Memories of Tien An Men Square End CSUN’s China Study : Education: Waning interest in studying in the Asian country is apparently a national trend. The 1989 massacre is blamed.

The allure of China has apparently faded for Cal State Northridge students sobered by the massacre in Tien An Men Square, forcing university administrators to cancel a spring semester program there because only two students applied.

The low level of interest--there were only eight inquiries--was a disappointment to university administrators, who have worked for more than a decade to establish educational links with China.

A ban by the California State University system on student and faculty travel to China, which began after the bloody end to 1989 student democracy demonstrations in Tien An Men Square, was lifted this summer.

“The institutional contacts are there, the contracts have all been signed and there are strong personal contacts, so it’s no problem to start the program up again,” said John Charles, international and exchange adviser. “It’s just the matter of getting the students interested again.”

Other schools across the country have registered a similar slump in student interest in China.

The Council on International Educational Exchange, which administers foreign study programs for 40 American colleges and universities, experienced a 73% drop in students headed for China between spring and fall of 1989, from about 90 students to only 24, program director Suzanne Fox said.

At CSUN and elsewhere, faculty, administrators and students blamed the waning interest on the suppression of the Chinese student uprising, saying that parents were frightened by the harsh reality of Chinese students being shot by government soldiers and that students lost their often naive fascination with living in a communist country.

“The romantic interest in China is kind of gone,” said Harold Gate, director of the campus’s China Institute. “It turns out the idealistic concepts of socialism are not really so romantic.”

Daniel Guevara, 21, was one of 28 CSUN students living in China in 1989. He now helps recruit other students through the college’s International and Exchange Program while continuing his own studies. Although he speaks wistfully of his time in China, Guevara said he was not at all surprised that the spring semester abroad turned out to be a hard sell this year.

“Who wants to go to a country that is economically and politically unstable, by our standards anyway?” he asked. “Nobody wants to go where there’s trouble.”

CSUN has one of the largest China exchange programs in the country and by far the largest of 11 at California State University campuses. A steady stream of Chinese students and faculty members continue to visit the Northridge campus from 17 Chinese universities, but Gate said excursions of CSUN instructors to the country also have declined significantly since 1989.

Along with the students, CSUN in the past has sent a faculty member or administrator to China to run the program and advise the students. The cost of replacing that person on campus--which depends on the person’s job--would be too high to send only a handful of students, said Mack Johnson, associate vice president for graduate studies, research and international programs.

Administrators hope, however, that the program can be revived, perhaps next year. The Semester in China Advisory Board, which in November made the final decision not to go forward this year, will review future plans in January, Johnson said.

“We’re eager to go forward with it,” he said.

CSUN student trips to China began with a trial program in the fall of 1987, when 20 students studied at Shaanxi Teachers University in the city of Xian. Because of parent complaints that their sons and daughters missed the start of the spring semester at CSUN because they traveled after finishing their classes at Shaanxi, the program was moved to the spring the following year, when 28 students participated.

The uncertainty that followed the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy protesters left CSUN parents living in fear for days and, in a few cases, weeks, until they heard from their sons and daughters, some of whom went into hiding with Chinese families. It also threw the future of CSUN’s exchange program into limbo while faculty debated whether future contact with the country could be construed as support for the government’s actions.

Representatives of the three other CSU campuses that have the closest ties to China after Northridge--located in Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco--all hope to send students in the fall for the first time since the massacre.