The activist Han Dongfang works from Hong Kong to keep the spirit of Tiananmen alive
I live on a hill on Lamma Island, 40 minutes by ferry from Hong Kong Island. I’m a country man, not comfortable in a big commercial city. Here there are no cars and our house is a 15-minute walk up from the village. I get up at 6.30 to take my third son to school — Joseph is 8, Jonathan’s 15 and Nathan is 16. Their mother lives in New York, and I have a new baby, Elise, with my partner, Valerie.
Before Tiananmen I was a railway worker near Beijing. We formed the Autonomous Workers’ Federation one night in June 1989 in a corner of the square. I remember journalists asking: “How many members do you have? How many factories?” We had none! Just a few papers where workers had signed what were probably fake names. Being a counter-revolutionary in communist China carried a five-year sentence, joining an organisation 15. But we were not afraid. For the first time, people gave speeches criticising the government. It was like a celebration — peaceful and exciting. Then the tanks came and excitement turned to fear.
My personal life has certainly suffered, but I still count myself as one of the top 10 luckiest people in the world, because for the past 20 years I’ve been able to follow my heart. I am not allowed back to mainland China, but we are pushing the labour movement forward there with the strategies and ideas we put out every month in our China Labour Bulletin and on Radio Free Asia.
I always advise people not to take to the streets. Go to court, fight using the system, not against it. Street power is not at all reliable: this is the lesson I learnt after Tiananmen.
I spent 22 months in prison. When I came out, half-dead from TB, the student leaders were all gone — dead or imprisoned or exiled.
If I have no meetings, I wear a T-shirt, shorts and running shoes. Maybe once in two years I’ll put on a suit and tie. My workload is heavy, but these days I don’t think about personal security too much. I try as much as I can to find similarities with the government and stay at peace with it. There is no other way to achieve change.
The China Labour Bulletin office is in Sheung Wan district, an old trading place for rice, silk, clothes, herbal medicine and seafood. In the early morning people are loading and unloading their trucks. It’s full of life, and weird dead things too. There are a lot of snakes, which are used in Chinese medicine, and the smell of dried fish is everywhere. It makes some people throw up, but I like it — it reminds me of my childhood in Shanxi province, south of Beijing. Dried fish was a luxury we longed for but couldn’t afford.
My mother was a construction worker. She left home at 5am, walked for two hours to get to work and wouldn’t get home until 10pm. It was tough. We never had enough of anything and I was hungry all the time. It’s difficult to forget. I talk to my children like an old man. “When I was in China we did not have this and that…” They don’t understand. They’ve never known real hunger.
I insist on one thing: everybody at the table must clean their bowl. Not a single grain of rice should be left. I sometimes buy two packs of blueberries from the supermarket and throw handfuls into my mouth at my desk with a cup of tea.
One of our jobs at China Labour Bulletin is to hire lawyers to act for workers in China. I run between the office and Radio Free Asia, where I host a short-wave phone-in three times a week. Today someone called to say he had worked in a jewellery factory for 10 years, cutting stones without proper protection, and
had contracted [the lung disease] silicosis. Instead of compensating him the factory fired him.
The internet in China is very developed. I post on five sites where people can lodge complaints against the government and I log in every few days to collect the stories. I’ll contact them one by one and help them take action through the legal system. After so many years of communism, progress will take time, but it’s a beginning.
Around 4pm I go to a canteen near my office and eat my favourite Vietnamese beef noodle soup. Same every day. Then I may meet up with colleagues to discuss cases, but at least three times a week I get the 6.40 ferry and have dinner with the children. We have no TV, so we read and try to go to bed for 10.
I believe I am a lucky person, not because I survived prison, but rather because after prison I survived in freedom. Opportunity landed on my shoulders and I must push my capabilities every day to use this luck and not waste it.
Interview by Caroline Scott.