TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051589/05158900.030

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.7 KB | 73 lines

                                                                              WORLD, Page 45

CHINA

Softening Up the Hard Line


Students take to the streets, and officials take to the airwaves


    Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong listened, stern-faced, as a
student questioner bore down on him and other local officials
about the nepotism and corruption that now pervade the Chinese
bureaucracy. As television viewers at home watched intently,
Chen, an unpopular hard-liner, seized the microphone and
answered defensively. "I'm a grade-twelve cadre with a monthly
income slightly over 300 yuan ($80)," he protested. "None of my
family members are high-ranking officials. My son is a junior
cadre in the Beijing civil affairs bureau, and my
daughter-in-law is an ordinary clerk."

    That China's aloof and secretive officials would submit to
such an interrogation might have seemed absurd a few weeks ago.
But the nation's student uprising, now three weeks old, has
thrown official China into confusion. Having failed to carry out
its threat to crack down on the immense student march that
engulfed Beijing two weeks ago, the government last week
launched a soft offensive, blitzing the public with self-serving
propaganda in support of its policies. When the leaders of the
new independent student union announced that they would go ahead
with a march across the capital on May 4, the 70th anniversary
of the birth of China's student movement, the newly pliable
bureaucrats indicated that they would not interfere.

    An estimated 30,000 students demanding democracy and the
legalization of their newly formed independent student union
poured out of 40 Beijing colleges to take part in the ten-hour
trek from their campuses to Tiananmen Square, a short distance
from Zhongnanhai, where China's leaders live and work. Again
tens of thousands of workers joined them, shouting
encouragement. One worker held up a sign in crude English
letters: I LOVE YOU. A waitress scribbled a message on a piece
of paper and pasted it on the window of a bus. "You must be
exhausted, students," it read.

    The marchers included 200 journalists employed by 40
state-controlled publications. Their demands: more press
freedom and the reinstatement of Qin Benli, who was fired three
weeks ago as editor of China's most outspokenly liberal journal,
the weekly World Economic Herald in Shanghai. The journalists
acknowledged the students' complaint that the official press had
distorted the goals of their movement. "We can't solve our
problems if we can't even write about them," said Chen Zongshun,
a correspondent of the Workers' Daily.

    The government's placid tolerance of such heresies is
largely a matter of timing. With 3,000 international delegates
attending the annual meeting of the 47-member Asian Development
Bank last week in the Great Hall of the People, within earshot
of Tiananmen Square, officials wanted to avoid any
unpleasantness. And the protest came just days before the
scheduled May 15-18 summit meeting between Chinese officials and
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

    While there is no guarantee against reprisals once
Gorbachev goes home, Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang sounded
a conciliatory note when he told the governors of the A.D.B.
that the best way to deal with the students is through
"extensive consultations and dialogues," not force. But Zhao is
a liberal whose influence has lately been on the wane, so it is
impossible to know how much weight his promises carry. Given the
gap between the students' demands and senior leader Deng
Xiaoping's aversion to substantial political reform, the
government's soft line on dissent is likely to be severely
tested in the coming months.