TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/051589/05158900.030

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 4KB | 65 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.