Interesting all the brouhaha over jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Lui Xiabo – and Obama’s “demands” that he be released – or that at minimum his family be allowed to travel to Oslo to collect his prize. Obviously if the President were really concerned about human rights in China, he could always impose trade sanctions on them, as he does on Cuba and Iran.

The US June 4^th Movement

The reality is that the US has always had a very schizophrenic reaction to Chinese human rights violations, starting with the June 4, 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. Much has been written, especially since the twentieth anniversary last year, about the underground June 4^th movement that developed in China after the massacre. However you never read anything about the parallel June 4^th movement that emerged in the US in the months after Tiananmen Square. It was led by Chinese university and graduate students on campuses all over the country – with the support of American pro-civil liberties advocates across the political spectrum.

For two to three months, it got extensive mainstream media coverage. I recall seeing an article in the Seattle Times about an upcoming meeting at the University of Washington. Unfortunately I was sick that night and unable to attend.

By September 1989, the US June 4^th movement had vanished without a trace. I found this extremely odd until six months later, an investigator friend learned, off the record from an FBI friend, exactly how the federal agency had shut down the American June 4^th movement.

It was quite simple really. The FBI went to all the Chinese leaders and told them their student visas would be revoked unless they agreed to inform on the other activists who attended the meetings. Not surprisingly, they chose to keep their visas and disband the movement. A very old strategy – still in use today (see http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/16428/spy-for-us-or-never-return-home-obamas-new-tactic-in-the-war-on-terror).

Why Did Bush Senior Shut It Down?

So why did Bush senior want the June 4^th movement shut down? According to my friend’s FBI friend, Bush was engaged in major trade negotiations that China refused to consummate unless Bush could guarantee the underground June 4^th movement wouldn’t receive (potentially substantial) financial and political support from Chinese students in the US.

With the recent FBI’s raids on Twin Cities and Chicago peace activists, there has been a lot of Internet traffic about a “resurgence” of the old FBI Cointelpro (the FBI operation which spied extensively on peace and social justice organizations in the sixties and seventies) This assumes Cointelpro ended when J. Edgar Hoover died, though increasing evidence suggests his successors continued it.

The FBI operation to shut down the US June 4^th movement is but one of many examples – in Seattle alone – that I discuss in my recent memoir The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.

Other Examples of Cointelpro-Type Activities

In The Most Revolutionary Act, I also cover the FBI’s collaboration with Marcos agents in 1981 to gun down Filipino cannery workers and union activists Domingo and Viernes (the US government later settled with their family, as they did with Fred Hampton’s family after the FBI gunned him down in his sleep). And, among other police-state activities, the FBI infiltration of CISPES and the grassroots campaign to create a Seattle African American Museum – and the 1989 murder of Seattle postal worker and union activist Oscar Manassa (it so happens it was the Postal Inspectors – another branch of US intelligence – who seized his evidence file to halt the homicide investigation).

In 1990, we very nearly persuaded two intrepid congressmen to launch a Congressional Investigation into the mysterious, violent “suicides” of 23 postal workers between 1986 and 1990. And then, as usual, one or both of them were blackmailed – it’s my understanding they typically threaten congress people with a trumped-up ethics investigation, as they have done recently with Maxine Waters. And the CI never happened.

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