MCLC: Tiananmen in History and Memory

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin Joseph Carrico <carricok at stanford.edu>
Subject: Tiananmen in History and Memory
***********************************************************

List members in New England might also be interested in this conference at
Harvard on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, to be held on
the historically significant date of April 26th.

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~tiananmen/

Tiananmen in History and Memory

Harvard College Students Remembering the Tiananmen Massacre
A Conference for the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Movement
April 26, 2014, 9am-6pm
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall, Harvard Yard

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Movement. In
Spring 1989, millions of Chinese took to the streets calling for political
reform. The nationwide movement ended on June 4 with the People’s
Liberation Army firing on unarmed civilians. Tiananmen remains a
politically taboo topic in China today.

We are a group of students at Harvard College hailing from different
regions of the world and embodying a wide range of ethnic and cultural
backgrounds and perspectives. We were not yet born in 1989 but were
brought together by a seminar “Rebels with a Cause: Tiananmen in History
and Memory” taught by Dr. Rowena He. During our time together, we studied
the primary source materials of the Tiananmen Movement, heard personal
accounts of student leaders themselves, and explored the Tiananmen
archives of the Harvard–Yenching Library. We imagined ourselves into the
minds of the authorities and civilians, touched the protesters’
blood-stained clothes, and re-enacted the night of June 3rd, trying to put
ourselves in the shoes of the protesters who then were around the same age
as we are now. Our learning experience shows that with free access to
information and free inquiry, we as young people can indeed come to our
own understanding of historical truth.

There have been hundreds of Tiananmen events in the past 24 years all over
the world, but we are excited that we as undergraduate students are
putting together a conference for the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen
Movement. Our conference will be held on April 26, a historically
important date in 1989 when the first official judgment of the movement
was printed in the lead editorial of the Party’s newspaper, the People’s
Daily, designating the student demonstrations as premeditated and
organized turmoil with anti-Party and anti-socialist motives.

The conference will include student paper panels with faculty members from
the university serving as chairs, and cross-generational conversations
among students and journalists who covered 1989, student leaders and
survivors, and scholars who study the topic. For us college students who
were not born in 1989, Tiananmen is history; for the invited speakers,
Tiananmen is memory. Invited panelists include survivor Fang Zheng, whose
legs were crushed by a tank, journalist Adi Ignatius, Beijing Bureau Chief
for the Wall Street Journal in 1989, scholar Wu Guoguang, who was speech
writer for former premier Zhao Ziyang, and professors Pei Minxin and
Arthur Waldron. The conference will end with a performance created by
students. Violinist Lynn Chang, a Harvard College alumnus who played at
the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony (for Liu Xiaobo) will join the
performance.

It is our hope that through this forum we may give a voice to those who
were silenced and that this voice will help keep the memory of June 4
alive. Join us!

2014 Harvard Tiananmen Conference Student Planning Committee