Student Protests Challenge Deng’s Policies in China

The demonstrations began last year with seemingly innocuous complaints about poor food, overcrowded dormitories and nighttime power cutoffs at Chinese universities.

They spread this September with campus demonstrations against alleged Japanese militarism and what students termed the “invasion” of China by Japanese consumer goods. These expressions of anti-Japanese sentiment appeared at first to have official sanction, but then took on a life of their own.

Now, student protests have blossomed into a significant factor in China’s domestic politics.

During the last two months, at campus meetings and in leaflets and wallposters, Chinese students have begun to raise broad concerns about price increases, official corruption and special privileges for the families of high-ranking officials. In a few instances, students have called for greater political freedom and democracy.

High-ranking Communist Party officials and provincial party secretaries have been dispatched to talk with students. In one such meeting in late October, before an estimated 10,000 people at Tongji University, Shanghai Mayor Jiang Zemin defended the Chinese regime’s lifting of price controls.

At Heilongjiang University in Manchuria, provincial governor Hou Jie even opened a temporary campus office this fall to meet with students and discuss their grievances.

The demonstrations are not so serious as to threaten the regime of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, an experienced hand at handling political dissent.

“This is not South Korea,” a Western diplomat said here recently. “There will not be riots in the streets. We’re not talking about serious political instability.”

However, the emergence of a student protest movement has put Deng and his allies on the defensive for the moment in their continuing efforts to reform China’s economic system and open up the country to foreign investment.

The official Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily acknowledged in a commentary Tuesday that some “new problems have cropped up amid reform.” In an apparent warning to would-be student protesters, the commentary said that any criticism of the Communist Party or the government must be reported through proper channels rather than in ways “detrimental to stability and unity.”

Support for Reforms

A Peking-based analyst said: “The student protests show that China is having difficulty digesting the (economic) reforms. I tend to think this is quite serious. It may be that, like so many other times in Chinese history, the reformers lack social support.”

The most immediate challenge confronting the regime will come next week, on the 50th anniversary of one of the best-known student demonstrations in modern Chinese history. On Dec. 9, 1935, young political activists in Peking staged a massive protest against Japanese imperialism and called for tougher resistance by China’s Nationalist government against Japan.

China’s Communist Party leaders have gone to great lengths to make sure that Monday’s anniversary celebrations are controlled by the party itself and do not become a vehicle for anti-government protests by students.

Four weeks ago, the Communist Youth League announced that it and other youth groups would sponsor official ceremonies to mark the 50th anniversary. Since then, government and university officials have tried repeatedly to convey the message that the students should fall in line behind the Communist Party leadership.

Party Role Stressed

“Some young people suggested that a students’ union should be able to lead students in a mass movement independently. This shows they do not understand history,” said Wang Xiaoting, deputy Communist Party secretary at Peking University, the focal point of the protests, during a recent student forum. “Ever since the December 9 movement, all patriotic students’ movements in history were under the party’s political leadership and were guided by the party’s overall planning.”

Nonetheless, some university students have persisted in trying to organize their own Dec. 9 anniversary events.

According to Chinese sources, students in Peking have told authorities they want to have public demonstrations outdoors at Tian An Men Square--the location in the center of the Chinese capital that figured prominently in the 1935 demonstrations and in other 20th-Century protest movements.

However, the sources said, the regime has refused to approve the use of Tian An Men Square and instead told students they should observe the Dec. 9 anniversary either on their individual university campuses or indoors at Peking’s Great Hall of the People.

“They (the authorities) said the situation has changed since 1935,” one source reported.

Small Campus Activities

On Wednesday, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry announced that the Dec. 9 celebrations “will take the form of small-scale activities on campuses.” For example, the spokesman said, there will be special ceremonies for people taking the oath to join the Communist Youth League. The spokesman declined to respond when asked whether students would be allowed to have public demonstrations at Tian An Men Square.

The student unrest comes at an awkward time for Deng and his allies, who are faced with the task of shoring up public support for their economic reforms.

Originally, in the fall of 1984, when the Communist Party announced plans to lift price controls on many items, the Chinese people were informed in official propaganda that the changes would lead to revolutionary advances in their life styles and standard of living. The official Communist Party People’s Daily urged people to dress more fashionably and to start buying more consumer goods.

Splurged on Imports

But after a six-month splurge in which Chinese people bought foreign-made television sets and refrigerators in record numbers, the regime found that its foreign reserves were dropping precipitously and moved to clamp down on imported consumer goods. This fall, the People’s Daily did an about-face and warned against “blind pursuit of high consumption.”

In their recent series of campus meetings, some provincial Communist Party leaders have acknowledged that the lifting of price controls on food and other items has created hardship or a drop in living standards for some people in China--particularly people on fixed incomes, such as government workers, teachers and students.

Some foreign analysts have theorized that the student protests this fall are being encouraged, or even instigated, by traditionalist elements within the Communist Party opposed to Deng’s efforts to change China.

“There have to be links between the students and the conservative wing of the party,” one diplomat said. “Ask yourself the old question, ‘Who does all this benefit?’ ”

No Collusion Found

Yet neither this diplomat nor any other analyst here has found any solid evidence of collusion between the students and Deng’s opponents inside the Communist Party.

The new round of student activism began last year with a series of demonstrations concerning campus-related issues. In Nanjing, for example, students complained that the university was not getting enough resources from the Ministry of Education. At Peking University, students protested a university decision to shut off electricity to dormitories at 11 p.m.

When students returned to their campuses this fall, China was in the midst of a series of celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of the end of the war against Japan, and the Chinese regime had just registered a strong official protest against Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s official visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which is dedicated to Japan’s war dead.

On Sept. 18, the anniversary of the 1931 Japanese attack on Shenyang (Mukden), which led to Japan’s occupation of Manchuria, as many as 1,000 students from Peking University went to Tian An Men Square in a protest against Japanese “militarism.”

Although there reportedly were attempts to stop some students from leaving their campuses to take part in the demonstration, police at Tian An Men Square allowed the protest to proceed. A day later, the Chinese Foreign Ministry in effect gave its blessing to the students’ action by releasing a statement expressing sympathy with their cause.

Bush Motorcade Affected

Over the next few weeks, further anti-Japanese protests were reported by students in the cities of Xian, Chengdu and Wuhan.

In October, American officials organizing a visit to Chengdu by Vice President George Bush reportedly changed the cars reserved for his motorcade from Japanese-made Toyotas to Chinese-made Shanghais after witnessing the anti-Japanese sentiment there.

To a certain extent, the anti-Japanese protests served the interests of the regime.

Foreign diplomats here believe that Chinese officials were genuinely angered by Nakasone’s visit to the war shrine. In addition, China is facing new problems of a growing trade imbalance with Japan--in part because of the rush in late 1984 and early 1985 to import Japanese-made consumer goods.

Nevertheless, several foreign analysts here said recently they believe Chinese leaders made a serious miscalculation in encouraging the students’ anti-Japanese protests.

If relations with Japan become a major point of contention in China, then the regime itself is politically vulnerable. Over the last five years, in their drive to modernize China, Deng and his top aide, Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, have forged closer links with Japan than any other major nation. Japan is China’s largest trading partner, and Japanese diplomats and visiting officials have been granted unparalleled access to Deng and Hu.

Japan Could Be Symbol

Also, Japan could easily be used as a symbol of westernization by the many Chinese still uncertain of their desire or ability to westernize--that is, by those who have not yet profited from Deng’s open-door policies and who resent the warm reception given here to Japanese, Hong Kong Chinese and other wealthy Asian visitors.

“Japan was not the main game. It was only a scapegoat,” a European diplomat observed last week.

As the demonstrations continued this fall, the Chinese students began to complain increasingly of the inflation and corruption that have accompanied the last year’s economic reforms. They also revived old grievances about the improper use of family connections in Chinese society.

Finally, in an echo of the ill-fated “Democracy Wall” movement here in 1979, some of the students have raised the slogans of “freedom” and “democracy.” Most of the dissident leaders behind the Democracy Wall movement were jailed or sent away to reform-through-labor camps.

This time, Communist Party leaders have countered by trying to link the cause of “democracy” with the chaos of China’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

Democracy and Turmoil

In one article called “Democracy Leads to Turmoil” published by the official New China News Service last month, a commentator wrote, “History has proved that such democracy with heavy anarchic coloring caused a grave catastrophe to our party and country in the 10 years of the Great Cultural Revolution.”

But such arguments carry less weight with students than they did five years ago. China’s university campuses are now filled with students too young to remember the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. A college student 19 years old this year would have been a mere infant during the period from 1966 to 1968 when education, work and ordinary life ground to a halt in many parts of China.

One foreign analyst here has even speculated about the possible emergence of a “new left” in China. Its membership, he said, is composed of young persons “who have not gone through the Cultural Revolution, who hate nepotism and bureaucracy, who feel that Marxism is the ultimate in China and that the country should go back to the real thing.”

Last Sunday, in an extraordinary move, the party leadership even invoked the oft-forgotten name of Mao Tse-tung in an effort to win the allegiance of the youthful protesters. The People’s Daily and other Chinese papers carried on their front pages a speech by Mao about the Dec. 9 student movement that was said to have been left out of previous collections of his works. In it, Mao said that students and intellectuals must unite behind the Communist Party in order to “follow the right road.”

While no one thinks the regime will let the student dissent get out of hand, so far Chinese authorities have treated the wave of protests very gingerly, avoiding any major police crackdown.

“We’re talking about the future--about how the current elite in China handles the future elite,” said one diplomat here. “The students at these universities are the people who will someday lead China. They are the guys Deng and Hu are counting on to carry out their policies after they’re gone.”