The Threat from the Other Side of the Ocean

Tiancheng Wang The Threat from the Other Side of the Ocean ALMOST EVERY TIME I AM ASKED TO TELL MY STORY, I START WITH 1989. It is a year I will never forget, because that year there started in China a great democratic movement involving millions of people that was brutally crushed by the Communist Party. Atthat time Iwas a student, but I survived the massacre and became a teacher at the law school of Peking University in the fall of 1989. Two years later, I was appointed as a law lecturer. But my career as a teacher and a scholar was soon derailed because a life in prison was coming. I participated in the founding of an opposition party, the Liberal and Democratic Party of China. In May 1992, when some activists and I were preparing to drop thousands of leaflets over Tiananmen Square, the center of Beijing, with a remote-control model aircraft, the crack­ down began. More than 20 of us were arrested. I myself was secretly arrested in October, and in 1994 was sentenced to five years in prison. I was released in October 1997, but since then, no university in China has been allowed to offer me a teaching or research post. I became a displaced person in my own country. Meanwhile, I lived a life closely monitored by the police. My movements were often followed or limited. My telephone was tapped. Thanks to the help of the Scholar Rescue Fund and the Scholars at Risk Network, I arrived at New York in January 2008. This is a summary of my experience in China. Since I am now a visiting scholar at Columbia University, I’d like to share with you a discovery I made in New York. social research Vol 76 : No 2 : Summer 2009 619 In March 2008, there was a panel discussion at Columbia University on the Tibet issue. W hen all the panelists had finished their speeches, the professor chairing the meeting asked me to give a comment; I said something about the whole picture of the human rights situation in China. But when I went out of the conference room, a visiting scholar from China asked me, “Mr. Wang, that was quite a speech. Don’t you want to go back to China? Do you think that the Chinese authorities will allow you to go back to China? W hat will happen after you return?” A young woman also came up to me, suggesting that there were prob­ ably Chinese security agents in the conference room. She said, “Mr. Wang, do you believe that you are not monitored by security here as you were in China?” It was a very short speech on very a sensitive issue, and two people came up to express their concern about me. But this was neither the first nor the last time I was asked such questions since arriving in New York that January. Those Chinese scholars and students who expressed their concern about me were well intentioned. But their worries were not only about me—they were also the voices of the fear they had in their own hearts. They thought they had better keep silent. They prac­ ticed self-censorship here just as they had in China. In America at this time, you can often meet visiting scholars and students from China, but please do not forget about the fear they take with them from China, their motherland that is left far behind. Now let me formulate my new discovery here: even in New York, you can still feel the threat of the dictatorship of China, the country beyond the Pacific Ocean. 620 social research ...