China We Will March!

Day after day, students in cities from Kunming to Shanghai to Peking marched through the streets waving banners vaguely demanding “freedom” and % “democracy.” And day after day the central government in Peking reacted with total silence, blacking out all news of the protests. Then, last week, the government finally decided how it would handle the largest outbreak of youthful unrest in China in a decade. When Peking finally spoke, its tone was at once threatening and conciliatory.

The students’ feelings about the need for more personal freedom were legitimate enough, declared a front-page commentary in the official party newspaper, the People’s Daily. Indeed, Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping had recently acknowledged that China’s “deep economic reform should be accompanied by corresponding political reform.” But, surely, continued the editorial, the students did not want to re-create the “anarchism” of the Cultural Revolution, when young people were mobilized to foment widespread turmoil. Anyone who tried to “obstruct the progress of the reform,” warned the People’s Daily, “would eventually eat bitter fruit.”

Less than 48 hours later, all public demonstrations were banned in Peking, as they had been a few days earlier in Shanghai. With that, the engine of student unrest began to sputter, though at week’s end thousands of students took to the streets of Nanjing to protest the government actions. The ongoing demonstrations presented the government with one of its toughest political tests in recent years. The question: Could the Deng regime keep its promise to tolerate the dissent and open debate that seemed to go hand in hand with its free-market economic policies? The answer: a resounding maybe. The Communist regime had waited weeks before moving to close down the student protests, but when it acted, it did so with a yin-and-yang-like merger of delicacy and firmness.

Each fall for the past several years, Chinese students have flexed their political muscle in scattered protests. In September 1985 several hundred Peking students marched to Tiananmen Square, ostensibly to protest Japan’s growing role in the Chinese economy, but also to attack corruption and nepotism among China’s ruling elite. This autumn, when student restiveness started up again, it was at first dismissed as the annual student itch. Not until the movement spread early last month to Shanghai (pop. 12 million), with its 200,000 university students and history as a hotbed of radical movements, did the government take notice. Explained a local citizen: “A demonstration in Changsha ((in Hunan province)) causes a tremor, but one in Shanghai causes a quake.” (

For five consecutive days beginning Dec. 19, up to 30,000 students marched through Shanghai’s narrow, bustling streets to People’s Square, a plaza surrounded by drab government office buildings. Phalanxes of mostly unarmed police stood by impassively as the angry students surged through the city, handing out leaflets and manifestos that opposed government “bureaucratism and authoritarianism” and shouting “Give us democracy and freedom!”

The protesters were a portrait of orderliness. Though some women were said to have been treated roughly and two cars were destroyed, such acts were widely attributed to liumangs, or rowdies. Just 100 yards from the tumult in People’s Square, couples strolled casually arm in arm and vendors hawked their wares. Not far from the besieged city hall, a sexagenarian jazz band at the elegant old Peace Hotel played a passable rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In.

Astonishingly, some local officials at first spoke approvingly of the antigovernment actions. “It is understandable that college students should be concerned about the restructuring of the political system and hope to express their views on this issue,” said a spokesman from the local education commission. But as the protests became increasingly disruptive, the attitude of Shanghai officials hardened. They finally outlawed further demonstrations on the grounds that they were blocking local traffic and preventing Shanghai residents from traveling to work. In Shanghai (and later Peking) the legal ban took the form of a new law requiring protesters to obtain a police permit, which authorities can arbitrarily deny if they deem public order is threatened. The students were officially chastised for “inadequate understanding of the actual situation of our country’s reforms and a muddled view of how to correctly exercise democratic rights.”

Nonetheless, several thousand students staged a raucous confrontation with Shanghai authorities. When an official told them to “calm down” and go back to classes, they broke into a chant: “We will march. We will march.” Instead of taking to the streets, however, most succumbed to pressures from school officials or their parents and hit the books. Reason: exams are scheduled for early January.

As the Shanghai protests quieted, students from Peking quickly picked up the chant. Several thousand of the best and brightest from Peking and Qinghua universities took to the streets in support of their fellows in Shanghai. A ; main complaint: they were unable to get information about the Shanghai protests because of the news blackout. “It is ridiculous that we have to learn what’s happening in our country through the foreign press,” said one student, referring to the Voice of America broadcasts that were a key source of information. “This is not democracy.”

By the time the Peking protests ended, a government-controlled media blitz was under way. Television, radio and newspapers hammered away at variations on a theme: while the students might have a well-meaning desire for more democracy, they should desist from actions that threatened the country’s “stability and unity.” More than once the specter of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was raised. The reign of the Red Guards, said the People’s Daily, was characterized by “unprecedented turmoil and calamity, and those who suffered most were precisely the younger generation.” Said a 38- year-old civil servant: “Linking the demos to the Cultural Revolution could stymie the movement for a long while. Nobody wants a repeat of the Cultural Revolution.”

Observers saw a close relationship between the students’ call for democracy and the sluggish pace of Deng’s economic reforms. The experiment is aimed at spurring productivity and raising efficiency by taking power from the bureaucrats and giving it to the peasants and local plant managers. The urban phase of the program, which began in late 1984, has raised overall productivity impressively, but has lately begun to falter. Just two weeks ago the government reported that industrial production costs are up and profits are declining. Deng’s lieutenants blame the foot-dragging on entrenched, stubborn and sometimes powerful mid-level bureaucrats. Officials in Peking, led by Deng, have therefore emphasized the need for public criticism of recalcitrant factory managers, government workers and other officials.

Some students have expressed frustration at the slowness of such political reforms. But their demands frequently seemed to reflect a breezy assumption that Western-style democracy could be grafted painlessly onto Deng’s bold economic experiment. Indeed, foreign reporters covering the demonstrations in Shanghai were sometimes cheered and applauded by the crowd. Said one student: “We simply want to have the freedom to do what we want.” A medical student said his idea of democracy was “freedom of expression, freedom of the press, publication and association.” At one confrontation between Shanghai students and the city’s reform-oriented mayor, Jiang Zemin, a student asked rhetorically, “Did we the people elect you our mayor?” Jiang was, of course, appointed by authorities in Peking.

Such idealism would not normally engage ordinary workers, but the protests have worsened dislocations created by Deng’s economic reforms. In Shanghai, Peking and other Chinese cities, reports have circulated of panic buying and hoarding in anticipation of price increases that are part of the government’s deregulation program. Noodles, rice, toilet paper and matches are said to be out of stock in many stores. Declared a Peking intellectual: “The ordinary masses might not be able to relate to calls for democracy, but they sure would take to the pavement if the issue turns to price increases.”

In the past the Deng government has been able to suppress student unrest with a minimum of violence by using the worst threat at its disposal: assignment upon graduation to an uninteresting job in a remote location. But as the last month’s events have suggested, some seem willing to risk even a promising future. “Somebody has to do it,” says a recent Peking University graduate. “The fate of the country is at stake.” The demonstrations, he added, “will eventually be viewed as a boon to history because they are keeping our leaders on their toes, forcing them to speed up the modernization and democratization process.”

Peking faces a particularly dangerous dilemma. The more “democracy” it allows the students, the more they will continue to demand. But the more their “freedom” is abridged, the more inevitable will further protests become. Unless Deng and his colleagues play their hand with exquisite skill, the result could be just the kind of harsh crackdown they desperately fear and seek to avoid.