Let a Hundred Flowers Wilt

By Richard Bernstein/Peking

After allowing stirrings of protest, the government turns tough

The charges ring disturbingly of the past: "Brazenly opposing the party's leadership, deviating from the orbit of socialism, desiring and envying the decadent, bourgeois way of life in the West." These and similar superheated phrases appearing in the Chinese press these days recall the years when the late Mao Tse-tung carried out his frenzied and reckless campaigns for ideological purity in China. Though the more moderate post-Mao leadership in Peking had repeatedly promised not to resume such repression, the official press has recently bristled with attacks on people who are said to hold "corrosive, erroneous ideas" and to fan "aimless, evil winds." Having lived through the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 and other waves of terror against individualism, many Chinese are bracing themselves for a new political campaign designed to impose obedience to the Communist Party's dictates.

It was Deputy Party Chairman Deng Xiaoping, China's most powerful leader, who had permitted a modicum of dissent in the late 1970s, much as Mao had launched his shortlived "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom" movement in 1957. Now Deng too has had second thoughts about the first faint burgeonings of freedom he inspired. Lately Deng has complained that the relative relaxation of recent years has led to a host of "unhealthy tendencies," most notably in literature and art. The press has referred darkly to the emergence of an artistic "counterculture" and complained of stories and plays that "propagate pessimism, nihilism and ultraindividualism," meaning in Deng's words, "opposition to the leadership of the party." In the spring, Bai Hua, a well-known writer, was viciously attacked by the Liberation Army Daily for a screenplay called Bitter Love that, the paper charged, showed "hatred for our party and our socialist motherland." More ominously, say Chinese sources, Deng has named at least ten writers who will be singled out in the months ahead as targets of a national campaign of "criticism and self-criticism."

Even Chinese leaders, like Deng himself, have stressed that the current campaign will produce nothing like the sweeping repression of the past, when tens of thousands were indiscriminately shipped off to labor camps or killed. Nor does it seem that China's leaders are preparing to impose anything like the absolute uniformity in literature and art that was ordained during the Cultural Revolution. But the new crackdown has had a dampening effect on many writers and artists who had been hoping that the government would allow ever greater degrees of free expression.

The repression began early this year when the Communist Party embarked on a no-nonsense effort to crush the stubborn remains of the "democracy movement" that had flourished in 1978 and 1979. Most of the activities, particularly putting up posters on Peking's "democracy wall," had already been banned by the party in 1980. Several of the liberals' most articulate spokesmen were arrested that year, including Liu Qing, deputy editor of the most widely circulated underground journal, April 5th Forum.

This year China's leaders set out to stamp out the more than 50 small underground journals that had blossomed during the movement's headier days. Though the journals were crudely mimeographed publications with readerships of at most a few hundred each, they were formally banned by the Party Central Committee in February. "The conservatives in the military and in the security apparatus just couldn't stand the underground papers," says one diplomat who is based in Peking. "They were determined to eradicate the dissident movement once and for all and, in this, they have been pretty successful."

The result has been a series of arrests, mostly of underground editors who had persisted in publishing. One such paper was Responsibility, published by the rather grandly titled National Federation of Unofficial Publications. When a group of ten federation members from various cities assembled in Peking last April to discuss strategy, they were nabbed by police. Among the seized was Xu Wenli, 36, a railway electrician who had edited the April 5th Forum and was one of the democracy movement's most articulate spokesmen. Neither Xu nor any of the others has been seen or heard from. In the weeks that followed that roundup, provincial police swept down on various other editors outside Peking, putting an estimated 50 of them into custody. The government has continued to arrest other activists.

In recent months there have been few new arrests, but the general mood of the government is hardly one of tolerance. The party leadership embarked on a series of programs that are menacing reminders of the dangers of departing from ideological orthodoxy. For example, after a long period of neglect, political study sessions have once again become mandatory in schools, offices and factories. This month foreign correspondents in Peking were warned by a high-ranking official in the Foreign Ministry against giving favorable coverage to dissidents.

Much of this new stress on ideology and discipline has puzzled analysts who expected a period of relaxation to follow the harsh crackdown earlier this year. One possible explanation for the campaign is the leaders' concern that any slackness could produce the kind of discontent that erupted during the heyday of the democracy movement of 1978-1979. Another explanation postulates a political compromise between Deng and more conservative law-and-order forces within the party. Some analysts speculate that Deng wants to show party hard-liners he is not soft on dissent so they will go along with his ideological heresy of allowing greater participation by foreign capitalists in the country's economy and his effort to weed out old, incompetent Maoists from the bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the country's disappointed artists and intellectuals will have to wait for better times to come. They will scarcely be encouraged by reading China's new constitution, which guarantees the right of free speech, of publication and of assembly--all freedoms that have been victims of the regime's new tough policies.-- By RIchard Bernstein/Peking

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