Great Crossroads in the Square

After weeks of political euphoria, of daily demonstrations of the people’s will, of spoken dreams for a new China, the thousands of students camping on Tian An Men Square, the tens of thousands of citizens marching each night, waited. They waited because they knew they had done all they could. They waited also because it is not they, but a small group of old men who would decide the path China will next trod.

Each evening last week, thousands of students and professors and bus drivers, doctors and Popsicle vendors, engineers, journalists and factory workers, mostly young but some older folks, gathered in front of the ornate gate of Zhongnanhai, a former imperial compound and now the working residence of China’s leaders. Through the open gate, beneath the crimson lacquered upswept eaves of this portal to power, the crowd saw, on an inner wall, immense characters scrawled in the calligraphy of Mao Tse-tung that read: “Wei renmin suwu”-- “Serve the People.”

The people stood, they sang, they chanted, they called on the old men behind this gate to hear them, to serve them. Cries of “Down with Li Peng,” “Long Live Freedom,” “Long Live Democracy,” echoed against the high cement walls, even as the somber green-uniformed praetorian guards stood at attention before them.

Li Peng, the prime minister, had forbidden this. He declared martial law, banned the encampments on Tian An Men Square, the parades through the heart of the capital, the slogan-chanting outside his compound. Yet the people persisted. They blocked his soldiers and ignored his commands. They flaunted their power and flouted his. But they knew this is China--and in the end it is not they but the men in Zhongnanhai who would decide how this all ends and that it could end at gunpoint.

“Maybe the government will win,” said a 23-year-old student of international politics at Beijing University. “That is because of military power. They have the guns. If the army wants to come, it could come immediately. Like South Korea, the people could be defeated.”

But before the guns are drawn, it is the party’s leaders, Deng Xiaoping, the man who set China on a course of economic modernization and reform, Yang Shangkun, the elderly military leader who is the country’s president, Qiao Shi, the Communist Party disciplinarian, Zhao Ziyang, the party’s general secretary who now has been eclipsed, and Li, who would decide. Everywhere on Beijing’s streets, there are rumors of the power struggle being waged within this coterie, a battle over the soul of the party, over authority, the right to rule, indeed the right to call oneself a communist.

It is now assumed that Deng, the man unquestionably behind Li’s effort to impose martial law, has turned viciously on his chosen head of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, labeling him a “counterrevolutionary.” Zhao is under house arrest, and it is said that his personal secretary Bao Tong has been arrested and a purge of Zhao’s supporters is under way. Then again there are rumors that Li will be dismissed--because he cannot prevail in one version, because he must be sacrificed in another.

This leadership battle, the most brutal since Mao’s death in 1976, has paralyzed the government and shattered the fragile succession structure assembled by Deng in the last two years. Although he has sought to withdraw from the quotidian work of government, Deng has remained the guiding influence for significant policy decisions and personnel changes. The explosive momentum of the student protests--what are now citizen protests--has exposed the frailty of Deng’s efforts, and the brittleness of the party he has tried to rebuild in the past decade.

Last week, Deng, who heads the military commissions of both the party and government, was forced to tour the country to rally support among China’s regional military commanders. Yet it required some time to determine what their attitudes were. He has apparently attacked Zhao and thrown his weight behind Li and the demand for repression--all in an effort to preserve his vision of a China, at once wealthy, powerful and controlled by an unshakable Communist Party.

Unacknowledged by Deng, though, his labors are precisely what have borne the fruit of protest, a discontent over tyranny and the yearning for some measure of individual and collective freedom. Economic liberalization--encouraging free markets and individual initiative to drive the economy--cannot be isolated from other facets of a society’s development. This is the lesson of the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan. But more is at work. New ideas and new values have flooded into China along with the Sony televisions, National refrigerators and Peugeot automobiles.

The young politics student, standing unshaven on Tian An Men Square, smoking distractedly under the midday sun, put it bluntly. “We have grown up in the last 10 years. The Chinese people have grown up. Everyone is awakened. Everyone can see.”

And what Chinese in cities from Beijing to Canton, Chengdu to Shanghai see is the unwillingness of China’s leadership to embrace the norms of modernity accepted elsewhere. This is why Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who has mastered the art of discourse, of persuasion, of the genuine, has become a hero for China’s students. Gorbachev has failed utterly to bring Soviet citizens the material rewards that Deng has, yet he has declared his respect for people’s minds, for their will. This China’s leaders have been unable to do--unable even to understand why they must.

The Chinese now take economic achievements for granted. They want more, and on the streets of China’s cities, they are saying they want it now. Not everyone says the same thing, but they all see how their demands are related. This coalition of desire has fueled the most powerful challenge to China’s communist leadership since 1949. Last week a journalist from the Guangming Daily marched under his newspaper’s banner on Thursday and spoke, not of abstract notions of freedom, but of censorship. “We cannot write what is true,” he said. “We cannot write what we should. We want to tell the Chinese people the truth.” A young man from Shenyang, a student at the Lu Xun Art Academy, talked earnestly of democracy, “We should be able to elect our leaders, like they do in the West.” Four workers from a railway department carried a placard reading “Li Peng step down.”

For the Communist Party, and especially for the emerging new hard-line leadership, none of these ideas is palatable, none acceptable. Free elections, as experience has shown in the Soviet Union and sentiment on the streets here has demonstrated, are counterrevolutionary--at least in that they signal the demise of the party’s claim to represent the people. The right to protest, a free press, guarantees of individual privacy and a government of law, all undermine the principles by which the Communist Party continues to exercise its authority.

On Tian An Men Square, as night closed in once again, the young students huddled under makeshift tents and lean-tos. Bicycle tea wagons labored through the maze of passages that separate the encampments, the students of the China Opera Institute from the Sichuan Foreign Languages Institute, the Petroleum Institute from Beijing University’s archeology department. The students were weary and admitted being far from their goals. Less than one hour away, in all directions, were hundreds of thousands of soldiers, armed with assault rifles and tanks. The students and the citizens of Beijing knew they had stopped the soldiers before, but they seemed unsure about being able to do it again.

Perhaps all that prevented Deng--and his public voice, Li--from issuing those orders is a deep-seated unease over the probable cost. More likely though, while the intense struggle was being waged within the leadership, there was no one--not even Deng--who could issue orders of this magnitude. It seems certain now that the party has suffered damage so serious that it will never rule with the authority it had before. But nonetheless the new party leadership appears intent upon a period of intellectual and political repression, a course that has failed in the past but remains the only one they know.

“Changes,” the student of international politics said, “must come from outside the party. Inside the party, they won’t listen to the people. The walls around them prevent them from touching the people. This is a long course, maybe 20, maybe 50 years. But what we are doing is a worldwide trend. If the party does not reform itself, it will be overthrown by the people.”