The New Haven green, in Connecticut, is the perfect place for protests. It has an appropriately "revolutionary" history: the Black Panthers once protested here, and Kingman Brewster, then president of Yale, allowed his students to join in at their local park. On a sunny day, it is a gorgeous playground for children—unless their parents insist they sit holding placards reading, "Stop Chinese Communist Party's crimes against humanity." And it is bisected neatly by Temple Street, allowing protest and counter-protest to be held simultaneously. In April, when the "Human Rights Torch Relay" (HRTR) pressure group came to the green "to raise awareness of, and stop, the Chinese communist regime's human rights crimes prior to the Olympics," Chinese students gathered opposite them to demonstrate against what they saw as the unfair denunciation of their country. Policemen on horseback patrolled between them.
The HRTR was started by the Committee to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong—the spiritual group banned in China—but has morphed into a diverse coalition. Here, there were student leaders who fled China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There were Tibetans wrapped in Tibetan national flags, many of whom had spent most of their lives in the US. Christian missionaries recalled people fleeing to Hong Kong in a bid to escape the cultural revolution. The first person I addressed in Mandarin informed me politely that he was Vietnamese. He was just opposed to communism.
This was not, the HRTR demonstrators emphasised, a protest against China. Rather, in attacking the Communist party (the CCP), it was a protest for China. "You wasted your time," snapped a Falun Gong practitioner, when I told her that I had spent three years in Beijing studying Mandarin and Chinese culture. "You should have gone to Taiwan." Communism, she said, was a "foreign devil," imported from European countries; it had destroyed traditional Chinese culture and even language (a reference to the party's simplification of Chinese characters). Falun Gong followers, through physical exercises, attained "traditional Chinese virtues." They were China.
I had never understood why Falun Gong was banned in China. They had seemed harmless gymnasts, no stranger than the old women doing tai chi in Beijing's parks. But listening to these arguments, I realised why they might be perceived as a threat. In claiming to be an independent source of virtue more Chinese than the party, they constitute a challenge to the party's legitimacy. And the challenge could be serious. During my time in China, I was left with a strong impression of a deep spiritual void among urban dwellers; the pursuit of money had left people with a sense of emptiness. "We are already unable to love," wrote a columnist in Xinwen Zhoukan, a Chinese weekly. In such circumstances, a charismatic leader promising peace and harmony could gain a following, just as Mao had. Not that Falun Gong had such leadership. Long exiled, they were out of touch with China's realities. They overestimated the resentment against the party amongst Chinese citizens; they believed they would be successful because it was "God's will to eliminate the CCP."
On the other side of the green, the threat to the party was presented in earthlier terms. "Say no to the US CIA campaign against China," read one banner. This paranoia was at odds with the smooth level-headedness of a law student who was helping to organise the counter-protest. He liked the US, he explained, but there was much misunderstanding of China here, perpetuated by groups such as the HRTR. For his part, he hoped China would become a democracy someday. It had its problems, he acknowledged, but these were nowhere near as bad as the activists on the other side made out. "There isn't any organ harvesting," he said, referring to some grisly posters the HRTR had up. The Tibetans needed to stop living in the past and deal with the present; they were part of China and the party had done them much good. A friend of his echoed the point.
"That's not true," chimed a voice from behind. A middle-aged woman from Falun Gong had wandered across the green. "Read this," she said, handing me a pamphlet that detailed party control of student groups abroad.
"The police don't want you handing out your materials here," said the law student.
She did not move. Neither did the police.
"It is true," said the law student's friend. "I've read history and the Dalai himself admits…"
"You've only read CCP history," she said. "I've read the Dalai Lama's own book…"
"Don't bother arguing with her," said the law student. But his friend and the woman ignored him; after a few more anxious attempts to break it off, he gave up and left. They exhausted the intricacies of the Tibet problem without resolving it, and then turned to the Falun Gong member.
"Why," asked the law student's friend, "don't you allow your followers to go to the hospital when they're ill?"
"That's not true," she said. "Go to the hospital and see for yourself. There are Falun Gong there."
For the briefest moment, doubt flickered in his eye. Then it was gone, and he was asking her why Falun Gong practitioners were banned if they were truly peaceful, and she was listing the atrocities of the Communist party and how it had destroyed China.
I left. It was a fair bet, I decided, that I had witnessed the best of the exchange. I recalled what Kang Zhengguo, a Chinese lecturer at Yale, had said earlier when he took the stage at the Human Rights Torch Relay. Kang had lived in China through the cultural revolution. He had been detained by provincial authorities when visiting his family in Xian in 2000. In his speech, he said that he disagreed with what the students on the other side of the green were saying, but felt glad that they were able to say it. He wished to remind them, he concluded, that they had to come here for that freedom.
