The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Student Movement

By Christena Leverton

My thirty-year-old eyewitness account of the Beijing Spring of 1989, recently discovered in a box of old college books and papers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christena Leverton
• Release date: Jan 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393834526

Book preview

New Foreword for 2020

Alittle over thirty years ago, I was a 23-year-old undergraduate student majoring in Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Because of my decision to delay my junior year abroad to what was supposed to be my senior year, and another decision to spend a second year in China before finishing my degree, I became witness to one of the most exciting, ultimately tragic times in contemporary Chinese history. I am referring, of course, to the Beijing Spring of 1989, which ended tragically on June 4 th , 1989 when Chinese troops opened fire in Tiananmen Square and surrounding areas of Beijing, massacring thousands of protestors.

I had already spent the prior academic year studying Chinese at Beijing University, as part of the University of California Education Abroad Program (EAP). I wanted to stay in China for a second year, for personal reasons. I had heard about the English teaching/independent study program, which was also part of the EAP, through a friend of a friend.

Even though I am an introvert and had zero teaching experience, I applied and was lucky enough to get one of the few teaching positions available to UC EAP participants at the Beijing University of Science and Technology (BUST). We received very little practical teacher training but our students, who were all masters and Ph.D. candidates of various metallurgic sciences, didn’t seem to mind. Most of them had learned English from Chinese teachers and professors, and they were just happy to be able to practice oral English with native speakers.

Aside from my relatively lightweight teaching duties, for each semester of that academic year, I was also required to complete an independent study project for UCSD credit towards my major graduation requirements. In the fall semester, with the help of a Chinese literature professor, I studied and translated a variety of modern Chinese misty poems into English. I recently found a copy of that 30-year-old work, buried in a box of old college papers and textbooks, along with the manuscript I am publishing here: my eyewitness account of the Beijing Spring of 1989. Given how easy it is to self-publish e-books in the 21st century, I decided to type my manuscript up and format it digitally so that my family and friends could read it. I have made very few changes to the original text, aside from cleaning up grammatical errors, spelling, breaking up some of the longer paragraphs, and rewording some of the most awkward phrasing.

As I worked my way through my original document, I realized just how naive and incomplete it is.  At times, I speculated and accepted as truth things that may have been rumor rather than fact.  Unlike a standard history research paper, there were no academic works for me to cite and analyze; at the time of writing, not much had been published about the recent events in Beijing, other than newspaper and magazine articles written by Western journalists. While writing my paper, I just fact-checked my memory of events the best I could, using copies of Time and Newsweek magazines, which published timelines of the movement’s major events.

My paper was purely a personal narrative, neither scholarly nor analytic in nature. A simple narrative is all I was capable of writing at the time. To tell the truth, I didn’t even want to finish it. After meeting with an academic advisor in the Fall of 1989 I told him I was willing to take an incomplete on my second-semester project from the prior academic year. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and extended the deadline yet again, telling me it would be therapeutic to write it all down. He connected me to a student health counselor who finally convinced me to do it. Armed with nothing more than my memory, and those news magazine timelines I sat down at a typewriter and wrote for several days, shaking and crying at times. My advisor was right. Getting it all down on paper was cathartic.

The cover page in my original manuscript is not dated, but I wrote it prior to my graduation from UCSD in May 1990. Judging from my reference to female student leader Chai Ling’s escape from China, which occurred about ten months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, I likely finished it in March or April of 1990.

I would like to end this foreword by pointing out that I never met any of the inner circle of student leaders. It is likely that if any of them were to read my account, they would find many errors and inconsistencies. Because of that, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this is more my story than theirs. It is nothing more than a young American’s view of a uniquely Chinese event.  To really understand the movement, I would encourage anyone who reads this book to seek out works by Chai Ling, Bob Fu, and other student leaders and dissidents who were able to flee China and take up residence in Western countries. Their stories are amazing and they, along with their fallen friends, are still my heroes.

Original Foreword

This paper has been completed under the guise of fulfilling the requirements of an independent study course with a Political Science title. But this