Success or Failure, Chinese Students Want to Make the News

The route to Tian An Men Square from the three big university campuses on the northwest side of Peking takes you through some of the most densely populated and heavily traveled areas of the city. The square itself is surrounded by the city’s major shopping streets, government offices, museums and hotels.

So when Chinese television reported the New Year’s Day activity in the square, a ceremony at the Monument to the People’s Heroes conducted by members of the Young Pioneers, hundreds of thousands of people--at the very least--knew that this was not the real news of the day. The real news was that a massive demonstration by university students for political democracy and intellectual freedom had led to a clash with police and numerous arrests.

The controlled Chinese press controls only the appearance of things. The reality is known well enough to the Chinese people, who of course have the direct experience of their own daily lives and, in addition, many effective unofficial means of getting the news. These means include what the Chinese call “small-lane news”--word-of-mouth that travels the winding back streets of the big cities; students demonstrating in Shanghai sent couriers to the railroad stations to shout the news so that travelers could spread the word across the country. Short-wave radio broadcasts of the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, the BBC and other international media have large audiences. Probably several million Chinese get to see the uncensored digest of foreign press reporting about China that is produced for senior cadres and is filtered through the small-lane editorial process. People do know what is going on.

Still, in a society that is based on thousands of years of an aristocracy of the intellect, and one that has only recently achieved mass literacy, public communication has a totemic value that cannot be supplanted by what is essentially an elaborate system of gossip. That’s why the specific demands of the students, in protests in 10 cities in recent weeks, have included freedom of the press and freedom of debate. They want their demonstrations and demands reported in the mass media, and some say that they want to publish their own newspapers and magazines. They have also called for support for China’s maximum leader, Deng Xiaoping, in his bureaucratic battles with conservative elements in the party.

And that’s why they are headed for a fall.

No doubt the students understand this better than any outside observer. All Chinese intellectuals are dedicated makers of historical parallels and are conscious of their role as a small elite class in pushing China into the revolutionary changes that it has undergone in the 20th Century.

Certainly they know what happened the last time that Chinese youth responded to Deng’s invitation to defend his economic reforms, in 1978-80. After Deng won whatever battles he was fighting at the time, the leaders of the Democracy Movement were arrested (and are still in jail), their public debates on “big-character posters” on Democracy Wall were replaced with advertising billboards, their magazines were suppressed, and when the movement showed signs of linking up with striking factory workers Deng threatened to impose martial law--he may in fact have done so in the provinces.

On Dec. 25, 1980, Deng gave a speech about the economy in which he sounded the death knell of the Democracy Movement. “We must struggle against bourgeois liberalism and out-and-out individualism,” he said. “We must continue friendly relations with the West and learn business methods, but in the ideological sphere we must struggle to the end . . . . We must emphasize stability and unity. Some people always want to stir up trouble.”

Thus spake Deng Xiaoping. I was working in China at the time, and in my diary I made this note: “The crackdown on democratic expression and strikes seems to be a quid on Deng’s part for the quo of cooperation with his economic reorganization. He gives a little, and the conservatives give a little. And the democrats end up in jail.”

They will end up in jail again, and they know it. It’s the price that they pay for what they see as their historic mission of moving China forward. Deng and his allies will protect their movement until the point at which they seriously put forward the argument that if competition is good for the economy it might be good in politics, too: Maybe the Communist Party could use some competition, to make it more creative and more accountable.

But for now the students will be content if they can get the revolution televised.