Above: Chen Jian in Tiananmen Square, October 1997.

hen Jian says he may always feel like a foreigner in the United States, and as a great fan of Chinese sports in his youth he sometimes wonders which side he would root for if there were a sports contest between a Chinese and an American team. Chen, a former senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace (1996-97), has no doubts, however, about his decision to remain here. He was a Chinese citizen studying for his doctorate at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC) in 1989 at the time of China's violent crackdown against the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. "I saw the television coverage and did not want to go back," he says. "In China, you still need to have a mouth that is not controlled by your mind."

For Chen, who came of age during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), memories of profound intellectual deprivation still linger. He recalls all too vividly the pain with which he and his friends faced the loss of opportunity, faith, and hope that swept through their generation after the Cultural Revolution. Two of his very close friends couldn't handle their despair: one killed himself, the other went insane. Chen, now a permanent resident of the United States and history professor at SIUC, considers himself lucky, because he is one of the few of his cohort who was able to salvage the promise of his life.

The Cultural Revolution

Chen says his experiences under Mao Zedong's rule were in themselves not remarkable. "My life was one common to many Chinese because the age itself was so extraordinary," he demurs. Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in an effort to sustain the momentum of the 1949 revolution, especially among China's youth, who he felt lacked the revolutionary motivation of his own generation. The Cultural Revolution was intended to stir up their emotional support, and also to use their fervor to rid the party and educational system of Mao's critics.

On June 1, 1966, a poster at Beijing University by seven faculty members was broadcast nationwide stating that students were needed as full-time revolutionaries. For Chen--then a 14-year-old student at Shanghai Middle School, a prestigious school with highly competitive entrance exams--that day marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Final exams for all students were canceled. Soon in various parts of the country, the children of Red families--families who had helped bring about the revolution--formed militant brigades called the Red Guards in support of Mao and the revolution. The Red Guards began demonstrating against "reactionary" leaders at their schools and in the party. Because Chen was not from a revolutionary family, at first he was not allowed to join. Before the communist takeover in 1949, his parents had worked for the China Peasants Bank. The bank's nominal president was General Chiang Kai Shek, head of the Nationalist Party, which had fought to suppress the communists. Chen says his parents were not particularly political. "They were just ordinary people who tried to make their living. . . . They led quite a comfortable life."

In 1966-67, the political chaos loosened things up and students from a broad range of family backgrounds were forming Red Guard organizations. Chen and his friends at school formed their own unit, and he became editor of two of their newspapers. Although at his school the Red Guards engaged in what Chen calls "destructive work," criticizing their teachers and each other, "It was not necessarily as brutal in Shanghai as it was in other areas. . . . Many of the teachers were our friends. They became part of the movement." Throughout the country, the Red Guards increasingly broke into factions that fought each other, at first in print. Chen and his friends collected all the dissident writings into two volumes, which they published early in 1968.

In the summer of 1968 Mao realized he had lost control of the students, who in some areas were engaged in armed battles against each other, and he sent workers and soldiers into the schools to impose order. In 1970-71, Chen and his friends were repeatedly interrogated, denounced, and coerced to testify against friends. Chen refused and was twice sent to prison for "attitude correction." The second time, he launched a hunger strike. It was soon after this that he lost his two close friends, one, a neighbor who committed suicide, and the other, a classmate who became mentally ill.

The neighbor, who killed himself in October 1972, had been born in 1949, the year of the communist revolution, and had proudly identified himself with China's revolutionary path. During the Cultural Revolution, however, he had questioned some of Mao's policies in a diary, which was discovered. "He was put into isolation for 16 months, then released, but he was still under continuous questioning," Chen says. "He just lost confidence and faith in everything." Ironically, the youth's name was rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution. "Everyone in our generation has some deep personal or family tragedy; basically it's the tragedy of a whole generation."

Although Chen was released from prison, the schools remained closed and for several years he wasn't allowed to work. He looked desperately for books to read, but could find only Chinese and western classic novels, which he pored over. He also studied Japanese and English with the help of some language courses on old records. "I wasted much of my time," Chen says. "I became a big sports fan. I compiled the most complete sports yearbooks, a heavy volume every year for six years. The book for 1975 is 400 pages long," he says, amused at the endeavor. "At one point I also copied daily weather forecasts and compared them, but this lasted only two years, because it became too dull, like manual labor." Finally in 1976, Chen was allowed to work building houses and later as a porter carrying supplies around a steel factory.

School, At Last

Mao died in September 1976, and in October 1977 the government announced that the first college entrance examinations would be given in two months. Chen was 25, and he hadn't studied with any discipline for over 11 years. "The months I prepared for the college entrance examination were very difficult," he says. "I had a huge headache every day. I never dreamed of going to the university during the Cultural Revolution, and I could not have dreamed about going abroad. Suddenly in those two months I had an opportunity to enter the university. It was like being completely in a dark tunnel, and now I could see real light. Spiritually, it was unbelievable."

The exam included math, history, geography, Chinese language, and party politics. Ten days before the final exam, Chen had to take a preliminary qualifying exam in math and Chinese language. "I got the highest score in Chinese language, but on math I scored 25 out of 100. With both scores, I qualified." However, he knew if he didn't improve his math scores everything he had now let himself hope for would be lost. He studied around the clock almost without a break. "Suddenly I had something meaningful to do and I dug into my potential, which exploded, because I saw a chance to realize my hope. I was young then. Physically it was possible."

Of the 150 students in his district who took the final exam, five were admitted to college. Chen, who had managed to score 91 out of 100 on the final exam in math, was among them. He entered East China Normal University, where as a history major he studied with the same passion that had motivated his self-education. After one year of undergraduate study, two teachers recommended that he be allowed to enter graduate school early. "In those years we had a slogan. We said we wanted to recapture the years we had lost in the Cultural Revolution, so I did not sleep much," he says with a laugh. In 1986, he came to the United States to study for his doctorate.

"As I get older I increasingly feel so very fortunate because many of my fellow students during the Cultural Revolution had their entire careers destroyed," Chen says. Only three to five percent of his generation were able to resume their education, while the others continue to work at dull, low wage jobs. "Some very prominent students simply lost a decade of their lives," Chen says. "At one point if you don't catch the right road, your life becomes constrained. I suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution, but in the end that became a valuable experience providing insights I can use in my work today."

While at the Institute of Peace, Chen worked on two manuscripts, "Revolution and Power: Mao's China Encounters the World, 1949-76," and "The China Challenge in the 21st Century: Implications for the United States." (The latter is being published by the Institute as a Peaceworks report.) In the first manuscript, Chen draws on his own extensive interviews with Chinese officials as well as on formerly unavailable archival materials to examine China's foreign policy during Mao's tenure. In the second, he draws on some of the insights of the first to examine China's behavior in the post-Cold War world, with policy recommendations for the United States. These topics are an outgrowth of his previous work, most notably China's Road to the Korean War, published by Columbia University Press, 1994, and Chinese Communist Foreign Policy and the Cold War in Asia: Documentary Evidence, 1944-1950, published by Imprint Publications, Chicago, 1996.

Chen's paper "Beijing and the Hungarian Crisis of 1956," delivered at a conference in Budapest to mark the 40th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, received considerable media attention internationally. The paper presented recently revealed material from the Chinese archives suggesting that Chinese influence may have been crucial in Khrushchev's decision to put down the Hungarian uprising by force. Chen says he feels privileged to have emerged from the tumult of China's revolution relatively unscathed so that now he can contribute to the understanding of Chinese history and of China's struggles to establish a foothold in the international community today.

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