Businessman paid steep price for his stand on Tiananmen June 3, 1999 By WILLIAM ARNOLD SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC Ten years later, the Tiananmen Square massacre is firmly entrenched as one of the seminal events of modern history. Indeed, Time magazine recently noted the incident's most powerful image, that anonymous man standing bravely before a tank, was a contender for its"Man-of-the-Century." One Tiananmen story that has not been told, however, is that of a British Hong Kong businessman and fourth-generation China Hand named Robin Dale, who found himself in a strange moral dilemma during China's days of destiny, and exonerated himself with a unique act of conscience. But in the wake of the massacre, Dale composed a song and produced a video supporting the Tiananmen martyrs that played continually on Hong Kong TV for nearly a month, and was beamed into China to become the foremost symbol of Hong Kong's support for the students. How this strange defection took place -- and the personal sacrifice that resulted from it -- is one of the great footnotes to the Tiananmen saga and a chronicle of show business, international intrigue and personal redemption worthy of a James Clavell novel. Talking about it today Robin smiles and says that what happened was mostly a case of his being unable to resist the "family legacy." "I come from a family that has loved and cared about China for four generations," he says. "In the end, I couldn't deny that reality." He is, in fact, the scion of a dynasty of English missionaries in Asia: his great-grandfather was the first Scottish Presbyterian missionary in Singapore, his grandfather was a medical missionary in eastern China, and his father was a medical missionary in Taiwan for almost half a century. Dale was born in London but he went to China before his first birthday and grew up mostly on Taiwan, learning to speak fluent Mandarin as a child -- an ability that is extremely rare in a Westerner and would later be his greatest asset in doing business in Asia. Like many sons of missionaries, he rebelled against his background. At Taipei American School he was 'President of a gang called "The Dukes", and his high school girlfriend was Betty Ting Pei, the actress-to-be in whose bed superstar Bruce Lee would later die under mysterious circumstances. He played bass and sang in a high school rock band, and, while visiting a friend in Michigan in the summer of 1966, he got a job as a roadie, then became a founding member of one of the top Midwest rock groups of the late '60s -- the SRC. "For a period of about five years, I lived the rock-and-roll life. We recorded for Capitol Records. I hung out with The Pink Floyd, The Who, Ted Nugent, Iggy Pop, The MC5, the amazing Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad and Bobby Segar -- all the big Midwest groups etc.. I let Alice Cooper rehearse in my double car garage studio just on the outskirts of Ann Arbor when he came to me and said his band could not afford a place of their own at the time." When the band fell apart in the early '70s, he "knocked around Hollywood for two years," then returned to Taiwan, where he opened a disco in the Hilton Hotel -- the island's first -- and "dabbled" in the Taiwan television, movie and recording industries. In the mid-'70s, the economy of East Asia was booming, and China began to slowly open its doors. With his fluent Mandarin and knowledge of how things are done in Asia, he found himself in an extraordinary position to take advantage of this opportunity. In 1977, he started an import-export company that eventually became a force in Pacific Rim trade.. In 1984, he moved his base of operations to Hong Kong, "because I always knew my destiny was China." By 1988 he had a penthouse office suite in the Bank of China building and a mansion on the Peak -- Hong Kong's two most prestigious addresses. More importantly, he had become a close personal friend of Xu Jiatun, the highest-ranking Chinese official in the colony and its "governor in waiting." The relationship with Xu made Dale the Western businessman best-connected with the Beijing inner circle, and a powerful broker in the transformation of China. In 1987-88, he took a succession of executives from the E.E.C and America's top corporations to Beijing, and he took Xu to the States to meet various U.S. politicians and the CEOs of Sears, Kmart and DuPont. As the pro-democracy movement grew in China through the decade, Dale took no part in it. "I didn't even know any dissidents. And I thought the students were brave but a bit naive in their demands, and downright suicidal when they started rudely confronting the leaders. You just don't do that in a culture that reveres age." But he was astounded in the spring of 1989 as their non-violent presence in Tiananmen Square seemed to double every other day and eventually grew to more than a million strong. "I remember calling my wife to the television and saying, 'What we're seeing here is absolutely unprecedented in the history of China.'" As these demonstrations were working to a peak in the first week of June, Dale was in the final stages of negotiating for the construction of a joint-venture shopping mall in Tianjin that, if built, would have been the largest shopping mall in the world -- and put his company on track to be a billion-dollar business. Even though he himself had no dissident connections, he knew at once that he was vulnerable on the pro-democracy issue because his friend Xu was publicly praising capitalism as "a great creation of human civilization." "So the smart thing for me to do at this point would be to just sit back and say nothing, distance myself from Mr. Xu, then wait for the smoke to clear and gradually reform my connections with (Beijing)." But something inside him -- "probably that missionary heritage" -- just wouldn't let him do the smart thing. As Tiananmen ran red with blood in the early hours of June 4, he watched the horror on CNN while numbly mumbling to himself, "The people who ordered this (the massacre) are the people I do business with every day . . . the people to whom I am bringing the leaders of the corporations of the E.E.C and America . . . the people I serve." He stewed about it for hours, then, "in a burst of inspiration," he closed himself off in his study and composed a song, "China, We Hear You Call." Somewhat in the style of the 1985 "We Are the World" appeal for Live Aid, it was a rousing, unashamedly emotional cry of support for the Beijing students right to Freedom of Speech and Democracy. The next day, he talked a Hong Kong TV station into lending him its footage of the demonstrations, then gathered some 30 young people (representing 20 nationalities and all races) as singer-actors and shot a music video, intercutting the Tiananmen footage with the young people singing his song. The "China, We Hear You Call" video was played constantly over the ATV station for the next three weeks, and became the symbol of Hong Kong's support for the Tiananmen victims, as well of the colony's fear of its own post-'97 future under a government that would so callously and methodically kill its own children. Today, that video is still a legend in Hong Kong. "It gives me goose bumps just to think about it," a noted Hong Kong filmmaker told me in 1997, shortly after the handover. "It was a pure expression -- maybe the last pure expression -- to come out of a Hong Kong that was suddenly terrified of offending the bully at the door." It not only burned Dale's bridges with Beijing and destroyed his business, it so infuriated the Communist leaders that he instantly moved to their enemies list. By the end of the following week, Herb Ellingwood, a former Deputy Counsel to President Ronald Regan flew to the British Colony and warned him that he and his family might be in "physical danger" and strongly advised him to leave Hong Kong In September 1989, he pulled up stakes and left Asia, settled briefly near his brother in Texas, then found his way to Seattle, where was hired to reorganize the stateside office of family friend Doris Brougham, a longtime Taiwan missionary and niece of legendary P-I sports editor Royal Brougham. From Seattle, he continued to act as a link to his friend Xu, who also fled Hong Kong to live in protective custody in California. As the most senior Chinese official ever to defect, Xu's support is often sought on China issues. For instance, it was Dale who got him to write an article making public his decision to stand behind President Clinton's controversial extension of China's most-favored-nation trade status in 1994. But the years after Tiananmen were hard ones for Dale. Even though his application for permanent-resident status was sponsored by top officials in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, it somehow became mired in red tape, and his fortune dwindled as the delay stretched into years before he could legally work in the U.S. Gradually, he managed to rebuild his life. He started a successful business selling Asian beauty and health products; and he returned to music, performing and recording in a lush symphonic pop style that he found suited his "die-hard romantic sensibility." As the memories of Tiananmen have receded, he's even made several brief trips back to China. He remains sad about America's 'lost opportunity.' "Ten years ago, the U.S. still had an ability to influence what China would become. But that's slipped away. America is so enmeshed in China now, it just can't draw a hard line and take all the business with it. It's too late. China is in the driver's seat now and America is not." As the capitalistic transformation of China has continued past the blip of Tiananmen, people invariably ask him if he ever regrets that burst of idealism 10 years ago that cost him so much. And he always answers, "No, not once. In retrospect, it may seem a rash and foolish act, but I'm still glad I did it. My kids are proud of me . . . and I sleep well at night." TV News Clip Ch 36 Austin Texas - Man of Honor |
