Interview by Hu Zixuan for Generation of ’89 (《八九一代》) magazine
When Tang Kai looks back on his youth, he sees a contradiction that would shape the rest of his life. Born into a Communist Party family, Tang grew up surrounded by the institutions of the Chinese state that permeated his earliest memories. His father served in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War before transferring to civilian work, while his mother worked as an obstetrician. The family enjoyed relative stability, and education was strongly encouraged.
Yet Tang says it was those same surroundings that first exposed him to the gap between official propaganda and reality. As a child, he remembers passing what authorities publicly described as an orphanage and nursing home, only to learn from his father that it actually housed surrendered Nationalist officers under armed guard.
He also witnessed a public execution that was later overturned as a wrongful conviction and heard conversations among doctors, former Rightists, and educated youth whose experiences often contradicted official narratives.
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Those experiences gradually eroded his faith in the Communist system. By high school and university, Tang said he had begun reading authors such as Leo Tolstoy and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, finding that many of China’s social problems were rooted not in individual leaders, but in the political system itself.
Journey to Beijing
In the spring of 1989, Tang was a sophomore at Shenzhen University when student demonstrations spread across China. Despite his family’s political background, he secretly helped raise money before traveling to Beijing to support the movement centered around Tiananmen Square. He recalls how his father would argue with him over politics, but now believes those disagreements were motivated less by ideology but rather rooted in concern for their son’s safety.
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deployed troops and tanks to crush a nationwide pro-democracy movement led largely by students. Though publicly-available information is scarce, the military assault ended weeks of peaceful demonstrations centered in Beijing, resulting in the deaths of many civilians, with estimates ranging from several hundred to over a thousand.
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Tang describes the early morning of June 4 as the most traumatic experience of his life. After students left Tiananmen Square, he says he and others moved toward Liubukou, where they encountered military vehicles. Believing the tanks would remain on the roadway, he was shocked when one turned toward the crowd.
He recalls seeing civilians crushed as panic spread through the intersection. According to Tang, soldiers also deployed what he believed were tear gas canisters. Having previously watched television footage of demonstrations overseas, he says he instinctively kicked several canisters away before helping carry injured people to waiting vehicles.
The images, he says, never left him. For years afterward, Tang experienced recurring nightmares and said that even the sight of military uniforms caused his hands to shake.
Life behind bars
Tang later returned to Guangdong following the crackdown, hoping life would gradually return to normal. But instead, he was arrested on July 9, 1989, while walking back to his dormitory at Shenzhen University. He recalls being seized by plainclothes officers, forced into a van, and taken to a detention center before being transferred to Beijing.
Tang spent approximately nine months in Qincheng Prison, China’s highest-security prison for many political prisoners. He says he shared cells with other student activists arrested after the Tiananmen protests and remembers prison officials warning detainees not to discuss what they had witnessed in Beijing. He also recalls learning that part of the prison complex had previously housed senior political prisoners, underscoring for him the gravity of his situation.
When he was finally released, Tang says investigators required him to sign a statement before issuing what he remembers as a stark warning: he was being allowed to leave prison, but not granted true freedom.
Decades under surveillance
According to Tang, imprisonment marked the beginning, not the end, of official scrutiny. After returning to southern China, he says public security officers repeatedly monitored him, questioned him about friends, and tracked his activities. Over the following three decades, he estimates he was contacted by state security officials as often as several times each month, particularly because he maintained relationships with other former June Fourth prisoners and activists.
Tang says the constant surveillance placed enormous strain on his personal life and contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage. The pressure intensified again during Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-extradition protests. After expressing support online, he says state security officers once again visited him, convincing him that remaining in China was no longer sustainable.
Later that year, he left China with his family and eventually settled in California.
Looking back, and ahead
Today, Tang works as an Amazon delivery driver in the United States. While the work differs dramatically from the life he once imagined, he describes one aspect of his new life as invaluable: No longer worrying about visits or phone calls from state security.
Looking back, he says he has no regrets about traveling to Beijing in 1989 despite the personal cost. Tang believes the experience ultimately reinforced his conviction that authoritarian systems rely on fear and cannot endure indefinitely. He expressed hope that future generations of Chinese people will one day live under a freer political system, arguing that greater access to information and the continued spread of democratic ideals make lasting political change possible.
More than three decades after Tiananmen, Tang sees his story not simply as a personal memoir but as one chapter in the broader history of a generation whose lives were permanently altered by the events of 1989.
Editorial note: This article is an English feature based on an interview with Tang Kai published in the second issue of Generation of ’89 (《八九一代》) magazine conducted by Zixuan. It is not a direct translation. The interview has been condensed and adapted for clarity, structure, and readability while preserving the substance of Tang’s account.
Original article
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