It has been 34 years since the last time when Chinese people showed up in the streets in many cities in China demanding political reform, demanding democracy, in millions.
That historical movement was meaningful not just for the Chinese people but for the world. The CCP crushed it ruthlessly, with tanks in Tiananmen Square and guns in the streets of Beijing, the capital city.
To this day, “89”, “64”, “Tiananmen tanks”, are forbidden words inside China. Many young Chinese growing up without knowing this significant part of the history of our country.
The leaders of the movement, mostly young students, were arrested and sentenced to jail. Years later, when CCP was eager to gain market, capital and technology from the West, they let many of them get out of China. Among them, the most famous man was the No. 1 on the most wanted list right after the crackdown, Mr. Wang Dan. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in history from Harvard University. Wang taught PRC history at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan from 2010 to 2015. In 2016, shortly after Trump won the US presidential election, Wang Dan returned to the USA.
Wikipedia has an interesting entry on Wang’s view on US politics:
“Wang has claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement is a plot by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2020 presidential elections and to disrupt US civil society. He has additionally said that the Democratic Party is “weak” on China. After Joe Biden won the 2020 elections, he said he wanted to hold-off recognizing Biden as president-elect and criticized the media for “biased reporting”.”
This is not very shocking, most of the June 4th group are pro-Republican. They believe that the Republican politicians will take on China and put in a new regime, making them the leaders of the country. Don’t ask me how I know it, hahahaha.
So what is the June 4th group?
It is the group of student leaders who were imprisoned, and eventually ended up in the USA. Most of them dedicated their lives and time to politics, especially meetings and speeches around June 4th each year. One of their recent achievements is the opening of the June 4th museum in New York, after the June 4th museum in Hong Kong was shut down by Hong Kong authority in 2021. The museum was officially opened on June 2nd 2023. You can read more details in the coverage of NYT: Tiananmen Exhibit Is ‘a Symbol of Defiance’ (alt link).
On June 2nd, when Wang Dan was living the best moment of his life, opening the ‘June 4th museum’ in NYC, a young man named Li Yuanjun posted on Facebook an allegation that on June 6th 2014, Wang Dan tried to force a kiss on him and tried to rape him.
Li said that he was 19 years old when he met Wang in Taizhong. He was educated in school with history lessons on the 8964 student movement and Wang Dan was a big hero to him. Wang invited him to visit the USA for a week with him, saying that he will take care of everything once landed. Li gladly went with Wang, too young to understand it was a setup. Wang arranged Li and Mr. Xie (Wang’s personal assistant) to stay in one room at the hotel. When Mr. Xie went out, Wang came into the room, and tried to force himself onto Li. Li was very shocked and then he made up an excuse: he said he just had an operation down there and the cut has not healed. Wang gave up.
That week in the USA, Li was living in fear, because Wang kept pressuring him to sleep with him, and when he asked Mr. Xie for help, Mr. Xie said that Wang was just teasing him. Not knowing anyone else in the USA, and not knowing how to report to the police, Li said it was the most fearful week in his life.
After returning to Taiwan, Mr. Li cut any contact with Wang and Xie, but he kept the conversation between Xie and him and photos of Wang’s home in California as evidence.
Mr. Li said that he was encouraged by the Me Too movement that is shaking the Taiwan political establishment right now. Because Wang has a strong following in Taiwan, he is taking a personal risk. Also, Mr. Li said he has not come out of the closet to his family. But he is stepping out because he believed that he was not the only one.
All Mr. Li wanted is a public apology. He gave June 6th as a deadline for the apology, and claimed that he will file a lawsuit if there was no apology.
The allegation spread far and wide on social media, not because it was unbelievable that Wang was doing such a thing, but because it was unbelievable that the allegation came out. For years on social media, people were saying that Wang is gay or bi-sexual. And he liked young men. But it was just rumour.
Journalists quickly checked Wang’s travel history, and the story checked out. Li also provided the conversation between Xie and him, and Xie did not deny it.
The next day, on June 3rd, a private statement was published on Twitter, in which a woman was alleging Wang was sexually abusive verbally to her during an event that was organized for Wang to meet young people in the Blank-Paper revolution.
Wang asked how she knew another famous June 4th group member, (the name was at first not disclosed here, but it is revealed later to be Mr. Zhou Fengsuo who was also mentioned in the NYT report on the June 4th museum) and lightly accused that June 4th group member like to trade personal favour with sex (“taking the yin to aid the yang”, was Wang’s original words). She was very shocked.
Then, she said Wang said other things that made an impression on her. On one occasion, Wang said that during the US Congress hearing of June 4th, they asked for a female witness, and he joked that had he known this earlier, he would change his sex. He told it as a joke, implying that transpeople were not real, and that one can change one’s sex for convenience. She did not feel comfortable with Wang’s attitude, since she knows a few transpeople and their struggle first hands.
Wang also asked if young people knew of Wei Jingsheng, a famous political dissident who is one generation older than the June 4th group. She said she knows of the sexual assault allegation. Wang replied, “We don’t know if it is sexual assault.”
The woman said that she decided to keep quiet because she thought everyone was there for a good time. But seeing young Li come out so bravely, she felt that she needed to call Wang Dan out. She wants to remain anonymous because her parents are still in China (She was afraid that the Chinese government will harass her family knowing her activities overseas. Her fear is quite reasonable).
On June 4th, a second man stepped forward and confirmed that Wang has a history of sexually harassing young men. Mr. Xu Qianhao has a master’s degree from Qinghua University, where Wang Dan was teaching. He recalled a night in 2010, when he was a new student at Qianghua, Wang put his hands into Xu’s shirt to touch his waist in a very sexual way. Xu said he was very shocked and he pulled Wang’s hands away and moved away from Wang.
According to Xu, Wang always likes to have a young man near him when he goes out. When eating together, Mr. Xie will be on one side and a young man that Wang likes will be on the other side. And Wang likes to put his hand on the legs of the young man next to him.
When Wang woke up on June 2nd in NYC, the allegation was already everywhere. He posted on Facebook a response, basically: this is political, there was no sexual harassment, I am very busy, I will continue my work.
On June 3rd, he posted on Twitter:
It is not my intention to speculate on why so many allegations have suddenly emerged in just a few days. I believe we all have our own judgment.
Wang continues to imply that the allegations were politically motivated. He said he will ignore them and work harder.
On June 7th, he posted a longer tweet claiming that he has ended his scholarship with the Hoover Institute at Stanford earlier and returned to Taiwan to face the lawsuit. But the rest of the tweet was about how busy he was with the June 4th museum (he will talk about it more in the future), what he learned at the Hoover Institute (he will report it to Taiwan society later), etc.
And then, the next day, he posted this:
I was told that I had become a “powerful person,” but I could only laugh bitterly.
I was arrested, exiled, unable to return home for decades, unable to bury my mother, I have not the support of the U.S. government fund, no newspaper and radio station of my own, and I am struggling to survive for more than 30 years, under threats from the Chinese Communist Party in the United States. Most overseas Chinese are afraid to approach us.
I am not a public official, and I do not have a huge fortune. There are only a few hundred people in the overseas pro-democracy movement. At best, I have a few Twitter friends, but not nearly as many as the big V.
I’m a “power player”? What’s the definition? Where is my “power”?
After boasting about his access to authorities in the fields of U.S. national security, diplomacy, think tanks, and military affairs at the Hoover Institute in the previous tweet, Wang wants people to think that he has no power in front of a 19-year-old boy who did not dare to tell his family that he was gay.
When the allegation came out, young Chinese activists spoke up. They are firmly against sexual harassment and they don’t think that Wang Dan can shrug it off as a political tactic by CCP. They hope that Wang seriously faces the allegation. On June 4th, they went to the Liberty Sculpture Park in LA for the June 4th rally, according to Li Laoshi:
“Blank Paper Generation Calls on Wang Dan to Respond to Sexual Harassment Allegations
June 4 rally in LA’s Liberty Sculpture Park on June 4.
Several young people took the stage to speak about the recent sexual harassment case against Wang Dan, calling on him to come forward and respond to the allegations.
“I think this is one of the rare and valuable opportunities for dialogue between young people and the older generation of the pro-democracy movement.”
Several youth organizations, including Citizen’s Daily and ‘Democracy Salon’, issued statements saying they would not continue to share any of the events and content Wang Dan has participated in as a speaker and organizer until he and those involved have responded satisfactorily to the sexual harassment allegations.
On June 7, Wang Dan posted that he had returned to Taiwan, saying, “I will not have any escape, and I only hope that justice will be done and the truth of the incident will be restored.”
Democracy Salon issued a statement that implied Li was a survivor, this made the newly opened June 4th Museum unhappy, so the museum curator unilaterally canceled an event of ‘Democracy Salon’ scheduled on June 11th inside the museum. This sparked one more round of criticism from the younger generation. Wang Dan is a board of trustee member of the museum. He later posted a screenshot from a group chat alleging that the Salon wanted to change venue on their own. But many people posted other screenshots to prove that it was the museum that pushed the Salon out.
As for Citizen’s Daily’s statement, someone on Twitter did a rough translation so I don’t have to:
Meanwhile, most of the 8964 generations supported Wang, for them, what Wang did was totally normal in any relationship. Wei Jingsheng, who was accused of rape rushed to defend Wang.
In response to one reply under his tweet,
Any sexual harassment, pales in comparison to the CCP’s massacre.
Wei replied:
Exactly.
As if he is afraid that no one pays attention to him, another famous person from 1980s of China, Su Xiaokang commented on Twitter:
Looking at all kinds of cases of sexual harassment and assault, they are just human nature that can no longer be suppressed. The only way to prevent them is to go back to tradition, the so-called “man and woman who are not related should not see each other”, but this tradition comes with a package, including foot-bounding, concubines, chastity, big family, etc. It is all rising or all falling, nothing in between. It was the May 4th movement that upended this tradition, and subsequently it ushered in the communist party from the Soviet…..
May 4th movement was a student movement in 1919 that was a landmark event in modern Chinese history, comparable to the 8964 movement.
The original tweet got very little response, but the screenshot of the tweet, along with Su’s background, was circulating. Most of the young people don’t even know who Su is. Su wrote a very famous TV series trying to diagnose why China as a civilization failed in 1988. It showed that the tradition and history of China are at a dead end, and the country must learn from the West moving forward. The TV series was one of the first attempts to publicly discuss the failure of modern China, although it was very flawed and badly framed, it did spark immense public interest and debate. And today, it looks like the writer of the show has learned nothing from the West in the past 35 years, despite having lived in the USA since the 8964 event.
Maybe that is the reason no one takes him seriously anymore.
Maybe that is what the 8964 generation is so scared of.
Meanwhile, Police detained 23 people in Hong Kong on Tiananmen anniversary.
Hong Kong’s last June 4th vigil was held in 2019, with 180,000 attendees.
Jailed Hong Kong activist Chow Hang-tung, one of the leaders of a group called The Alliance, which used to organize the June 4 vigils, said on Facebook that she would hold a 34-hour hunger strike.
In December 2021 and January 2022, Chow was convicted respectively for inciting and taking part in an unlawful assembly on the occasion of the vigil in 2020, and for organizing the vigil in 2021, and sentenced to a total of 22 months in prison.