Hundreds of Chinese Stage Peking Sit-in

Hundreds of Peking natives ordered into the countryside during Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution staged a sit-in today at City Hall and begged to be allowed to return to the capital.

The demonstrators occupied the front steps of the building housing the municipal government and Communist Party headquarters in the first such demonstration in six years.

China’s 1982 constitution guarantees the right to demonstrate. But such public gatherings, and posters airing grievances, have continued to be banned since leader Deng Xiaoping cracked down on a free-speech movement in 1979.

The city dwellers were ordered to go live and work in rural areas in 1968, when Mao decided they needed to be “rusticated.”

“We all want to come back to our hometown,” said a 35-year-old man who, like the others, first toiled as a peasant before taking a factory job in Shanxi province.

Many of the huddled protesters were reluctant to talk with a foreign reporter. “We don’t want to tell you anything. You’ll get us into trouble,” one said.

One demonstrator said 400,000 Peking youths, including former Red Guards, were sent to Shanxi in 1968 and about 20,000 are still there.