Tiananmen Exiles

Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China is a scholarly book by Rowena Xiaoqing He, published by Palgrave Macmillan in April 2014.

[1] It is primarily an oral history of Yi Danxuan, Shen Tong, and Wang Dan, all exiled student leaders from the 1989 Tiananmen Movement in China.

"[2] Dan Southerland notes in Christian Science Monitor that the book provides "fresh insights and an appreciation for the challenges that exiled Chinese student leaders faced after they escaped from China.

[6] She is a current member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2018-2019) working on her manuscript on history, memory, and Chinese student nationalism in the Post-Tiananmen era.

[8] In her profile interview with the New York Times (in both English and Chinese editions), He details the challenges of "teaching Tiananmen to a generation.

"[7] In the Tiananmen courses she created, she engaged students to organize symposiums to share what they had learned with the general public, and invited faculty members to serve as chairs and discussants, among them, historian Merle Goldman and political scientist Roderick MacFarquhar, who gave closing remarks each year at the student-initiated symposium.

Based on a Boston Globe story one freshman student from China "told the packed auditorium" that “I took this class because I am the generation that’s being brainwashed... Everything I knew about June 4, 1989, was the fragments I heard from my dad.

Wang Dan was a student leader who was arrested after the protests and served fourteen years in two different sentences, he would later be exiled to the United States and would receive his PhD.

[21] Shen Tong co-chaired the Student Dialogue Delegation, escaped China six days after the crackdown, and would later publish the autobiography Almost a Revolution.

[22] Yi Danxuan was the Vice-President of the Guangzhou Patriotic Student Federation, spent 2 years in prison, and was exiled from China but was allowed temporary entry during the Beijing Olympics.

"[40] Historian Yu Ying-shih commented that "Rowena Xiaoqing He has ingeniously reconstructed the entire movement in a historical perspective not only to unlock the past and explain the present but also to peer into the future of China's sustained struggle against totalitarian tyranny.

Historian Vera Schwarcz commented that "Rowena He's book is an essential corrective," to the "complex legacy of Tiananmen:"Through her own writings and ongoing testimony about the events of 1989, she has refused to let the hope for democracy wither under the weight of platitudes and Party-imposed amnesia.