Jim Huskey

Published on July 31, 2015

Jim-Huskey "Then we began hearing gunshots coming in from the west and all these hundreds of thousands of people began running..."

Chapters

Background and Travels

Jim Huskey talks about his time at Samford University and travels in Europe and Asia.

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US Diplomat in China: Human Rights Officer and the Tienanmen Massacre

Jim Huskey discusses his time as a US diplomat in China, and witnessing the Tienanmen Massacre.

Tienanmen Square

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US Diplomat in India: Promoting Economic Development

Huskey talks about his time as a diplomat in India, and his role in promoting economic development and trade.

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US Diplomat in Kenya: Democracy Building

Jim Huskey discusses the role he played in building democracy while serving as a diplomat in Kenya.

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US Political Counselor in Taiwan: Conflict Prevention

Huskey talks about his time as the Political Counselor at the American Institute in Taiwan and conflict prevention.

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Working as a team and Unofficial Diplomats

Huskey introduces his wife, Joanne, and discusses the many roles played by "unofficial diplomats".

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The Role of the Unofficial Diplomat

Joanne Huskey discusses her role as an "unofficial diplomat".

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Asia and Foreign Policy

Jim Huskey discusses Asia, particularly China, India and Japan.

Deng Xiaoping

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US Liaison to ASEAN

Jim Huskey talks about his time as the State Department Liaison to the Association for Southeast Asian Nations, the problems with ASEAN and his role in US foreign policy in Asia.

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US Diplomat in China after Tienanmen

Jim and Joanne Huskey talk about their time in China leading up to and after the Tienanmen Square Massacre and US relations with China during that time.

Replica of the "Goddess of Democracy"

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US relations in other areas after Tienanmen

Jim and Joanne Huskey discuss the impact US-Chinese relations had on other areas of Southeast Asia, specifically Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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Effect of the Tienanmen protests on the rest of the Communist World

The Huskeys talk about how the coverage of the Tienanmen protests affected the collapse of the Communist nations.

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Witnesses to the Tienanmen Square Massacre

The Huskeys discuss the causes of the Massacre, who started it, and the aftermath.

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How to Join the US Foreign Service

The Huskeys explain several of the different methods for getting into the US Foreign Service, such as the Peace Corps, as well as some of the types of people who join, and the requirements to join.

Georgetown University School of Foreign Service

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The Chinese Government's Reaction to the Tienanmen Protests, and its Impact Today.

The Huskeys discuss the reactions of the Chinese government to Tienanmen, and how the Massacre is seen in China today.

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US Diplomat: America's Response to Tienanmen

Jim Huskey explains why the American government responded to Tienanmen the way it did.

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Post-Communist China

The Huskey's talk about the changing government policy of China, the declining influence of Communism, and the future of that nation.

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Reform Groups in China

The Huskeys discuss the possible groups pushing for reform in China, specifically the role that environmental groups play. They also discuss specific environmental problems facing China, and the government's role in keeping reform groups under control.

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Closing Remarks

Jim and Joanne Huskey make their closing remarks in the lecture on the nature of human rights in China, building for the future, and final questions.

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Transcript

JIM HUSKEY: My international partner and wife. Have you started studying
Tiananmen yet?

PAUL CHA: No we haven't but they've seen a documentary and they're aware of it.

JIM HUSKEY: I want to talk a lot more than just about Tiananmen but I'll focus
on that as much as you want. The problem is when you get some Foreign Service
officers in a room, you start telling stories, because we have so many
adventures in our lives and we're rabid tourists. We love to tell stories. Let
me just back up for a minute. In September 1965, Howard College became Samford
University and then it began the march from being a small state college to a
regional university and now a national university. That same September I started
as a freshman. The trees out here were this high. The campus was denuded of
anything. Just a few buildings. It was an empty place. That same month a young
Howard College graduate returned after doing his doctorate for four or five
years to teach here. His name was Wayne Flynt. You probably have not heard of
him, because he left a number of years ago. He is one of the great teachers of
the South. He is a wonderful historian and teacher, but he taught a course
called "Far East." It was the first time Samford had a course on anything
outside of Western civilization. Far East. And I began studying about Japan,
China, Korea. Vietnam I knew about, because of what was going on there, the
Vietnam War, and there was a growing anti-war movement so Vietnam I knew about
but otherwise it was new to me and it planted a seed inside of me that
germinated and continued to grow my whole life. I went up to Wisconsin, the
University of Wisconsin, to get my master's degree in history. Be careful about
these professors here, because they can change your life. I was going to med
school and I ended up doing my doctorate in history and being a diplomat. I went
to Wisconsin and did my master's and then I did my doctoral prelims, preliminary
examinations. Then I went off to Europe for the summer to get rested before
starting the grind, the doctoral grind, and I kept going. I never went back to
Wisconsin. I kept going east, south over the Strait of Gibraltar into Morocco,
where I had my first experience with a non-Western world. And it was
mesmerizing. Whole different patterns of thinking, different value systems, and
I tried to factor this into my Southern Baptist upbringing in Alabama and it was
to me, mesmerizing. Kept going east. Algeria, Libya. Hitch-hiking on oil tankers
across the Northern Sahara desert. Tripoli, Libya, caught a freighter over to
Turkey. Turkey is the bridge between East and West, between Asia and Europe, and
that's where you see the sequential change between civilizations. Kept going
east through Iran, the great 3,000 year old Iranian-Persian civilization, to
Afghanistan, which then was peaceful, an amazing place. These tall, six foot
plus Afghanis, long calloused hands, they would welcome you to their culture,
Muslim culture, but you always knew if you crossed them, they have a knife under
their hand and they use it. A different culture, a different way of organizing
society. On to India for a year, getting to know that ancient and complex
civilization. Later, across to Southeast Asia, all ten of those countries. Ten
fascinating countries. Are you studying Southeast Asia at all?

JIM BROWN: No.

JIM HUSKEY: Fascinating countries, all ten of them. Burma, which is changing
very quickly now. Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Philippines, Laos,
Cambodia, Vietnam. A fascinating set of civilizations. I caught a freighter up
to Hong Kong; then I finally met China, which I had always been reading about,
studying about, and I was just pulled right in. The culture, the language. Used
my last $40, $35 to take a freighter across to Taiwan, an island off the coast
of China, and stayed there three years, learning Chinese, working. Therefore I
ended up a Sinologist, a China specialist. Had I stopped in India, I would have
been an Indologist. I have often thought if I stopped in Bali I would be a
Baliologist. This is what happens. Far East, I ended up, 5 years later, living
in Asia, becoming an Asianist, an Asian specialist, a Sinologist, a China
specialist. I came back and did my doctorate at UNC Chapel Hill in U.S.
Diplomatic History and I believe you have a diplomatic course in the history department.

JIM BROWN: We used to long ago.

JIM HUSKEY: Bring it back.

JIM BROWN: Political science is claiming all that too.

JIM HUSKEY: You need a historical perspective on diplomacy. Political science
gives you one slice of it, history gives you a different slice of it. So I got
my doctorate in U.S. diplomatic history with a specialty in East Asia, but
especially China. Then I went off and joined the Foreign Service. My wife and I
went to Beijing. Let me give you a quick synopsis of what we did before we turn
to directly discussing Asia. Our Foreign Service life is very Asia-centric. In
1988 when I joined the Foreign Service we were first sent to Beijing. We worked
in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. I already spoke Chinese. Shortly after we
arrived a movement, a student movement, broke out and laborers joined in
demanding an end to corruption and demanding more say, even the word democracy,
they began to say democracy, which was unheard of in China. This movement grew
day by day. Joanne and I would go out each night, watch students and workers
demonstrate, first a few hundred, the next night, a thousand, next night,
several thousand, then ten thousand. Night by night, sequentially, it just
exponentially burgeoned. After a few weeks you have hundreds of thousands of
students and workers demonstrating every night. Democracy, democracy, stop
corruption. So, this is from April until June 3. June 3. That night, I was in
the square, in Tiananmen Square, watching the students give speeches saying "We
have won this movement. China is now a democracy. The government is finished."
Then we began hearing gunshots coming in from the west and all these hundreds of
thousands of people began running toward what turned out to be tanks, seventy or
eighty tanks coming in and PLA, People's Liberation Army soldiers behind them
with machine guns and basically for the rest of the night, I happened to be the
only U.S. official in the square to witness this, so this became our official
position on what happened. I spent the night watching five waves of massacre of
students and workers and just regular citizens of Beijing. It was a terrible
thing, but, you know, all night long I kept thinking, remembering “Far
East”, because in that class under Professor Wayne Flynt, we studied about the
May 4 Movement, a movement in 1919, just after World War I, when Chinese
students stood up in cities all across China and demanded modernization and
democracy. So here seventy years later I was here in Tiananmen Square watching a
students' movement and I thought, "This is deja vu. I have been here before."
This time though it ended differently, in massacre. As I talk about these four
of our posts, what I am doing is representing what we in the Foreign Service do,
what our foreign policy is. In this case, I was a human rights officer. Every
embassy has a human rights officer. I was appointed human rights officer and as
a result of that I wrote a human rights report on the Tiananmen Massacre which
detailed what I witnessed. The Chinese were saying "Nobody was killed", but my
estimate was about 1,200 were killed. I think the number I had was 1,235 from
what I witnessed, from what we talked with doctors in hospitals, that was our
figure. But the Chinese government was correct and this is interesting to know
if you ever get into a discussion of this, either historically or in
conversation. The Chinese government is right. Nobody was killed in Tiananmen
Square, this massiv

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Interviewer	Jim Brown
Interviewee	Jim Huskey
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Collection	STORI Collection
Accession	SUHist/NationalService/001