Peking Official Reportedly Fired Over Student Unrest

A Communist Party propaganda official has been fired, the first high-ranking victim of an expected purge of leaders blamed for recent student protests, a pro-Peking Hong Kong newspaper said Sunday.

The newspaper, Wen Wei Po, said that Zhong Peizhang, director of the government’s Information Bureau since 1983, was replaced by Deputy Director Wang Furu. The announcement coincided with reports of an impending purge of Communist Party members considered soft on capitalism and “bourgeois liberalism.”

Meanwhile, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang canceled a scheduled meeting with a Japanese visitor Sunday, and a spokesman explained that he was “too exhausted from overwork.”

It was the second time in two weeks that Hu failed to show up for a public event at which he was expected to appear. The 71-year-old Hu was noticeably absent from the Jan. 7 funeral of Huang Kecheng, the former chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army.

This comes at a time when China’s official press is conducting a campaign against “bourgeois liberalism” and has raised questions of whether Hu, a supporter of political reform as well as a close ally of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, might be in trouble.

The press continued its attack Sunday. In a front-page commentary, the official newspaper Guangming Daily said that an unnamed “comrade who is vice president of a university” has publicly advocated the “total Westernization” of China. It said such a view is tantamount to rejecting socialism.

Western diplomats said the commentary was a reference to Fang Lizhi, the 51-year-old vice president of the National Science and Technology University in the eastern city of Hefei, where the first of at least 13 reported pro-democracy demonstrations occurred on Dec. 5.

The commentary was the official media’s most explicit attack yet on Fang, who is being expelled from the Communist Party. Fang, an outspoken supporter of democracy, had been lionized by the students.