China Upheaval Likely to Force Major Changes : NEWS ANALYSIS

The crisis now engulfing China has reached such critical proportions that even if the country’s aging leaders manage to crush the democracy demonstrations and sweep student protesters from the streets, the future course of the world’s most populous nation has almost certainly been changed.

The forces that have come to the surface over the past week run so deep that, if history is any guide, the Chinese regime will not be able to keep them suppressed forever.

“It certainly is an upheaval of historic dimensions, and I think it will eventually change the dynamics of politics in China,” Prof. Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, said Sunday.

Over the past four decades, ruling leaders of the Chinese regime have several times cut off student protests or other demonstrations--only to find in later months or years that the protests had reemerged even stronger and that leaders of the crackdown were themselves swept away.

And, with the possible exception of a full-scale revolt in Tibet in 1959, none of these previous outbursts of protest were nearly so large or pervasive as the outpouring of demands for democracy that have swept the country over the past week.

Although students have taken the lead in the massive democracy demonstrations, experts agree that they are supported by virtually every segment of the Chinese population and throughout nearly all regions of the nation.

The most dramatic example of a crackdown that proved unsuccessful in the long run was in April, 1976, five months before the death of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. As many as 100,000 people turned out in Tian An Men Square to protest what they felt was the Chinese leadership’s refusal to give proper respect and honors to the memory of former Premier Chou En-lai, who had died earlier that year.

Then, as now, the fervor of the protesters was mingled with softer emotions that seem to characterize such confrontations in China--including surprising concern among the demonstrators for the forces arrayed against them. Such sentiments stand in sharp contrast with the harsh spirit of comparable protests in many other countries, most notably neighboring South Korea.

In the spring of 1976, the regime was controlled largely by radical leaders such as Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. The leadership called security forces into Beijing to clear the square and quell the protests. By all accounts, there was considerable violence and, according to the initial estimates of security officials, more than 100 deaths.

The brutal suppression of that protest, while initially successful, eventually helped lead to the downfall of some of the Chinese leaders involved in calling out the security forces. A month after Mao died, his wife and her allies--known as the Gang of Four--were arrested.

The more moderate leaders who rose to power after Mao’s death overturned the Chinese Communist Party’s judgment that the 1976 protests had been counterrevolutionary and instead concluded that they had been “completely revolutionary.”

“If Chairman Mao had been in good health, if he had been capable of making up his own mind, he would not have made such decisions,” declared a new Chinese leader nearly three years after the suppression of the Tian An Men demonstrations.

Ironically, that new Chinese leader was Deng Xiaoping, the same man who now, as chairman of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, has become a symbol of resistance to political change and the target of student protests.

Democracy Wall Protests

In late 1978 and early 1979, a new series of demonstrations swept Beijing. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of young people began gathering at a site known as Democracy Wall, where wallposters called for human rights and democracy in China.

Deng, then in the process of consolidating his control over the Chinese Communist Party, at first voiced some support for the Democracy Wall protests. But a few months later, he led a crackdown. The demonstrations were stopped, leaders were arrested and the right to put up wallposters was eliminated from the Chinese constitution.

Wei Jingsheng, the leader of that Democracy Wall movement, was tried as a counterrevolutionary for allegedly giving state secrets to a foreign journalist. He remains in jail, but the people in the streets today--numbering in the hundreds of thousands--are his political heirs.

Deng’s willingness to suppress the Democracy Wall campaign was reminiscent of his successful efforts two decades earlier, with Mao, to crack down on intellectual freedom in China.

‘Hundred Flowers’ Movement

In 1956, when Mao was Communist Party chairman and Deng was the party’s general secretary, the party encouraged intellectuals to voice their opinions. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,” said Mao, quoting an old Confucian aphorism.

The following year, astounded by the vehemence of the intellectuals’ criticism of the Communist Party that the invitation had triggered, Mao and Deng cracked down. About 300,000 people were purged from the party, and thousands of intellectuals were jailed or exiled to the countryside.

More recently, Deng and the Chinese regime have confronted a recurring series of student demonstrations and have tried to cut them off. But the efforts have proved unsuccessful over the long run.

The current wave of student demonstrations dates to December, 1984. At first, the protests were pitifully small, particularly when compared to the mass outpourings of the past week.

At Beijing University, the nation’s most prestigious school, several hundred students put up wallposters and marched at night to protest overcrowded conditions on campus. At another nearby university, students demonstrated to complain of poor food.

The regime paid little attention until the following fall, when the student protests spread to Tian An Men Square and took on larger political overtones. Nearly a thousand students outside the Great Hall of the People denounced Japan’s “economic invasion” of China and corruption within the party. Some of these demonstrators also called for democracy.

This time, the Chinese leadership acted. The regime warned students that it would use tough measures against anyone who took part in another planned demonstration. After the protest movement subsided, a handful of student leaders vanished from campuses.

Within a year, however, Chinese students were back in the streets, this time in much greater force and focusing more directly on the cause of democracy. In December, 1986, protesters at a small university in Hefei, encouraged by a school administrator named Fang Lizhi, took to the streets to protest efforts by party officials to exclude non-approved candidates from an election.

This time, the protests for democracy spread. In Shanghai, tens of thousands of students took to the streets. In Beijing, students staged a midnight march to Tian An Men Square.

The crackdown began in January, 1987, when the Chinese Communist Party launched a campaign against “bourgeois liberalization.” Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang and his propaganda chief were ousted from their jobs, and three leading intellectuals, including Fang Lizhi, were expelled from the Communist Party.

For a time, the crackdown worked. But in April, triggered by the death of Hu, students took to the streets again, this time in far larger numbers and with the support of workers and others in China.