The Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China is proud to announce the publication of a report on Confucius Institutes and the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of American academic institutions. To read the report, which was published by the Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights, please go to catholic.edu/chr and visit our research and analysis page.

Will Deatherage: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Barefoot Lawyer reports on China. My name is Will Deatherage, the producer. Joining me, as always, is Chen Guangcheng.

Chen Guangcheng: Hello, everyone. I’m glad to see you here again.

Will Deatherage: Today we begin the first episode in our series that covers the modern history of human right’s abuses in Communist China. Since a majority of Guangcheng’s work has been done in the last few decades of Chinese history, he will be presenting in each of these episodes a bit of history surrounding China’s descent into its modern human right’s abuses. So Guangcheng, what time periods will we mostly be talking about in this series?

Chen Guangcheng: We will talk about the CPP’s history starting in 1989, as that was just after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. We will talk about what happened at that time.

Will Deatherage: That sounds good. Of course, for those listening, this is the era of human rights which you’re an expert of, Guangcheng. This is the era when you were very active; where would you like to start?

Chen Guangcheng: I want to talk about the events after the CCP cracked down on the movement in Tiananmen Square. The CCP killed a lot of students and people in Beijing at that time. Western media focused on Beijing, but the movement occurred in a number of different places and provinces. For example, Qingdao, Shanghai, and Guangdong; in numerous different places, people came out to protest and to demand the rule of law and democracy.

Will Deatherage: Right. For those of you out there who want to learn more about Tiananmen Square, especially what happened in Beijing, we have several episodes we’ll put in the description that talk about the events. Guangcheng, please continue.

Chen Guangcheng: Thank you. Several days before the event, the CCP cut off the phone lines to the US embassy. The official who worked for President Bush at the time later told me that secret story. She said that at that time, the CCP cut off the phone lines so the US could not connect to the embassy in Beijing. But at that time, the White House just ignored that; they did not respond strongly to the CCP. The CCP thought maybe the US government didn’t care what happened in Beijing. So the CCP prepared to crack down on Tiananmen Square protesters. If at that time the US stood up instead of giving into this pressure, maybe history would have been different. 

Will Deatherage: Because if the US cracked down when the phone lines were taken down, then the CPP would have respected the US authority more. Right, Guangcheng?

Chen Guangcheng: Yes. This story told us we should focus on it and we should think how to prevent that. After Tiananmen Square, the CCP cracked down on the human right’s movement, and tried to arrest the activists in Beijing and in the other provinces in the whole country. A number of the activists tried to escape to foreign countries, and a lot of people passed through Hong Kong to go to foreign countries. You can see at that time, Hong Kong helped them a lot. After Tiananmen Square, the Khan party could not get the weapons from Western countries because of an arms embargo. The arms embargo was very useful. Unfortunately, just after several weeks, the US government sent an official to go to Beijing to talk with Deng Xiaoping

the president at the time. That was a bad move; the CCP killed a lot of people. We should have not talked to the CCP for a very long time, yet I don’t understand why at that time the White House sent officials to Beijing to talk with Deng Xiaoping. 

That made the Klan party think the US still wanted to have a relationship with us. Since the Communist Party opened the country in 1979, the business situation started getting better and better. The CCP relaxed their isolation policy. Because of this, the people’s lives in mainland China got better and better.  So until 1989, the businesses were the best in modern Chinese history. But after the CCP cracked down on the movement in Tiananmen Square, the situation changed very quickly.

Will Deatherage: So even though business was going well, the people wanted democracy, right Guangcheng?

Chen Guangcheng: Yes! Because the people saw the bad future of China and how good life was in democratic countries, they wanted China to become like one of the democratic countries. But after the CCP crackdown on Tiananmen Square, the business situation got worse. The economy was not good; they had a big problem. The people didn’t believe the Communist government would protect justice and their rights. In this situation, Jiang Zemin was the leader in the central Communist government, but Jiang Zemin had to listen to Deng Xiaoping. At that time, he was 90 years old. He went to South China, close to Hong Kong. He said, we should create a big city here. We can use the business situation from Hong Kong, and maybe the Hong Kong economy could influence the cities. 

So the Khan Party moved a lot of military there and created Shenzhen City very quickly. they opened the special areas, the big city in South China. Since that time, it looked like the business, stopped getting worse and worse. But because the CCP cracked down on Tiananmen Square, a lot of people, even in the Communist Party, lost faith in the government. Before Tiananmen Square, the Khan party would secretly steal the money. After that crackdown on Tiananmen Square, the Communist Party officials would steal money publicly. They took the money for themselves and their families. So at that time, the people didn’t believe the CCP’s propaganda. They didn’t believe that communism would make our country better and better in the future.

Will Deatherage: A lot of people lost faith in the government, right?

Chen Guangcheng: Yeah. A lot of people lost the faith of the government. These made a lot of different things happen.

The Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China is currently sponsoring an essay contest for students of all ages. This year’s prompt asks writers to describe a human rights issue in Communist China that they think deserves more attention, what current efforts are addressing it, and what can be done in the future to resolve it. To learn more about this contest, please go to catholic.edu/chr and visit our human rights essay contest page.