NR PLUS WORLD

Why Some Tiananmen Protesters

Support Trump
By RONG XIAOQING June 4, 2020 6:30 AM

Chinese students carry a sign during a demonstration in Tiananmen Square, May 14, 1989. (Dominic Dudouble/Reuters)

‘Many American politicians are too close to Beijing. Finally, we got

Trump, who is vehemently anti-the Communist Party.’

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AST March, I attended a Chinese Trump supporters’
gathering at a karaoke bar in Flushing, N.Y., for a story I
remaining.
was writing. Two participants really grabbed my attention. >
 Before pouring out their admiration for Trump, they
revealed their involvement in the Tiananmen democracy movement in China in
1989.

One of them, Cai Guihua, was a leader of the Shanghai workers’ protests back
then; the other, Chen Liqun, was a mobilizer of supporters for the movement in
Hangzhou. Both paid a high price after the bloodshed on and around Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square on June 4 that year.

Cai was jailed for nearly two years, and Chen fled the authorities and wandered
across China for 17 months before things calmed down. Both were involved in
the founding of the dissident Democracy Party of China in 1998 and came to the
U.S. not long after, amid a brutal crackdown.

Now they are cheering for Trump with the same passion they devoted to China’s
democracy movement.

Conservatism has been rising among Chinese immigrants in recent years. The
Chinese community in the U.S. is no longer locked into voting Democrat. Still,
discovering a whole slew of Trump supporters among Tiananmen-era protesters
surprised me.

Wasn’t it the current House speaker Nancy Pelosi who unfurled a banner on
Tiananmen Square in 1991 to memorialize the victims? Wasn’t it former
president Bill Clinton who negotiated with Beijing to get some of them out of
prison and bring them to the U.S.? And all in all, isn’t President Trump
undermining the democracy that Chinese dissidents fought for when they were
young?

People can of course stray away from their early beliefs when they are older, and
they may become more conservative. Immigration may accelerate the process. I
was thinking,
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articles this be just
remaining. another example of the initial dream getting >
 lost on the way to pursuing it? But further talks with some Tiananmen
protesters proved me wrong.

It’s hard to know how many of those involved in the Tiananmen protests who
now live in the U.S. are Trump supporters. Cai and Chen acknowledge that they
may not represent the majority. Some told me they support Trump but cannot
vote for him because they haven’t become U.S. citizens.

Cai, 62, now an acupuncturist in New York, has been voting for Republican
presidential candidates since he became a U.S. citizen in 2009. He said that his
taxes were often higher under Democratic presidents, and he lost his job during
the financial crisis in 2009 when Obama was in the White House. But most
important, he blames the Democrats for allowing China’s Communist Party
government to become so powerful.

“We’ve been fighting against China’s Communist Party. But the CCP grows ever
stronger. We need to reexamine the China policies of the Democratic Party,” Cai
said.

In his view, the Democrats rolled over and allowed unfettered globalization so a
lot of American investment could pour into China, and this made the U.S. reliant
on Chinese sourcing for many products. It all helped turn China into a
superpower. President Clinton’s support for granting China permanent most-
favored-nation trading status in 2000 was a big accelerant for this, said Cai, who
was brought to the U.S. with some other dissidents as a Chinese concession in
those trade negotiations.

“I benefited from the bill,” said Cai. “But I don’t judge things on my personal
interests. My mission is to fight against the Communist Party.”

The deep anger and resentment directed at the CCP is generating Trump
support
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3 free articles remaining. protesters. Many support his trade war against >
 China and his attempts to punish Beijing for concealing information about the
coronavirus when it first emerged. They also defend his description of COVID-19
as a “Chinese virus,” saying the moniker is reasonable given the provocative
claim by Chinese government spokesperson Zhao Lijian that the American
military brought the virus to Wuhan.

“Many American politicians are too close to Beijing. Finally, we got Trump, who
is vehemently anti-the Communist Party,” said Chen, 62, who voted for Trump
in 2016. She had voting for Obama in 2012, soon after becoming an American
citizen. “Trump represents my values better.” She said that she’ll vote for him
again this year even though she is living on welfare payments as a disabled
person and might typically expect to have more protection from a Democratic
president.

Wang Juntao — labeled by Beijing as one of the “black hand” masterminds

behind the Tiananmen student movement and sentenced to 13 years in prison —
has also been gravitating toward Trump, though he is still not a U.S. citizen and
therefore cannot vote. “I wouldn’t have voted for him in 2016, but I would now,”
said Wang, who was released and came to the U.S. after pressure on Beijing by
the Clinton administration in 1994.

Now 62 and armed with a master’s degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from
Columbia, he is still campaigning for democracy in China from his base in New
York. He is concerned, though, that some dissidents are relying too much on
Trump. “They need a hero to fight against the Communist Party. And they
project their hope on Trump. But the American president’s job is not to fight
against China,” he said.

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 He places more of his hope on Mike Pompeo, applauding the secretary of state
for being “one of the very few American politicians who can differentiate
between China and the Communist Party.” He sees Pompeo as someone who can
be a catalyst for the democracy movement in China.

But there is another reason – in addition to opposition to the CCP — that puts
even those who say they wouldn’t vote for Trump at ease about the support he
gets from fellow Chinese in America.

Wang Dan, one of the main Tiananmen student leaders, was released from
prison and exiled to the U.S. in 1998 before former President Clinton’s visit to
China that year. Now 50, he said that, if he were a U.S. citizen, he would vote for
Democratic candidates because he feels close to the party and supports its
values. But he gives Trump a thumbs-up for his trade war against China and his
move to pull funding from the World Health Organization for serving China’s
interests more than the world’s.

He doesn’t like Trump’s description of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” and

finds the president’s compliments to China’s President, Xi Jinping, hard to
stomach. He also can’t forgive Trump for saying in 2016 that the Tiananmen
protests were a “riot” and for telling Playboy in 1990 that the Chinese
government’s ability to put down the revolt showed “the power of strength.”

Nonetheless he is confident that Trump cannot harm American democracy. “He

doesn’t follow the rules of democracy, especially the rules on freedom of speech,”
said Wang, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. “But American democracy is
protected by the fundamental political system of separation of powers. If you
think a president is able to tear a piece off democracy, you lack . . . confidence in
democracy.”

This firm faith in the invincibility of democracy — maybe even firmer than that
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Americans at this moment — and their belief in the system>
 are shared across the board among the Tiananmen protesters.

They don’t seem to agree  on whether the Communist Party’s throttling of
freedom in China will accelerate the country’s journey to democracy or postpone
it. But many are still working on China’s democracy movement in exile — Wang
Juntao leads the Democracy Party of China in New York, and Wang Dan runs
Dialogue China, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that is drawing up a new
“blueprint for China’s future.”

The two men, alongside many other Tiananmen leaders in the U.S., haven’t
applied for citizenship here, though they’ve long been eligible. “I feel more
attached to China than to the U.S.,” Wang Juntao told me. “My dream is to
topple the Communist Party and go back to China as a Chinese citizen.”

More than three decades after Tiananmen, these gray-haired protesters are still
who they were, with or without Trump.

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 1989: Tiananmen Square Protests
A look back at images from the 1989 student pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Pictured, the iconic image of “Tank Man” confronting a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing.

Stringer/Reuters

RONG XIAOQING is an Alicia Patterson fellow.

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