“Beyond boundless lands and oceans, countless souls are all connected to me.”
– Lu Xun
Amid the myriad posters at a Western University student encampment urging its school to divest from Israeli-linked investments, a little one quoting Lu Xun gave Vincent Wong’s heart a special lift.
It triggered memories for the human rights law scholar and University of Windsor prof about his own personal political awakening by the events surrounding Tiananmen Square in 1989.
That the Students for Gaza movement builds on protests against the Vietnam War, against apartheid in South Africa, and on the Civil Rights movement is obvious. But during this, the 35th anniversary week of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Western University encampment poster underlines the ties that also connect it to struggles against oppression in China.
That connection has led some in the Chinese diaspora to organize for Palestine, aiming to highlight the links between China and Israel and mobilizing to break them.
“Chinese officials see Israeli counter-insurgency measures against Palestinians as a model for the security regime in Xinjiang ... and Chinese drones and facial-recognition cameras have been used by Israeli authorities to control the Palestinian population,” wrote Yale research scholar Yangyang Cheng in The Nation.
The Tiananmen Square protests were student-led demonstrations against corruption and communism, calling for socialist democracy and free expression.
Protesters regularly quoted Lu Xun, a Chinese literary giant whose contributions inspired another, older Tiananmen protest popularly known as China’s May Fourth Movement that took place from 1917 to 1921.
Lu, an early 20th-century cultural critic and poet who is hailed as the father of modern Chinese literature, was an influential figure in that intellectual and sociopolitical revolution. It was sparked in part by China signing the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War that would see it cede land to Japan.
Of course there are differences between the Tiananmen protesters and those fighting for Palestinian rights on campuses today, as well as between their respective targets, but there are also similarities — and not just that the historical and current protests have been led by students fighting for a just future.
For starters, they are all escalatory actions after demands at rallies and speeches went unheeded by authorities.
Then there is the relationship with labour.
In 1989, when student actions faltered or dwindled, it was workers who kept the movement going, organized rallies and strikes and obstructed the military with barricades.
Similarly, the Ontario Federation of Labour rose in solidarity with the University of Toronto encampment after the administration gave students an ultimatum to clear off, telling the powers that be last month: “If you decide to move against the students, you’ll have to go through the workers first.”
The OFL was joined by national unions including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the United Steelworkers (USW) in a solidarity rally for students in defiance of the trespass order.
There is also what Wong calls the smear, the accusation of protesters being influenced by “outside agitators.” Chinese authorities in 1989 thought its youth were being influenced by plants of other governments keen to foment a domestic uprising; today, some in Canada claim China or Iran are bolstering students here.
A Canadian MP claimed there were “demonstrators for hire” among protesters and a McGill University administrator claimed without substantiation that “a large number of outside people” were seen at the school’s encampment. It is insulting to say the students are anyone’s dupes.
Tiananmen is remembered today in large part because of the massacre that took place when the protests refused to abate.
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government deployed 180,000 soldiers who rolled into the square with tanks and armoured vehicles and fired into the crowd, killing hundreds, if not thousands of its own citizens — protesters and onlookers alike.
We don’t live in an autocracy. This is not China and the Western world rightly decried its violence. Tiananmen is not happening here. But beware complacency, for any overreach in stifling dissent is dangerous.
The same West did not shy away from leaning on state authorities to clamp down on protests here. At York and McGill universities, police in riot gear forcibly cleared students from campus this week. Last month, police fired tear gas and stun grenades and arrested protesters at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.
The Tiananmen Square massacre directly impacted Wong who was an infant in Hong Kong when it happened. He said there was a real fear that China was going to violently crush democratic movements that had spread across the country. His parents moved to Canada shortly afterwards.
While China quashed commemorations of the massacre, Hong Kong’s Victoria Park hosted an annual candlelight vigil until recent years, when continuing the tradition was made a jailable offence. Wong, who attended the vigil as a young undergrad in 2010, was deeply impacted when he saw hundreds of thousands of people, “people who had been part of the protests, those who saw friends die, had family arrested who were making speeches,” and was inspired to pursue a career in human rights law.
Wong was equally heartened to see posters from the Chinese-language Palestinian solidarity network at the University of Toronto student encampment.
These connections between the oppressions in China and in Palestine highlight a truth embodied in a popular protest chant that goes, “In our hundreds, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.”
