Cashing in on Tiananmen

Part 3 - Coming to America

by Yvonne Abraham

The TV cameras had protected the students for a long time: Deng would hardly have put up with such a flagrant challenge to his authority for six whole weeks had the world's media not been in China to cover Gorbachev. Nor, for that matter, would the students have been so bold. The protests were a testament to the power of the Western press.

That power wasn't lost on Chinese students in America. During the spring of 1989, hundreds of Boston's Chinese students and expatriates converged on a three-story house in Newton, part of the Walker Center for Ecumenical Exchange. The Walker Center had long been a haven for political exiles from all over the globe, including China. In 1989, the center provided phones and a fax machine so that Chinese expatriates living in Boston could keep in touch with friends and relatives, sending them Western newspaper reports on the protests, and, later, updates on the crackdown. It was one of the few ways those in China received news of the student dissidents' fates, which Deng's government was unwilling to make public. It became a kind of command central, a remote outpost of the movement, itself the subject of several national news reports.

It was here, at the Walker Center, that Tiananmen Square protester and former Beijing University biology student Shen Tong first arrived on June 11, 1989. The first of the students to come to America (others had fled first to Hong Kong or Paris), he emerged publicly on June 30, at his own press conference. The place was jammed.

At that first press conference, Shen was a shy youth who spoke halting English. Now he is a supremely confident, articulate, and, above all, media-savvy man of 28. He has exchanged biology for a PhD in political science at Boston University. He also heads the Democracy for China Fund (DCF), which he says is a full-time job, too.

So, he says, he sleeps little. "I follow the words of Napoleon," says Shen. "Anyone who sleeps more than four hours a night is a fool."

Sitting in Harvard's noisy Greenhouse Coffee Shop, remembering that press conference, Shen is struck most by the efficiency of the media machine. "There was a huge turnout," he says. "Reporters were flying to Newton from all over the country. The impact of that -- of how established the media response was -- was very important for me."

Indeed, Shen's first public appearance demonstrated that even the students in the square, with their banners in English and their "of-the-people-by-the-people-for-the-people" soundbites, had underestimated the power of the media. Shen's future would be transformed by that power.

But at his first press conference, it was busy transforming his past. "We are taking great precautions about everything because he's very high on the most-wanted list," Gordon Shultz, executive director of the Walker Center, told the Globe, which described Shen as "one of the three major student leaders" of the movement. In fact, as Shen says today, "I was a small potato." Nor was he on the Chinese government's most-wanted list; he had come to America on a student visa. Already, the spin had begun.

"Today I am in mourning for all the Chinese people," Shen said, reading from a statement in English. He told the enormous press corps that he had been on Changan Avenue, where the worst violence took place, in the early hours of June 4, and that he had seen the soldiers killing people all around him. He wiped tears from his eyes. The Globe reported that he "projected charisma."

At one point, Shen turned his back to the television cameras to show off his T-shirt. "This is the Statue of Liberty," he said. "And this says `Democracy,' and this says `Freedom.' " He had crossed from closed society to media circus, and he was learning fast.

A month after Shen Tong's press conference, Wu'er Kaixi arrived at the Walker Center. Charismatic, telegenic, and number two on China's most-wanted list, Wu'er was one of the most famous people on earth. He had escaped first to Hong Kong, then spent several weeks in Paris, and had finally come to Boston. Wu'er was a star of the movement even before he left China. Once here, he was in constant demand. Rival Chinese student groups in Chicago fought over who would have him appear at their meetings. And then there were the social engagements: he spent one of his first weekends in Massachusetts on the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. He was so busy that first week that he stood up Mayor Raymond Flynn for breakfast.

Meanwhile, Li Lu (who was traveling on business and did not return calls by deadline) had fled the country and wound up in Manhattan. Chai Ling (who declined to be interviewed for this article) settled temporarily in Paris before coming to America in the spring of 1990.

In China, each of these students was one among many. In America, they were suddenly thrust, not just into an alien culture, but way up into its highest reaches. They'd gone from hunger strikes to banquets in their honor, most of them in the space of six months.

The most famous students were presented with a bewildering array of options, besieged with requests to appear on television, to speak at political rallies, to have their lives made into books and movies. They were also offered places at American universities -- Chai at Princeton, Li at Columbia, Wu'er at Harvard, and Shen at Brandeis. They were called on to brief Congress on the situation in China, and to make speeches at colleges and churches. They joined the speaking circuit, where they garnered thousands of dollars in fees to tell the American public about China, and the movement, and what it was like to be heroes.

Part 4 - Dissident PR

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham@phx.com.