Chinese Activists Trade Dreams of ’89 for Careers

Decades from now, they will still be remembered as the June 4 Generation.

They were the young college students and the older, battle-scarred rebels, the Communist Party reformers and independent union leaders who converged on Beijing’s sprawling Tian An Men Square in the months of April, May and June, 1989, in a massive appeal for more freedom.

On June 4, their dreams of a more democratic China were crushed when a phalanx of tanks and troops from the elite 27th Army moved into the city, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of citizens in their path.

Five years later, the June 4 Generation is only now coming out of its shell and daring to speak cautiously of new ambitions for the world’s most populous country and for themselves.

In interviews with The Times, two dozen Tian An Men veterans, most of whom spoke on condition that their full names not be used, said they have put their political dreams aside and concentrated in recent years on their careers.

A few said they still hope for a day when the nation’s politically disenchanted once again take to the great central square of Beijing to urge reform of the Communist regime.

“If Tian An Men happens again, I will support it,” said Zhang, 21, who joined the demonstrators in the square when he was a student and who now works for a furniture design company.

For the most part, however, the politically repressive years after the crackdown have made the June 4 Generation a much less idealistic lot, preoccupied with finding good jobs and starting families.

“I’m more concerned about how to make a living, how to support a family and how to be a good newspaperman,” said Wu, 24, a budding journalist and part-time television actor.

For most of the Tian An Men Square veterans, President Clinton’s announcement last week that he was renewing most-favored-nation trading status for China came as welcome news.

Ironically, the push to link trade relations to human rights conditions was never broadly supported by dissidents inside China, who argued that withdrawal of normal trading relations would reinforce hard-line elements inside the country--the same people who ordered the army crackdown.

In addition, many of the Tian An Men Square activists are now engaged in business, often with foreign joint-venture companies, that would have been affected by withdrawal of the preferential trade status.

In the weeks leading up to Clinton’s decision, prominent 1989 student leaders Wang Dan, who served four years in prison for his leadership in the Tian An Men movement, and charismatic figure Chai Ling, who escaped and is now living in the United States, both came out strongly in favor of MFN renewal.

In 1989, after the army moved into the center of Beijing and enforced martial law, three of the most prominent student leaders--Li Lu, Wuer Kaixi and Chai--fled to the United States, where they have had considerable trouble adjusting to their new lives.

Chai, a Beijing psychology student and passionate voice for democracy, said in a recent article written for a Hong Kong newspaper that her years in the United States, where she studied at Princeton University, taught her that a more moderate approach best fits China’s needs.

“I am more convinced than ever that China’s future is through constitutional reform,” she said. “I don’t agree with extremist theories that once international pressure is increased, the Chinese government will collapse overnight, or that once China starts political reform, chaos will begin.”

Li, a graduate student in business at Columbia University, now believes that business enterprise is the best way to liberate China.

“I firmly believe that business is the ultimate force for democratic change in China,” he told a reporter from Business Week magazine in March. “Economic expansion is teaching people they can have a better life. Everyone is a capitalist in China now.”

After serving four years in prison, Beijing University history student Wang, organizer of the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation that played a key role in the demonstrations, still lives in Beijing under heavy police surveillance.

Wang, 25, continues to speak out in favor of democratic reforms. But to avoid a possible confrontation with officials, he left Beijing for the countryside several days in advance of the anniversary. Before departing, however, he and seven other veterans of Tian An Men Square released a statement to foreign reporters calling for the government to free all remaining June 4 prisoners and to compensate the families of those who were killed.

But the statement also struck what many believed was a conciliatory note by expressing the need, in terms that the government often uses, for “a stable social environment” in China.

“We feel that the June 4 incident represents an undeniable ‘knot’ in the Chinese people’s historical development,” Wang and his colleagues wrote. They urged the government to “untie the knot in the people’s heart” by eliminating the term “counterrevolutionary rebellion” from the official government description of the June 4 incident.

The two men charged by the Chinese government with being the “black hands” behind the Tian An Men protests, intellectuals Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming, were recently released from prison on medical parole, apparently to meet demands for improved human rights conditions made by the Clinton Administration.

But according to a report recently compiled by the international organizations Human Rights in China and Human Rights Watch (Asia), at least 200 more June 4 demonstrators remain in jail.

Five years after the crackdown, it is still dangerous to speak publicly about the events described by the government as a “counterrevolutionary riot.”

Despite the passage of time, the Chinese people still have not won back the freedoms they enjoyed in the years just before the crackdown, when economic reforms had begun to bring new wealth to the land.

Naturally, this has caused many to wonder if China might not have made more progress in civil rights and democratic reforms if the demonstrations at Tian An Men had never taken place, or at least not reached the point of confrontation that allowed hard-line political factions to call in the troops.

“Every June 4 since then,” Wu, the journalist said, “my wife and I drink a lot of beer, smoke Marlboros and shout. I still can’t believe that people died. This result was a lot worse than no result at all. Still, I’m convinced it wasn’t useless. At least the government had to bring out its troops to stop us.”

“If viewed from a short-term perspective,” said Zhou Duo, a former Beijing University lecturer, “the 1989 student protests and June 4 have hurt the cause of political reform in China. Many ordinary people now associate democracy with chaos and violence and are therefore afraid of it.”

In 1989, Zhou, now 44, was a supporter of the reform wing of the Communist Party headed by former party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang.

After 1989, Zhao was removed from leadership and placed under virtual house arrest, although Japanese diplomats say they occasionally see him on one of Beijing’s golf courses.

Zhou, whose recent efforts to launch a tourism business outside Beijing were unsuccessful, spent several months in jail on charges that he acted as an “unauthorized” negotiator, representing the Zhao Ziyang faction, with the students demonstrating in Tian An Men Square.

“Although the protests in 1989 resulted in a reversal of liberalization and reform, I think that few of us who took part in the movement regret our actions then,” Zhou said.

Perhaps the most negative result of June 4, Zhou lamented, was the chilling effect it has had on the subsequent generation of students.

“On college campuses today,” he said, “the main two goals of students are to go abroad or to become rich. Few young people want to get involved in politics, because they believe they can’t change the system or that it is too dangerous to try.

“People have become pessimistic, so they channel their energy into making money and concentrating on their own future.”

In some instances, democracy movement demonstrators have made surprising accommodation with the forces that opposed them.

Take the case of Li, 27, a student in Shanghai and an active participant in that city’s pro-democracy movement. By chance, he was out of the city on the day of the crackdown and thus avoided political prosecution.

His clean slate allowed him to take a high-paying job with a People’s Liberation Army-owned company, with such perks as an imported car and an apartment in Hong Kong.

“Every day when I drive to work, I feel very lucky I was not there on June 4,” he said.

Wang, 26, was a student at the Central Institute of Drama when the events of Tian An Men began to unfold. He jumped into the movement enthusiastically, joining a hunger strike for more democratic rights.

But after the June 4 crackdown, he found it hard to get a job. Employers demanded that he first write a self-criticism detailing his actions in the square.

Tall and handsome, he recently won some plum parts on Chinese television and seems on the verge of becoming a matinee idol.

Looking back, he now sees his actions in 1989 as naive.

“I don’t regret them at all,” he said, “but they (the Tian An Men protests) had a negative effect on the art world. The policy toward art circles has been more strict than before, and more strict than any other fields.”

More typical is Lin, 25, who graduated from Beijing University in 1991 after participating actively in the Tian An Men protests.

Today, engaged to be married, she has a high-paying job with a foreign company in Beijing.

“I joined the ’89 movement because I was curious, ardent,” she said. “I knew that China needed a change, somebody had to push it.

“Now I have a good job, make lots of money. I think the country needs a stable situation. The current policy that puts the economy at the forefront is the right one. If there were another student movement, I would not participate--although maybe I would support it as an outsider.

“Disorder is no good to anyone, especially the common people.”

As China’s first post-Mao generation, which came of age during a decade of reform, the students knew they wanted change but were unclear about their objectives.

Only a handful of the June 4 demonstrators had the vaguest notion of democracy or democratic institutions when they launched their protests. Many simply equated democracy with the wealth of the West they saw on imported television programs or bootleg videocassettes.

Although he participated in the 1989 demonstrations and even joined the student hunger strike, Han, 28, a 1990 graduate of the Institute of International Relations, now believes that “what China really needs is not a Western-style democracy. Sure, we don’t want to go back to the Mao stage either. China is now in an interim period of transition . . . to a civil legal system.”

Han said he would not join any new movement like the one in 1989.

“I might watch it, but I’m already pretty apathetic about politics,” he said. “Money is the most important thing to me now. I want to have a good life and a bright future.”