Rowena He
This fall, I’m honored to have made a new friend: the noted Chinese dissident scholar Rowena He, currently a Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at UT Austin, and formerly of Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and other fine places. I was connected to Rowena by the Harvard computer scientist Harry Lewis.
But let’s cut to the chase, as Rowena tends to do in every conversation. As a teenage girl in Guangdong, Rowena eagerly participated in the pro-democracy protests of 1989, the ones that tragically culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Since then, she’s devoted her life to documenting and preserving the memory of what happened, fighting its deliberate erasure from the consciousness of future generations of Chinese. You can read some of her efforts in her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China (one of the Asia Society’s top 5 China books of 2014). She’s now spending her time at UT writing a second book.
Unsurprisingly, Rowena’s life’s project has not (to put it mildly) sat well with the Chinese authorities. From 2019, she had a history professorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she could be close to her research material and to those who needed to hear her message—and where she was involved in the pro-democracy protests that convulsed Hong Kong that year. Alas, you might remember the grim outcome of those protests. Following Hong Kong’s authoritarian takeover, in October of this year, Rowena was denied a visa to return to Hong Kong, and then fired from CUHK because she’d been denied a visa—events that were covered fairly widely in the press. Learning about the downfall of academic freedom in Hong Kong was particularly poignant for me, given that I lived in Hong Kong when I was 13 years old, in some of the last years before the handover to China (1994-1995), and my family knew many people there who were trying to get out—to Canada, Australia, anywhere—correctly fearing what eventually came to pass.
But this is all still relatively dry information that wouldn’t have prepared me for the experience of meeting Rowena in person. Probably more than anyone else I’ve had occasion to meet, Rowena is basically the living embodiment of what it means to sacrifice everything for abstract ideals of freedom and justice. Many academics posture that way; to spend a couple hours with Rowena is to understand the real deal. You can talk to her about trivialities—food, work habits, how she’s settling in Austin—and she’ll answer, but before too long, the emotion will rise in her voice and she’ll be back to telling you how the protesting students didn’t want to overthrow the Chinese government, but only help to improve it. As if you, too, were a CCP bureaucrat who might imprison her if the truth turned out otherwise. Or she’ll talk about how, when she was depressed, only the faces of the students in Hong Kong who crowded her lecture gave her the will to keep living; or about what she learned by reading the letters that Lin Zhao, a dissident from Maoism, wrote in blood in Chinese jail before she was executed.
This post has a practical purpose. Since her exile from China, Rowena has spent basically her entire life moving from place to place, with no permanent position and no financial security. In the US—a huge country full of people who share Rowena’s goal of exposing the lies of the CCP—there must be an excellent university, think tank, or institute that would offer a permanent position to possibly the world’s preeminent historian of Tiananmen and of the Chinese democracy movement. Though the readership of this blog is heavily skewed toward STEM, maybe that institute is yours. If it is, please get in touch with Rowena. And then I could say this blog had served a useful purpose, even if everything else I wrote for two decades was for naught.
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Comment #1 December 20th, 2023 at 2:14 pm
Your optimism is misplaced. Many universities will gladly take Chinese funding, to the total tune of around $1B a year (Harvard’s take: $93M), which comes with implied strings attached (and a side order of industrial espionage).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-06/harvard-leads-u-s-colleges-that-received-1-billion-from-china
Comment #2 December 20th, 2023 at 2:27 pm
Fazal Majid #1: I’m not here trying to fix American universities, or China, or the world, just Rowena’s personal situation. It will only take one institution with sufficient vision and moral courage (and many, including mine, have already given her temporary fellowships).
Comment #3 December 20th, 2023 at 2:44 pm
An off-topic question: Have you considered taking in ChatGPT as a PhD student?
It might not be good enough for that right now but maybe in two or three years it will be?
Comment #4 December 20th, 2023 at 7:24 pm
I wish I could help. You should probably ready yourself for the arrival of CCP chatbots on your blog (in addition to Iranian and Russian ones).
Comment #5 December 20th, 2023 at 10:12 pm
If there were a way to give Dr. He personal donations, via PayPal or some other means, I would like to do so, as a tangible way of expressing support.
Comment #6 December 20th, 2023 at 11:41 pm
Amir Michail #3: … and what exactly would be the admissions process? I can already give ChatGPT vastly more work than I’d give any grad student, right now! 😀 But it’s not currently set up in such a way that it will “learn” from my interactions with it, outside its current context and anything I save from it.
Comment #7 December 20th, 2023 at 11:44 pm
JimV #5: Thanks!! I just emailed Rowena to ask if she’d consider setting up a GoFundMe or the like.
Comment #8 December 21st, 2023 at 10:07 am
JimV #5: Rowena asked me to share the following response.
Please thank the netizen. I am grateful for the support, but as a principle, I do not accept donations, not even during the most trying times in the past twenty years when I was struggling to keep the memory alive. I think my work belongs to those young people who were violently silenced on that fateful night in 1989. I will not take donations. Please just support us to carry on the dream of democracy and liberty that inspired us to take to the streets in 1989. Many thanks. Rowena
When I pressed her further—surely she could name an organization to donate to, etc?—she replied:
They can certainly buy my book! Although I think I get 20’cents from one copy. 😭😂
Comment #9 December 21st, 2023 at 12:58 pm
Thanks for inquiring, Dr. Aaronson. I have bought the book ($9.99 on Kindle and $32.51 in hardcover). Wish I could do more.
Comment #10 December 21st, 2023 at 3:40 pm
Rowena,
I have ordered the book from Amazon. My wife is Chinese and will be greatly interested in it. Friends of hers travelled to Beijing in 1989 to join the protest but returned home when they realised the danger they were in. Some of them had friends who were subsequently killed or injured.
Good luck and best wishes,
David
Comment #11 December 21st, 2023 at 4:39 pm
I guess, the most one could do as US citizen to subvert China’s subversion of (not only) US firms and universities is … vote Trump, not DEMs. I am aware that you do not like too much politics in this thankfully TCS-centered blog, but this special topic is just 123% political. As a sidenote on current affaires, have we all noted, how strongly connected and mostly identical are pro-Hamas people and the Left?! We should.
For Rowena: She might have a good chance at the new “anti-woke” University of Austin in Texas, not to be confounded with the long-standing University of Texas in Austin. And then anti-woke Elon X. is planning a new university in … Austin, TX.
Comment #12 December 22nd, 2023 at 10:05 am
What’s even more sad at this point is that the vast majority of Chinese people, both in Mainland and in HK (!), now firmly believe that any Chinese who still brings up Tiananmen and aspirations of Democracy is, at best, hurting the common interest of all Chinese people in the quest to restore China’s power to what it should be and helping/working for its enemies (the West), at worst, being a traitor and should be thrown in jail.
It’s all a result of the CCP taking sole credit for the rise of China as the world main economical power.
Comment #13 December 22nd, 2023 at 10:29 am
Correction:
This applies not just to all the Chinese still living in HK (and mainland), but also to all the Chinese expats from HK who’ve lived here in the US for decades (friends), especially with people in their 50s and above.
They used to constantly criticize the CCP in the 90s and 00s, but now that China has risen and turned things around, the sense of national/civilizational pride is just too strong.
Not only that, but all the typical nationalistic talking points signaled by the CCP on social media are fully resonating with them:
1) their Chinese identity is their most important attribute (no matter how long they’ve lived out of China)
2) the constant hammering (in Chinese language news, movies, podcasts) that all the wrongs of the past still matter (i.e. the “rape” of China by the West in the 19th century or the atrocities committed by Japan in WW2) and that it’s now finally time for payback.
And it works especially so well here in the US because it’s all in line with woke attitude.
Comment #14 December 22nd, 2023 at 10:39 am
Btw, the next big potential inflection point in all this will be the 2024 Taiwanese elections, where it’s not clear who’s gonna win, between the anti-Beijing democrats now in power and the more pro-Beijing Kuomintang party.
Comment #15 December 22nd, 2023 at 10:52 am
Last point:
It’s true that the Tiananmen 1989 events were horrible, and it’s worth preserving an accurate account of the truth.
But, for many Chinese, it could also be time to move on…
it’s like how an American would feel when constantly bringing up the “My Lai Massacre” or the bombing of Laos during the Vietnam war to criticize the US government in 2023 (which many do).
Especially that there’s no shortage of horrible things being done by the CCP in the 21st century (the pandemic, the treatment of Uyghurs in XinJiang,..).
Comment #16 December 22nd, 2023 at 12:42 pm
fred #15: That is, to be frank, a dumb comment. For one thing, the CCP very obviously hasn’t moved on; they continue to censor any mention of the massacre from the Chinese Internet and to fire or imprison any academic who talks about it. For another, we’re talking about one historian who’s chosen to devote her life to preserving the memory of what happened (and who, if it’s relevant, got rapturous, standing-room-only crowds talking about it in Hong Kong before the 2019 crackdown). No one’s talking about making all Chinese people spend their lives on Tiananmen remembrance, any more than all Jews (or Germans) spend their lives on Holocaust remembrance.
Comment #17 December 22nd, 2023 at 3:24 pm
Scott #16
I’m talking about how the people of Chinese ancestry that I know (and I know quite a lot of them since I married one, specifically from HK) respond when someone non-Chinese brings up the topic nowadays.
It’s not my fucking opinion, it’s the answer I get …
When it comes to the HK protests, what hasn’t been reported in the Western media is that the public opinion over there (the older generation) turned markedly against the protest when the students (the younger generation) started to loot and destroy. All the HK people I know have stories of even more horrible acts of violence committed on people who weren’t all the way in with the looting (like stories of an elder man set on fire… whether it’s true or not I have no idea). The older generation in particular just want social peace and opportunities.
Comment #18 December 22nd, 2023 at 3:33 pm
fred #17: Then it sounds like there’s a problem to be solved. Clearly opinion is far from unanimous in Hong Kong, or wouldn’t have been protests in the first place! Given that the pro-democracy side is now almost totally unable to get its message into the media, you could view it as remarkable how much support it still has. As in all authoritarian regimes, I think the real issue is how to make the level of support common knowledge—a collective action problem.
Comment #19 December 22nd, 2023 at 3:46 pm
https://observers.france24.com/en/20191113-gruesome-video-man-set-fire-hong-kong-marks-escalation-violence
Yes, HK people have feared the Communist take over for a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Years_(2015_film)
But, when the 2019 protests suddenly turned violent and destructive, in the name of democracy, the CCP didn’t have to do much to convince the rest of the population that democracy = chaos, and that anti-China foreign influence was stirring things up, with no regard for social order in HK.
The older generations there fears social chaos more than any abstract notion of “losing freedom”.
HK people have never known true “democracy”.
They’ve been under British rule for 100 years, with little access to power and control, and from this they jumped right back into CCP rule.
That’s in stark contrast with Taiwan, where democracy was built from scratch and from the inside, without any foreign influence.
Comment #20 December 22nd, 2023 at 4:12 pm
Keep in mind, Honk Kong is 7.4 million people, Mainland China is 1,411 million people.
Given what the Mainland Chinese population endured during covid, it’s now clear that no level of authoritarian crackdown on freedoms is what’s gonna make things change.
The vast majority of people there just don’t care all that much about freedoms (the way the West cares about them), they just want wealth and security (because their “great depression”, where millions died from poverty/starvation, lasted for decades after WW2).
At this point, if true change will ever come it’s going to be through deterioration of the economy… it turns out that Xi is actually only good at pushing his ideological bullshit, and doing a piss poor job at maintaining what his predecessors accomplished in terms of social satisfaction, e.g. supposedly 22% of youth unemployment, that doesn’t bode well for the future.
Comment #21 December 22nd, 2023 at 4:51 pm
MJV #11
“I guess, the most one could do as US citizen to subvert China’s subversion of (not only) US firms and universities is … vote Trump, not DEMs.”
While Trump can be credited for starting the China pushback thing (he was obsessively relentless about it), he did it for the wrong reason (in the 80s he was making the exact same points about Japan, for him Japan in the 80s = China in 2020, which is clearly a very myopic view of things) and the wrong way (trade barriers weren’t that effective).
China feared a Biden victory in 2020 way way more than a Trump victory… that’s because they knew Biden would repair all the crucial alliances Trump severed during his presidency.
Now, after 4 years of Biden, the US has built back a strong alliance with Europe… also a side effect of Putin’s war on Ukraine and Biden strong support of Ukraine and building a stronger NATO. When Trump was in charge, he tried to unload as much of the US responsibility as he could, so, before the Ukraine invasion, Macron was saying NATO was like an ICU patient with cerebral death… now NATO is on the rise again, Finland and Sweden jointed it, and the rest have increased their budget dramatically.
So, not something China wanted… Xi has been trying to undermine the EU through his belt and road initiative with divide and conquer… but now Italy just left the belt and road initiative, a big slap for Xi.
For 4 years Biden has also kept preparing the Europeans that the next big challenge is China… at first they didn’t want to hear it, they didn’t want to take side (“China has done nothing to us, we have nothing to do with Taiwan”), but now the public opinion in Europe has vastly turned negative against China, and Xi knows it. His big soft power maneuver has failed.
Then Biden also strengthened back the alliances in Asia that Trump had jeopardized:
– with Japan, South Korea …when Trump was in charge, the Japanese/Korean relations were at a low point, now they’re back to normal, working again as one to counteract excessive Chinese influence.
– the Philippines – during Trump, Duterte (very Trump like) had moved away from the US, embracing Chinese influence and money, they’ve now moved back to the US side during the Biden administration, even opening a new naval US base.
– Australia has now moved away from China, and Biden has built a strong alliance in the South Pacific with Australia, the US, and England (remember when Australia dropped France for its submarine fleet, to get nuclear subs from the US?).
So, it’s Biden who’s actually bad news for the CCP, while Trump is just some vacuous circus act they can deal with.
Comment #22 December 22nd, 2023 at 4:53 pm
fred #20: I don’t know what will happen. The USSR also looked like it would never collapse just a couple years before it did (I was only a child, but I remember!). In any case, if I ever had any inclination to shrug, throw in the towel, and say might makes right, a few conversations with Rowena completely disabused me of it.
The millions dying from poverty and starvation were, of course, directly because of the crazed authoritarian rule of Mao. And if most Chinese don’t know that, that’s also because of authoritarianism.
Comment #23 December 22nd, 2023 at 5:10 pm
fred #15, #17, #19: There was a reason why I reacted so surprised when your comments suddenly felt somewhat “incomprehensible” to me. I certainly could go back and read your older comments more closely again, but I am pretty convinced that they didn’t feel so “strange”. Yes, even so what you write above certainly sounds like “you”, and the core of the content might even be OK, there is something strangely off-tune about them, which was never like this in the past.
Do you have fever or jetlag? Are you on medication (or drugs)? Or maybe just distressed or angry?
Comment #24 December 22nd, 2023 at 5:29 pm
Scott #22
I do care very much about all those things as well, and I care very much about people who lived through the Tiananmen events (I met a few of them at Columbia U. in the late 90s, and I’ve worked with others during the 2000s).
And I’m very happy that you’ve posted about this.
I’ve come to the realization that, as time passes and my generation gets older (you, me, Rowena), important things for us that happened 30-40 years ago just don’t resonate the same way with the new generations in China and the West.
There’s an expiration date on things that inspire/outrage the new generations, e.g. “Free Tibet!” was a big thing when I grew up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but not so much these days, especially as the main actors are fading away (the Dalai Lama, etc).
Chinese society itself has changed tremendously since then, so the “angles of attack” against the CCP have to be adapted according to the new realities.
E.g. since the world seems now to care so much about the plea of Muslims in Gaza, maybe it’s time to bring back to everyone’s attention how the CCP is treating its Muslim minority in Xinjiang…
But that doesn’t diminish the need to maintain the truth about the past and provide safe havens for people who work to preserve it, which will be useful when things finally change in China.
Comment #25 December 22nd, 2023 at 7:28 pm
gentzen #23
Lol, sorry, I was posting various points of discussion that Scott addressed in a youtube video interview he had posted in another thread. After the fact I realized it was confusing.. but since there’s no way to delete/edit stuff after the fact.
I just posted responses to some of your points over there… let’s see if it still feels like I’m high or angry.
Comment #26 December 22nd, 2023 at 7:51 pm
Hi, Fred! I’d like to comment on this by you:
“so the “angles of attack” against the CCP have to be adapted according to the new realities”
In the first place, why do you have to attack CCP? Isn’t it more reasonable for a USA citizen to care about what’s happening in your own country? Or is this all about hegemony?
Comment #27 December 22nd, 2023 at 8:50 pm
China is the world leader in applying AI to solve the alignment problem
(between CCP and the Chinese people).
Comment #28 December 22nd, 2023 at 9:24 pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/world/asia/china-tiananmen-rowena-he.html
“The facts are relatively straightforward. But, swayed by the rationale that the crackdown was necessary to thwart a Western conspiracy to divide and weaken China and hence paved the way for China’s rise, many of the younger generation tend to identify with the government’s twisted reasoning.”
The second clause, “paved the way for China’s rise” had been exceedingly easy for CCP/government to defend (“China’s rise” being an “ever-more-spectacular reality to behold by all”).
Comment #29 December 22nd, 2023 at 9:51 pm
Scott #22: If one is of the view that underlaying the Soviet collapse was the internal economic pressure (as I am personally inclined to be), the opening of your first paragraph can be viewed as, in effect, supportive of the conclusion of the comment fred #20
Comment #30 December 23rd, 2023 at 5:28 am
fred #25: Your post #21 above feels like the posts I remember from you. Let me try to describe it: like a post from a well-informed grown-up person that tries to focus on the relevant facts. Compared to that, your recent posts felt more like they had been written by your son or daughter: more opinion or even opinionated. And yes, strangely off-tune. (Which is why I wondered whether there might be a reason why you suddenly appear to be in a different state of mind.)
Thanks for your replies. They don’t feel like you’re high or angry.
Comment #31 December 23rd, 2023 at 9:20 am
@fred #21: “with Japan, South Korea …when Trump was in charge, the Japanese/Korean relations were at a low point, now they’re back to normal, working again as one to counteract excessive Chinese influence”.
The normal Japanese/Korean relations is not what you might think, certainly not “work as one”, except in a very superficial level, at most high politics and rigged economics. And this has nothing to do with Biden nor Trump, it has to do with Yoon and internal politics in Korea, and it looks like it is gonna end with Yoon, who is actually a Trumpian character.
As a matter of fact, the association of Biden with Yoon is not helping his reputation. Most people that I know in Korea consider Biden a total disaster and would be happy if anyone (maybe even Trump) kicked him out of the White House.
Comment #32 December 23rd, 2023 at 3:03 pm
gentzen #30
“strangely off-tune”
Yes, I’m still tuning myself, the LLM where the real “fred” uploaded the totality of all his blog posts, a few weeks ago.
Comment #33 December 23rd, 2023 at 3:06 pm
Max #31
I’ll admit I don’t have huge opinion on this. My only info comes from watching the NHK everyday, and when Trump was president, the relations between Korea and Japan were at a low point because Korea was again bringing up the “comfort women” issue from WW2, etc.
Comment #34 December 27th, 2023 at 8:09 am
fred #21
No matter the politics of the day the Korean populace views Japan with considerable enmity and comfort girls are only a part of it. Japan conducted their occupation of Korea (as with China) with brutality. The Russian Far East has a considerable ethnic Korean population because forced labor from Korea was used by the Japanese during their occupation of Sakhalin Island and remained there after the war. Various polls show 65-90% of South Koreans have negative opinions of Japan and believe they cannot be trusted.
I don’t agree very much with your assessment of the dynamics of NATO either but will not go through it again.
Comment #35 December 27th, 2023 at 12:33 pm
In 1938 Chiang Kai-shek ordered dikes destroyed on the Yellow River to stop the Japanese advance. Estimates of Chinese civilian deaths due to the flooding range from 500,000 to 900,000. It did stop the Japanese advance but effective repairs were not completed until 1947 so stopped at a horrific cost.
Comment #36 January 2nd, 2024 at 4:24 pm
OhMyGoodness
“Various polls show 65-90% of South Koreans have negative opinions of Japan and believe they cannot be trusted.”
That’s not saying much considering that SK views on China, NK, Russia are even way lower…
Asian nations all have a fairly negative view of one another anyway, that’s just the way things are over there, where nations are all very monolithic (with hardly any diversity/immigration), and they all think everyone around them is inferior one way or another. The best you can get is having two nations agree to dislike a third one even more.
On the good side, the new generations are typically way more open minded.
Anyway, what I was talking about was at the government level, in terms of cooperation against China, so the “politics of the day” was the point.
Comment #37 January 3rd, 2024 at 2:24 pm
The question of relations among Korea, Japan, and especially China and the United States is more than the legacy of all-to-real grievances. I lived in Tokyo for several years in the late nineties and came away thinking that deeply held beliefs notwithstanding, world circumstances were drawing the interests of our two countries into greater alignment. That view has grown stronger over the years. I also believe the US alliance with Korea, conditioned on the same circumstances, will strengthen more with the United States, and also with Japan. It makes sense for our technologically and economically advanced democratic countries to work together whenever and wherever possible. If we can make that happen, regardless of other events, it will contribute to peace and development.
Comment #38 January 5th, 2024 at 1:01 pm
As someone who was born in the US but made frequent visits to China (for both family and business), it is clear that many of the individuals in this thread have never lived in China nor have they whole-heartedly sought the opinions of the general Chinese public.
From what I’ve seen, the comments in this thread suggest that there is some sort of a God-assigned need to demonize the Chinese through only those specific, terms, events, and decisions which are associated (some through accusations by the US themselves) with controversy (CCP, Tiananmen, and Xinjiang, Mao, “brainwash”, “genocide”, and “rape” are the go-to’s).
They are wonderful people with a wonderful culture who deserve to prosper. The world has been watching the US do the same for the last hundred years.
Let the defensive replies to this comment be proof of what I argue.
Comment #39 January 7th, 2024 at 9:41 am
Larry
“They are wonderful people with a wonderful culture who deserve to prosper.”
That’s the crux of the matter – the Chinese culture has been so advanced for so long, regardless of its current government, there’s no reason for it not to play a crucial role in the modern world in the medium/long term, and the same goes for the Indian culture.
In those two cases it’s also simply a matter of the size of the population… China and India have a combined population that’s nearly 10 times the size of the US!.. so, all things equal, they ought to have an influence that’s proportional.
We can think of it another way: in our “next” life (whatever that means), we all have pretty much a 50/50 chance to be (re)born Chinese or Indian… so it’s in the interest of everyone to make sure those nations are on the right track – i.e. not run by a bunch of thugs.