TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).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

China

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