China No Smiling -- It's Subversive

By Lisa Beyer

The call to protest was deliberately low key. In fax messages Chinese dissidents abroad urged sympathizers on the mainland to honor the April 15 anniversary of the beginning of last year's prodemocracy upheaval by simply taking a stroll through Beijing's Tiananmen Square. But the country's security watchdogs were eavesdropping. Last week, at the suggested start of the modest commemoration, police seized the 100-acre square in the heart of the capital. As soldiers guarded the perimeter, thousands of schoolchildren performed a ceremony to honor the nation's revolutionary-war dead. When the security forces melted away and Tiananmen was reopened to the public, scores of plainclothes agents kept people from gathering in large numbers.

The scene was repeated four days later. This time the protest was scheduled to coincide with Qingming, a festival in which Chinese offer respect to the dead by sweeping their graves. To ensure that the ritual did not turn into a mass tribute to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who perished in the massacre of demonstrators last June, authorities ordered that Beijing's cemeteries admit only those with death certificates that proved their loved ones had died within the past year. Citizens were warned to avoid any display of black armbands or white flowers associated with mourning. "We were not only told to stay away from the square," said an incredulous professor in Beijing. "They also said we could not stroll in public and smile at the same time."

No detail of resistance is too small for China's hard-line leadership to crush these days, despite the lifting of martial law in Beijing last January. The campaign of repression that followed the June Tiananmen massacre continues unabated, as authorities attempt to roll back all vestiges of "bourgeois liberalization."

Anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 people, by Western diplomatic estimates, have been arrested in connection with last year's protest. Many have never been charged or brought to trial. For those who do appear before a judge, the prospects are grim. Earlier this year Ren Jianxin, the head of China's Supreme People's Court, signaled that the country's move toward a more independent judiciary had been reversed. Justice, he said, cannot "be executed without the guidance" of the Communist Party.

The security forces have also been hauled further into line. Last month top officers of the People's Armed Police Force, who were criticized for failing to contain last year's upheavals, were replaced by army generals. Police officers were given doses of ideological indoctrination and loads of new antiriot equipment. Despite the shape-up, Chai Ling, 23, one of the three main leaders of the beleaguered democracy movement, managed to escape a nationwide dragnet. Chai turned up in Paris last week after ten months on the run within China.

The Communist Party itself is still being "rectified," though less dramatically than the police. Key sympathizers of deposed party leader Zhao Ziyang, who was sacked for supporting last year's protests, have been demoted or dismissed. Last week Premier Li Peng told reporters that Zhao, who has not been seen in public since last May, is a "free man" but is still under investigation for political crimes. Meanwhile, the party process of Maoist- style "self-criticism," or recantation, continues.

As that process demonstrates, thought control is enjoying a new heyday in China. Publishing houses are pouring out tracts that extol doctrinaire Marxism. Censorship of the press has been tightened further, and foreign journalists are frequently subjected to open police surveillance.

Because students were in the vanguard of the democracy movement, campuses have been the special targets of the orthodox juggernaut. Beijing has ordered that the 564,000 students graduating this year be assigned jobs at the "grass-roots level" -- in small cities or the countryside. Normally they would have been given mid-level government posts or allowed to seek work on their own.

In the meantime, the nation's 597,000 university freshmen have spent the past school year in virtual isolation from upperclassmen and faculty members considered politically suspect. All 800 first-year students at Peking University, a hotbed of last year's activism, were dispatched to an army camp outside the capital for intensive military training and ideological studies. If the brainwashing continues, says a professor in Beijing, "we will see the ruin of a whole generation, which is probably the best-educated group in the country's history."

But the picture is not entirely bleak. Try as they may, the authorities have not managed to triumph completely. A government survey of university students late last year found that only 20% endorsed the views of the Communist Party. "The students are defiantly cynical," says an instructor. "When they heard they were not supposed to smile during Qingming, they laughed uproariously." And miles away from Tiananmen Square, beneath Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge, anonymous protesters managed to pay tribute to the brief freedom of last summer. On the dry riverbed they arranged hundreds of pebbles to spell out LONG LIVE JUNE 3. The slogan honored citizens who gathered on that night last year in a courageous attempt to stop the tanks from rolling into the great square.

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