Chinese News Media Warn Students to Avoid Violence as Wave of Protest Ebbs

China’s news media lectured on the virtues of stability and the excesses of zeal Wednesday as a degree of normalcy returned to cities shaken by student demands for more democracy.

The only report of large-scale student activity came from the port city of Tianjin east of Peking, where 3,000 students from Nankai University demonstrated in front of the city hall, according to foreign teachers.

The teachers said this was apparently the first time that the Nankai students, whose university has a strong liberal arts tradition, had publicly joined the rallies staged in more than a dozen cities by students seeking political reforms.

Peking, Shanghai Quiet

Shanghai, the scene of five straight days of protest, was quiet, and there was no evidence of student gatherings in Peking, where 4,000 young people rallied Tuesday night in support of their Shanghai comrades.

The national media broke their silence on the Shanghai protests, chronicling the havoc they wrought with traffic and commerce and reminding readers of the terrible days of the Cultural Revolution, the last time throngs of students took to the streets.

The reports gave most Chinese their first word of the Shanghai protests, in which thousands of students appealed for less bureaucratic control over their lives, more participation in campus and local politics and a freer, more objective press.

China’s tightly controlled press, a propaganda arm of the government, rarely reports domestic unrest, except indirectly in editorials calling for an end to “unhealthy tendencies.”

Theme of Reports

The common theme in newspaper and television reports on the Shanghai protests was that Chinese should avoid the excesses of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when radical, anti-intellectual Red Guards unleashed by Mao Tse-tung destroyed property, persecuted millions and brought the nation to the brink of civil war.

The Shanghai newspaper Wen Hui Bao published reports on meetings between professors and students in which the professors expressed sympathy with the students’ demands but pointed out that most were too young to remember the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and called for stability and unity.

Students say the current activism in no way resembles that of the Red Guards, who promoted blind obedience to dogma.

Some of the students have said they seek only to promote the government policy of allowing more economic and personal freedoms. But others have expressed the desire to see eventual elections for political office and an end to the Communists’ one-party rule.

For most, the term democracy signifies, primarily, the freedom to choose one’s own job, live where one chooses and speak one’s mind without fear of persecution.

First Arrests

The government announced its first arrests in the demonstrations, the seizure of two young men in Shanghai.

Official Shanghai television showed film Wednesday of two young men appearing in court and signing indictment papers for causing public disorder and attempted arson in a demonstration by more than 10,000 students Sunday.

The indictment said Huang Cuizan and Sue Wenjeng, both factory workers, overturned a car near Shanghai’s People’s Square and attempted to set fire to it. They were arrested after police who filmed the disturbances traced them to their factory.