Before & After 6/4 Massacre: UC Irvine Chinese Students Mobilize in 1989

Irvine -- As the world outside China recalls the brutal massacre in Beijing on 4 June 1989 thirty years ago, we look back at how students, faculty and staff at UCI responded back in 1989 to the student protests in China and the eventual massacre.  Significantly those participating in a remembrance event 7 June 1989 outside then-Paley Library were many shocked students from the Peoples' Republic of China.  They would not be among those subsequent students from Mainland China who would suffer from Party-enforced "politicized amnesia".

Participants pack the steps and balcony at UC Irvine three days after the massacre

At a memorial service speakers paid tribute to those who sacrificed their lives as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) tanks rolled over the student protestors. Objects of scorn were "Paramount Leader" Deng Xiaoping, with one protestor carrying a small bottle, a play on his name. Another was Premier Li Peng, the "Butcher of Beijing," who had imposed martial law and ordered the PLA to crack down.  In contrast, one student raised a pole with stuffed toy turtle, in apparent support of ousted Party Secretary Hu Yaobang, whom Deng had called dismissively "turtle egg Yaobang" when briefed 24 April 1989 by Li Peng about a politburo standing committee meeting in April that year, according to Richard Baum's Burying Mao.  News of the slur had leaked out; calling someone turtle egg is akin to calling someone a bastard.  Hu had met with the protesting students and was sympathetic.

Taking photographs at the time of the memorial at UC Irvine in 1989, I remember the shock and grief among those gathered facing a "coffin" and speaker set up borrowed from KUCI, the campus radio station. It was only four years later, in 1993, I would start my weekly Subversity Show on KUCI.

In 1989 the over 4,300 Asian and Asian American undergraduate students made up over a third of the 13,000-strong undergraduate UC Irvine student body (according to a news article in the Los Angeles Times, 16 May 1989). Weeks before the massacre, the University announced the hiring of Chinese scholar Pauline Yu, grabbed from Columbia University, to head the recently approved East Asian Literatures & Languages Department.  She was slated to start work on 1 July, 1989.  The Executive Vice-Chancellor at the time who hired Yu was Tien Chang-lin, who would soon go back to UC Berkeley to become UC Berkeley Chancellor.

The student newspaper New University did not cover the UC Irvine remembrances on its front page in the next issue.  Instead, it issued a humor edition called the New Ewe.  (The digitized copy of 12 June 1989 "archived" online at UCI is incomplete, lacking many pages, and superimposed with a later issue).

But a New University issue of 29 May 1989 did cover UCI students from Taiwan and China participating in solidarity protests in Los Angeles.  A photo shows UC Irvine marked on two banners or flags carried, with biology and economics senior Philip Huang and biology junior Tony Lee identified in the caption, which notes that "about eight other UCI students"  joined the march in Chinatown Los Angeles the previous Saturday.  The marchers went from the Sun Yat-sen statue to the Chinese Consulate.

UCI students among those gathered at UCI

UCI student raises turtle on a pole

Tony Lee, the incoming Republic of China Student Association president, thought the protests might "at least" make the authorities there more open to democracy. Jennifer Wang, a senior biology major and president of UCI's Chinese Association (for students from China) was working on a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress, hoping to inform Congress "that there are a lot of people who support (the Chinese students) and to get the President... to take a stronger stand."

A vice-president elect of ROCSA, Philip Huang said, "If we get people across the globe to recognize what students want to achieve and to bear pressure on the CHinese government, maybe" Chinese leaders will move for some change.

Continuation of New University article

But a UCI Political Science Professor at the time, Mark Petracca, who had taught at Beida the previous year, disgreed, echoing what has become the Party line, in China as well as in Hong Kong, regarding anti-government protests: "I don't know why the Chinese government would pay attention to what a group of students do abroad... Foreign influence in China over the last 150 years has always been suspect."  Petracca, having left UCI recently, was not reachable to see if he has changed his mind.

The previous Friday, ROCSA had held a petition drive plus donation collection in Gateway Plaza at UCI.  ROCSA sent a support letter the group worked on for two weeks to the New University, which published it in the same issue.  Signed by its President, Wayne Wu, the Taiwan student club commended, in the gendered language of the time,  "our fellow brother students" in Mainland China "for their dedication and perseverance in the pursuit of life, liberty and democracy."  Although students from Taiwan, "we still feel a sense of brotherhood among the Chinese race, and an unspeakable passion of patriotism toward the country of our forefathers," a call not likely to be echoed in today's Taiwan except by Kuomintang supporters.

 "It is the common goal of all Chinese, regardless of background or origin, to one day see a united body of China striving for the progression and advancement of our beloved country." Adding that "what they are fighting for is just and good," the statement ends: "Our spirits, as well as our hearts, will go out to them in an endless wave of support until the endless conflict has been resolved and victory is in sight."

Of course, hopes were extinguished after the army moved in to wipe out the protest just six days after the letter was published.

ROCSA statement in New University 29 May 1989

Seventeen years later, in 2006, Tiananmen student leader Wan Dan would address a packed audience at UC Irvine on China's future. See our blog entry. He spoke in English.  The audio link is here.

Despite the current influx of many international students from China, many of whom may think 6/4 is just foreign propaganda, there is reason to trust that truth will prevail and justice will eventually prevail.  -- Daniel C. Tsang.  Photos copyright © Daniel C. Tsang 1989.

Chinese Moms Talk About Their Queer Offspring in New Documentary

To listen to the KUCI Subversity Online podcast of our interview, recorded earlier today, with director Fan Popo,  click on: . 

Queer activists the world over will find this new documentary about coming out refreshingly different.  Instead of the typical coming out story from a gay or lesbian teenager or adult, Fan Popo's latest film, "Mama Rainbow," focuses rather on mothers of gay males or lesbians - and how they have become advocates for their offspring.

A lesbian and a mother from "Mama Rainbow"

Fan, young (born in 1985) and creative, is a product of Beijing Film Academy.  Working with the local activist group PFLAG China and the Queer Comrades webcast collective, the director has crafted a gender-balanced (in terms of offspring) movie that traipses across urban China in the quest of outspoken moms who have become active in the queer community in support of their children.  One of the more touching scenes is when a mother reveals to her son that in fact, she had already figured it all out months before her son told her, but she dared not ask her son if he is gay. 



In our Subversity Online interview, Fan concedes that the film features rather well-off families and mothers rather than fathers - although he reveals that some fathers (willing to be interviewed) were located after the film project was finished.

Fan at Outfest.  Photo copyright Daniel C. Tsang 2013

Developed from a shorter version posted online on the Queer Comrades video site, Fan suggests in the interview that half a dozen is the appropriate number of mothers to include.  His film may make viewers rethink what "family" means in a fast-modernizing China as well as moderating one's conception of "Tiger Moms".  Funding came from the partner groups, including those partially supported by the Ford Foundation.  The 2012 film is now on the festival circuit against a backdrop of growing efforts to combat homophobia in China.

Fan (right) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose latest film has been shown in China and at film festivals in Bombay, San Francisco (Frameline) and now at Outfest in Los Angeles.  The documentary screens Saturday, 20 July, 2013, at 2 p.m. at the downtown venue, Redcat at Disney Concert Hall, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles, 90012.  For the entire festival lineup, see the Outfest LA program guide. See also ticket information. - Daniel C. Tsang.

On how I got started in mainstream journalism: Remembering FEER

Cover of July 14, 1978 issue

Irvine - It was the hard-hitting Far Eastern Economic Review that gave me my start, as it were, in mainstream journalism. Not that I did much after that in the mainstream, beyond occasional op eds in the Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News. I am more an advocate of alternative media, and have written [or reported] for decades for ethnic and alternative press covering a host of topics, most profusely at one point for the OC Weekly, now owned by the Village Voice chain. My Los Angeles Times op eds can be found with other publications on my UCI 'faculty' profile page, which also posts UCI librarian's profiles.

FEER, for decades the pre-eminent news magazine to cover the Vietnam War and the rest of Asia, ran my piece at the bottom half of a two-page spread in its July 14, 1978 issue.

My piece, Home Truths from History under the header HONGKONG, focused on the following, as the FEER wrote in its table of contents page: "Had the China's communists tried to take Hongkong in 1949 the United States would not have come to its rescue, according to US secret papers which recently came to light."

In those pre-WikiLeaks and pre-Internet days, I didn't have a Bradley Manning or a Julian Assange, as a source, or Google as a search engine. It fact the documents from which I quoted were officially declassified, and made available in microfiche, as I indicated in the article, through Carollton Press, and discoverable in the major academic libraries.

The editor at the time who accepted my freelance piece was Derek Davies, a Welshman who had once worked as an MI6 agent in Vietnam I would later learn. At FEER he expanded the staff to make in the news magazine known for its superior coverage of the conflicts in IndoChina and of Asia in general.

I don't know why he agreed to accept a contribution from someone totally unknown to him. I am sure like all newsmen he had an eye for what was newsworthy and thought my piece fit that.

Ironically the cover of that same issue in which my piece appeared featured the growing tension between Vietnam and China, much as in today's climate, Vietnam and China are again at odds, this time specifically over the South China Seas. One big difference, no FEER to cover the current crisis.

The cover story, by noted FEER correspondent Nayan Chanda, focused on "Danger of a War by Accident," as the headline went. An accompanying piece, "David on the Defensive," by another well-known correspondent, David Bonavia, discussed how China was viewing Vietnam in the context of the latter's ties with the Soviets, and also on how the "overseas Chinese" question came into play, with Bonavia writing that China's main position was that the Chinese being repatriated from Vietnam were Chinese nationals, not Vietnamese of Chinese descent.

It was sad to see, in the 2000s, the slow demise of the newsmagazine. Reduced to a monthly, moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai, and with its foreign correspondents let go, it was doomed to die, and guess who is the culprit? News Corporation, the currently scandal-plagued conglomerate, whose Wall Street Journal subsidiary eventually killed FEER, in a "corporate killing of diversity" as FEER's Philip Bowring so correctly lamented. FEER, which begain in 1946, died in 2009. [ADDED 7/21/2012: The Economist however, attributes its ultimate demise to the end of Asia as an isolated entity.]

For me, I am glad I was associated even in a tiny way with this publication. - Daniel C. Tsang