Adrift abroad amid a sense of loss and longing, what became of ‘brightest and best’ Tiananmen Square dissidents?
- Some 400 intellectuals, students and officials became exiles in wake of the June 4 crackdown, settling in Europe, the United States and Taiwan
- Once determined to remember events of 1989 and promote democracy from overseas, time has led to disarray and infighting in the ranks
In the final instalment of a six-part series, Jeffie Lam looks at how the overseas democracy movement lost its momentum in exile
Exiled filmmaker Su Xiaokang remembers the precise moment he cut all ties with China, and knew he would no longer call it his motherland. It was the day in 2003, as he scattered the ashes of his late parents in the waters of Bohai Bay in northeastern China, near Tianjin.
That brief trip to mainland China, allowed by the Chinese authorities with conditions, came 14 years after he fled the country in the wake of the June 4, 1989, crackdown on protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He arrived too late to see his ailing father one last time. His mother died much earlier, two years into his life in exile.
He found a China that had changed so much.
“I am not talking only about the crowds, pollution and congestion in Beijing. It was the spiritual and cultural atmosphere that I found unbearable,” recalled Su, now 70 and living in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He noticed an obsession with power, money and nationalism, and was appalled.
“People loathed the West, but at the same time were envious of it,” he said.
