GORBACHEV IN CHINA: The Communist Summit : Massive Beijing Protest Demands Leaders Quit : Students Want Deng, Premier to Resign; Marches in 24 Cities

Hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents took to the streets Wednesday to demand the resignations of senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng and the implementation of democratic political reforms.

“We demand that Deng Xiao-ping, Li Peng, old people and those among the young who are incapable should immediately resign,” a student leader declared over a loudspeaker in Tian An Men Square on Wednesday evening.

The same basic message was repeated in slogans, banners and cartoons as the people of Beijing--protected by their numbers and the apparent unwillingness of the government to launch a crackdown--enjoyed a rare opportunity to publicly ridicule their leaders.

“Clean Up the High-Level Garbage,” declared a banner that captured the general tone. “Stupid Old People Should Resign Quickly,” said another.

Protests also swept other major cities across China. The official New China News Agency--which like other state-run media has over the past few days begun to issue increasingly detailed and accurate reports on the escalating protests--reported that demonstrations took place in more than 24 cities.

Some banners in Beijing specifically included Chinese President Yang Shangkun among those who should step down.

Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, widely viewed as the most enthusiastic advocate of reform among the top leaders, was the target of much less criticism.

In recent days, Zhao has taken the key public role in promoting a conciliatory attitude toward the demonstrators. Some protesters said he may end up politically strengthened by the upsurge of sentiment against other top leaders, but this is far from certain.

2,000 on Hunger Strike

Students remained at the core of the protest, with about 2,000 continuing a hunger strike, but ordinary residents of Beijing far outnumbered students both in the square and in large, banner-waving processions that snaked through the city.

At the peak of afternoon and early evening activity Wednesday, there were about 300,000 people in Tian An Men Square, with as many as several hundred thousand more parading or simply milling through streets leading to and from the square. Some estimates put the total figure as high as 1 million.

Many factory workers and office employees abandoned their workplaces to join or watch processions that set out on marches through the city.

Journalists, including a group from the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, also took part in the demonstrations. Groups of uniformed soldiers carrying banners identifying their units, monks from the All-China Buddhist Assn. and officials from the Beijing Airport Customs Unit were among the participants.

Ordinary people joining the demonstrations “want to speed up the pace of reform, make China strong and have the people be the true masters of the nation,” declared a young man who identified himself as a cadre, or official, in a government agency.

Students Demand Dialogue

The student protesters have been demanding a publicly televised “dialogue” with a top government leader. They have also called for increased press freedom, better treatment of intellectuals and an effective attack on corruption.

Until Wednesday, the resignation of top leaders was not a formal part of their demands. It is not clear whether protest leaders would insist that such resignations take place before they would call for an end to the demonstrations.

Late Wednesday evening and early today, the New China News Agency carried a series of reports on different mainstream organizations and individuals issuing calls on the government to accept the demand for a public dialogue between top leaders and protesters.

“We hope that, to ease the tension, top leaders of the party and the government will go among the students as soon as possible to acquire a proper understanding of their patriotic feelings and reasonable demands,” said a joint statement released by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League, the All-China Youth Federation and the All-China Students’ Federation.

“We hope and believe that the party and government will seriously take heed of the reasonable demands of the students and the public, take resolute measures to fight corruption, further political structural reform and economic structural reform and strengthen democracy and the legal system, so as to boost China’s socialist modernization,” the statement added.

Those issuing similar pleas included the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles; the chairmen of four small non-Communist parties that are allowed to exist so long as they cooperate with the Communist Party; Rong Yiren, president of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and the government-controlled Students Federation of Beijing Municipality.

It was not immediately clear whether these calls constituted further protest or whether they might have been encouraged by supporters of Zhao hoping to set an ideological and popular basis for further conciliatory steps that might end the demonstrations and boost Zhao’s authority.

The dominant mood of the street protesters in Beijing was festive, with peddlers of soft drinks and flavored ice doing a booming business. An air of additional excitement and tension was added by the sirens of ambulances removing exhausted hunger strikers from the square.

Police made no attempts to control the protesters, but student parade marshals used plastic twine to mark lines and hold back the crowd at key intersections to provide a passageway for the ambulances.

Singers on Open Truck

Before sunset Wednesday, a group of popular singers, standing on an open truck equipped to blast out recorded pop tunes, proceeded to the square to the great excitement of many who saw them. A banner indicated that they had dubbed themselves the Save the Nation Band.

After midnight this morning, the protest acquired something of a rough undertone, as gangs of rowdy youths banged on cars that tried to drive too near the square.

A month of escalating pro-democracy protests in Beijing has not involved any violence, but student protests last month in the central China city of Xian and the south China city of Changsha sparked rioting.

Protests have broken out again in those cities, the New China News Agency reported Wednesday. It said that nearly 30,000 protesters gathered outside Shanghai’s city hall on Wednesday, that more than 1,000 students launched a sit-in in front of the railway station in the coastal city of Tianjin Tuesday evening and that more than 5,000 students began a sit-in in front of Hubei province offices in the central China city of Wuhan on Tuesday morning.

Nearly 30,000 students paraded through Nanjing on Wednesday morning, and nearly 10,000 students, teachers, journalists and writers marched through Hefei, capital of Anhui province, the agency reported.

Similar demonstrations, all aimed at showing support for the hunger strikers in Beijing, took place in Canton, Jinan, Hangzhou, Lanzhou, Kunming, Guiyang, Nanchang, Chengdu, Taiyuan, Zhengzhou, Hohhot, Shijiazhuang, Changchun, Shenyang, Harbin, Haikou, Shenzhen and unspecified additional cities, the official news agency reported.

Foreigners interviewed by telephone by Beijing-based Western journalists used similar figures to describe the scale of protests in Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan. Confirmation of the New China News Agency figures for other cities was not immediately available.

The protests in Beijing have implied strong criticism of Deng and Li--and the entire top leadership of the Communist Party--from the time they began last month.

More Explicit Criticism

But events Wednesday raised the explicit criticism of Deng and Li to new levels, just one day after they had met visiting Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the first Sino-Soviet summit in 30 years.

One banner in Tian An Men Square ridiculed the top political arrangements of China, under which the five members of the Politburo Standing Committee--Zhao, Li, Vice Premier Yao Yilin, Qiao Shi and Hu Qili--must refer major issues to Deng for a final decision.

Zhao announced for the first time Tuesday, during his meeting with Gorbachev, that this arrangement is not merely informal but was decided by a Communist Party Central Committee plenum at the end of the 1987 party congress at which Deng stepped down from the Politburo.

“Collective Responsibility but One Man Decides. Strange!” declared the banner. On one side of the words was a cartoon of old Chinese men with flowing beards. On the other side was a caricature of Deng wearing a crown and holding up one hand, with Zhao, Li, Hu, Qiao and Yao mounted as puppets on each finger.

GORBACHEV ECLIPSED--Protests overshadow summit, U.S. officials say. Page 18