Shen Tong - 30th Anniversary Of Tiananmen Massacre
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| shen Tong (right) |
Twenty-five years ago, Shen Tong was 20. He was a thoughtful student at Beida University who became one of the main negotiators of the Tiananmen Square demonstration, co-chairing the committee on dialogue with the Chinese government.
"I always expected things to be harsh," he recalls when I met him in the New York office of his software company, VFinity. But when the harshness came, even he didn't believe it. The person standing next to him on Changan Avenue collapsed and died and still, he thought: "Oh, it's a rubber bullet."
People were bleeding in the courtyard of his home, being dragged on to roofs for safety, and yet, he says: "You somehow felt you were invincible. It took so long for reality to sink in."
Shen Tong had been accepted to do Masters in Biology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts; by means he still cannot reveal, he managed to collect his new passport, remain in hiding for six days and fly to the US, where he gave a press conference supplying the first eyewitness account by a student leader of the massacre. Months later, he was named one of its people of the year by Newsweek.
For the next 10 years, he worked tirelessly to raise awareness of human rights in China. Under the umbrella of his non-profit organization, the Democracy in China Fund, he returned to China in 1992, testing Deng Xiaoping's assertion that students who had left would be welcomed. "Sure enough," Shen Tong says with an ironic smile, "they put me away."
He was imprisoned for 54 days and released only after he became a figurehead for human rights as part of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. "We're still too close to it to understand what happened," Shen Tong's says when I ask what 1989 achieved. "We're too close to the French Revolution, let alone to Tiananmen." Broadly, intellectually, he can say this: "If there is a simple answer, it highlighted the key question of how to keep in step with the rest of the world. Right after 89, the government said: we really need to justify the regime. A completely self-righteous totalitarian regime is much worse than a technocrat-run authoritarian regime justifying its legitimacy by some means that's close to human life, such as economic development."
Personally, though, his feelings are far more ambivalent. "Did we make any difference? I'm not sure we did," he reflects. "It's a huge price to pay: my youthful years, all of them. Second, only to my own family, my beliefs remain probably the most important thing to me. But I don't know what to do with them."
He has done many things: he has written a memoir, by shen Tong Almost a Revolution; scholarly essays; film criticism; novels. He set up a TV production company and opened a bookshop. Then he hit upon the idea of using technology to empower people. Since the early 90s, he had been involved in smuggling modems into China. Now he does business there officially.
In general, the people Shen Tong knew in exile became very hard. He sought a different way of being: he has married and has two young children. They live in SoHo and collect art. Emphatically, he says: "I have a normal life. It sounds so basic, but among the exiles, that hasn't been basic at all."
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