“A student left me flowers,” Xiaoqing Rowena He writes on WhatsApp. Attached is the photo: on the door of her office at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, normally barely decorated with her name, there is now a bouquet of crochet thread. “I want to cry,” she sums up.
And on October 24 it was made public that the authorities of the former British colony were refusing to renew his visa. The university expelled her five days later. “The candidate to renew the visa should not be singled out for security or criminal reasons,” explained a Government statement posted in the middle of the night.
He, a historian, is a rare bird in Chinese territory as a specialist in the Tiananmen revolt of 1989, the repression that followed, the democratic movements in China, and the relevance of historical memory for the power and identity of young people – on what who writes a book – was left without a job or residence in Hong Kong overnight.
He found out, in fact, in Austin, Texas, where he ended up in August 2022 for a one-year stay thanks to a joint program between his Hong Kong university and the US National Center for the Humanities. Since June, he has been waiting to return to Hong Kong. Kong is also a researcher at the University of Texas.
“I barely slept for days,” he confesses to La Vanguardia. “I am not radical or extremist in any sense. I am modest, calm, defender of peace. I only teach on campus and I didn’t even go out to defend anything on the streets. This is called kill the chicken to scare the monkeys. It’s a Chinese proverb. This is how it happened all the time, and as a friend told me: if it happens to a woman when in China they are thought to be weak, humble, polite and do not seek confrontation; “If she attacked herself and expelled someone like that, what will happen to the rest in Hong Kong?” he elaborates.
Beijing tightens its control over the former British colony. And she is the first piece to fall into the academy.
Although the nightmare, in his case, is also a return to the past.
In 1989, the year of Tiananmen, the year of the largest uprising the communist regime has yet faced, He was a high school student in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong. She was there and experienced it firsthand, because the movement, largely student, took place throughout China. He, after growing up during the Maoist cultural revolution (1966-1976) and living through the reformist era of Deng Xiaoping (1978-1989), she thought, “we all thought,” she says, “that the country was opening up. That’s why Tiananmen happened. We did not take to the streets in 1989 out of hatred or anger; “We left with the hope that the government would reform and that is why in my book I said that the military repression was a betrayal of the loyalty of an entire generation and perhaps of the entire Chinese nation and people, because that was the atmosphere in 1989.” , appointment by phone.
She links it to the Chinese tradition of Confucian dissent; to seek not a revolution or regime change in China, but to press for political reforms, to help the ruler improve.
After Tiananmen, she remained silent. And she ended up studying at the South China Normal University. And she worked for a few years in the financial field at the same time that the government encouraged people to make money however they wanted as long as they didn’t touch politics. Then, in 1998, she emigrated. And she suffered: she worked days and nights seven days a week to survive. She did a master’s degree and a doctorate in Toronto. She researched, among other centers, at Harvard. She wrote Tiananmen exiles: Voices of the struggle for democracy in China. Success: It was named one of the five best books about China of the year by the Asia Society. She returned to Hong Kong in 2019 hired by the Chinese University.
-But her book on Tiananmen is from 2014 and she was still hired in Hong Kong in 2019. What changes now? We ask.
-“In 2019 there was an unprecedented social movement in Hong Kong. I survived post-Tiananmen China. Our voices were not heard. And we all learned to lie to survive. We all had to accept the official version. But the darkness of June 4, 1989 was always with me as it was with many of my generation. Maybe we can’t talk about it, but it is a collective memory,” he explains.
-You work on Tiananmen, on the democratic movements in China and on the influence of historical memory and power on the youngest… Maybe you expected this ending in Hong Kong?
-“Within China, if you talk about it, it is possible that you will not only lose your job, but you will end up in prison and worse. Tiananmen, of which next year is the 35th anniversary, remains a taboo subject, prohibited by the Government. “It’s not that I was that naive, I knew the potential risk.”
He details it: “When I finally left China as a migrant I could only go to Canada. I worked just to survive. And when I saved some money, I wanted to go to graduate school. So they told me that with an MBA you can make a lot of money, and I also wanted to have a good life as an immigrant in a new country, but I felt that I had to learn about what, when we are inside the country, we know very little about. For years, while doing my master’s and doctorate, I lived in fear. That was the time when China was on the rise. They were exporting that Chinese model that combines state capitalism with total authoritarianism and everyone was hypnotized. I remember now, in retrospect, that people told me not to study it. “They thought I would get into trouble and wouldn’t get a job even in democracies.”
All of this is now history: after being awarded for her teaching during a pandemic in Hong Kong, she ends up expelled in the post-pandemic.
Worse: the university demands 740,000 Hong Kong dollars (almost 90,000 euros at the current exchange rate) “because I do not return to my academic position; I will have to appeal to obtain the exemption,” he says via WhatsApp that he was informed a few days after receiving the dismissal letter.
But no surprise, he maintains. And it continues:
“I couldn’t return to China for years. I always lived in fear and I live in fear. When I went to China in 2019 I was not so naive: in fact I signed a document that assigned a lawyer professor so that, if I was arrested or disappeared – as happened to many supporters of human rights in China – this person would be authorized to help me. I had it prepared when I went to Hong Kong. So what has happened is not a shock.”
More so when Hong Kong has recently been Beijing’s internal target.
The former British colony, returned to China in 1997, was governed for years under the umbrella of the one country, two systems policy. It preserved its liberal tradition. In recent years, however, vetoes have been added to civil society associations and non-governmental organizations, to journalists, and to the media. And the academic is the last link that is touched.
“The social movement in the 2019 elections,” he continues, “gave the Government an excuse to enter the city and destroy the freedom it used to enjoy. He has gradually taken over civil society. People were asking the Chinese government to keep what it promised – to maintain freedom – while they pushed for democracy. And China won’t let that happen. He just didn’t know who they would go after first. And unfortunately, I became the target. They came for a historian, which is not surprising. Rationally I understand it because I feel that it is not just an attack on me. Here the personal is just a way of being able to control society and the people,” says She He directly, confidently, almost running over each other’s words.
He cites that pursuing history “is a tradition.” And he remembers George Orwell’s 1984 to insist that whoever controls the past controls the future. History is extremely important, “because it is the collective memory of the people about the nation and influences public opinion about democratization, nationalism or war,” he says.
It is said, therefore, the first but not the last.
-Do her colleagues expect everything to get worse? she is asked.
-“I felt that they were even sadder than me because, seeing what happened to me, they will think about what is going to happen to them. For me this is in the past, it already happened, but they will have to face what they are going to do now,” she considers.
On November 2, recently, the funeral of Li Keqiang, former Chinese premier and part of the liberal wing of the communist regime, was spontaneously honored by a crowd. There were those who interpreted it as a way of expressing his rejection of the Xi Jinping era.
Chance?
He assures that Beijing “was never as strong as it seems. And it is exactly because the regime feels weak and insecure that it has to do all that.”
-And what is the role of young people?, it is insisted. Because it has been repeated for years and years that the Chinese people do not remember Tiananmen, that they are only interested in economic progress. Even in Hong Kong memorials disappear.
“In my early days I was not only attacked by that part of China closest to the government, but also by the younger generation that I thought I was doing this for. I hoped that the future generation would not have to live in fear like we do. That was the context in which I began to work on Tiananmen. Later, when I became recognized as the Tiananmen scholar and was able to make myself heard, they used to respond: ‘What does that have to do with us?’ We are just Chinese looking to progress.’”
This is why he quotes the younger generation of Chinese “growing up with what the government teaches it means to be patriotic. “They seem not to be able to distinguish and they attack anyone who is critical of the Chinese Communist Party as a person who is critical of China, because they don’t see the difference.”
-Before I cited the Confucian tradition of dissent to reform China. Is there anyone who really still puts pressure on China to reform from within?
-“In my generation we were deeply influenced by Confucian ancestry,” he responds, “but in the post-Tiananmen period nationalism and materialism largely replaced this tradition although it is still deeply rooted in many. From the outside you can see that people do nothing. In reality, silence is also part of that Confucianism, because it is not a passive action but an active action that shows that they cannot do anything, that they live in darkness but that they are not going to help produce darkness.”
