TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050189/05018900.026

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.3 KB | 163 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 44

CHINA

"Come Out! Come Out!"


Mourning for a fallen leader erupts into defiant demands for
political change

By William R. Doerner


    Night after night, arriving on bicycles or on foot, they
converged on Beijing's gigantic Tiananmen Square. Gathering
ostensibly to mourn the ousted Communist Party chief Hu
Yaobang, who had died the previous weekend at 73, the throngs
of university students actually had a much more provocative, and
important, goal in mind: a demand for greater democratization
in the world's most populous country. Implicit in the spreading
protest campaign was a call for a shake-up in China's Communist
leadership, including the retirement of Deng Xiaoping, 84, after
a decade in power. In a scene never witnessed in the 40 years
of Communist rule, more than 1,000 students assembled outside
the ornate red-lacquered gate of Zhongnanhai compound, where the
top leaders officially live and work. Sitting on the pavement,
lotus-like, they exhorted Premier Li Peng to hear their demands,
chanting, "Come out! Come out!"

    The furor reached a peak on Saturday. As many as 150,000
students and other activists massed in Tiananmen for one of
China's biggest demonstrations since the Communist revolution
in 1949. As the nation's top leaders filed into the Great Hall
for Hu's memorial service behind a wall of 8,000 Chinese troops,
the protesters waved their fists and chanted, "Long live
freedom!" and "Down with dictatorship!" Some of the leaders
seemed to stop momentarily to listen to the shouts. In Xian, to
the northwest, the demonstrations turned into a riot as students
burned 20 houses and injured some 130 police; 18 protesters were
arrested.

    The demonstrations had been growing in intensity through
the week, spreading quickly from Beijing to at least six other
cities, including Nanjing, Shanghai and Tianjin. Always the
rallying cry was for political reform. "The Chinese government
proclaims that democracy is here, but China still has
dictatorship," said a demonstrator dressed in jeans and running
shoes.

    The protests recalled two other convulsive events in
Tiananmen Square, both of which preceded major political turning
points. In 1976, after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, crowds
numbering 100,000 marched through the square and eventually were
brutally routed by club-wielding police. The demonstrations were
widely interpreted as a revolt against the leftist policies of
the so-called Gang of Four, who at the time had effectively
seized power from the dying Mao Zedong. Two days later the Gang
of Four, led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, sacked Deng, the
recently rehabilitated Senior Deputy Premier whom they suspected
of masterminding the demonstrations. But after Mao died five
months later, the military overthrew the Gang of Four and Deng
returned to power in 1978.

    More recently, university students spearheaded a series of
demonstrations in the winter of 1986-87. As with last week's
marches, those protests were mounted to put pressure on China's
leaders for political liberalization. The result was the
opposite: a crackdown by authorities and the ouster of dozens
of pro-reform intellectuals. The most prominent political victim
was party leader Hu, who was regarded by conservatives on the
ruling Politburo as too liberal and thus partly responsible for
the unrest. He was stripped of his party job as General
Secretary but allowed to remain in the Politburo. Though Hu
showed some sympathy for China's academic community, which has
been attacked during Communist rule, it was his role as the
official fall guy in 1987 that enshrined him as a hero to
intellectuals.

    During his decade in power, Deng has transformed China's
economy from a rigidly controlled system of central planning
into a hybrid entity that incorporates free-market features.
But political reform in China never really got off the ground.
Power remains almost entirely in the hands of a small clutch of
leaders in Beijing. If anything, the political climate took a
turn for the worse in the wake of the 1986-87 demonstrations.
Officials conducted a campaign against "bourgeois
liberalization" aimed squarely at liberals inside the
universities and elsewhere. Among those expelled from the
Communist Party during this campaign were two men who have since
become China's best-known dissenters: journalist Liu Binyan and
Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist who gained attention in February
when police prevented him from attending a dinner in Beijing
given by President George Bush.

    Deng, a moderate usually but a pragmatist always, did
nothing to undermine the campaign for most of a year. But then,
at the 13th Party Congress in October 1987, liberal reformers
loyal to Deng scored a clear victory over Old Guard
conservatives, and the country's political atmosphere began to
loosen slightly.

    Still, intellectuals remained resentful of Deng for his
earlier temporizing, and their displeasure with the regime has
deepened in recent months. For one thing, there is widespread
suspicion, valid in some cases, of rampant corruption among top
leaders and their children, including the embezzlement of hard
currency to establish bank accounts abroad. Guandao (official
corruption) is an especially touchy matter on university
campuses because salaries there are low even by Chinese
standards.

    Last week's demonstrations began the way nearly all student
protests do in China: with the display of "big-character
posters" at major universities. At Peking University, which has
a rich and widely respected tradition of student dissent, a raft
of such carefully inscribed banners began appearing late in the
afternoon on the day of Hu's death. Then last Monday more than
1,000 students and teachers, most from the little-known
Political Science and Law College of China, staged a public
mourning in the streets of central Beijing. Chanting "Long live
democracy!" and "Down with bureaucracy!," the crowd marched to
the Monument to the People's Heroes, an obelisk at the center
of Tiananmen Square. The crowds returned daily, but the police
did not crack down until early Thursday morning, when they used
leather belts to swat some of the 200 students outside
Zhongnanhai and herded them into vans.

    The most intriguing question to emerge from China's strange
week of unrest is why the authoritarian leadership permitted it
to get started. One possibility is that with Mikhail Gorbachev
due in Beijing on May 15, China's rulers were loath to set the
stage with a crackdown. Some cynics speculated that
conservatives plan to use the spasm of protest to claim a new
liberal victim, possibly Hu's successor, Party General Secretary
Zhao Ziyang. But a Western diplomat in Beijing disagreed,
suggesting that the era of fall-guy politics has ended. Said he:
"Can they let another guy go down the tubes, given the growing
cynicism of the Chinese people, the concern for human rights
outside the country and their need for more foreign investment?"

    The most important lesson of last week's events was the
degree to which China has changed since the deaths of Zhou and
Mao, the downfall of the Gang of Four and the emergence of Deng.
Says Fang Lizhi: "At the time of Premier Zhou's death, the
people liked him, but they thought of him as a good dictator.
The people were still Marxists then." By contrast, continues
Fang, who welcomes the transition, the people no longer speak
of Marxism, and when they venerate a man like Hu Yaobang, they
are paying homage to him not as a benign dictator but as a
symbol of reform.

    Perhaps no one is more aware of China's changing realities
than Deng Xiaoping, whose revolutionary credentials are far
stronger than those of most of his academic critics. Diplomats
who have seen him during the past two months believe that he
remains in good form for a person of his age. But he is surely
aware that his political power, especially among the young, is
on the wane. He can afford to allow university students to let
off steam occasionally in pursuit of democracy or in memory of
a fallen hero. The test will come if, when the ceremonies for
Hu are past, the engine of protest should suddenly roar out of
control.


-- Sandra Burton and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing