25 Years Later, Student Leaders Witness Freedoms Fought for in Tiananmen
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Wu’er Kaixi took a microphone beneath a portrait of the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and began firing up the crowd around him.
“At critical moments in history, it is honorable to stand up,” he boomed. “At critical moments in history, it is our responsibility to stand up.”
He could have been speaking in Beijing in 1989, when Mr. Wu’er was 21, a student at Beijing Normal University and a prominent leader of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
But this was 25 years later, here in Taipei, and he was addressing student protesters who occupied the Taiwanese Legislature on March 18 to protest plans by President Ma Ying-jeou and the governing Kuomintang to swiftly ratify a trade pact with China.
Mr. Wu’er was here with a comrade from 1989, Wang Dan. They slipped in to the chamber, past the chairs piled around doorways to keep the police at bay, and declared their support for the students, many of whom were not yet born when the protests in Tiananmen took place.
“If you can stand up at this critical moment, then it shows that there is hope for Taiwan,” Mr. Wu’er told them.
After the Tiananmen protests were crushed, Mr. Wu’er and Mr. Wang eventually found their ways to Taiwan, even though neither had any previous connection with the island. Once here, they witnessed firsthand the kind of democratic transformation they had hoped to start at home.
“We call ourselves freedom fighters, but we lost our freedom,” Mr. Wu’er said in a recent interview. “Many of us were thrown into prison. I was forced into exile. But in the flagships of democracy — in exile, I lived in France, the United States and Taiwan — I had a chance to learn about democracy. Where would be a better place to understand democracy than Taiwan, a Chinese society that’s been through its own democratization?”
Mr. Wu’er moved to Taiwan in 1996, the year of the island’s first fully democratic presidential election. It was also a year when China, which considers Taiwan to be part of its territory, fired missiles into the waters around the island in an effort to intimidate its voters.
He and Mr. Wang made careers here that reflected their roles as student protest leaders. The voluble Mr. Wu’er, who famously interrupted Prime Minister Li Peng of China during a televised meeting in May 1989, has become a political commentator. Ask him a question, and he will warn you that an hour might not be enough time to answer in full. The more bookish and soft-spoken Mr. Wang is an assistant professor at National Tsing Hua University, where he teaches courses on cross-strait relations and political development in China and Taiwan.
Mr. Wang served two prison terms in China after 1989 and did not get out of the country until 1998. He then studied at Harvard and completed a doctorate in 2008 with a dissertation on state violence in Taiwan and mainland China in the 1950s. Perry Link, a China scholar who knows Mr. Wang well, said he encouraged Mr. Wang to accept an offer of a teaching position in Australia, but ultimately Taiwan made the most sense.
“Going back to the mainland would be perfect, but outside of that, Taiwan is the best place for him, because he can teach in Chinese,” Mr. Link said. “He really loves that.”
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Some of the leaders of the occupation of Taiwan’s Legislature this year, which became known as the Sunflower Movement, were Mr. Wang’s students. But in contrast to the demonstrators he led in Beijing 25 years ago, Mr. Wang said, the Taiwanese students had sophisticated political objectives and needed no advice from him.
“In 1989, the student movement’s goals were simple: democracy, opposing corruption and so on,” he said. “But the Taiwan student movement is much more complicated. They feel like the progress of Taiwan’s democracy has fallen under threat.”
The Sunflower Movement, whose name alludes to the light and transparency the students want to bring to Taiwanese politics, is confronting the question of Taiwan’s relationship with China, Mr. Wang said. Many of the demonstrators believe that the trade bill would expose Taiwan to far greater direct influence from China, and that local businesses would be unable to compete with Chinese companies.
Mr. Wu’er noted that both in Tiananmen and in Taipei, students occupied a public arena to voice the concerns of society around them. But he said the parallels end there.
“We were asking for democracy,” Mr. Wu’er said. “They are exercising it. They are defending it.”
In 1989, Mr. Wu’er was one of more than a dozen student leaderssmuggled out of China to Hong Kong, then still a British colony, with the help of organized crime syndicates. He lived first in France, then studied at Harvard and later at Dominican University near San Francisco. Now, while Mr. Wang’s parents have been allowed to visit their son in Taiwan, Mr. Wu’er’s parents have been blocked from traveling outside mainland China. Mr. Wu’er believes there are two reasons: His family are ethnic Uighurs, and Beijing considers him a fugitive.
Mr. Wu’er said he tried several times to turn himself in to the Chinese authorities, most recently in November during a stopover at the Hong Kong airport. Each time, though, he was rebuffed.
The two men differ on whether Taiwan’s democratization can be a model for China. Mr. Wu’er hoped so, but Mr. Wang argued that Taiwan’s political overhaul was driven in part by its pro-independence movement, which could not be replicated.
Though China has been trying to pursue a closer relationship with Taiwan by signing a series of trade deals with President Ma’s government, Mr. Wu’er and Mr. Wang believe the people of Taiwan are not likely to ever want to reunite with the authoritarian mainland.
“The youth of Taiwan, they have no feelings for China,” Mr. Wang said. “They’ve grown up amid the process of democratization, so they deeply treasure democracy.”
That divide becomes especially clear during the annual remembrances of those killed during the 1989 crackdown. In Hong Kong, crowds of thousands turn out for the events, not just to remember the dead but also to express discontent with the local and central governments. But in Taiwan, the crowds are much smaller — a sign, Mr. Wu’er said, of just how separate the Taiwanese see themselves from China.
“It’s the same in France,” he said. “All 60 million French people cried out for liberty and democracy when they saw Tiananmen on television.” But every year on the June 4 anniversary, “Just a few hundred people will gather,” he said. “It’s a foreign issue.”
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