I know a lot of scholars working on the PRC who, like me, are based in other parts of the world. Not surprisingly, as COVID-related travel restrictions began to ease, many began trying to figure out how to get back to the places they have visited and written about most. One subset did not: specialists in Tibetan and Xinjiang studies.

One way to sum this up is that I know both Can’t-Wait-To-Returners and Can’t-Returners.

I don’t fit into either camp. Shanghai and Hong Kong are the places I have written about and visited most, but I have not been to either in the 2020s and I have no plans to go to either.

Hearing this, some ask me if I have been banned because of what I have written about Tiananmen over the years, or because of how I handle more recent protests in my 2020 book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink. But I have not been banned.

I took a break from going to the PRC once before. That hiatus, which lasted from 1988 until 1996, was due partly to how I felt about a brutal crackdown and my sense that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was taking the country in the wrong direction. The same thing can be said about my not going now.

Some readers might imagine I am disappointed when friends itching to return to the PRC tell me they have been or are planning to go, and that I discourage my students from heading there. But this is not true.

We live in an era of binary thinking and all-or-nothing stances, so I have been finding it hard to convey the nuanced thinking behind my position on the to-go-or-not-to-go question. Curiously, though, when Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz, who turns out to have some things in common with me related to China, to be her running mate, I found a new way to explain my stance.

Walz, like me, first went to the PRC at the age of 25 in a year associated with protests. He went in 1989. I went in 1986, a year when small demonstrations took place that helped set the stage for the epochal Tiananmen ones. The young people Walz met—part of a generation of youths who dreamed of living in a freer country and were willing to take risks to try to push the CCP to do better—made a deep and lasting impression on him. The same was true for me.

Walz was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when soldiers killed unarmed civilians of varied ages and occupations on the streets of Beijing. He has said that some people urged him to head back to the U.S., viewing it as unsafe, unconscionable, or both to cross the border as he had planned to and start a year teaching on the mainland. But he stuck with his plan. People-to-people ties would be important in U.S.-China relations going forward, he thought, and working to foster cross-cultural understanding through classroom engagement remained a worthy goal.

In 1989, at 28, I might have joined the chorus of those urging Walz to head home. But three-and-a-half decades later, I’m glad he went to the PRC.

If he hadn’t gone, he might not have developed his enduring concern with CCP human rights abuses. He might not have met with the Dalai Lama and Joshua Wong. He might not have taken the lead in the 2014 hearing on Tiananmen that the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held to mark the 25^th anniversary of the 1989 events.

Why might the 28-year-old me have urged Walz not to go to the mainland? I was in California throughout 1989. It was through published reports and television coverage that I followed the news of that year’s inspiring protests and repressive events such as the June 4^th Massacre.

No one I knew was killed, arrested, or driven into exile but I felt a direct connection to the horrors of that year, which included a massacre in Chengdu as well as the much better known one in Beijing. Many of the victims were just like people I had gotten to know during my time in the PRC. I did not make a conscious decision to stay out of the country, but it did not feel right to go, especially as a general tightening of controls was taking place and the official media was either grotesquely distorting the story of 1989 or pretending that nothing had happened.

I started going again after there were several years of heartening signs of a shift back toward liberalization. Political reform was off the table, but the CCP leaders had decided that, to avoid losing power the way their Soviet bloc counterparts had, they needed to allow people some of the personal choices the Tiananmen generation had demanded.

My two last trips to the PRC were both to Hong Kong 2019, and I planned to return to the same city the next year to do launch events for Vigil once it came out early in 2020. Those plans had to be scuttled, due initially to COVID restrictions and then, after Beijing imposed a harsh National Security Law on the city, due to the political environment.

In the wake of many months of disheartening news coming out of Hong Kong of arrests and political trials and the battering of the press and civil society, I not only abandoned hope of being able to give public talks about my work in the city but started wondering if I would ever go there again. This was also linked to a general sense of dismay at the direction the PRC had been heading for quite some time. The grotesque long-standing abuses of human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet and a general sense that many people across the PRC are finding less room to manoeuvre in the Xi Jinping era contributed to this pessimistic feeling. 

I have the luxury of being at a career stage where I do not need to go. My current projects can be researched elsewhere. I have no family in the PRC. I can thus be at peace with the idea that the break from trips to the PRC that began when I was in my late fifties could easily last through my sixties and beyond.

And yet, I am glad that many friends and students have headed to the PRC or are planning to go there. I like hearing about their experiences.

It feels right to me to not go to the PRC. But I believe it is useful for people to strive to keep lines of communication open and minimize sources of misunderstanding.

This makes it easy to know what I’ll do if I encounter any 25-year-olds who describe facing dilemmas like the one Walz did at their age. If they tell me their impulse is to make the same call that he made in 1989, I’ll tell them I support their decision.