China Beijing Spring

By Michael S. Serrill

The night before the march, Jia Guangxi and his five roommates at Peking University toasted one another with farewell glasses of wine. "Some of us even wrote last wills," recalled Jia, 18, an economics major from Inner Mongolia. And why not? Chinese officials, having tolerated eleven days of protests by tens of thousands of students, were darkly warning of a crackdown that would put an end to the demonstrations once and for all.

On Thursday morning Jia rose early, grabbed a megaphone and headed for the headquarters of the student organizing committee. As his classmates poured out of their dormitories, Jia held up his megaphone and shouted quotations from the constitution. "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration!" he bellowed. School officials blasted a threatening countermessage over loudspeakers: "Go back to your classes! Don't give in to pressure from your fellow students! Beware of the consequences to yourself and your family!"

Just outside the university gates was a sight to give even the most determined demonstrator pause: row upon row of uniformed policemen. What happened next will be remembered for years to come. As more than 50,000 striking university students flooded the streets in defiance of government warnings, some 250,000 ordinary citizens joined them, supporting their demands for more democracy.

The outpouring of discontent, and the authorities' decision not to stop it, represented an unprecedented humiliation for Deng Xiaoping and his government. Wisely deciding not to use force to end the march, the Chinese government acceded to demands for a dialogue with the students. "The demonstration marks the raising of democratic consciousness of the people," triumphantly said a graduate student of philosophy from Peking University.

The festive event lasted 16 hours, as students from 32 colleges paraded 25 miles from the university belt in northwestern Beijing to Tiananmen Square in the city's center. It was the latest and by far the largest in a series of protests that began when students gathered on April 16 to mourn the death of former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, whose tolerance of demonstrations two years ago precipitated his downfall. The marchers, divided into well-organized ranks according to their school, chanted and waved red and white banners. When they tired of singing the Internationale and the national anthem, the students launched into homemade ditties. To the tune of the French song Frere Jacques, they warbled in Chinese, "Lying to the people, lying to the people, very strange, very strange."

Along the way battalions of unarmed police halfheartedly tried to block the protesters' path. Again and again the police were pushed aside by students who sometimes reached out to shake the hands of the startled men. "The People's Police love the people," the marchers chanted, "and the people love the People's Police!" One protester playfully snatched an officer's hat, and another threw it about like a Frisbee.

The most extraordinary phenomenon was the support shown for the students by workers, an allegiance that had not been so evident in earlier demonstrations. Thousands of workers streamed from their offices and factories into the spring sunshine to watch and cheer. Food vendors handed out free drinks and popsicles. Those who did not join in the march climbed atop buildings, billboards and subway entrances for a better view. At one intersection workers broke through a line of 200 police to clear a path for the procession.

The tensest moment came when the students burst through the last police line before Tiananmen Square, the symbolic seat of power and the scene two weeks ago of a violent confrontation between students and police. According to students, two were seriously injured and 300 briefly detained. As the activists proceeded down the Avenue of Eternal Peace toward the north side of the 100-acre square, they were met by truckloads of troops. But the soldiers made no move to stop the demonstrators, who swarmed around the trucks. After a few minutes, the vehicles and their bewildered passengers slowly drove away to thunderous cheers from the gathered throng. Surprisingly, the students did not stop at the square but, wishing to avoid confrontation, marched past it and returned peacefully to their campuses.

The day before Thursday's protest, there was every indication that the government was ready to crush even the smallest sprig of dissent. On Tuesday Premier Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun reportedly informed Deng that the movement had spread "to high schools, the countryside and even among the workers." Deng, whose sole official government title is Chairman of the Central Military Commission but whose ironhanded control of the government has led the students to dub him the "Emperor," agreed that the protesters intended to overthrow the Communist Party. Referring to the turmoil that has accompanied political reform elsewhere in the socialist world, Deng said, "Look what happened in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union." He called the demonstrators "a black hand against the party and myself," and told Li and Yang that "we must take strict measures to deal with this movement, or there will be nationwide turmoil." Vowed Deng: "We must use a sharp knife to cut the flaxen threads."

The following day the People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, came close to accusing the demonstrators of treason in an editorial that was broadcast and reprinted all over China. "This is a planned conspiracy that . . . aims at negating the leadership of the party and the socialist system," said the editorial. It called the students' independent unions illegal and said that new demonstrations would be put down. As a first step in the expected crackdown, Shanghai party officials restructured China's most outspokenly liberal newspaper, the weekly World Economic Herald, and fired its editor, Qin Benli.

Jia Guangxi and his fellow students took these actions as provocations and immediately began organizing their largest protest yet. "The government wants to intimidate us, but the measures they have resorted to only make us angry," he said minutes before the giant march began. Meanwhile, tear gas, helmets and ammunition were being readied for the police.

Then the unthinkable happened. So many officials disagreed with Deng's directive to smash the protest that he was forced to rescind it. Some 100 staff members at the People's Daily signed a letter to their bosses challenging the paper's harsh editorial. Within the party, opposition to a crackdown was no less vehement. "The real dissatisfaction of the cadres was made known to Li shortly after the editorial was presented," said a knowledgeable Communist Party member. "They feared that if the leaders suppressed the demonstration and blood was shed, it would be like a big fire that would burn not only in Beijing but nationwide."

Most decisive was the reaction of the security forces to Deng's directive. The chief of Beijing's Public Security Bureau reportedly tried to step down rather than suppress the demonstration. Finally, cooler heads prevailed, and a last-minute decision was made to greet the marchers with unarmed policemen.

For their part, the students took care not to trigger a showdown. In the streets they outmaneuvered the police and kept tight ranks to prevent provocateurs from causing an incident. By constantly quoting the constitution to justify their rally, they presented themselves as anything but wild-eyed radicals. To silence criticism that they are "antiparty" or "anti- socialist," students stopped denigrating Deng and Li. Peking University students carried a banner reading WE RESOLUTELY SUPPORT THE CORRECT LEADERSHIP INSIDE THE PARTY. Asked which leaders were correct, however, one of the students holding the banner quipped, "None."

To broaden their movement beyond the campuses, the students framed their demands so they would appeal to workers and peasants as well as to the intelligentsia. In addition to their traditional demands for freedom of assembly and the press and greater "democracy," this time they pushed for a new campaign against government corruption -- an increasingly popular issue among the masses -- and for China's leaders to make public their personal financial holdings. "Many of these students took part in the 1986-87 protests," said a graduate of the University of Politics and Law who is now a government official. "They have learned their lessons, and they now know which means would work and which would not."

Jia Guangxi is a good example. The son of two physicians, he lived a comfortable middle-class life before arriving at Peking University this year. He was only a halfhearted participant in the original rally on April 16. "I was rather doubtful that it could lead to anything useful," he says. Only after the police roughed up demonstrators in front of Zhongnanhai compound, where China's top leaders officially live and work, was he moved to strong action. Says he: "After that, all my social gripes came surging out, and I threw myself into the movement."

But Jia is hardly a firebrand. He still holds three youth posts at the university. And he intends to apply for membership in the Communist Party soon. "I idolize the party just as Christians do their religion," he said. "If China must establish some ideology, we should rely on the party."

The student leader's faith in the system is bound to be challenged by events. Late last week the two sides in the conflict were still shadowboxing over the protesters' chief demand: an ongoing dialogue between independent student leaders and senior government officials. An initial three-hour session on Saturday failed to satisfy student activists when the government side refused to recognize the legitimacy of the students' newly formed association. The government's decision to talk, not fight, "is only a tactical one," says an influential party member. When Hu Qili, the party's propaganda chief, briefed top editors of the party-controlled press late last week, he reportedly likened the unfolding crisis to the situation in Poland, telling them that the government could not accept all the students' demands lest it create "many Lech Walesas, not only in Beijing but in every province."

The students, of course, still have their megaphones. "We reserve the right to demonstrate again if the government fails to show good faith during the dialogue," says Wang Zongliang, 22, a geology student at Peking University. Rallies are already planned for May 4, the 70th anniversary of the beginnings of China's student movement. If those demonstrations prove half as successful as the one that shook Beijing last week, the conservative Chinese leadership might finally be forced to couple its economic reform with a relaxation of restrictions on political and civil rights. But few government observers expect much movement from the stubborn Deng. As one informed party member put it, "Deng Xiaoping never admits his errors."

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