Official Media Remembering Hu Yaobang

The great student movement of 1989 was triggered by the untimely death of former General Secretary Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦). Ever since then, it was a rare occasion that Hu's name would be mentioned in China's official media. One notable exception was that, in 2005, a moderate ceremony was held to commensurate the 90th anniversary of his birth. But perhaps due to the fact that the date of his death is so closely connected to the movement itself, there has been no activities on the anniversary of his death, on April 15th, 1989.

Maybe until now. It is still two months away from that anniversary but a very unusual essay praising Hu is being published in the official Xinhua Net. The article, originated from the News of the Communist Party of China, is titled "Hu Yaobang's Character as a Public Servant: Not Worrying about the Level of his Position, but Worrying about the Lack of Morality" (胡耀邦的公仆品质：不患位之不尊，而患德之不崇). It's a pretty lengthy appraisal of Hu's characters: modesty, open-mindedness, tolerance, and intelligence. It illustrates each of the character with some small stories of Hu's political life. The personal stories are interesting, but however not very revealing.

The beginning paragraph of the article is pretty telling:

Hu Yaobang has passed away for 19 years. But his voice and expression, his marvelous achievements, and his characters as a public servant are still deeply etched in people's memory. His virtues, noble character, integrity, and charisma, is still being widely praised.

胡耀邦辞世19年了，但他的音容笑貌，他的丰功伟绩，他的公仆品质，仍然深深铭刻在人们的记忆深处；他的良操美德，他的高风亮节，他的人格魅力，仍然被人们广为传颂。

In the coming months, will there be more to come?

Speak No Evil During the Olympics

It looks like the controversial mix of human rights and the Olympics will not be restricted just in China this year. British media is reporting that the British Olympic Committee is forcing a contract to their athletes, banning them from speaking up on China's human rights issues. Any athletes who refuses to sign the contract will not be allowed to travel to Beijing, or sent home right away should they be found in violation.

According to this report by the Daily Mail, New Zealand and Belgium have also censored their athletes, while countries including the United States, Canada, Finland, and Australia have pledged to stand by their athletes' rights of free speech.

A Portrait of Hu Jia

Melinda Liu of Newsweek just published a nice portrait of activist Hu Jia. It is interesting to note that "Hu's moment of awakening was the carnage of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on prodemocracy protesters", according to the article.

Hu Jia is Charged

According to internet sources, activist Hu Jia has been formally charged for the crime of "inciting subversion of state power" (煽动颠覆国家政权罪).

Walking Together in Shanghai

A few years ago, when the internet fad "flash mob" was introduced in China, It went beyond the usual hippy young crowd who practice it just for the fun of it. Rather, ordinary people, who may not even internet-savvy, found very practical purposes, such as gather a large crowd at a certain department store to buy the same appliance. With the crowd, it's easy to negotiate a on-the-spot volume discount for everyone's benefit.

Or a on-the-fly assembly to express an opinion in public, anonymously.

Large assembly or protests are strictly monitored and practically forbidden in China, although it remains as a right in the Constitution. It's extremely risky for anyone to step up and organize such activities, even with government's approval. Therefore, a "flash mob" gathering, with no trace of its organizers or initial agitators, fits the bill perfectly.

Long before the internet, a very low-tech version of "flash mob" has already been in practice, such as the New Year's Day protest in 1987. In more recent years, with the advance of cell phones and the popularity of text-messaging, it's much easier to reach a larger group of people on an upcoming gathering.

Such flash mob style protests have been practiced before. In 2004, thousands of people gathered on the streets of Shanghai, expressing anti-Japan sentiments. In June last year, a large scale demonstration broke out in Xiamen, protesting the building of a chemical factory in residential area.

A few days ago, another such protest broke out in Shanghai, humorously referred as "Taking a Walk Together", as there is no law against walking together. The purpose was to protest the building of a new maglev train line. The crowd is reported to be huge. They even chanted slogans and sang the national anthem together when confronted by police. Police detained, and soon released, a few people but was generally powerless with the crowd, who seem to be dispersing and gathering at random.

What is more remarkable, however, is that this time the event was reported in local media. Today, the main newspaper in the city, the Liberation Daily (解放日报), published an editorial addressing the issue. In a typical condescending tone, it lectured that while the government needs to listen to people's voices, people should use "normal and legal" channels to express them, instead of resorting to "street politics".

It wasn't a harsh editorial. But it has an all-too-familiar title: We Must Make a Clear-Cut Stand Against Street Politics （必须旗帜鲜明地反对街头政治）. It echoes the most (in)famous People's Daily editorial, We Must Make a Clear-Cut Stand Against Turmoil, published on April 26, 1989. That editorial ignited the then-fledging student movement into a full-scale confrontation.

We haven't seen such language being used often since then.

One Professor's "Last Lesson" on Tiananmen

Eighteen years after the Tiananmen Massacre, that historical event remains to be one of the biggest taboo in China. Even the official version is not being taught in classrooms. The subject just can not be mentioned.

But this week, at the University of Political Science and Law (政法大学), an Associate Professor by the name of Xiao Han (萧瀚) mentioned it during his "last lesson" to his class. It was supposed to be the last class of the semester and Xiao was unusually emotional. He prepared his lecture notes for a week before delivered it.

Citing the famous novel by Alphonse Daudet, Xiao told the students that although their situation is not as dire as the French in that novel, it is nevertheless an emotional time. He expressed his regret that he had been teaching only the knowledge, but not the value of life. And he went on:

Compared to you, I am already too old: I am almost twice as old as you are. If you were born in 1987, at the beginning of that year, China's college students went on the streets for the first time, asking for political reform with their passion, blood, faith, and youth. There was no results -- or worse than no results. Two years later, in 1989, when you were probably only 3 years old, in that summer, even more students, with even more blood and youth, tried to wake up this sleepy nation. But many of them left their blood in the [Tiananmen] Square. Only one body remains in that Square now. But the blood can not be cleansed. It will last longer than any real tombstone... ... The names of those people had been erased from all files. We don't even know who they are. Some among you probably don't even know that had happened. But for us, for myself who had experienced that time, it was the most important social event of my life. It deeply affects my life.

One more year, this event would have passed for twenty years. Time passed so fast. We didn't even have time to let our tears flow, yet our tears had already run dry. We didn't have time to remember, but our memory had already been lost. But I know, anyone who had experienced that event like me, will forever remember it deep in his heart. And now and then he will take it out and give it a good remembrance. That event represented our youth, the first broken dream of any young people who concerned about the world, the broken heart of a failed first love with this society. It cannot help but to be sculptured in our hearts and bones.

A week after delivering this lecture, Professor Xiao resigned from the school. His resignation was not prompted by his above lecture or for political reason. Rather, he was fed up by an incident in his school in which a professor was involved in a physical fight with a student during a dispute on class attendance. Maybe that was just the last straw for Professor Xiao, who is obviously deeply disappointed with the current status of education in China.

Due to its sensitive subject, the University of Political Science and Law had long been a very conservative school in Beijing. However, in the early days of 1989, it was from this school many students first marched to Tiananmen to commemorate Hu Yaobang's death, led by several young teachers from Beida.

Maybe Professor Xiao Han was one of them as well.

Fang Lizhi Reminiscences the Early Years of USTC

This year, 2008, will mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of University of Science and Technology of China (USTC, 科大). In planning for the upcoming commemoration activities, some faculties at the school suggested to invite Professor Fang Lizhi back home to attend. After all, Fang had worked in that school for more than 28 years and served as its Vice President for a few years before he was sacked.

But that of course would never happen. Fang Lizhi is still an "enemy of state" for his alleged involvement in the Tiananmen movement and in exile. It's increasingly unlikely that he would be allowed to be back in China in his lifetime.

In lieu of attending the ceremonies, Fang has just published an essay to reminiscence on the very early years of USTC. It's a touching remembrance of a time that has thankfully become more and more unfamiliar to today's people in China.

USTC was founded in 1958 as a small but ambitious technical college in the western suburban of Beijing. It's mission was to rapidly turn out graduates highly skilled in the most advanced technology so they could serve in the budding defense projects including nuclear bombs, missiles, and satellites (两弹一星).

As a new school, however, it had to accept "cast-offs" from existing universities to establish its faculty. Fang Lizhi estimated that 60% of USTC's founding faculties were "political defects" such as himself. Fang had just been expelled from the Communist Party for his outspokenness during the "Anti-Rightists Movement" and was dispatched from Beida to the new USTC.

Perhaps because such a high ratio of "bad elements", Fang fondly recalls that, life in the early USTC was actually easier for them. Fang was allowed to teach undergraduate classes right away, although he was barely a lecturer at the time. He was also able to conduct his own research, in between performing physical labor as all intellectuals were required to do at the time. However, when his first research paper was accepted by the top physics journal in China, he was told that he could not use his real name. A pseudonym was used: 王允然, which literally means "allowed by the King".

USTC was eventually moved out of Beijing to the remote Anhui Province in early 1970s. Taking advantage of its distance from Beijing, Fang Lizhi and other like-minded young faculties and administrators reformed the school into a basin of free thinking and academic excellence. During the 1980s, when Fang was the Vice President of the school, USTC had gained enough prestige to be regarded on par with the more traditional powerhouses such as Beida and Tsinghua.

Also due to its remote location, USTC was never a hotbed for student movements. But in the Fall of 1986, inspired by Fang's liberal speeches, USTC ignited a wave of large-scale protests that swept the southern part of the country. In January, 1987, Fang Lizhi was expelled from the Communist Party once again and stripped all his positions in USTC. He returned to Beijing and was assigned to be a staff in Beijing Astronomical Observatories.

As Fang noted in his essay, both his arrival and departure of USTC coincided with his being expelled from the Party.

Today, Fang is a Professor of Physics at the University of Arizona. Since his forced departure of USTC, the school had lost much of its fame in China.