Protesters Reshaping China Political Debate : Party Infighting Intensifies, Pace of Economic Reforms in Doubt After Student Demonstrations

An American visitor happened to be traveling through the sleepy Yangtze River port of Zhenjiang a week ago when he looked outside his bus window and saw about 1,000 students carrying banners and marching through the town.

“Oppose Bureaucratism,” one of the banners proclaimed. “Support the Students of Shanghai,” said another.

From accounts such as these, it has become clear that the demonstrations, first in Shanghai and now in Peking, by Chinese students for the cause of democracy, which have attracted worldwide attention, are part of a widespread movement--one that affected even some of China’s smaller cities and towns.

Authorities Challenged

From Kunming in China’s far southwest to Shenzhen near the border with Hong Kong to Tianjin in north China, young Chinese students have dared to challenge local authorities by conducting protest marches and putting up wallposters, a practice that is illegal under the Chinese constitution.

Repeatedly, the students have expressed classic Western libertarian ideals.

“We want public elections. We want to elect our leaders,” one Peking demonstrator said. Many of the protesters have called for freedom of the press, and a few have borrowed American symbols such as the Statue of Liberty or American sayings such as Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

Largest for a Decade

In both numbers of protesters and of locations, it has been by far the largest such movement since the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. The tens of thousands of people in the Shanghai demonstration alone eclipsed anything seen during China’s famous but short-lived “Democracy Movement” of 1978-79.

Who are the protesting students, and what lies behind the sudden outbreak of student demonstrations? Have they been organized or encouraged by any higher authorities or factions within the Chinese leadership? What role will they play in China’s domestic politics?

Although there is no agreement yet on the answers to these questions, analysts are beginning to form tentative judgments--and to admit that they are reconsidering some of their earlier assumptions about current Chinese society.

Pace of Change Affected

“This changes the whole way we think about this place,” admitted one Western European diplomat, a man who has been in China for more than four years. “We have to think through again the long-term effects of China’s opening up to the outside world and the possibilities for reaction against it.”

No matter whether they now continue or subside, the student demonstrations have already had considerable impact.

According to several political analysts, the wave of demonstrations has called into question whether the Chinese regime can proceed as fast as it wants with planned economic reforms. Any substantial new price increases or factory changes could cause urban workers to join in the unrest.

Furthermore, the analysts say, the student protests have raised the political stakes within China’s ruling Communist Party, touching off a new and seemingly bitter round of infighting between what are commonly called reform and conservative factions in the months before a nationwide party congress this fall.

Press Tone Grows Strident

The party-controlled press began to take on an increasingly strident tone last week. Newspapers issued rare warnings that “class struggle” has not yet ended in China and attacked unnamed “people in ideological and cultural circles” who were said to have encouraged a “trend toward bourgeois liberalization.”

On the surface, the demonstrations by the students seem a long way from such high-level political infighting.

The participants in the democracy demonstrations are generally young. Some are first- or second-year university students, and a few are as young as 17 or 18 years old--people who were not even born at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In some instances, they have been joined by recent university graduates, people working in scientific institutes or as teachers.

Their wallposters are often written not on old newspapers or cloth, but on computer printout paper. Many of the participants wear what are, for China, fashionable clothes. At the end of one demonstration in Peking last week, protesters asked police for a bus to transport them back to their campus.

The tone of some of the posters is one of rebellion against authority, somewhat similar to that in Western youth movements.

Movement Lacks Leadership

“I don’t understand why some of our youth are so vulgar,” said one drippingly sarcastic poster at Peking University. “We should really keep silent and listen to the party and the government. We should mind our own business.

“If things under heaven rot, the worst that could happen is we’ll be like everybody else. This is the consistent logic and philosophy of us Chinese. Why shouldn’t we believe it? Aren’t we just puerile university students?”

The student movement has no public leadership or organization. Those who talk to the press at all rarely give their names, and even those who do ask that the names not be published or broadcast.

In these respects, the current democracy movement differs considerably from the “Democracy Wall” movement that burst forth in China in 1978-79. The adherents of that earlier movement were older and had fewer connections to universities. Many had returned to cities from forced service in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

“The voices we heard at the Democracy Wall belonged to the generation in its 20s and 30s,” wrote one observer, British diplomat Roger Garside. “Many had been in their teens when Mao (Tse-tung) mobilized them into the Red Guards in 1966, releasing them from the routine of study and the constraints of school, family and neighborhood.”

The earlier Democracy Movement also had public organizations, magazines and leaders, some of whom are now in jail. The movement was at first given some encouragement by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping as he was trying to consolidate his support within the Communist Party, but he later suppressed it. It was after the movement was shut down in 1979 that wallposters were made illegal.

No Outside Control Seen

Foreign analysts here say that there has so far been no solid evidence that the students taking part in the new democracy movement are being organized or controlled by anyone else. And several analysts said they believe the demonstrations represent a genuine, largely spontaneous outpouring of sentiment by young students motivated by democratic ideals.

“There’s some evidence of organization among the students themselves on when to demonstrate, but that’s it,” said one diplomat who is following the protests. “I don’t believe in the theory that there is some plot here.”

For its part, the official Chinese media suggested last week that the demonstrations were being instigated by Peking’s archenemy, the Nationalist Chinese government of Taiwan.

Still, even if the students are acting on their own, their protests have strong connections to Chinese politics. Analysts note that the demonstrations originally grew out of some developments at high levels of the Chinese leadership--and that the protests are now being seized on by high-ranking Chinese officials for political purposes.

The Chinese leadership is controlled largely by a group of so-called reformers, whose ranks include Deng’s top aides, Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang and Premier Zhao Ziyang, and a series of other younger leaders. They are most closely identified with China’s moves toward Westernization and its efforts to develop a market-oriented economy.

Resist Deng’s Reforms

But within the highest levels of the Communist Party, there remains a group of conservatives who often seek to slow down the pace of change. They include such men as Peng Zhen, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and Chen Yun, a member of the Politburo’s five-man Standing Committee.

These party elders were ousted along with Deng during the Cultural Revolution and came back into leadership positions with him in the late 1970s. But since then, they have been complaining that Deng has swung too far in the opposite direction from Mao and that China’s reform program deviates from party orthodoxy.

A year ago, the reform group seemed on the defensive, largely because the lifting of some price controls had led to a serious bout of inflation in Chinese cities. But last spring and summer, the “reformers” launched a broad new campaign of “political reform” that was aimed at galvanizing new intellectual and popular support for the leadership under Deng.

For several months, Chinese newspapers carried essays by scholars, writers and intellectuals discussing the possibility of far-reaching political liberalization. Prominent themes included the importance of the right to dissent and the need for a more democratic, less authoritarian style in Chinese organizations and politics.

It is this months-long campaign of political reform that appears to have emboldened students to launch their demonstrations for democracy. Moreover, some of the intellectuals who became outspoken proponents of political reform gave encouragement to the youthful protesters.

‘Straighten Up Their Backs’

One outspoken intellectual was Fang Lizhi, 50, a leading Chinese astrophysicist and member of the General Assembly of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In November, Fang told the Shanghai newspaper World Economic Herald that “Chinese intellectuals should straighten up their bent backs. They should not be completely obedient to the higher level or wait for orders from above when dealing with things.” He also said Chinese intellectuals “should place their hope on the young intellectuals who are growing up during the 1980s.”

Fang now serves as the vice president of the Chinese University of Science and Technology in the city of Hefei. This university served as the focal point from which the wave of recent demonstrations radiated to other cities.

On Dec. 5, more than 1,000 students at Fang’s university in Hefei held a demonstration to protest the method by which authorities narrowed down candidates for an election to the local district People’s Congress without consulting the students. A second demonstration in Hefei four days later attracted 3,000 students, some from other local universities.

“The students’ requests were very correct,” Fang said.

Local authorities later changed the election procedures.

No Penalties Expected

Afterwards, Fang stressed that none of the demonstrating students had been arrested and that none of them would be penalized with poor job assignments after graduation.

Fang was the subject of a flattering article in a December issue of Beijing Review, an official, government-sponsored weekly magazine. Some analysts here point to his role as a sign that the student demonstrations had indirect sponsorship from the Chinese leadership.

There have been other signs as well that some of the demonstrating students see themselves as supporting reformers in the Communist Party leadership. One banner at the demonstration in Peking’s Tian An Men square Thursday said, “Oppose the Reactionaries and Conservatives.”

A wallposter put up at Peking University last week told readers: “The party’s 13th congress is due to be held (this year). There will be a major reshuffle of personnel in Chinese politics. Once conservative forces rise, reforms in China will fail. At such an important moment, the important task is to support the reforms and to create public opinion for them.”

Some foreign analysts reject the theory that the demonstrations have the official sanction of the reformist leaders. They maintain that although the reformers want to encourage and enlist the help of intellectuals like Fang, there is no reason to think the regime would want to encourage demonstrations and student unrest.

“Things have been going well for the reformers. They’ve made a lot of advances over the past year,” one Western analyst said. “I can’t see what they would gain from all this.”

Indeed, at least in the short term, the student demonstrations seem to have greatly strengthened the hand of the party traditionalists who seek to slow down the reforms.

Now the talk of political liberalization, of the right to dissent and of academic freedom have virtually disappeared from the official Chinese press. And traditional Marxist concepts that had not been seen for several years, such as the idea that China is still engaged in “class struggle,” have made a comeback.

Writing in the Canton Evening News last Wednesday, one commentator said that the students are trying to create havoc in China.

“Let them taste the iron rule of the people’s democratic dictatorship,” he urged.