TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062689/06268900.036

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.2 KB | 214 lines

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                                                            WORLD, Page 32

CHINA

Deng's Big Lie


The hard-liners rewrite history to justify arrests and bury
democracy

By Jill Smolowe


    NEWS BULLETIN: the bloodiest urban massacre in Communist
China's history never took place. Thousands of troops never stormed
the perimeters of Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, probably thousands,
of students never died. Photographs depicting bloodied faces and
battered bodies, news footage documenting the clatter of gunfire
and the crunch of army tanks, foreign press reports detailing the
pileup of dead and wounded bodies at hospitals -- none of it
happened.

    Instead, what transpired was this: as army convoys moved toward
Tiananmen in the early-morning hours of June 4, troops were
viciously attacked by rioters brandishing fire bombs and guns
financed by "overseas reactionary political forces." The reluctant
soldiers exercised maximum self-restraint, but were finally
compelled to open fire. Even then, General Li Zhiyun insisted last
week at a press conference, "it never happened that soldiers fired
directly at the people." In the end, nearly 100 soldiers and
policemen were killed putting down the "counterrevolutionaries."
Civilian casualties totaled no more than 100 dead, perhaps a
thousand wounded. That's the official story.

    Can it really be that easy? Can memory be so short? Can history
be rewritten by proclamation of the Beijing Communist Party
propaganda department? Eerily, China's top leaders apparently
believe that if they repeat the lie enough times, it will turn into
truth. More chilling still, Chinese citizens outside the capital,
with little access to independent information, seemed to accept the
government's sanitized version of events. Perhaps they are relieved
to be no longer teetering on the brink of civil war. Perhaps they
find a military occupation, 1,000 arrests and a revision of history
a small price to pay for restoration of order. Perhaps, suggests
a university professor in Shanghai, "the truth is too painful to
accept."

    It is the sheer enormity of the untruth, however, that is so
stunning. Certainly there is nothing subtle about the Chinese
leadership's tactics. Tell the lie again and again. Broadcast mug
shots of wanted "hooligans." Lionize citizens who cooperate by
ratting on alleged culprits. Parade arrested students before
cameras, their heads shaved and bowed, their wrists cuffed, signs
detailing their crimes strapped around their necks. Hour after
hour, run their "confessions" of wrongdoing on national television.
Construct a new reality, one that checks democratic aspirations by
preying on fear and paranoia. The result? "A week ago we were free
to say anything," says a university professor. "Now I suspect
everybody."

    The breathtaking lie is manipulated by officials with the
doggedness of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. A long-haired man is
marched before Chinese television cameras, looking dejected.
Viewers have just been told that two vigilant women in Dalian, east
of Beijing, spotted the errant man buying cigarettes and informed
authorities, who then arrested him. His crime? "Rumormongering."
His deed? Appearing in pirated American television footage
estimating casualties in the Tiananmen massacre at up to 20,000
people. "I am a counterrevolutionary," the man now says. "I admit
my crime."

    Authorities made clear that the testimony of strangers is not
enough. It is a citizen's duty to betray his own kith and kin. The
Zhou clan, willingly or by coercion, did its duty. Zhou Fengsuo,
22, a physics student at Qinghua University in Beijing, was among
the 21 student leaders named by officials last Tuesday as the
country's most-wanted criminals. The next night on television, Zhou
was shown being led into a police station for interrogation. The
scene then shifted to the home of Zhou Yanrong, the student's
sister. Dandling a baby on her lap, her husband at her side, the
woman explained that after seeing the wanted notices for her
brother, she contacted security officials.

    If a witch-hunt is required to make scoundrels of the student
heroes, then a campaign of glorification is required to make heroes
of the army scoundrels. Over and over, Chinese television replays
shots of soldiers cleaning the streets and distributing food
supplies. China's leaders troop through the hospitals visiting
wounded soldiers. "You have done an excellent job," an official
tells troops in Beijing.

    In Beijing, where most of the carnage took place, citizens are
not yet foolish enough -- or desperate enough -- to buy the
government's line. But they are toeing it, as a sullen normality
descends on the city. Although most of the tanks are gone, the
streets still teem with helmeted soldiers, AK-47s poised at their
sides. The handwritten broadsheets that served as a free press have
been peeled from walls, but perhaps some cyclists are heartened as
they spot one last declaration chalked on the Forbidden City: THE
FASCIST GOVERNMENT OPPRESSES THE ENTIRE PEOPLE OF THE COUNTRY. It
is impossible to know what the people are thinking; they have
lapsed into silence.

    The government's efforts to bury the shattered remains of the
democracy movement and to provide a justification for the brutal
military suppression near Tiananmen Square play far better outside
the capital. There memories of the dunce caps, denunciations and
deaths of the Cultural Revolution may be more vivid than the fuzzy
reports of recent events in Beijing. Even in Shanghai, China's
largest city and a hotbed of pro-democracy activity just two weeks
ago, the spy-on-your-neighbor campaign is having the intended
effect. Says a Shanghai cabdriver: "Bad elements took over the
student movement. The army bravely carried out its duties."

    Local authorities are having no problem recruiting thousands
of neighborhood informants and auxiliary police to revive the once
pervasive system of spying. Last Monday evening, when an ABC news
crew went into a private home to film a family watching Chinese
television reports, a neighbor notified the local police. Within
minutes, security officials rounded up the journalists and detained
them for two hours. The next day the crew's correspondent and
producer left Shanghai after warnings that covering the news
without permission was "dangerous."

    The real danger, however, was that foreign press crews might
continue to disseminate truthful information, blackening the
Chinese government's careful whitewash. At midweek officials
charged two American correspondents, Alan Pessin of the Voice of
America and John Pomfret of the Associated Press, with violating
martial-law restrictions, and gave them 72 hours to leave China.

    The expulsion of Pessin was particularly telling, since the VOA
is an arm of the U.S. Government and its broadcasts played a key
role in keeping millions apprised of developments in Tiananmen
Square. Pessin was charged with distorting facts and stirring
turmoil. Many interpreted the harsh charges as a deliberate whack
at the Bush Administration. For now, China's leaders portray the
U.S. as a meddler, but there are hints that China might yet find
Washington a convenient scapegoat to shoulder a larger
responsibility for the student strife.

    The Bush Administration responded to the expulsions with
indignation. "Actions such as these," said White House spokesman
Marlin Fitzwater, "will not succeed in keeping the truth about what
is going on in China from being heard in that troubled land or
throughout the world."

    Washington continued to thwart China's efforts to silence two
prominent dissenting voices, those of astrophysicist Fang Lizhi
and his wife Li Shuxian. Consultations between Secretary of State
James Baker and Han Xu, Ambassador to the U.S., failed to resolve
the wrangle over Fang and Li, who have taken refuge in the U.S.
embassy in Beijing. Baker suggested that the couple be sent to a
third country. At week's end China had not responded.

    The fate of the Fangs plainly rankles Chinese officials. Almost
a week after the couple took refuge, the government issued arrest
warrants charging them with treasonable offenses. Foreign observers
did not rule out a violent attack on the embassy to retrieve the
couple; a week earlier, Chinese troops sealed off one of the
compounds where foreigners live to search for someone, perhaps
Fang.

    Meanwhile, unconfirmed rumors circulated that the Australian
embassy in Beijing was harboring one of the 21 sought student
activists, Chai Ling. A psychology student at Beijing Normal
University, Chai, 22, managed to smuggle out of China a 40-minute
tape-recorded message recounting the terrible hours before and
after the assault on the square. "Please think, these youthful
children, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, sitting quietly
beneath the monument (to the People's Heroes), saw (the) murderer
with their own eyes," her message says. "We are still alive. But
many more remain in the square and in Changan Avenue. They'll never
come back. Never."

    It is unlikely that Chai's poignant appeal will ever reach a
Chinese audience. As authorities sought to curb the reporting of
foreign journalists, officials were also clamping down by
surveilling material sent into China by fax machines. Imported
newspapers are growing scarce, as customs officers at international
airports use their X-ray scanners to ferret out all forms of
printed matter.

    Much as they would like to, however, Beijing's leaders cannot
curtail the flow of information beyond China's borders. They know
their campaign of intimidation is not playing well in the West,
where present and future investors are gauging the viability of
continued relations with China. All last week the Chinese press
carried upbeat articles intended to reassure foreign businessmen.
"Many foreigners with foresight have invested a great deal in China
over the past and have got considerable profit," said Foreign Trade
Minister Zheng Tuobin.

    Such statements cannot disguise the hemorrhage of tourist and
investment dollars. Hotels averaged only 30% occupancy last week,
and seven temporarily closed their doors. More important for
China's economic outlook, international organizations were
reassessing their involvement. The World Bank is reconsidering more
than $700 million in new loans that were scheduled for delivery to
China by the end of the year.

    Caught between the need to reassure the outside world and
intimidate citizens at home, China's aging leaders are still
groping for a way out of the political morass. The desire to grind
out all traces of the democracy movement takes precedence. A court
in Shanghai accused three people of burning a train that ran over
a human barricade, and quickly sentenced them to death. The harsh
actions open the door to a wave of execution orders. Such a move
would be tragic for China's psychic well-being and potentially
fatal for its economic health, and it was unthinkable just a few
weeks ago. But if China's leaders can get away with rewriting so
recent a past, what is to stop them from scripting any future they
choose?


-- David Aikman/Beijing and Richard Hornik/Shanghai