Flowering of China Spring Puts Beijing in a Dilemma

In late December, 1987, a Shanghai court sentenced Yang Wei, a Chinese student who had been studying at the University of Arizona, to two years’ imprisonment for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” because he hung wall posters and distributed letters during the student demonstrations of December, 1986. Yang’s case is an indication of a deeper struggle as China tries to balance reform and control.

Yang was convicted of acting on behalf of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy (or China Spring movement), a dissident organization founded in New York in 1982. Immediately after his arrest, the alliance organized a sophisticated publicity and lobbying effort to bring American pressure to bear on the Chinese government. The organization supplied news of Yang’s arrest to American newspapers. Alliance chairman Wang Bingzhang went to Capitol Hill and visited the offices of sympathetic senators, including Jesse Helms and Dennis DeConcini. The Senate held hearings on human rights in China at which Yang’s wife, Che Shaoli--also a student in the United States--appeared. The alliance then organized a wave of telephone calls to senators’ offices from Chinese students in the United States. Shortly before Yang’s trial, a Helms-DeConcini bill, calling for Yang’s release, was adopted by Congress and signed by President Reagan, to the sharp irritation of the Chinese government.

Never before had a Chinese political case aroused so much pressure in the United States. The Chinese government felt the pressure. Arrested in January, 1987, Yang was not tried until December. When the trial finally occurred, Yang received the lightest sentence known to have been given to a Chinese convicted of counter-revolutionary activity.

These events demonstrate the growing strength of the alliance. The organization has suffered leadership splits and a shortage of money, and there are serious charges that it fabricated material published in its magazine and has accepted money and political direction from the Taiwan authorities. Whatever the truth of the charges, the tide of opinion among Chinese students in the United States and Chinese-American businessmen has shifted somewhat in the alliance’s favor. More mainland students have submitted articles to the group’s magazine, China Spring, and several have dared to publish in their own names. Some Chinese-American businesses now advertise in the magazine.

Most important, in an early January meeting in San Francisco the alliance showed itself to be more than a personal coterie of its founder by electing a new chairman. He is Hu Ping, a graduate student at Harvard who has considerable prestige among Chinese students in this country because of his intellectual attainments and record of political courage.

The alliance’s growing strength is a symptom of sharpening dissatisfaction toward the Chinese government among the approximately 19,000 Chinese students in the United States. Many were severely disillusioned by the party’s reaction to the 1986 student demonstrations--the ouster of party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was popular with Chinese intellectuals, the purge of three prominent liberals from the party and the inception of a campaign against “bourgeois liberalization.” In January, 1987, 1,682 Chinese students signed an unprecedented open letter protesting these events; 701 signed their real names.

The students waited anxiously for a sign that the party leaders understood their good motives and would not punish them after they returned home. But the party unwisely refused to offer such assurances. For these and other reasons, and despite the continued strong trend toward reform in China, a considerable number of students--no one can tell how many--seem to have concluded that it is hopeless to expect fundamental political change and personally unwise to go home.

The growing alienation of some students and the increasing prestige of the alliance may explain why the Chinese government used the occasion of Yang’s sentencing to label the alliance as counter-revolutionary, thus taking public notice of its existence for the first time. In a published interview, an anonymous Shanghai Public Security Bureau official warned that Chinese who participate in the alliance or contribute to its magazine will be dealt with “according to law” on their return home. Perhaps as a means of emphasizing the alliance’s dangerousness, the official painted its influence inside and outside China in the most impressive terms yet used by anyone outside the organization. Another decision, which may already have been made--it has been rumored but not publicly announced --is to reduce the number of students who will be permitted to go abroad, especially to the United States.

The party’s relations with the Chinese students in the United States are signs of its equally tense, but more hidden, conflicts with the much larger stratum of intellectuals at home. The Yang Wei case illustrates the party’s difficulties in opening up while still keeping control, and reminds us of the fragility of the reform impulse in China.