Opinion | What I Learned Leading the Tiananmen Protests

During my weeks in hiding, I watched on television as my fellow activists were captured one by one. I decided to go back to Beijing, knowing that I, too, would be caught. The police found me on July 2, and arrested me after a car chase. “Little Wang has been caught!” one officer phoned his boss in excitement.

I spent three years and seven months in prison. My heart was often laden with guilt and sorrow. A large number of students and Beijing residents had died during the bloody crackdown. I felt partly responsible.

In 1993, when China made its first bid to host the Olympics, I was released in a show of political relaxation. I was arrested again two years later, and sentenced to 11 years, for work in support of political prisoners and for signing a petition calling on the government to apologize for the Tiananmen massacre. I was again released early, in 1998, in another moment of political thawing, just before President Bill Clinton’s visit to China. After that, I came to the United States, and I have been shut out of my native China ever since.

Our movement failed 30 years ago because we lacked support and experience in promoting democratic change. Many of us had pinned our hopes on the liberal factions of the Communist Party leadership to initiate changes from within the system, but we underestimated the power of the party elders. The massacre shattered our illusions, helping us see the brutality of China’s one-party rule.

We students were not the only naïve ones. Within a few years of the Tiananmen massacre, many Western governments lifted their sanctions against China. The West’s engagement policy — based on the hope that trade and investment would bring about democratic changes in China — prevailed.

But instead of instigating liberalization, Western capital fattened the pockets of the Communist Party leaders, giving them the power to prolong their rule by silencing dissent at home and expanding the country’s global clout.

Despite our failure, I believe that we protesters made a difference. CNN reported live on what happened in Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese government realized that it could no longer butcher its citizens with the whole world watching. We raised the public’s awareness of democracy; many of the lawyers and human rights activists who have challenged the legitimacy of the Communist Party in the years since the massacre were participants in or supporters of the 1989 movement. And today, the West has finally recognized the dangers of China’s totalitarian regime.