China "Come Out! Come Out!"

By WILLIAM R. DOERNER !

Night after night, arriving on bicycles or on foot, they converged on Beijing's gigantic Tiananmen Square. Gathering ostensibly to mourn the ousted Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang, who had died the previous weekend at 73, the throngs of university students actually had a much more provocative, and important, goal in mind: a demand for greater democratization in the world's most populous country. Implicit in the spreading protest campaign was a call for a shake-up in China's Communist leadership, including the retirement of Deng Xiaoping, 84, after a decade in power. In a scene never witnessed in the 40 years of Communist rule, more than 1,000 students assembled outside the ornate red-lacquered gate of Zhongnanhai compound, where the top leaders officially live and work. Sitting on the pavement, lotus-like, they exhorted Premier Li Peng to hear their demands, chanting, "Come out! Come out!"

The furor reached a peak on Saturday. As many as 150,000 students and other activists massed in Tiananmen for one of China's biggest demonstrations since the Communist revolution in 1949. As the nation's top leaders filed into the Great Hall for Hu's memorial service behind a wall of 8,000 Chinese troops, the protesters waved their fists and chanted, "Long live freedom!" and "Down with dictatorship!" Some of the leaders seemed to stop momentarily to listen to the shouts. In Xian, to the northwest, the demonstrations turned into a riot as students burned 20 houses and injured some 130 police; 18 protesters were arrested.

The demonstrations had been growing in intensity through the week, spreading quickly from Beijing to at least six other cities, including Nanjing, Shanghai and Tianjin. Always the rallying cry was for political reform. "The Chinese government proclaims that democracy is here, but China still has dictatorship," said a demonstrator dressed in jeans and running shoes.

The protests recalled two other convulsive events in Tiananmen Square, both of which preceded major political turning points. In 1976, after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, crowds numbering 100,000 marched through the square and eventually were brutally routed by club-wielding police. The demonstrations were widely interpreted as a revolt against the leftist policies of the so- called Gang of Four, who at the time had effectively seized power from the dying Mao Zedong. Two days later the Gang of Four, led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, sacked Deng, the recently rehabilitated Senior Deputy Premier whom they suspected of masterminding the demonstrations. But after Mao died five months later, the military overthrew the Gang of Four and Deng returned to power in 1978.

More recently, university students spearheaded a series of demonstrations in the winter of 1986-87. As with last week's marches, those protests were mounted to put pressure on China's leaders for political liberalization. The result was the opposite: a crackdown by authorities and the ouster of dozens of pro-reform intellectuals. The most prominent political victim was party leader Hu, who was regarded by conservatives on the ruling Politburo as too liberal and thus partly responsible for the unrest. He was stripped of his party job as General Secretary but allowed to remain in the Politburo. Though Hu showed some sympathy for China's academic community, which has been attacked during Communist rule, it was his role as the official fall guy in 1987 that enshrined him as a hero to intellectuals.

During his decade in power, Deng has transformed China's economy from a rigidly controlled system of central planning into a hybrid entity that incorporates free-market features. But political reform in China never really got off the ground. Power remains almost entirely in the hands of a small clutch of leaders in Beijing. If anything, the political climate took a turn for the worse in the wake of the 1986-87 demonstrations. Officials conducted a campaign against "bourgeois liberalization" aimed squarely at liberals inside the universities and elsewhere. Among those expelled from the Communist Party during this campaign were two men who have since become China's best- known dissenters: journalist Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist who gained attention in February when police prevented him from attending a dinner in Beijing given by President George Bush.

Deng, a moderate usually but a pragmatist always, did nothing to undermine the campaign for most of a year. But then, at the 13th Party Congress in October 1987, liberal reformers loyal to Deng scored a clear victory over Old Guard conservatives, and the country's political atmosphere began to loosen slightly.

Still, intellectuals remained resentful of Deng for his earlier temporizing, and their displeasure with the regime has deepened in recent months. For one thing, there is widespread suspicion, valid in some cases, of rampant corruption among top leaders and their children, including the embezzlement of hard currency to establish bank accounts abroad. Guandao (official corruption) is an especially touchy matter on university campuses because salaries there are low even by Chinese standards.

Last week's demonstrations began the way nearly all student protests do in China: with the display of "big-character posters" at major universities. At Peking University, which has a rich and widely respected tradition of student dissent, a raft of such carefully inscribed banners began appearing late in the afternoon on the day of Hu's death. Then last Monday more than 1,000 students and teachers, most from the little-known Political Science and Law College of China, staged a public mourning in the streets of central Beijing. Chanting "Long live democracy!" and "Down with bureaucracy!," the crowd marched to the Monument to the People's Heroes, an obelisk at the center of Tiananmen Square. The crowds returned daily, but the police did not crack down until early Thursday morning, when they used leather belts to swat some of the 200 students outside Zhongnanhai and herded them into vans.

The most intriguing question to emerge from China's strange week of unrest is why the authoritarian leadership permitted it to get started. One possibility is that with Mikhail Gorbachev due in Beijing on May 15, China's rulers were loath to set the stage with a crackdown. Some cynics speculated that conservatives plan to use the spasm of protest to claim a new liberal victim, possibly Hu's successor, Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. But a Western diplomat in Beijing disagreed, suggesting that the era of fall-guy politics has ended. Said he: "Can they let another guy go down the tubes, given the growing cynicism of the Chinese people, the concern for human rights outside the country and their need for more foreign investment?"

The most important lesson of last week's events was the degree to which China has changed since the deaths of Zhou and Mao, the downfall of the Gang of Four and the emergence of Deng. Says Fang Lizhi: "At the time of Premier Zhou's death, the people liked him, but they thought of him as a good dictator. The people were still Marxists then." By contrast, continues Fang, who welcomes the transition, the people no longer speak of Marxism, and when | they venerate a man like Hu Yaobang, they are paying homage to him not as a benign dictator but as a symbol of reform.

Perhaps no one is more aware of China's changing realities than Deng Xiaoping, whose revolutionary credentials are far stronger than those of most of his academic critics. Diplomats who have seen him during the past two months believe that he remains in good form for a person of his age. But he is surely aware that his political power, especially among the young, is on the wane. He can afford to allow university students to let off steam occasionally in pursuit of democracy or in memory of a fallen hero. The test will come if, when the ceremonies for Hu are past, the engine of protest should suddenly roar out of control.

With reporting by Sandra Burton and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing