Wang Dan Of China To Speak Today

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Wang Dan, the Beijing University undergraduate who served as co-leader of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, will speak at Harvard today at 12:15 p.m.

Wang, 29, was arrested in June 1989, several weeks after the Chinese army stormed into Tiananmen Square and brought the pro-democracy movement to a bloody conclusion. Since then he has been kept either in prison or under house arrest.

Chinese authorities released Wang on April 20 and handed him over to American embassy officials in Beijing. From there he flew to the United States.

Wang's talk, titled, "My Experiences," will be held in the Harvard-Yenching Auditorium at 2 Divinity Ave. It is sponsored by the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and is free and open to the public. Merle Goldman, an associate of the Fairbank Center and author of Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Harvard University Press, 1994), was responsible for bringing Wang to Harvard.

In an interview in The New York Times this Tuesday, Wang, a history major at the time of his arrest, said that his immediate plan is to finish college. He also said that his long-range goal is to return to China and become president of Beijing University after earning a Ph.D. from Harvard.