STANDING UP FOR LIBERTY: A CONVERSATION WITH PERRY LINK

Abstract

In this enormously rich and spirited conversation, Perry Link reminisces about his training as a student of Chinese language and literature in the midst of American involvement in the Vietnam War, his early understanding of Chinese revolution and socialism, and his encounters with such well-known Chinese intellectuals as Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi during the late 1980s and after, as well as his involvement with the publication of the Tiananmen Papers.

Keywords:

• Perry Link
• cultural fever and crisis
• post-colonialism
• human rights in China
• Tiananmen Papers

Notes

* The authors would like to thank Frederic Lu for his assistance in preparing the interview script.

1 For more information on the CCAS (Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars) movement, see Ronald Suleski, The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University: A Fifty Year History, 1955–2005 (Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, 2005) , Chapter 1.

2 In protest against US bombing of the Vietnamese city Haiphong, Perry Link led a group of interpreters in April 1972 to boycott interpreting for Nixon in the White House on the occasion of the president receiving the Chinese Ping-Pong delegation in the Rose Garden.

3 See Perry Link, “Dawn in China,” in Kin-ming Liu, ed., My First Trip to China (Hong Kong: East Slop Publishing, 2012), 49–55, for the detail of his disillusionment with Maoism during his first trip to China in 1973.

4 Harrison Salisbury (1908–93), a Pulitzer Prize winner.

5 Nieman fellowships, funded by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, are annual awards to mid-career journalists, both American and foreign.

6 Zhang Hanzhi (章含之, 1935–2008) was the Mao-Nixon interpreter during the latter’s historic 1972 trip to China. Qiao Guanhua (乔冠华 1913–83) was the Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of China from 1974 to 1976.

7 Orville Schell (1940–) is a China scholar who is currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He previously served as Dean of the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.

8 The article was published in Liaowang zhoukan (Lookout Weekly), March 1989, no. 12.

9 The question refers to the book, The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force against Their Own People—In Their Own Words, compiled by Zhang Liang, edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).