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SPECIAL REPORT
Walter Hutchens, left, and Jim Brown
visit the World Expo in Shanghai.
Twenty-five years
ago this summer,
a group of Samford students and faculty
spent a harrowing few days trying to get out
of the People’s Republic of China in the
wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square
protests in Beijing.
The group, led by history professor Jim
Brown and biology professor Bob Stiles, was
visiting Anhui Normal University in the city
of Wuhu, about 600 miles south of Beijing
on the Yangtze River in east central China.
Music professor Tim Banks and his wife,
Wanda, were part of the group.
They left Birmingham May 27, 1989,
for a planned four-week stay, part of an
exchange program that had been in the
works for four years. Three weeks were to be
at Anhui and one week in Beijing.
But student-led protests against
inflation, government corruption and lack
of political reforms had been under way for
several weeks in Beijing and other cities by
the time the Samford group arrived in
China May 31. On June 4, Chinese army
troops attempting to suppress the protests
killed a number of students and others in
Tiananmen Square.
At that point, Brown and Stiles made
the decision to cut short the trip. But given
the violence in Beijing and the prospect of
further civil unrest, transportation out of
China was suddenly very hard to arrange as
hordes of foreigners fled the country. It took
several 4 a.m. departures, a bus trip through
Chinese back roads and a last-minute
scramble by Samford to purchase emergency
airline tickets before the group could safely
leave.
“All our parents were watching images
of burning tanks and spilled blood back in
Beijing,” recalled Walter Hutchens, a
student on the trip. “They were nervous. It
wasn’t clear what would happen next, and
we reluctantly acceded to the decision to
go home.”
The situation was in stark contrast to
today, when faculty and students routinely
travel to China and the university actively
recruits Chinese students to study on
campus. About 150 students from China
began the most recent academic year at
Samford.
Brown recalled the 1989 experience
after he and Hutchens visited China again
in June of this year. Hutchens, a 1990
Samford graduate, is now a business school
professor specializing in China at the
University of Redlands in California.
“I had never met a Chinese person
when I set foot on the Samford campus,”
said Hutchens. “I am very grateful to
Samford and to Dr. Brown in particular for
introducing me to China in a history class.
I’ve been mesmerized ever since.”
Hutchens went on to earn an M.A. in
Asian studies and a law degree. He learned
to read and write Chinese, and went back to
live in Beijing for about five years. Today, as
an endowed chair of global business at
Redlands, he teaches courses about doing
business in China and leads study-abroad
trips to the nation.
Brown had visited Anhui with four
Samford students in 1988. He brought back
an offer from the Chinese school to bring a
class of 20 Samford students in 1989. The
school would provide a short course in
Chinese language and make available
lectures from any of its 1,000-member
faculty.
“This was going to be the best foreign
studies group ever sent out by any Alabama
university, bar none, and the first week bore
that out,” Brown wrote in a Seasons magazine
report in the summer of 1989. Banks
took part at the behest of Samford Provost
William Hull in hopes of initiating an
exchange of music and art faculty.
Even after the tanks entered Tiananmen
Square on June 4, Brown and the group
decided to stay a few more days, thinking
the turmoil was limited to Beijing. But by
the night of June 5, student protests had
spread to many Chinese cities and it was
clearly time to get out of China “before all
airports were shut down in a civil war,”
Brown wrote.
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