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