TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050889/05088900.036

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.4 KB | 221 lines

                ╞ε                                                            WORLD, Page 36

CHINA

Beijing Spring


With 150,000 students on the march, Deng agrees to open a
dialogue.  Will talk be enough?

By Michael S. Serrill


    The night before the march, Jia Guangxi and his five
roommates at Peking University toasted one another with farewell
glasses of wine. "Some of us even wrote last wills," recalled
Jia, 18, an economics major from Inner Mongolia. And why not?
Chinese officials, having tolerated eleven days of protests by
tens of thousands of students, were darkly warning of a
crackdown that would put an end to the demonstrations once and
for all.

    On Thursday morning Jia rose early, grabbed a megaphone and
headed for the headquarters of the student organizing
committee. As his classmates poured out of their dormitories,
Jia held up his megaphone and shouted quotations from the
constitution. "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy
freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association,
of procession and of demonstration!" he bellowed. School
officials blasted a threatening countermessage over
loudspeakers: "Go back to your classes! Don't give in to
pressure from your fellow students! Beware of the consequences
to yourself and your family!"

    Just outside the university gates was a sight to give even
the most determined demonstrator pause: row upon row of
uniformed policemen. What happened next will be remembered for
years to come. As more than 50,000 striking university students
flooded the streets in defiance of government warnings, some
250,000 ordinary citizens joined them, supporting their demands
for more democracy.

    The outpouring of discontent, and the authorities' decision
not to stop it, represented an unprecedented humiliation for
Deng Xiaoping and his government. Wisely deciding not to use
force to end the march, the Chinese government acceded to
demands for a dialogue with the students. "The demonstration
marks the raising of democratic consciousness of the people,"
triumphantly said a graduate student of philosophy from Peking
University.

    The festive event lasted 16 hours, as students from 32
colleges paraded 25 miles from the university belt in
northwestern Beijing to Tiananmen Square in the city's center.
It was the latest and by far the largest in a series of protests
that began when students gathered on April 16 to mourn the death
of former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, whose
tolerance of demonstrations two years ago precipitated his
downfall. The marchers, divided into well-organized ranks
according to their school, chanted and waved red and white
banners. When they tired of singing the Internationale and the
national anthem, the students launched into homemade ditties.
To the tune of the French song Frere Jacques, they warbled in
Chinese, "Lying to the people, lying to the people, very
strange, very strange."

    Along the way battalions of unarmed police halfheartedly
tried to block the protesters' path. Again and again the police
were pushed aside by students who sometimes reached out to shake
the hands of the startled men. "The People's Police love the
people," the marchers chanted, "and the people love the People's
Police!" One protester playfully snatched an officer's hat, and
another threw it about like a Frisbee.

    The most extraordinary phenomenon was the support shown for
the students by workers, an allegiance that had not been so
evident in earlier demonstrations. Thousands of workers streamed
from their offices and factories into the spring sunshine to
watch and cheer. Food vendors handed out free drinks and
popsicles. Those who did not join in the march climbed atop
buildings, billboards and subway entrances for a better view.
At one intersection workers broke through a line of 200 police
to clear a path for the procession.

    The tensest moment came when the students burst through the
last police line before Tiananmen Square, the symbolic seat of
power and the scene two weeks ago of a violent confrontation
between students and police. According to students, two were
seriously injured and 300 briefly detained. As the activists
proceeded down the Avenue of Eternal Peace toward the north
side of the 100-acre square, they were met by truckloads of
troops. But the soldiers made no move to stop the demonstrators,
who swarmed around the trucks. After a few minutes, the vehicles
and their bewildered passengers slowly drove away to thunderous
cheers from the gathered throng. Surprisingly, the students did
not stop at the square but, wishing to avoid confrontation,
marched past it and returned peacefully to their campuses.

    The day before Thursday's protest, there was every
indication that the government was ready to crush even the
smallest sprig of dissent. On Tuesday Premier Li Peng and
President Yang Shangkun reportedly informed Deng that the
movement had spread "to high schools, the countryside and even
among the workers." Deng, whose sole official government title
is Chairman of the Central Military Commission but whose
ironhanded control of the government has led the students to dub
him the "Emperor," agreed that the protesters intended to
overthrow the Communist Party. Referring to the turmoil that has
accompanied political reform elsewhere in the socialist world,
Deng said, "Look what happened in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet
Union." He called the demonstrators "a black hand against the
party and myself," and told Li and Yang that "we must take
strict measures to deal with this movement, or there will be
nationwide turmoil." Vowed Deng: "We must use a sharp knife to
cut the flaxen threads."

    The following day the People's Daily, the Communist Party
newspaper, came close to accusing the demonstrators of treason
in an editorial that was broadcast and reprinted all over China.
"This is a planned conspiracy that . . . aims at negating the
leadership of the party and the socialist system," said the
editorial. It called the students' independent unions illegal
and said that new demonstrations would be put down. As a first
step in the expected crackdown, Shanghai party officials
restructured China's most outspokenly liberal newspaper, the
weekly World Economic Herald, and fired its editor, Qin Benli.

    Jia Guangxi and his fellow students took these actions as
provocations and immediately began organizing their largest
protest yet. "The government wants to intimidate us, but the
measures they have resorted to only make us angry," he said
minutes before the giant march began. Meanwhile, tear gas,
helmets and ammunition were being readied for the police.

    Then the unthinkable happened. So many officials disagreed
with Deng's directive to smash the protest that he was forced
to rescind it. Some 100 staff members at the People's Daily
signed a letter to their bosses challenging the paper's harsh
editorial. Within the party, opposition to a crackdown was no
less vehement. "The real dissatisfaction of the cadres was made
known to Li shortly after the editorial was presented," said a
knowledgeable Communist Party member. "They feared that if the
leaders suppressed the demonstration and blood was shed, it
would be like a big fire that would burn not only in Beijing but
nationwide."

    Most decisive was the reaction of the security forces to
Deng's directive. The chief of Beijing's Public Security Bureau
reportedly tried to step down rather than suppress the
demonstration. Finally, cooler heads prevailed, and a
last-minute decision was made to greet the marchers with unarmed
policemen.

    For their part, the students took care not to trigger a
showdown. In the streets they outmaneuvered the police and kept
tight ranks to prevent provocateurs from causing an incident.
By constantly quoting the constitution to justify their rally,
they presented themselves as anything but wild-eyed radicals.
To silence criticism that they are "antiparty" or
"anti-socialist," students stopped denigrating Deng and Li.
Peking University students carried a banner reading WE
RESOLUTELY SUPPORT THE CORRECT LEADERSHIP INSIDE THE PARTY.
Asked which leaders were correct, however, one of the students
holding the banner quipped, "None."

    To broaden their movement beyond the campuses, the students
framed their demands so they would appeal to workers and
peasants as well as to the intelligentsia. In addition to their
traditional demands for freedom of assembly and the press and
greater "democracy," this time they pushed for a new campaign
against government corruption -- an increasingly popular issue
among the masses -- and for China's leaders to make public their
personal financial holdings. "Many of these students took part
in the 1986-87 protests," said a graduate of the University of
Politics and Law who is now a government official. "They have
learned their lessons, and they now know which means would work
and which would not."

    Jia Guangxi is a good example. The son of two physicians,
he lived a comfortable middle-class life before arriving at
Peking University this year. He was only a halfhearted
participant in the original rally on April 16. "I was rather
doubtful that it could lead to anything useful," he says. Only
after the police roughed up demonstrators in front of
Zhongnanhai compound, where China's top leaders officially live
and work, was he moved to strong action. Says he: "After that,
all my social gripes came surging out, and I threw myself into
the movement."

    But Jia is hardly a firebrand. He still holds three youth
posts at the university. And he intends to apply for membership
in the Communist Party soon. "I idolize the party just as
Christians do their religion," he said. "If China must establish
some ideology, we should rely on the party."

    The student leader's faith in the system is bound to be
challenged by events. Late last week the two sides in the
conflict were still shadowboxing over the protesters' chief
demand: an ongoing dialogue between independent student leaders
and senior government officials. An initial three-hour session
on Saturday failed to satisfy student activists when the
government side refused to recognize the legitimacy of the
students' newly formed association. The government's decision
to talk, not fight, "is only a tactical one," says an
influential party member. When Hu Qili, the party's propaganda
chief, briefed top editors of the party-controlled press late
last week, he reportedly likened the unfolding crisis to the
situation in Poland, telling them that the government could not
accept all the students' demands lest it create "many Lech
Walesas, not only in Beijing but in every province."

    The students, of course, still have their megaphones. "We
reserve the right to demonstrate again if the government fails
to show good faith during the dialogue," says Wang Zongliang,
22, a geology student at Peking University. Rallies are already
planned for May 4, the 70th anniversary of the beginnings of
China's student movement. If those demonstrations prove half as
successful as the one that shook Beijing last week, the
conservative Chinese leadership might finally be forced to
couple its economic reform with a relaxation of restrictions on
political and civil rights. But few government observers expect
much movement from the stubborn Deng. As one informed party
member put it, "Deng Xiaoping never admits his errors."