China Deng's Big Lie

By Jill Smolowe

NEWS BULLETIN: the bloodiest urban massacre in Communist China's history never took place. Thousands of troops never stormed the perimeters of Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, probably thousands, of students never died. Photographs depicting bloodied faces and battered bodies, news footage documenting the clatter of gunfire and the crunch of army tanks, foreign press reports detailing the pileup of dead and wounded bodies at hospitals -- none of it happened.

Instead, what transpired was this: as army convoys moved toward Tiananmen in the early-morning hours of June 4, troops were viciously attacked by rioters brandishing fire bombs and guns financed by "overseas reactionary political forces." The reluctant soldiers exercised maximum self-restraint, but were finally compelled to open fire. Even then, General Li Zhiyun insisted last week at a press conference, "it never happened that soldiers fired directly at the people." In the end, nearly 100 soldiers and policemen were killed putting down the "counterrevolutionaries." Civilian casualties totaled no more than 100 dead, perhaps a thousand wounded. That's the official story.

Can it really be that easy? Can memory be so short? Can history be rewritten by proclamation of the Beijing Communist Party propaganda department? Eerily, China's top leaders apparently believe that if they repeat the lie enough times, it will turn into truth. More chilling still, Chinese citizens outside the capital, with little access to independent information, seemed to accept the government's sanitized version of events. Perhaps they are relieved to be no longer teetering on the brink of civil war. Perhaps they find a military occupation, 1,000 arrests and a revision of history a small price to pay for restoration of order. Perhaps, suggests a university professor in Shanghai, "the truth is too painful to accept."

It is the sheer enormity of the untruth, however, that is so stunning. Certainly there is nothing subtle about the Chinese leadership's tactics. Tell the lie again and again. Broadcast mug shots of wanted "hooligans." Lionize citizens who cooperate by ratting on alleged culprits. Parade arrested students before cameras, their heads shaved and bowed, their wrists cuffed, signs detailing their crimes strapped around their necks. Hour after hour, run their "confessions" of wrongdoing on national television. Construct a new reality, one that checks democratic aspirations by preying on fear and paranoia. The result? "A week ago we were free to say anything," says a university professor. "Now I suspect everybody."

The breathtaking lie is manipulated by officials with the doggedness of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. A long-haired man is marched before Chinese television cameras, looking dejected. Viewers have just been told that two vigilant women in Dalian, east of Beijing, spotted the errant man buying cigarettes and informed authorities, who then arrested him. His crime? "Rumormongering." His deed? Appearing in pirated American television footage estimating casualties in the Tiananmen massacre at up to 20,000 people. "I am a counterrevolutionary ," the man now says. "I admit my crime."

Authorities made clear that the testimony of strangers is not enough. It is a citizen's duty to betray his own kith and kin. The Zhou clan, willingly or by coercion, did its duty. Zhou Fengsuo, 22, a physics student at Qinghua University in Beijing, was among the 21 student leaders named by officials last Tuesday as the country's most-wanted criminals. The next night on television, Zhou was shown being led into a police station for interrogation. The scene then shifted to the home of Zhou Yanrong, the student's sister. Dandling a baby on her lap, her husband at her side, the woman explained that after seeing the wanted notices for her brother, she contacted security officials.

If a witch-hunt is required to make scoundrels of the student heroes, then a campaign of glorification is required to make heroes of the army scoundrels. Over and over, Chinese television replays shots of soldiers cleaning the streets and distributing food supplies. China's leaders troop through the hospitals visiting wounded soldiers. "You have done an excellent job," an official tells troops in Beijing.

In Beijing, where most of the carnage took place, citizens are not yet foolish enough -- or desperate enough -- to buy the government's line. But they are toeing it, as a sullen normality descends on the city. Although most of the tanks are gone, the streets still teem with helmeted soldiers, AK-47s poised at their sides. The handwritten broadsheets that served as a free press have been peeled from walls, but perhaps some cyclists are heartened as they spot one last declaration chalked on the Forbidden City: THE FASCIST GOVERNMENT OPPRESSES THE ENTIRE PEOPLE OF THE COUNTRY. It is impossible to know what the people are thinking; they have lapsed into silence.

The government's efforts to bury the shattered remains of the democracy movement and to provide a justification for the brutal military suppression near Tiananmen Square play far better outside the capital. There memories of the dunce caps, denunciations and deaths of the Cultural Revolution may be more vivid than the fuzzy reports of recent events in Beijing. Even in Shanghai, China's largest city and a hotbed of pro-democracy activity just two weeks ago, the spy-on-your-neighbor campaign is having the intended effect. Says a Shanghai cabdriver: "Bad elements took over the student movement. The army bravely carried out its duties."

Local authorities are having no problem recruiting thousands of neighborhood informants and auxiliary police to revive the once pervasive system of spying. Last Monday evening, when an ABC news crew went into a private home to film a family watching Chinese television reports, a neighbor notified the local police. Within minutes, security officials rounded up the journalists and detained them for two hours. The next day the crew's correspondent and producer left Shanghai after warnings that covering the news without permission was "dangerous."

The real danger, however, was that foreign press crews might continue to disseminate truthful information, blackening the Chinese government's careful whitewash. At midweek officials charged two American correspondents, Alan Pessin of the Voice of America and John Pomfret of the Associated Press, with violating martial-law restrictions, and gave them 72 hours to leave China.

The expulsion of Pessin was particularly telling, since the VOA is an arm of the U.S. Government and its broadcasts played a key role in keeping millions apprised of developments in Tiananmen Square. Pessin was charged with distorting facts and stirring turmoil. Many interpreted the harsh charges as a deliberate whack at the Bush Administration. For now, China's leaders portray the U.S. as a meddler, but there are hints that China might yet find Washington a convenient scapegoat to shoulder a larger responsibility for the student strife.

The Bush Administration responded to the expulsions with indignation. "Actions such as these," said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, "will not succeed in keeping the truth about what is going on in China from being heard in that troubled land or throughout the world."

Washington continued to thwart China's efforts to silence two prominent dissenting voices, those of astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian. Consultations between Secretary of State James Baker and Han Xu, Ambassador to the U.S., failed to resolve the wrangle over Fang and Li, who have taken refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Baker suggested that the couple be sent to a third country. At week's end China had not responded.

The fate of the Fangs plainly rankles Chinese officials. Almost a week after the couple took refuge, the government issued arrest warrants charging them with treasonable offenses. Foreign observers did not rule out a violent attack on the embassy to retrieve the couple; a week earlier, Chinese troops sealed off one of the compounds where foreigners live to search for someone, perhaps Fang.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed rumors circulated that the Australian embassy in Beijing was harboring one of the 21 sought student activists, Chai Ling. A psychology student at Beijing Normal University, Chai, 22, managed to smuggle out of China a 40-minute tape-recorded message recounting the terrible hours before and after the assault on the square. "Please think, these youthful children, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, sitting quietly beneath the monument ((to the People's Heroes)), saw ((the)) murderer with their own eyes," her message says. "We are still alive. But many more remain in the square and in Changan Avenue. They'll never come back. Never."

It is unlikely that Chai's poignant appeal will ever reach a Chinese audience. As authorities sought to curb the reporting of foreign journalists, officials were also clamping down by surveilling material sent into China by fax machines. Imported newspapers are growing scarce, as customs officers at international airports use their X-ray scanners to ferret out all forms of printed matter.

Much as they would like to, however, Beijing's leaders cannot curtail the flow of information beyond China's borders. They know their campaign of intimidation is not playing well in the West, where present and future investors are gauging the viability of continued relations with China. All last week the Chinese press carried upbeat articles intended to reassure foreign businessmen. "Many foreigners with foresight have invested a great deal in China over the past and have got considerable profit," said Foreign Trade Minister Zheng Tuobin.

Such statements cannot disguise the hemorrhage of tourist and investment dollars. Hotels averaged only 30% occupancy last week, and seven temporarily closed their doors. More important for China's economic outlook, international organizations were reassessing their involvement. The World Bank is reconsidering more than $700 million in new loans that were scheduled for delivery to China by the end of the year.

Caught between the need to reassure the outside world and intimidate citizens at home, China's aging leaders are still groping for a way out of the political morass. The desire to grind out all traces of the democracy movement takes precedence. A court in Shanghai accused three people of burning a train that ran over a human barricade, and quickly sentenced them to death. The harsh actions open the door to a wave of execution orders. Such a move would be tragic for China's psychic well-being and potentially fatal for its economic health, and it was unthinkable just a few weeks ago. But if China's leaders can get away with rewriting so recent a past, what is to stop them from scripting any future they choose?

With reporting by David Aikman/Beijing and Richard Hornik/Shanghai