle. He told how the students, knowing now that they were going to die, linked arms as they were mowed down row upon row.

He described how another group of about 200 students, including a large number from the Aeronautical Studies College, who might have had a chance to get away, linked arms around the Monument to Revolutionary Martyrs declaring themselves ready to die for democracy. Then they were gunned down.

Most of us in that room had spent all of our adult lives studying about China. As a group, we were probably as well-informed as any in America. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. A member of our own community was telling us what he had seen with his own eyes. Some of us had friends and colleagues who were now dead. All of us had personal friends and colleagues whose lives were now in grave danger.

Our grief and anger were mixed with, and exacerbated by a terrible sense of helplessness. But, flying in the face of futility, we have been hard at work. Our Coordinating Committee for Scholars in the Boston-Cambridge area has written an open letter to the Chinese people expressing our moral outrage and promising to “stand on the side of all those in China who work for the cause of human rights and democratic change.” In two days, we had already collected more than 100 signatures of America’s China specialists on this letter and were preparing another letter for signature by ordinary citizens across the country.

We had sent a telegram to President Bush urging expeditious action to extend the visas of Chinese already in the United States and to grant asylum to people facing political persecution in China. We had urged him to have the United States flag flown at half mast at the U.S. Embassy and consulates in China. We were gathering information for the American press and general public. As long as the horrors in China persist, we and colleagues in similar research centers around the country plan to continue this kind of work.

But as I heard Huang Jing talking, I could not help but wonder, what good was any of this? Attempting to answer that question challenges us to reflect more deeply about the value and purpose of our academic work.

Like other Americans in the academic community, most of us are optimistic, can-do people. We assume that our work is good because it brings about progress. It does this by enlightening people about the value of rational, pragmatic action and by making it possible for people to cooperate on the basis of mutual understanding of self-interests. We assumed deep down that with the opening of China there would develop a taste for this peaceful, rational systematic march toward progress for the mutual benefit of China and ourselves.

We thought that as China’s economic, political and cultural connections with the world community deepened, this progress would be assured. There would be twists and turns on the march toward progress, but things would generally work out all right. I gave a talk to the “moral education” department of the Aeronautical Studies College last December, telling them that they could really understand democracy only if they put it in practice by organizing themselves in democratically run groups working to make their world better.

I made it sound too easy.

What would I say to them now?

We can’t be optimistic about progress in China any more. And for the near future, we can’t do much substantively to make things better.

So what good has all our research and teaching done ?

We now have to see our work as directed toward purposes even more fundamental than material progress--toward the creation of the most fundamental dimensions of human community, the ability to mourn with those who mourn as well as rejoice with those who rejoice, to preserve memories, even of the most painful things, and to hold on to hope together. That will keep us going as we put in long days of hard work in these dark times.