TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052989/05298900.032

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                                                          WORLD, Page 36

COVER STORIES

State of Siege


With Tiananmen Square the epicenter, a political quake convulses

By Daniel Benjamin


    On history's calendar, last week had been circled in
advance. It was set aside, blocked out ahead of time for a grand
show involving two men who wished to immortalize themselves
through a feat of statesmanship.

    History, however, takes no reservations. The efforts of
Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev to capture the world's
attention were swept before them by one of those rare and
indescribable upwellings of national spirit. Events within the
Great Hall of the People, where the leaders set about mending
a 30-year rift, received some note. But it was the events in
Tiananmen Square, where a hunger strike by 3,000 students
swelled to a demonstration by more than a million Chinese
expressing the inexpressible -- a longing for freedom and
prosperity -- that transfixed the eye. On Saturday, as
government troops were trucked into Beijing to end the protests,
China was plunged into a turmoil unrivaled since the Cultural
Revolution more than two decades ago.

    The confrontation between the people of the People's
Republic of China and the government created a surreal deadlock
-- chaotic yet tranquil, jubilant but darkly ominous. Using
lampposts and bicycle racks, bands set up barricades on the
avenues leading into the heart of the city. Word spread of a
military plot to deploy forces via the Beijing subway system,
but the plan went awry when transit workers decided to back the
striking students and shut down the power supply. "The people
will win!" many exclaimed. Still, the presentiment of danger
always lurked, and several dozen people reportedly were injured
in clashes with police and troops. On one side of Beijing,
flatbed trucks were seen filled with soldiers armed with AK-47
assault rifles. As military helicopters, a rare sight in the
city, swooped overhead, people below looked up and shook their
fists. Any attempt to disperse the crowds and end the
demonstrations would seem to require massive firepower. The
protesters waited, one minute hoping that Deng would come to
his senses and call off the troops, the next minute dreading
that the command might be issued to clear the streets no matter
how much blood would be spilled.

    Split by factional strife and confronted by a clamorous,
hostile public, the Communist Party leadership faced its most
serious challenge in the state's 40-year existence. Every hour
seemed to bring a fresh rumor, especially after the government
ordered the restriction of China Central Television and the end
of foreign television transmissions. Deng remained very much in
charge, stripping power from Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party
leader who only days earlier had been host of a banquet for
Gorbachev. Premier Li Peng assumed control of the party as well
as the government, but the bond between the Chinese people and
their leaders snapped so violently last week that Li may end up
representing a constituency of three hard-liners: himself, Deng
and President Yang Shangkun.

    Seldom are glory and dread quite so thoroughly mingled for
so many. And seldom is history played out on such a grand
scale, minute by minute, before such an enormous global
audience. Though the drama had been building all week, the
countdown began early Saturday morning, after Li announced in
a televised speech that "we must end the turmoil swiftly" and
ordered troops into the city. While Li's raspy voice echoed from
Tiananmen Square's loudspeakers, sirens wailed and blue lights
flashed as an ambulance arrived to take away yet another
weakened hunger striker. A full moon, shrouded in mist, gleamed
above the Great Hall of the People. Some slept, some talked, and
all waited for what the new day would bring.

    But already the city of 10 million had begun to stir.
Supporters of the students banged pots and pans to wake
neighbors and send them into the streets with a mission: stop
the trucks and armored personnel carriers heading toward
Tiananmen, the vast square that has been the center stage of
Chinese politics for more than three centuries. Because troops
stationed in Beijing might not comply with orders out of
sympathy with the hunger strikers, the forces were drawn from
nearby provinces. Many of the soldiers were peasant boys who had
spent the previous week in camps outside the city. Forbidden to
read newspapers or watch television, they were not aware of how
much support the hunger strikers had attracted.

    They quickly learned. Residents swarmed around the military
vehicles, stopping them in their tracks. Sometimes they sat on
the hoods; sometimes they simply lined up before the convoys.
Often they covered the windows with glue and paper, and slashed
tires.

    Then they lectured the soldiers. "We are people and you are
people! Why do you have no feelings?" a demonstrator screamed.
"You should think about what you are doing," another exhorted
a truckful of soldiers. At the intersection of Gongzhufen, five
miles west of Tiananmen, thousands flooded around a convoy of
50 trucks, bringing food, water and pleas for the soldiers.
Urged a young woman: "The students are for the people. Please
don't hurt the students."

    Some vehicles backed up and departed, the soldiers flashing
victory signs. Other trucks, hundreds of them, just sat where
they were, blocked by thousands of protesters. On the faces of
some of the young troops, tears glistened.

    Then at 10 a.m. the government announced that all satellite
dishes operated by foreign television networks would be shut
off. Viewers around the world watched in amazement as the
minutes ticked by, concerned that as soon as the plug was
pulled, the crackdown would begin. By noon Saturday in Beijing,
all live broadcasts had ceased.

    In any country at any time, such a confrontation between
power and protest would be extraordinary. In China, a nation
whose tradition is suffused with respect for authority, last
week's outpouring of discontent was nothing short of
revolutionary. No major power in the postwar period has ever
been so rudely shaken -- rocked, in fact, to its foundation --
by the dissent of its populace. Still, on the faces of the
hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square and of their millions of
supporters around the country, the message was clear: China had
crossed a threshold into a new era, where the future was
entirely and terrifyingly up for grabs.

    The ouster of Zhao, who was rumored to be under house
arrest, was the most telling proof of a rift in the leadership
between conservatives and reformers. According to some sources,
Zhao offered to resign when his proposals to accommodate the
students were rejected by the Politburo Standing Committee, the
highest policymaking body of the Communist Party. Others in
Beijing claim that the party chief's fall, which could well
presage a purge of other liberal reformers, came partly because
of remarks he made during a remarkable predawn visit with Li to
the hunger strikers on Friday.

    The Premier left quickly, but Zhao stayed on. A proponent
of rapid economic reform, Zhao was well aware that his
predecessor, Hu Yaobang, supported political reform and was
sacked for not moving quickly enough to crush student
demonstrations more than two years ago. (Hu's death on April 15
sparked the first demonstrations of the past tumultuous month.)
But in Tiananmen, Zhao did not go out of his way to avoid Hu's
mistake. His eyes welling with tears, he acknowledged the
patriotism of the students. "I came too late, too late," a
student quoted him as saying. "I should be criticized by you."

    If Zhao's remarks to the students finally precipitated his
fall, they were apparently not the only reason. In his talk
with Gorbachev, telecast live to millions of Chinese on Tuesday,
Zhao told of a secret party agreement specifying that Deng,
though semiretired, was responsible for major party decisions.
The document, crafted in 1987, was a compromise that paved the
way for the retirement of a clutch of old party conservatives.
That disclosure got Zhao in trouble less because it was made to
the representative of an old enemy nation than because it
signaled to the viewing audience that resentment of the
government's treatment of the hunger strikers should be directed
at Deng. Zhao's effort to distance himself from the government
and Deng was, the Politburo apparently judged, inexcusable.

    Zhao's dismissal removed an obstacle to the coming
crackdown but did little to help the government restore order.
If anything, it probably widened the chasm between state and
society. Though Zhao was originally a protege of Deng's, his
popularity rose because the public knew he opposed suppressing
the demonstration. His eviction from power further alienated
those already hostile to the Communist Party. It also narrowed
the party's options for restoring order, making force seem
virtually the sole choice.

    The riotous bloom of people power, Chinese-style, that took
hold of Beijing last week began as a movement almost
exclusively of students. But in one of those extraordinarily
rare and historic occasions -- it was Karl Marx who gave such
moments the classic definition "revolutionary praxis" -- a kind
of instant solidarity appeared last Wednesday. It bound together
the disparate groups -- students, workers, professionals,
academics -- whose union China's leaders had long feared.

    When it happened, suddenly a million or more marchers were
streaming into Tiananmen, perhaps ten times as many as had been
there the day before. It was the largest demonstration in
modern Chinese history. People poured out of factories and
hospitals, the Foreign Ministry and kindergartens. And not just
in Beijing. By midweek the ferment had spread to at least a
dozen other cities, with another hunger strike taking place in
Shanghai. In some provincial cities, plans for a general strike
were reported.

    At times, Tiananmen looked like the site of a corporate
jamboree: supporters of the hunger strikers paraded around the
square, their placards and signs bobbing up and down,
proclaiming the presence of CAAC (China's civil airline), CITIC
(China's largest investment company) and PICC (people's
insurance company). Held aloft beside them were the ubiquitous
signs inscribed sheng yuan (support the students) or HUNGER
STRIKE -- NO TO DEEP-FRIED DEMOCRACY. Other signs had a
distinctly American provenance. I HAVE A DREAM, said one,
echoing Martin Luther King Jr. Another amended the words of
Patrick Henry: GIVE ME DEMOCRACY OR GIVE ME DEATH.

    Even if some of the demonstration's rhetoric was borrowed
from America, it was the Soviet Union and, more specifically,
Mikhail Gorbachev, whose presence counted more than any other.
Countless banners lauded PIONEER OF GLASNOST, while posters with
his portrait declared him AN EMISSARY OF DEMOCRACY.

    For Gorbachev, who came to Beijing in his guise of
Triumphant Conciliator, the demonstrations, which hailed his
other persona of Democratic Liberator, were something of an
embarrassment. The contrast with the treatment accorded Deng,
once recognized as a great economic reformer and the author of
China's recent prosperity, could not have been starker: huge
effigies were paraded around with placards saying DOWN WITH DENG
XIAOPING.

    Despite the palpable anger at the party leadership, the
spirit of much of the week-long demonstration was exuberant, as
though a long-silent nation had again found its voice. Acrobats
tumbled, children sang and banged drums, and musicians from both
the Central Philharmonic and a rock band performed to offer the
students "spiritual uplifting." A pack of close to 200 Beijing
motorcyclists, many of them getihu (private entrepreneurs),
roared along Changan Avenue, which leads into the square, their
girlfriends sitting behind them, clinging tightly.

    With spirits running so high and the crowds so thick, the
total absence of violence up until Saturday bordered on the
miraculous -- a testament to the skill of the demonstration's
young organizers. "This was not an explosion from nowhere. This
had been building for a long time," explains David Zweig, an
assistant professor of government at Tufts University's Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy. Even so, he adds, "it is remarkable
how unviolent it has been."

    Behind the street theater, though, a profound seriousness
pervaded Tiananmen, born of the knowledge that people were
prepared to die for democracy. Construction workers and medical
volunteers erected a makeshift clinic, using scaffolding and
canvas, as doctors and nurses ministered to the hunger strikers,
some of whom had sworn off water as well as food and were
wilting rapidly in the warm weather. The strikers were given
glucose solutions, intravenously or orally. When the weather
turned foul on Wednesday night, they were moved inside buses
that had been brought to Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Red
Cross.

    All along, the wail of sirens was the week's background
music, as ambulances ferried the sick to hospitals. Such
efficiency was another sign of the students' organizational
abilities: while central Beijing ground to a standstill because
of the crowds that thronged to the square, the demonstrators,
using packing string and their own bodies, cordoned off lanes
so the ambulances could always get through. Many hunger strikers
made the trip out; almost as many came back to resume their fast
once they felt well enough to do so.

    More than anything else, this drama of so many endangering
their lives for a common good triggered the vast outpouring of
solidarity from a people used to tending to their own.

    The forbidding gap between private lives and that distant
sense of a common ground was first bridged on April 26, when
150,000 people flooded the square to show disapproval of an
inflammatory People's Daily editorial that denounced the
students. "That was a major breakthrough in Chinese modern
history," says Roderick MacFarquahar, director of Harvard's
Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. It marked the "first
time since 1949 that a demonstration by society against the
state was made successfully in the face of a powerful
government."

    The achievement almost proved short-lived. As the number of
demonstrators in the square dwindled to nearly none, the
students decided to employ one of civil disobedience's most
sacred weapons, the hunger strike. With a large contingent of
foreign press on hand for the Gorbachev visit, the decision
seemed a brilliant public relations ploy. But the choice of
tactics also harked back to the sensibility of a much earlier
age.

    "The students have struck an ancient chord in Chinese
history," explains Thomas Bernstein, a China scholar and
chairman of Columbia University's political science department.
"It is the idea of the scholar-official who remonstrates with
the emperor about some evil in the kingdom that the ruler should
put right. The emperor won't listen, and the scholar-official
takes his own life as a witness, or sacrifice, to the higher
good." By casting themselves in the role of the
scholar-official, the students have become the bearers of that
tradition.

    All but eclipsed by the rebellion was the Sino-Soviet
summit, an event whose significance dropped to that of a sizable
footnote. What was intended as an elaborate celebration of
China's assured and independent standing and the Soviet Union's
new civility in the international arena became incidental
entertainment beside the pro-democracy demonstrations. Early on,
Mikhail Gorbachev quipped about his comeuppance. At a meeting
with President Yang, the Soviet President remarked, "Well, I
came to Beijing and you have a revolution!"

    He did not know how truly he had spoken. Although the
four-day visit became a botch of hurriedly changed venues, the
minuet of diplomacy went on within the whirlwind. Commented a
frustrated Soviet embassy official at the welcoming banquet for
Gorbachev on Monday: "Everything has gone smoothly today. The
only thing lacking was information about the time and location
of our meetings and whether they would take place on time or
ever."

    During a meeting on Tuesday with Zhao, Gorbachev remarked
offhandedly, "We also have hotheads who would like to renovate
socialism overnight." Well before leaving, though, he must have
been informed of the gravity of the situation by his staff,
since he was later more deferential to the students, carefully
pointing out that a "reasonable balance" had to be struck
between the enthusiasm of the young and the wisdom of the old.

    The talks went well, if not spectacularly. For Gorbachev,
the crucial tete-a-tete was with Deng, who had forced him to
wait three years for the meeting, a ploy in a cunning strategy
to further Chinese aims such as a reduction in Soviet armaments
and a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Their lunch Tuesday was
cordial and uneventful. The high point came when Deng upstaged
his visitor, the great upstager, by beating him to the historic
punch. Just as the press corps was about to file out of the room
where the two had met, Deng proclaimed, "Because the journalists
have not left us yet, we can publicly announce the normalization
of relations between our two countries." Thus ended, at least
officially, 30 years of antipathy, a period in which relations
were icy at best and at times threatened war between the two
Communist giants.

    The declaration was a fait accompli long before Gorbachev's
arrival in Beijing. Surprisingly, there were no further major
achievements. While Gorbachev vainly tried to keep up his Asian
charm offensive by spinning visions of joint industrial
projects and border links, the Chinese were preoccupied with the
ferment in Tiananmen. What had been billed as the 84-year-old
Deng's swan song became, instead of a moment of glory, an ordeal
of damage control. Hence, there was no breakthrough on Cambodia,
where there is an urgent need for a power-sharing arrangement
between the Soviet-backed Phnom Penh regime and the
Chinese-supported opposition coalition led by Prince Norodom
Sihanouk.

    If the summit achieved less for Gorbachev than he had
hoped, it did produce one fascinating intellectual exchange. In
his Tuesday-afternoon meeting with Zhao, Gorbachev reflected at
length on socialism and reform. The two seemed warmly disposed
to each other and sympathetic on matters of theory. They agreed
that democracy is compatible with a one-party system, provided
it exists in a state ruled by law. And they concurred that
thoroughgoing reform was the only answer to the disgruntlement
of dissenters. Zhao, so long chary of the subject of political
reform, ventured some fateful remarks on the topic. "Political
structural reform and economic structural reform should
basically be synchronized," said the Chinese leader. "It won't
do if one outstrips the other or if one lags behind the other."
The words, could they have heard them, might have made student
demonstrators cheer.

    At the heart of the Tiananmen spectacle were some troubling
questions: What exactly did the hunger strikers and their
supporters want? Did they even know?

    Several of their objectives are clear. One is a clean sweep
of China's rampant corruption. The demand seems straightforward
enough, but implied in it is an attack on what the protesters
see as the abuse of power by top party officials. Virtually all
of them have been accused of nepotism. Li Peng is viewed as a
beneficiary of nepotism since he was an orphan raised by Zhou
Enlai.

    Another demand is for a free press, which is largely
related to the drive against corruption. Investigative
journalism is regarded in China as the foremost tool for rooting
out corruption. Thus far, the government has confined
journalists to relatively small cases, protecting upper-level
party members. The value placed on a free press was underscored
by one of the most astonishing aspects of the demonstrations.
The ordinarily staid party organ, People's Daily, broke with
long-standing practice and reported fully on the protests before
Li announced a crackdown. Central China Television did so as
well, with one of its news anchors -- incredibly -- broadcasting
news of the student leaders' demand that Deng step down.

    Beyond these immediate wishes of the crowds, the picture
becomes fuzzy. Democracy, the rallying cry of the
demonstrators, is an ambiguous word. For some of the protesters,
who have no experience and little knowledge of democratic
practices in other countries, democracy meant the opposite of
everything associated with Communist Party rule. "They can't
enumerate concretely what they want," says a diplomat in
Beijing, describing the antigovernment movement as fundamentally
a "scream of the damned." As Grace, 19, a pig-tailed student who
spent Friday night in Tiananmen Square, put it, "We think
everything must change."

    The demands may be amorphous, but there can be no doubt
about the passion, as evidenced by the willingness of ordinary
people to obstruct tanks and of hunger strikers to court death.
If anything, the absence of an ideology with specific long-range
aims indicates just how powerful is the public revulsion at the
party and the entire status quo. The immediate reasons for the
discontent -- the government's condescending treatment of the
student demonstrators and its general repressiveness -- are
clear. But the anger also stems from the less political aspects
of everyday life. Economically and socially, China is
experiencing many of the dislocations that typify an era of
revolutionary change. The overall effect is one of widespread
frustration and rising expectations. "It is not always when
things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out,"
Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his study of the French
Revolution. More often, he added, people take up arms when an
oppressive regime that has been tolerated without protest for
a long period "suddenly relaxes its pressure."

    The assessment neatly fits the China of the past decade.
Since the much harsher repression of the Cultural Revolution
ended in 1976 and since Deng began his program of economic
reform in 1979, the country has become for many of its
inhabitants a more hospitable and prosperous place. Possibly the
most remarkable indicator of this is the 132.8% rise in per
capita income between 1978 and 1987. Meanwhile the economy
boomed at an average annual rate of almost 10%.

    Much of the trauma comes from the fact that the benefits
are rarely spread equitably. "There's a widespread feeling that
Chinese society has become unjust," says Stanley Rosen,
professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.
"The decisions as to who will do well seem arbitrary results of
government policy." Entrepreneurs and party officials profit
from the economic reforms, but office workers and intellectuals
do not. So while an individual's expectations are conditioned
by the prosperity he sees around him, that newfound affluence
is cruelly out of reach for many. TV, with its ubiquitous images
of the wealth that many enjoy beyond China's borders, has
deepened the dissatisfaction. The contrast is all the more
painful because, amid it all, corruption flourishes. Says Rosen:
"There's an ideological confusion. People feel leaders don't
know how to solve problems."

    What most hurts the average Chinese is an inflation rate of
around 30%. Expectations developed over years of growing
personal income have suddenly been sharply set back. Prosperity,
instead of being around the corner, looks out of reach. Such
economic dips happen frequently in history and rarely cause
revolutions. But almost all revolutions follow economic
downturns. France in 1778 entered a lengthy depression; the
tremendous damage done to the Russian economy by World War I
helped precipitate that country's revolution.

    Thus China's turmoil is not surprising in light of its
inhabitants' mounting frustrations. Nonetheless, true
revolutions, as opposed to coups or intermittent mass protests,
are extremely rare and all but unheard of in situations in which
the state wields so much force. Without a core of ideologically
inspired revolutionaries, without its own Jacobins, Bolsheviks
or even latter-day Long Marchers, China is unlikely to have a
full-scale revolution.

    Much, however, depends on the Beijing regime. Revolutions
are usually triggered by the intractability and violence of
governments, and the declaration of martial law showed that
Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng were prepared to crush the protests
with military force. Violence can, and often does, achieve its
aim of suppression. It can also galvanize an opposition and
make compromise unthinkable.

    Power, Mao Zedong famously sneered, grows out of the barrel
of a gun. But the preacher of Chinese Communism neglected to add
that the will to fire is a prerequisite when the target is not
intimidated by threats and when a society is prepared to resist
those with the guns by peaceful means. A week ago, certainly
two, the protests might have been extinguished with the number
of casualties usual for large demonstrations -- 20, 50, perhaps
several hundred deaths. Now, the government might have to kill
thousands before the protests would cease.

    The choice that faced China was between a serious erosion
or even collapse of government authority and a massacre in
Tiananmen Square. Deng and Li Peng would not risk anarchy, so
they called in the military, but at least initially were
hesitant to give it a free hand. That left it to the soldiers,
their trucks blocked by mobs of pleading countrymen, to ponder
another saying of Mao's: "Whoever suppresses the students will
come to no good end."


-- Sandra Burton and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing and John Kohan
with    Gorbachev