China: State of Siege

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.”