The Guardian
Monica Tan
28 May 2015
Wu Lebao, who lives in Melbourne, has signed a letter condemning the secrecy around the Tiananmen protests. The political situation in China is getting worse, not better, he says. Photograph: Wu Lebao
One week ago a letter, lengthy but beautifully written, was posted online calling for the Chinese government to end its long-standing secrecy over the Tiananmen Square massacre. In one part it boldly proclaimed: “The butcher must stand trial.”
It was signed by 11 Chinese students, mainly living in the US with one from Britain. The eleventh and final name belonged to Wu Lebao, a 31-year-old Chinese refugee living in Melbourne.
Wu describes the bloodshed of 4 June 1989, when the Chinese government opened fire on hundreds of students who had been calling for democracy, as the day authorities “want people to forget”. When he was a student in China his history textbook dedicated just one sentence to the incident, trivialising it as “political turmoil”.
“That was the closest we came to achieving democracy,” says Wu. “Many people died and lots of people lost their family, friends and classmates.”
The letter’s public critique of the government is unusual, more so because it comes from a new generation of Chinese students who are too young to remember the massacre first-hand and have grown up in a ruthless media blackout, with government censors actively scrubbing the Chinese internet clean of any frank discussion about that fateful week in 1989.
A fraction of China’s 600 million internet users, including Wu, use a VPN to “jump the firewall” and access censored content and global perspectives on blocked sites like Twitter.
The letter triggered an angry editorial by China’s nationalist paper The Global Times, which accused the authors of trying to “tear society apart”, adding: “When China is moving forward, some are trying to drag up history in an attempt to tear apart society.”
The lead signatory to the letter, Gu Yi, called the paper’s response “the best advertisement” the letter could have ever received.
Last week the Chinese president Xi Jinping rallied overseas students to “serve the country” and become a “united front” – a term Wu says was “first applied by Chairman Mao”. “Even in western countries most Chinese students are under the control of Chinese authorities,” he says.
Not one of the Chinese student groups at any Australian university can be called autonomous and they are all funded by the Chinese embassy, he claims. Student leaders overseas are not elected but installed by the Chinese government, just as they are at home, he says.
Political action is considered a taboo subject in China, one in which personal risks are high and the rewards low. “I was imprisoned for it – so it is dangerous,” Wu says. He used to work as a lecturer at a training college in Bengbu, a town in the northern Chinese province of Anhui, and says some of his fellow teachers knew nothing of the massacre.
Wu is in the habit of apologising for his heavy Chinese accent, yet he commands an impressive vocabulary, using words like “apostate” and “jingoist”. He describes one of his tweets – the one eventually used by authorities as evidence to detain him – as doggerel, poetry that is irregular in rhythm and rhyme, often deliberately for burlesque or comic effect.
In 2011 whispers that the political uprising in Tunisia, known as the Jasmine Revolution, would come to China were blowing like seeds in the wind. While the talk bore no real fruit, the rumours alone were enough to rattle the authorities who came crashing down on anyone suspected of being involved.
Wu had visited Chinese artist and famous pot-stirrer Ai Wei Wei in his Beijing studio earlier that year. Authorities would later use this fact and cherry pick a few of Wu’s tweets, including one that stated “if you hold jasmine in your hand the police will arrest you”, as evidence he had plans to incite an overthrow of the government – something Wu denies.
After 107 days of detention, filled with endless hours of interrogation, Wu was released to house arrest. The following year he decided he could no longer live under such conditions and in early 2013 fled to Australia where he was eventually granted refugee status.
Wu lives a lonely life in Melbourne. At times he is gripped by powerful feelings of homesickness. “Sometimes in my dreams I’m in China,” he says. “After I wake up I must find something, like a flag, to make sure I am in Australia.” He is on medication to treat his depression; he does not know when he will see his family in China again and is concerned for their safety.
In the south-west Melbourne suburb of Leveton, he keeps his refugee status hidden from his Chinese landlord and flatmate. A previous tenancy application had been rejected after the landlord searched his name and uncovered his history.
Renting hasn’t been easy without steady work, but he has a part-time job managing a website and every afternoon takes English classes at a language centre for new migrants.
Right now his goals are modest. “I want to improve my English,” he says. “Then I will apply to go to university and continue my study.”
He has few Chinese friends. There is a kind of gap between him and other young Chinese people in Australia. “I know some Chinese students in Australia, for example,” he says, “who will tell their teachers and classmates, ‘If you want to keep me in this classroom, you can’t criticise the Chinese political system’.
“They think if you criticise the party, you criticise China. And if you criticise China, you insult them. In my opinion, that’s very ridiculous.”
Wu, on the other hand, is taking full advantage of Australia’s relative freedom of expression and has felt “more responsibility to say something about Chinese politics” since his exile. He says on the whole western countries are deluded in thinking the political situation in China is getting better. “On the contrary,” he says, “it’s becoming worse.”
But he still hopes it will improve. “Not just the Communist regime being overthrown, but many deep-rooted aspects of Chinese culture need to be revolutionised,” he says. “Every culture has its pros and cons. Something wrong cannot be justified simply because it belongs to a culture.”
