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1,000,000 Protesters Force Gorbachev to Cut Itinerary : The Center of Beijing Is Paralyzed

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From Times Wire Services

More than a million demonstrators in Beijing and legions more in almost every provincial capital of China took to the streets today in the biggest anti-government protests since the 1949 Communist revolution.

The center of Beijing was paralyzed almost all day, forcing visiting Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to change his schedule completely in what diplomats said was a humiliating experience for China’s leaders.

The Soviet leader had to cancel a visit to the Forbidden City in central Beijing and to move the news conference from the Great Hall to the guest house where he was staying.

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“All these rallies made us nervous,” Gorbachev said in an interview broadcast by Chinese television. But he said his visit, which has produced a normalization of Sino-Soviet relations after a 30-year chill, was going well.

With no formal meetings scheduled today, Gorbachev delivered a keynote address to Chinese intellectuals, tramped around the Great Wall with his wife Raisa and held the news conference at the Diaoyutai State Guest House in western Beijing.

The protest was dominated today for the first time by workers rather than students. The march began in central Tian An Men Square, the site of a hunger strike, to the sound of firecrackers set off under the huge poster of Mao Tse-tung at the entrance to the former Imperial Palace.

Many demonstrators carried banners and shouted slogans demanding the resignation of 85-year-old senior leader Deng Xiaoping for not resolving the plight of students who called the hunger strike for democratic freedoms.

“I would not take on myself the role of a judge or deliver assessments of what is going on,” Gorbachev said after arriving two hours late for a news conference, the site of which had been hastily changed to the official guest house.

“There is a difficult but genuine dialogue under way between the Chinese leaders and the students and other groups in Chinese society. . . . We should welcome the fact that there is a political dialogue and we must hope that solutions will be found,” he added.

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Pressed to comment on the protests, Gorbachev told reporters the process of reform in communist countries is sometimes painful.

He declined to answer directly when asked what lessons he might take back to the Soviet Union, itself in the throes of a radical political shake-up that has brought demonstrators into the streets of Moscow and other cities.

“I think that in the Soviet Union, as well, if such a situation arose--and problems of a similar order could arise--we would look at them in a concrete fashion and find political methods to solve them,” he said.

In Shanghai, where Gorbachev is due to meet the local Communist Party chief Thursday on the last day of his four-day visit to China, about 20,000 students and some workers were demonstrating outside government headquarters.

The peaceful protests were the climax of mounting anti-government sentiment which engulfed Beijing in wave after wave of marching students, factory workers, shopkeepers, civil servants, teachers, journalists, peasants and even uniformed recruits from Beijing’s police academy.

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