China Seeks to Mollify Its Students

Leaders in the capital city met with a selected group of university students Sunday in a continuing attempt to end two weeks of pro-democracy protests.

In a conciliatory gesture at the meeting, Mayor Chen Xitong and the capital’s Communist Party head, Li Ximing, made public the amounts of their official monthly incomes.

In another development that may also be intended as a conciliatory act, the wife and daughter of Xu Wenli, one of China’s most famous political prisoners, were allowed to visit him in prison Sunday for the first time in more than three years.

Release of income figures by Chen and Li came in response to protesters’ demands directed at China’s leadership in general. Corruption has been the target of sharp criticism by demonstrators, who want the incomes of top leaders and their family members made public.

Meaningless Statistic

Official salaries, however, are almost meaningless in China, because one’s standard of living is determined by the quality of housing, transportation and other benefits provided free or almost free based on one’s rank. A top leader, for example, may enjoy the use of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz without paying for it.

Also, the students with whom Chen and Li met apparently were handpicked individuals associated with the government-controlled Beijing Municipal Students Federation. The official New China News Agency reported the meeting late Sunday evening, and it was not immediately clear whether protest leaders even knew it had taken place.

Leaders of a new, unofficial student association that staged a huge protest march Thursday--and which is considered an illegal organization--have demanded that the government recognize their group as legal and conduct a dialogue with it.

The 29 students at Sunday’s meeting heard Li announce that his monthly income is slightly more than 300 yuan--$81--and that this is the highest among his colleagues, the New China News Agency reported.

Chen said his monthly income is about 300 yuan, slightly less than Li’s, the agency reported. “It is enough for me,” Chen said, according to the report.

The protesters’ demands for public disclosure of income figures have not been primarily directed at official wages, which are already known to be low, but are aimed at the various other sources of income and perks that make high officials’ lives very comfortable. The New China News Agency report made no mention of Chen and Li addressing this issue.

The news agency report, which itself constitutes part of an official effort to calm the protests, states that disclosure by Li and Chen of their incomes and that of their family members “drew applause from the students.”

“At a dialogue lasting longer than three hours, Beijing leaders and students also exchanged views on such matters as students’ demonstrations and boycott of classes, democracy, education and clean government,” the report added.

2nd Week of Strike

A student strike at Beijing universities in support of demands that include press freedom, better treatment of intellectuals and an attack on corruption is due to enter its second week today.

Students are also boycotting classes at universities in the coastal city of Tianjin, 70 miles east of Beijing, according to students who spoke with reporters. Thousands of students held a protest march Friday in Tianjin to support Beijing students who marched the previous day, activists said.

Kan Tong, the wife of Xu Wenli, 45, told the Associated Press that she and her 16-year-old daughter, Xu Jin, were allowed to visit Xu for 30 minutes Sunday in the presence of five police officers and an official stenographer.

Kan said that her husband--an editor of unofficial pro-democracy journals who has been imprisoned since 1981 for those activities--has become “a bag of bones.”

“His hair is completely white and all the teeth on the left side of his mouth have fallen out,” Kan said. “We sat there on benches. The police were on high chairs, sitting above us. Both of us just looked at our hands. He was shaking. He shook throughout the meeting. Then he cried.”

Xu Jin said it was wonderful to see her father.

“But it also was so sad,” she said. “He told me to keep painting and to study a foreign language.”