TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061989/06198900.041

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                                                                                COMMUNISM, Page 18

CHINA

The Wrath of Deng


The old men emerge on top, but their compact with the people is
shattered

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan


    Surely this way madness lies. Having suffered through the
massacre of thousands, China continued to lose its mind,
lurching from question to question, contradiction to
contradiction, sorrow to sorrow. Who was in charge? Would
soldiers of the People's Liberation Army fight one another? Had
the yearning for political change been snuffed out or merely
suspended? What next for an anguished nation of 1.1 billion?

    China last week was not the China of freedom banners and
victory signs. That China perished on June 4. The new China
brutally rejected the demands for change that are sweeping the
Communist world. But in ordering the bloody suppression of the
democracy movement, the government lost much of its authority,
leaving itself isolated and condemned at home and abroad. There
are even fears that Chinese Communism may be reaching backward
for a discredited tool. Warned a Western diplomat: "Everything
that has gone on has been preparation for Stalinist terror. Deng
Xiaoping is an old Communist who believes that when you don't
observe party discipline, you are dead."

    Yet, after days of invisibility, as Deng and his
conservative supporters, appropriately clad in Mao suits,
paraded across the television screen to show their grip on power
late last week, the contradictions -- and the questions --
remained. For the time being, the old men seemed to be in
control again. But for how long? If the Chinese were being cowed
into submission, a long-standing compact between them and their
government had been broken. Tiananmen Square and Beijing might
belong to the P.L.A., but the struggle for control of China is
far from over.

    That did not appear to matter in the red-walled Zhongnanhai
compound, where China's leaders live and work. The dead
apparently did not matter either to the aging revolutionaries
who came to power by force 40 years ago -- and used force to
keep it. Reason itself did not seem to matter. The government
that once trumpeted the need to "seek truth from facts"
manufactures facts to buttress lies.

    In the days after the Tiananmen massacre, government organs
pressed a surreal drive to mislead the country about what had
happened. Most of the victims of what they described as a
battle against "counterrevolutionary insurgents" were soldiers,
claimed a government spokesman, who placed among the dead a few
hundred troops and only 23 students. Hours later, those figures
were revised again and turned into impossibly good news by a man
in military uniform on state television. Said the officer: "Not
one person died in the square." Late last week state radio was
even claiming that no soldiers opened fire in Tiananmen.

    The truth was different, and Beijing knew it. An estimated
5,000 citizens died in only a few hours between Saturday night
and Sunday morning after units of the P.L.A.'s 27th Army
launched their brutal assault to oust pro-democracy students
from Tiananmen; the exact number of victims may never be known.

    From June 4 to June 8, as the leadership was enveloped in
an unseen struggle for power, the world searched for signs of
reason amid the turmoil. The country's rulers finally began to
re-emerge, but not reason and not humanity. First came Premier
Li Peng, 60, the front man for the regime's hard-line faction,
giving the lie to rumors that he had suffered a gunshot wound.
On TV he praised the soldiers who had killed and maimed to wrest
the capital from the demonstrators. "Comrades, you must be
exhausted," Li said. "Thank you for your hard work."

    At about the same time, the government issued harsh
martial-law decrees ordering leaders of the prodemocracy
movement, "important figures who incited and organized this
counterrevolutionary insurrection in the capital," to turn
themselves in for "lenient treatment." The decrees set up a
spy-and-report network, complete with 18 telephone hot lines,
so that citizens could help round up dissidents. Fearful of
arrest, student leaders who had survived the carnage went
underground or fled the city. The astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, a
leading dissident who was prevented by the government from
dining with George Bush during the President's visit last
February, sought refuge in the U.S. embassy; the presence of the
"traitor" there provoked Chinese complaints of American
meddling.

    The next day Deng, 84, China's supreme ruler for the past
decade, made his first appearance on television in nearly a
month. At his side were Li and a host of top leaders and party
elders, as well as representatives of all key factions in the
military, including those who had been considered loyal to party
moderates. Present too were President Yang Shangkun, 82, a
former army general and the reputed mastermind of the Tiananmen
attack, and Qiao Shi, 64, the state security chief who may
become General Secretary of the Communist Party. Conspicuously
missing was the incumbent in that post, the moderate Zhao
Ziyang, whose whereabouts have remained unknown since late last
month, when he held sympathetic talks with student
representatives in Tiananmen. The officials applauded as Deng
hailed the soldiers. "Facing a life-threatening situation," he
said, "our troops never forgot the people, never forgot the
party, never forgot the country's interest." He had condolences
for the families of soldiers killed during the upheaval but not
a word for the victims in the protesters' ranks.

    By then the arrests had started. All over Beijing, Chinese
who had Western friends began to disappear, either into hiding
or, in increasing numbers, into jails. In one incident opposite
the foreign-community compound of Qijiayuan, some 30 Chinese
were taken in by security forces. In another part of town, 28
more were led away. "It is the night of the long knives," said
a Western diplomat. The total in custody at week's end: 400.

    The government's lurch backward to the thuggish practices
of the Cultural Revolution may be the only way it knows to deal
with another kind of madness: popular anger. At the time of the
massacre, many citizens were so incensed that the P.L.A. was
being used against the people that they ambushed stray groups
of soldiers with fire bombs, bricks, clubs, even bare hands.
Later, outgunned and powerless, the resistance turned to words.
In the shadow of the Beijing Hotel, a young man spotted a
military helicopter hovering over Tiananmen and wrathfully
wished destruction on it. "Fall down!" he cried. "Fall down!"
Across the square, a worker stared angrily at a group of
soldiers and muttered, "So many died, but not in vain. It's not
over yet, just you wait. We'll get you in due time."

    Other vengeful visions proved illusory. When units of the
38th Army, a contingent normally based in Baoding, rolled into
the city three days after the Tiananmen bloodletting, residents
cheered them on, hoping they would drive out the hated 27th.
"Let it be blood for blood!" shouted bystanders. But the 38th
Army supported the 27th and martial rule.

    After a decade of reform that the Chinese had hoped would
lead to steady economic and social progress, why had chaos and
barbarity suddenly descended on Beijing? No answer had meaning
for long. Even as Li and Yang appeared at Deng's side,
speculation was rife that the Premier and the chief of state
were dispensable. Rumors about Deng's frail health were not
resolved by his appearance on television: his left hand
trembled, his face was puffy, his eyes ringed with dark circles.
But as he spoke, his words grew in coherency and exuded
authority. At one point, he dismissed an unwanted bit of
prompting from Li with a withering look.

    As the week wore on, it appeared that whatever power Deng
and his colleagues held came from the guns of the P.L.A.
Intelligence specialists believe the army has played a role not
only in securing the capital but also in preparing for further
repression. One possible goal: to scare off prying foreigners.

    Constant and mysterious military movements stirred
confusion and alarm. Tank convoys rumbled to the east, away from
Tiananmen, only to return a few hours later. Armored vehicles
were deployed at a strategic cloverleaf east of the square, as
if awaiting attack by another military force. Rumors of
skirmishes, even artillery duels between the "bad" 27th Army and
the "good soldiers" of the 38th Army, fluttered through the
capital. With fear of an armed confrontation rampant, foreign
governments ordered the evacuation of their nationals. Beijing
airport was packed with diplomats, tourists and businessmen
waiting for tickets and specially chartered planes to leave a
capital seemingly under siege.

    Furthermore, soldiers on trucks careened through the
diplomatic quarter, shouting "Go home! Go home!" Yet others
sprayed bullets into the walls and windows of Jianguomenwai, a
compound occupied by foreigners. One diplomatic analyst is
convinced that under the cover of random gunfire, military
snipers were deliberately shooting up apartments inhabited by
diplomats who had the previous night disrupted what appeared to
be preparations for a surreptitious execution of young Chinese
men. "What they did in the foreign compound," said this
intelligence expert, "was to attempt to drive out every foreign
eye so they can go about their executions." Western
photographers and television crews have been roughed up.

    In fact, the expected confrontation between military
factions never materialized. By the end of the week, 27th Army
soldiers who had participated in the Tiananmen assault had
decamped and were replaced by fresh troops from other regiments
unconnected with the massacre. Only hours after Deng's
appearance on TV, long columns of armor left the city. The
military maneuvers served mainly to camouflage a deep political
conflict. The massacre at Tiananmen may have been just a violent
stage in the ongoing struggle of succession, not unlike the
turmoil that has occurred throughout Chinese history whenever
a dynasty waned.

    For the past several years the Communist Party has been
facing the question of who will ultimately replace Deng. He
complicated the problem by purging his own chosen heir, the
reform-minded party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, who was
relieved of his job in 1987 for not quickly crushing student
demonstrations. Hu's replacement as designated successor was
Zhao, who now appears to have also fallen victim to Deng's
displeasure.

    Throughout his years in power, Deng balanced moderate vs.
hard-line factions in every organ of the state -- the party,
the government, the military. The result was paralysis:
important decisions were frequently avoided or ignored. Deng
remained the ultimate arbiter, but hobbled by age and his
penchant for toughing out dilemmas, he increasingly played off
would-be successors against one another, letting their
disagreements fester into bureaucratic skirmishing.

    The death of Hu last April precipitated a crisis. When
expressions of grief sparked in Tiananmen the demands for
greater democracy, differences between the factions left the
leadership impotent to take a united stand on how to cope with
an unprecedented event. As the leaders dithered, the protest
swelled.

    The students' modest calls for more democracy and less
corruption not only confronted the leadership with fundamental
questions about China's future direction but also created an
opening for political jockeying. According to one theory, Zhao,
69, the leader reputedly most willing to adopt more open
politics, took advantage of the situation to ask for greater
authority. From Deng, Zhao reportedly sought the power to grant
some of the students' demands. Sensing an attempt at a power
play, Deng refused.

    An internal document leaked through Hong Kong claims Deng
then demanded action and the suppression of all perceived
threats to the party's central authority -- namely himself. In
spite of Zhao's refusal to support the imposition of martial law
in Beijing, Deng pressed ahead with plans for military rule with
Premier Li and President Yang.

    Yang turned to the 27th Army, normally based in
Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, and largely composed of
ill-educated peasant conscripts with no ties to Beijing, for the
harsh job of clearing Tiananmen. The President has personal
links to the 27th through his brother Yang Baibing, who is top
political commissar of the P.L.A., and Chief of Staff Chi
Haotian, said to be another relative.

    But what may have been planned only as a show of force
turned into a bloodbath. Soon armed soldiers and unarmed
protesters were locked in furious combat. Ruan Ming, a former
lecturer on Marxism at Beijing's Communist Party School, argues
that a propaganda blitz mounted by the government last week to
justify the Tiananmen sweep was an attempt to "salvage the
situation and save face."

    As architects of the debacle, Li and Yang could eventually
prove liabilities to Deng, and he might have to jettison them.
An alternative could be provided by Qiao Shi, an unfamiliar
Politburo member, who emerged as a rising star after a telegram
from the Supreme Court congratulated him for his support of the
military crackdown.

    Little is known about Qiao, but he is thought to be one of
the more politically agile members in the party elite. In the
days leading up to the crisis, he reportedly abstained from a
crucial vote when the party was paralyzed over how to act on the
student protests. That demonstration of neutrality may have made
him acceptable as a compromise leader to all sides. "He is a
very shrewd man," says Ruan. "He was elevated to the Politburo
by Hu Yaobang. But when Hu was ousted, Qiao acted against his
former mentor and sided with Deng."

    Yet the problem for Li, Yang, Qiao or anyone else trying to
rule China in the post-Tiananmen era is not more street
protests. In the few days after the massacre, demonstrations and
strikes did erupt in several key cities -- from Shenyang in
Manchuria to central Wuhan to southern Guangzhou. Students and
workers set up barricades in Shanghai, China's largest city and
economic hub, and paralyzed the public transportation system.
But the activism soon petered out. Protest rallies shrank from
the ten thousands to the tens. On Shanghai campuses, student
associations dissolved. With the crackdown officially under way,
the vast majority of people -- even in the once radical Shanghai
-- have been frightened into nervous silence.

    Putting down dissent through repression and propaganda is
one thing; finding the road toward political and economic
recovery quite another. In Beijing, much of the public
transportation system has been destroyed or damaged. Losses to
the national economy are estimated in the hundreds of millions
of dollars. Japan, China's largest foreign-aid donor, has
announced a halt in negotiations for a $120 million loan for an
oil project. The U.S. and Britain have suspended all public and
private arms sales to China for the foreseeable future: the
P.L.A. alone needs to replace more than 300 vehicles smashed or
burned in the taking of the square.

    Despite the government's assurances that it will continue
to keep its doors open to the outside world, foreign trade --
$82.6 billion in 1988 -- can be expected to slide steeply in the
next few months. Though China may want to trade, will anyone
want to trade with China? As foreigners have fled the country,
joint ventures with Western and Japanese firms are frozen. Even
before the protests erupted, inflation, corruption and
unemployment had put a brake on progress; hesitation by
outsiders to invest in China will only exacerbate these
problems. Said a senior British diplomat: "First, there is the
revulsion factor in the wake of the bloodbath that will keep a
lot of Westerners away. Second, there is the question of
confidence. Deng built that up, and now it lies destroyed. No
one is willing to invest unless there is reasonable assurance
of stability. Restoring international confidence will be one of
the leadership's toughest tasks."

    The task may be impossible without a wholesale change in
the leadership, which is not likely soon. Deng was deservedly
admired for having navigated China toward economic
modernization, but his achievement is tainted by the blood of
the demonstrators killed in Beijing. The aged conservative
revolutionaries surrounding him are out of touch with a
population whose majority is under 40 years of age. The P.L.A.,
contrary to its popular repute, has shown itself to be the
regime's, not the people's, army. Said a senior British diplomat
last week: "There is not a single institution that has not been
besmirched in these past weeks." The threat of civil war has not
entirely vanished -- if only as a psychological rather than an
actual battle. The students' calls for democracy had
unparalleled national support, which may have gone underground
but will not go away. Perhaps 300,000 troops are still encamped
around the capital. The Communist Party leadership is distrusted
by large numbers of its own people. The men at the top have been
condemned by the outside world as the enemies of the people.

    Elsewhere in the Communist world, leaders like Mikhail
Gorbachev and Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski are trying to break
old patterns by channeling unrest and rising expectations into
a limited evolution toward more democracy. China's old men seem
to have missed the message -- and sacrificed much to their
desire to retain absolute power. Forced to choose between
accommodating change and maintaining the regime, they chose
tyranny.


-- David Aikman, Sandra Burton and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing
and Richard Hornik/Shanghai