6 Peking Protesters Reportedly Vanish : Students Arrested Several Months After New Spate of Wall Posters

Six students who took part in a series of political demonstrations last fall at Peking University, China’s most prestigious educational institution, have been arrested by police and taken away from the campus this spring, according to student sources.

The young activists were said to have been involved in a new campus movement to press the cause of democratic government in China. The call for democracy was raised last fall, during a series of protests in which students also complained about inflation, corruption and what they said was China’s overly close relationship with Japan.

Arrested in Dormitory

One of the arrests was made when police reportedly drove onto the campus in a jeep late at night, walked into the dormitory room of a history student and told him to pack up his belongings. “You are going to change your living conditions,” they told him, according to a dormitory source.

A spokesman for the university said Saturday that two students have been arrested on the campus. He refused to give any other details, saying “it’s the job of the Public Security Bureau.”

A spokesman for that Peking bureau confirmed that two students were arrested in April but would not give their names or say why they were held or specify the charges against them.

Student sources said that, since they were arrested, the six students have simply disappeared. Friends have been unable to locate them. Four of the students were from the History Department and two from the Law Department, the sources said.

Developments at Peking University take on particular political significance in China because of the special role the campus has played in Chinese history throughout the 20th Century.

Goes Back to 1919

The so-called “May 4 movement” that provoked a revival of Chinese nationalism began with a political demonstration at Peking University in 1919. The Cultural Revolution was sparked by wall posters appearing at the university in 1966.

A new round of political activity began at the campus last September, when hundreds of students put up posters at the campus triangle and sought to march to Tian An Men Square in the heart of Peking.

Student sources say that one of the wall posters proclaimed the formation of a new political party called the Chinese Democratic Party and invited other students to join. The stated aim of the group was to help China’s Communist Party increase the degree of democracy in government.

Constitutional Changes

Some students also called for creation of a multiparty government and for revision of the Chinese constitution, which says that China is “a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.”

Last fall, the wave of protests that began at Peking University spread to campuses in other cities. The demonstrations appeared to cause considerable consternation among China’s top leaders.

High-ranking national and provincial officials were sent to meet with the students, and early this year, the regime announced that 1986 would be a year of “consolidation” in which there would be no further price rises or economic reforms in China.

By the beginning of the spring semester at Peking University, campus unrest had begun to wane. It was then that the arrests began, according to sources there. At the same time, the sources say, authorities held a secret meeting of department heads and other ranking university officials, at which it was decided to investigate those who had written the wall posters put up during the fall demonstrations.

Students Now Pessimistic

“Right now, there aren’t any secret activities going on,” one campus source said last week. “The students are apathetic and pessimistic. They know that there is nothing they can do. So they spend all day in the library studying and hoping they can go abroad.”

The students’ effort to press for democracy in China was apparently the most serious since 1979, when young activists set up a “democracy wall” in downtown Peking to display posters expressing political dissent.

Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping originally sent a message supporting the wall. Eventually, however, it was closed down. Some leaders of the “democracy movement” were arrested, and the Chinese constitution was rewritten to remove guarantees of the right to put up the dissenting posters.