China

By William R. Doerner

On most holidays, Peking's Tiananmen Square is jammed with thousands of residents and visitors who traditionally promenade through the 100-acre open area and photograph one another in front of the surrounding monuments. But on New Year's Day, revelers arriving at the huge square found it virtually blocked off by hundreds of police standing at rigid attention. "What's happening?" asked one perplexed out-of-towner. "Any foreign dignitaries arriving?" That was hardly the cause for the show of force. Within hours, despite the police, the historic site was aswarm with protesting students, singing and chanting slogans. It was the largest illegal demonstration in the Chinese capital since the suppression of the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79 -- and a stinging reminder that the student unrest born in early December had far from run its course.

Just as wall posters at Peking University had urged, at about noon some 300 students collected on one side of the square. The assemblage was blatantly unlawful. The students had not only failed to comply with the recently imposed statute requiring them to register any demonstration five days in advance but also ignored a specific prohibition against holding such events in Tiananmen Square. As holiday strollers watched from behind police barricades, the students unfurled a dozen posters and banners calling for democracy and declaring support for the economic reforms introduced by Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping. Seemingly unaware that their actions might instead serve to undermine Deng, they locked arms in a column eight abreast and began marching away from Tiananmen. Then, abruptly, the phalanx of students turned and surged back toward the square.

As they broke through police lines, hundreds of onlookers also burst into the square. Moving swiftly to stop the marchers, the besieged officers isolated several of those at the head of the column and roughly shoved the others back behind the police cordon. Several of the front marchers were manhandled and pinned to the ground. Within minutes police had dragged the arrested students to waiting vans and whisked them off to a nearby detention center.

It was the first time in the current wave of protests that the authorities had arrested students. Reaction from their campus compatriots was not long in coming. Thursday evening, some 3,000 students gathered in front of the home of Peking University President Ding Shisun, demanding that he intercede on behalf of the detainees, who they claimed were 24 in number. Speaking through a megaphone, Ding promised to seek their release. But the crowd was in no mood to disperse, despite subzero temperatures and a fresh two-inch snowfall. Instead, it picked up additional demonstrators in a march through the campus and from nearby People's University, and set out across White Stone Bridge toward Tiananmen. At its height the throng numbered around 5,000.

The police showed extraordinary restraint in controlling the crowds. Authorities kept track of the marchers' progress from a dozen police vehicles equipped with two-way radios, but made no effort to block the marchers except at the State Guesthouse in western Peking, where public gatherings are strictly forbidden. The ranks began to thin when Peking University Vice President Sha Jiansun announced over a police loudspeaker that all student detainees had been released. By the time those who persisted had completed the ten-mile trip to Tiananmen Square at 3:30 a.m., the size of the crowd had dwindled to only 1,000 or so.

Precisely how large a threat the continuing demonstrations pose to Deng's government remained exasperatingly unclear. The senior vice chairman of the State Education Commission, He Dongchang, estimated the number of student protesters who have joined the current campaign at 40,000, or only about 2% of China's 2 million college students. Indeed there is little evidence that the student demonstrations have found much sympathy with Chinese workers, as some officials had feared. Last week the Workers' Daily scathingly compared today's student protests to the rampages of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

Even so, some local authorities believe the outbursts are serious enough that they have acknowledged a key student grievance: the lack of choice in electing candidates to district legislatures. At the prestigious University of Science and Technology in Hefei, for example, students last week were able to send one of their own to the local people's congress after a rule was abolished that permitted only a single candidate selected by the Communist Party to seek office. Perhaps more tellingly, the government for the first time in the crisis pointed an accusing finger at outsiders for fomenting student unrest, a signal to some of growing official alarm in Peking about continued student protests. The government accused Taiwan of ordering its "agents" to exploit the demonstrations, with the goal of toppling the party from power.

Chinese officials also implicitly criticized the Voice of America, which broadcasts English- and Chinese-language programming into China. The New China News Agency singled out one VOA report that quoted "independent-minded" U.S. Journalist I.F. Stone as saying that the Chinese demonstrations were a "comfort to dissidents elsewhere." VOA officials defended their decision to broadcast the remark on the grounds that support for the protesters from Stone, a longtime sympathizer with the Peking regime, was news. For all their cautious restraint so far, China's rulers last week seemed to be casting an increasingly disapproving eye on the actions of their unruly children.

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Peking