Thinking About Home

Ever since students in China began pressing for democratic reforms last December, thousands of their compatriots studying at U.S. colleges and universities have closely watched their progress. Even so, the over 14,000 Chinese students in the U.S. kept mum about the demonstrations and the subsequent government crackdown. Last week the silence ended. While their fellow students in China protested the latest crackdown on reforms with their signatures, some 1,000 Chinese students in the U.S. made their feelings known in a dramatic and unprecedented gesture of their own: they signed an open letter to the Communist Party hierarchy questioning the government's tough response to student calls for reform.

Earlier this month Chinese students began meeting on campuses ranging from Harvard to Berkeley to draft a two-page letter that was eventually signed by students from dozens of schools across the U.S. The letter, though phrased in polite language, expressed strong disapproval of the ouster of Communist Party Chief Hu Yaobang, a prime mover in China's liberalization movement. The students warned that the expulsion from the Communist Party of prominent intellectuals associated with the reform movement was not "conducive to building a system of democracy. We fear the reoccurrence of the Cultural Revolution."

Irritated Chinese officials promptly responded that the letter writers did not represent the "overwhelming majority of the Chinese abroad," who "welcome" Hu's resignation. Whatever the truth of that claim, the protest by the U.S.-based students clearly stung. Said China Scholar Anne Thurston: "It is always significant when anyone who is Chinese and who plans to go back to China puts his name on a document of protest." Declared a student from Shanghai at Columbia University: "Chinese students overseas are becoming an independent political influence in China's politics."

The letter was yet another reminder to Chinese authorities that sending students to the U.S. for study can be a risky business. Although many of them are party members, their exposure to American political values, says one student, "makes them more democratic." Confirms Maria Chang, a political scientist at the University of Puget Sound: "They are the most uncynical believers in American democracy."

Peking's aim in allowing foreign study was to satisfy a thirst for Western technology. Since 1978 increasing numbers of Chinese have enrolled in American schools, usually to pursue degrees in mathematics or the sciences. The students, many of whom are awarded government aid or fellowships, generally work hard and live frugally.

But an official publication recently reported that more than half of them have yet to return home. Judging by Peking's stern response to the student protests at home, the show of independence by Chinese students in the U.S. will probably not go unchallenged.