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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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061989
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06198900.035
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1990-09-22
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NATION, Page 32Fax Against Fictions
When word of the massacre in Tiananmen Square first reached
the University of Michigan, the 250 Chinese students studying there
jumped into action: they purchased a fax machine. Daily summaries
of Western news accounts and photographs were faxed to
universities, government offices, hospitals and businesses in major
cities in China to provide an alternative to the government's
distorted press reports. The Chinese students traded fax numbers
back home along the computer network that links them around the
U.S. The fax brigades at Michigan were duplicated on many other
campuses. "We want everyone to see that there's blood in the
streets," says Sheng-Yu Huang, a chemistry student at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Some 40,000 Chinese are studying in the U.S., one of the
largest group of foreigners on American campuses. They represent
a crucial element in China's hopes for economic modernization, but
they have also had firsthand experience with Western political
freedoms. All around the U.S. last week, they were in the forefront
of protests against the repression in their homeland.
In New York City about 30 people have engaged in a symbolic
hunger strike across the street from the United Nations. They were
demanding U.N. condemnation of the crackdown in Beijing and the
dispatch of medical workers and human-rights observers to China.
Though many of the students in the U.S. are children of Communist
Party members, and some are members themselves, the army's
brutality has soured them on the party's monopolistic rule. "The
only way to save the country is to go to a multiparty system," says
John Shao, a student at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University in Blacksburg. He renounced his party membership
after witnessing scenes of the Tiananmen Square bloodbath.
For many, the most anguishing decision is whether to return to
China when their studies are completed. Now that Chinese
authorities are tracking down the leaders of the Tiananmen Square
demonstrations, students who took part in protests in the West may
also be seen as infected with the disease of democracy. One young
adviser to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators was Liu Xiaobo, a
lecturer at Beijing Normal University; he had returned to China
last winter from a fellowship at Columbia University.