I am not sure we made a difference: Tiananmen protester

Growing up near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Shen Tong saw democracy activists writing in blood on the Democracy Wall in 1978-79. Ten years later, in that heady spring of 1989, he was himself marching on the streets, demanding greater freedoms.

After the crackdown, Shen went into hiding in Beijing, unable even to see his father, who was dying of leukaemia, before being spirited out to the US, where he gave the world the first eyewitness account of the massacre. For 10 years, he continued to campaign for democracy in China, but was arrested on a visit there in 1992.

Now a hugely successful tech entrepreneur in the US, he remains a confirmed 'China watcher', but wonders, in this interview to DNA, if the student-led movement of 1989 set the country back politically.

Is there anything in your family background and upbringing that might explain how you became involved in the 1989 student movement?

I grew up in an area that is about two miles west of Tiananmen Square. My father was a university professor-turned-government technocrat. My mother is a medical doctor. My whole family — uncles and close friends of both my parents — was interested in public issues. Back in 1976, when premier Zhou Enlai died, and in 1978 and 1980, there were pro-reform and pro-democracy movements, in which intellectuals and students participated, even in street politics.

In 1976, I was only eight years old, so what I remember are the images I saw, not so much the content of the speeches I heard. Those were the times of the 'big character posters': ordinary people did not have access to printing facilities, so they would write political messages on paper — in big characters — and post them around Tiananmen Square, on the Monument (to the People's Heroes), and on lamp-posts.

In 1978-79, when I was in high school, there was what is called the Democracy Wall movement. In those days, people used to write in blood on the Democracy Wall, which was just two minutes from my home. The adults in my family would take me to these places — not because we didn't have daycare facilities (laughs), but because they were interested and they thought it would be good exposure for me.

But I will make a distinction, which was very clear in my father's mind. It was his own conflicting way of relating to reality back then in China. He wanted my sister and me to be intellectually alert and curious about public issues and even political issues, but he also wanted us not to take direct action. That is because his generation and the generation before him had suffered so much. My paternal grandparents killed themselves during the early days of the Cultural Revolution. My father was then a teacher in the military academy, but he was not allowed to go back to his parents' funeral.

Why then did you become an activist in 1989?

It happened even before that. In 1985, when I was in the final year of high school, my sister was in college; she went to Peking University, where I too enrolled a year later. In the summer, I would spend time on the campus with my sister and her friends — and we would sell illegally printed poetry collections. My involvement began then and in 1989, when my peers were getting politically conscious, I was already an old hand.

Although I respected my parents, I had my own ideas. I attended campus meetings, and then led students on to the streets, but I didn't want my father to know about it. My neighbours would see me marching on the streets and cheer me, and I would tell them, 'Just don't tell my parents!'

But there was a tragic irony to this, which I didn't know — and I learnt it only two years after I was exiled and went to the US. At that time, my father was working in the Beijing municipal government, which turned out to be the key instrument for the suppression of the student movement and eventually the massacre. They had a citywide surveillance system, with closed-circuit TV cameras, so my father, going into work, could see me marching on the streets. He knew what was going on.

What I didn't know was that he was pressured directly by the top officials of the Beijing municipal administration to either stop me from participating in the protests or report to the government about my activities. He was tormented during those days. My mother told me years later that during the spring of 1989, when he came back from work, he could not sleep at nights: he would sit in the dark, and keep talking to himself, saying, 'I won't betray my son.'

Why did he not caution you or counsel you?

He died of leukaemia about a month after the June 4 massacre, and I was in hiding during that time, so I never had a chance to talk to him about that. I only met him once before I had to leave the country. There was a whole lot of shooting going on in the city even a week after the massacre. I finally came out of hiding to the hospital to see him, but it was a very brief meeting and I didn't have the time to talk.

Even before the massacre, the students around me in the campus and in Tiananmen Square effectively stopped him from seeing me. Quite a few other student activists and leaders had been stopped at the start of the movement that way: their parents were sent to the campus by their work units, or they were pressured by the government, to take the students away from the campus. So my father had very little chance to see me. I learnt later on, from my sister and my mum, that he tried many times to go to my dorm or to Tiananmen Square, but he was stopped, and then he was hospitalised in late May and he couldn't really do anything.

Did you have a clear idea of why you were on the streets? What were you hoping to achieve?

The student community always believed we were doing things for the good of the country.

I myself was somewhat reluctant, not because I was afraid of the repercussions — I'd passed that point early on in the 1989 movement — but because of my own experience in the previous student movements and uprising. I felt we wouldn't be able to go on for long, that the government would put an end to it fairly quickly. In the first major election, I didn't offer myself as a candidate, I spoke up at the election saying that student leaders' foremost responsibility is to minimise the damage to the larger student body.

My objective was two-fold. One, I felt that in certain aspects there needed to be greater campus freedom so we could freely talk of and do good things for the country as it tried to keep pace with the rest of the world and modernise itself. I wanted greater openness to progressive ideas, economic reforms, legal reforms, and maybe even political reforms. I had fairly limited goals, which I believe were good for the country.

On the other hand, when students started to go out on the streets, I instinctively understood one thing based on my earlier experience of witnessing street politics, although I was only 20 years old and didn't have analytical sophistication. I didn't think I could lead the students, but I felt that if I could do anything it was to get the students organised so that the movement doesn't get out of hand. That way, there would be fewer excuses for the government to crack down and less potential damage to either the students or the city. The student movement was so large, it was affecting the whole city, and later on, of course, it spread like wildfire to more than 400 cities all over China.

That was my objective. I was individually very liberated, but as an organiser, I was more concerned about making sure that it didn't get out of hand. Both aspects were very naïve.

You were one of the student leaders who were organising negotiations with the government. Why did the negotiations fail?

The larger question here is: was the result inevitable? I personally don't think things had to turn out the way they did — in the massacre and the purge of the reform wing of the government and the liberal faction in the Communist Party. That wasn't inevitable.

But perhaps the most important thing to be understood was this: the main struggle wasn't on the streets. What was happening on the streets was forcing a very turbulent internal struggle in the government. What really happened was that the reformers and (then party general secretary) Zhao Ziyang and even some old guard leaders were all ambivalent about how they wanted to treat this defiance. Some of them were very sympathetic to the student-led movement — and I want to emphasise it was a student-led movement: it wasn't a 'student movement' anymore; all walks of society became involved.

The reformers lost that internal struggle. At that point, it was not what we were doing that mattered, because it became a catalyst for an internal struggle within the Communist Party — at the politbureau level, the highest level of proletarian power — and the moderates and the reform-minded faction lost to the hardliners.

That's when the fate of the street politics was sealed. At that time, the reformers felt obliged, compelled — and this is very unusual in Communist history — to go out on the streets. They went public to say, 'We support the students.' Because they lost internally, they felt that they had exhausted all their resources and options in the normal path of internal struggle, so they should go for the last round.

By and large, the student movement felt: 'Now we have Zhao Ziyang coming to Tiananmen Square and because of his action, even Li Peng is coming: this is really bizarre.' Even the police and part of the armed forces demonstrated in support of the students. We felt we were invincible and that everybody was on our side!

But I was scared: I felt this just couldn't be true. On the one hand, I felt I was so limited in my mind: it's going to be harsh, and there is going to be a massive crackdown. But on the other hand, I was moved by the sheer power of the people. I'm really old-fashioned in my mind…

But I also felt that this meant that the reformers had lost the battle in the government, which is why they were on the streets with us. We wanted them to convene a special session of the National People's Congress, we wanted them to have a showdown with the hardliners and push them out. So how come they were with us?

Once that happened, it was inevitable. The government need not have killed so many people, but they didn't care.

What were your immediate reactions to the June 4 massacre?

My immediate reaction was one of disbelief. The night of June 3-4, my friends told me my father was gravely ill. I thought they were trying to keep me from going back to campus or to Tiananmen Square because both places would be targeted for the most harsh crackdown. But it was true, and I went home. I was there when the government ordered everyone to stay home or else…

In the evening of June 3, I got a few phone calls, and remember hearing gunshots in the background, but I couldn’t believe it. And even when the troops marched through that part of Chang’an Avenue where my home was, I kept telling everybody it must be rubber bullets. Even when I saw people get shot and fall, right at my doorstep, I was saying, 'Stay calm, it must have been only a rubber bullet.'

Right after the massacre, you went into hiding. How did you leave China?

I can only tell you to the extent that I was fortunate for two things — one by accident and the other by design.

First, I didn't leave Beijing. I wasn't being wise at the time, but I was one of the few students who stayed on in Beijing. A lot of people who wanted to help students leave the country couldn't find anyone in Beijing, and I was there, and they found me.

Second, the people who were helping me were very organised: everything from the hiding place to the transport from where I was hiding to the airport, the tickets, and everything was arranged, and I didn't know any of this until afterwards.

Two days after I arrived in the US, martial law army troops went to my dorm and the police went to my mother's apartment. They didn't know I had left the country even though on paper everything seemed legit. I had an air ticket, I had an American visa, and I went through the normal procedure when I left the country.

So I got out of China first, even though I was one of the last to leave Beijing. But rather than take a harsh route to escape to Hong Kong or Macau or Thailand, I just flew out.

You wrote a book, Almost A Revolution. What were your emotions when you wrote that?

A reporter from The Washington Post quit her job, came to Boston, and helped me with it. My English was not good enough; but what you are asking me is how could I be objective to the extent of writing a day-to-day account of the movement. I must say it was this reporter who helped me to bring some objectivity to it. I feel that even today, 20 years later, I'm too close to it.

When you say you are too close to it, are you saying that you are not able to formulate or take a stand? Are you not able to review it dispassionately even today?

That means two things: one is that thinking about it even today is a very emotional experience. And when you are very emotional, passionate, or upset about things, you cannot be objective, that's one thing.

I had an unusual opportunity compared to most of the students of my generation. I actively participated in street protests. For the next 10 years after 1989, I talked about it extensively through public speeches, university talks, panel appearances. I wrote a book, and wrote dozens of articles, and granted hundreds of interviews. I had a chance to really talk about it instead of burying it, which you would have had to do back in China. But even with that, the sheer magnitude of this event and the impact on me personally was too tremendous.

But, more importantly, when I say we are too close to it, we are only 20 years after the event. Even after 220 years of the French Revolution, the Bastille Day, we are too close to it to assess its profound impact on modern history. Likewise, Tiananmen — or, more correctly, the uprising and street protests for six-plus weeks in the spring of 1989 throughout China — is a profound event in modern Chinese history, and its impact is still unfolding.

When you look back, seeing everything that has happened in China, how relevant is 1989? Should the world move on?

It's extremely relevant, and it's not. It's extremely relevant because no one can understand what is going on in China today without knowing at least what happened 20 years ago. A lot of its impact is still unclear and still unfolding, but one thing that is very clear is that it had a double impact. The conscious policymaking over the course of the past 20 years and in years to come from that point on: one, the regime knew it really had to justify its legitimacy. And, at the same time, they had to be ruthless in political control.

On the first one, they resort to two things: nationalism, which at times turns into ultra-nationalism, and continuous, unwavering economic reforms. You see the impact. Anyone who watches China knows that economically, the country is moving forward very quickly. And there is this strong xenophobia, strong nationalism, among the youth and the whole country.

Politically, China is every bit a police state with a contemporary twist: it doesn't even have an internet. The whole of China is an intranet. That's the impact of the June 1989 massacre. And to the extent that we can tell, they dodged the impact of a free internet.

Do you feel any kind of moral ambivalence looking back on Tiananmen? Do you sometimes feel: 'Yeah, we were there, but then 300 million peole have been lifted out of poverty, so perhaps the blood price that the student community paid was worth it?'

That's actually the second part of the answer to the last question. Did we make a difference? There are conflicting ideals… But with massive street protests of this magnitude, in terms of what we intended to do, I think it's fair to say that China as a whole — and Chinese politics in particular — took a step backward. Not only because of the massacre, but because of the policy changes following what happened in the spring of 1989. China actually took a step back in political reforms. So, did we make a difference? Yes. Did we make a positive difference? I am not so sure. It's certainly not a direct positive impact.

Maybe in certain areas, there are common, shared goals: anti-corruption measures have been put on the agenda. It doesn't stop corruption, but it's something they are extremely aware of. And I think it's clear also that because of the dissent that showed up in the party, they know they have to prove themselves, and what they did was implement economic reforms, and opened up the popular-culture aspects of social life. These could be argued as positives. But politically the country took a step back.

Does it bother you that students in China today have no proper understanding of that bit of history — and probably don't care?

Of course, it does. Not only because of my role back then and what I did continuously for the first 10 years of my exile life, but also it's just unfortunate for a nation that paid such a huge price in its effort to experiment with modernisation, with social policies, that it doesn't have that kind of memory available for generations to come so we can lower the cost of social experiments.

You started the Democracy for China Fund, and you were arrested later in 1992 when you went back to China. What did that say to you?

Everytime I go back to China, I have to have special permission; it takes a long time, it's a hit or miss; sometimes I'm allowed, sometimes, I am not. Sometimes they put me in custody and send me back without allowing me to enter China.

One of the things that makes me wonder about all this human loss is this. I was an idealist and I still am an idealist, that's one of the things that defines a modern man: you stand up, you pay any price for your ideals. But my family didn't choose to do that, yet they paid a severe price.

You are in the technology business. There was the expectation that greater prosperity — and the widespread use of technology — would democratise China, but it hasn't happened. If anything, China has demonstrated that it can harness technology in imposing greater control. How will social media change China?

In this day and age, China doesn't have an internet; the whole country is an intranet, connected to the internet world outside through filters. China has a cyberpolice force that is bigger than that of the rest of the world combined. And they seem to have dodged another bullet. We thought internet technology was an unstoppable force that would democratise anything it touches — and I generally believe that's true. But 10 years after the proliferation of the web in China, they seem to be able to control it.

We don't know why that is. But I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that bureaucratic capitalism in China doesn't value as much of the knowledge class as in the developed industrialised and the newly emerging economies such as India, where there is a general belief that if you get a proper education, you are well-versed in modern technology and modern ways of professionalism, you will get ahead.

In China, that is simply not true. The people who really got ahead are the ones who are a part of, or are very closely affiliated with, this other capital — not money, not professionalism, not free flow of information, but a part of the Chinese government, basically. These are the state-owned or controlled enterprises, companies that are affiliated with ministries and provincial governments... These are really the winners of the Chinese economic reforms.

So, free flow of information and objective analyses on social news or economic news are not conducive to economic success. If anything, it's counterproductive to what is still a behind-closed-doors type of economic transaction that makes the biggest companies in China successful.

Do you think of yourself as a stakeholder in China?

For almost 10 years, I was active. The Democracy for China Fund was my main organisation. But for the past 10 years, I've not been nearly as active.

Why is that?

I'm an idealist. My actions are mostly based on my ideals. I have the same ideals: I'm just not sure what to do about them. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I made a difference. I don't want to continue the action for action's sake; that is not the way I do things. So, instead, I write and I am still very much a 'China watcher', in spite of all the difficulty of not being able to go back to China as freely as I would like to. I put a lot of my energy in writing, instead of in my foundation. I don't know what would be effective to make things better.

What's happening in China and what's going to happen in China matters tremendously to me. I do have a vision (laughs) for China: it's pretty straightforward, actually: China — and, more importantly, the Chinese people — deserve balanced development. I mean, they are not pigs! The Chinese government might say, 'Well, they need to be fed.' Sure, they need to be fed, but they also need dignity. There are ample ways of doing that: call it democracy, accountable government, accountable political process, and transparency in economic activities, reliable data from the government and from the stock market... None of these things, which are critical to human dignity, are there in China.

The whole country is making a lot of money, but at the same time nearly 500 million people are making less than a dollar a day. This is horrible. I don't think politics is the only thing in people's lives: my god, it better not be! But in China's situation, politics happens to be the gatekeeper of a lot of profound problems that need to be properly addressed.

Is China better today than it was 20 years ago? In some ways, yes, and to this extent — and this extent only: because a technocrat-run authoritarian regime is better than a completely self-righteous totalitarian regime. In that sense, China is better. And on everything else, I'm not sure Chinese people as a whole are better off than before.

Did you sign Charter 08 (drawn up by pro-democracy campaigners in China last year to demand an end to one-party rule, among other things)?  If not, why not?

I am in total support of that, but I don't think lending our names is important. It may hurt the movement if it is not seen as a home-grown movement within China. My stand is clear to anyone who cares; it's very clear to the Chinese government. Even though I primarily do business and sometimes go back to China, they have no illusions that I have changed my mind. And as a tactical decision, we should leave the activities of the movement from within China alone. Otherwise, it will give the government an easy excuse to say, 'Oh, they are just the same as the people — either the US government or liberal exiles — who criticise China all the time.'