TURMOIL IN CHINA: Protests For Democracy : China Journalists Give Audience Subtle Hints of Their Disapproval of Martial Law

To casual readers, it may have seemed like simply a news story about politics in Hungary, but to Chinese readers of the People’s Daily, the story had another meaning.

On Friday, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party gave front-page display to a news story saying that Hungary’s leadership had decided to rehabilitate the memory of Imre Nagy, who led his country’s unsuccessful revolt against Soviet troops in 1956.

In Beijing, a city now surrounded by 150,000 to 300,000 troops brought in to restore order, the message was unmistakable: Those who press for political change in the face of overwhelming military power will, in the long run, be vindicated.

“Obviously, someone at People’s Daily is still finding the Hungarian angle useful to make points,” observed one Western diplomat here.

The front-page coverage of Nagy’s rehabilitation was merely one of numerous examples over the past two weeks in which official, party-controlled Chinese newspapers have expressed subtle resistance to the imposition of martial law here.

Earlier Freedom

Only two weeks ago, as an outgrowth of the student demonstrations for democracy in which more than 1 million people participated, Chinese journalists were basking in unprecedented freedom from government controls.

Now, with martial law in effect, contingents of troops from the People’s Liberation Army are stationed inside Beijing television stations and newspapers to ensure that the orders from China’s newly reorganized propaganda apparatus are carried out.

But the troops and the censors can’t catch everything.

Every day, those who read Chinese newspapers or watch television carefully find some new way in which writers and editors artfully slip political messages into their news reports.

On television, film editors sometimes manage to get footage onto the air that catches the reality of a news event.

When the regime began organizing pro-government demonstrations in support of Premier Li Peng on the outskirts of Beijing this week, China’s main news show carried film that showed bored, unenthusiastic participants.

At Chinese newspapers, writers seeking to convey political messages are helped by the complexities of the Chinese language, which lends itself to metaphors, double meanings and puns. Perhaps the cleverest instance of China’s new journalism of subversion was an article published in the People’s Daily on May 28.

“Anecdotes of well-known people who quit smoking,” it was headlined. It then named a series of famous political figures, such as Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin and Ronald Reagan who were said to have stopped smoking.

The article made repeated use of a Chinese pun: the phrase for “quit smoking”-- jie yan --is virtually identical to the phrase for “martial law.”

The article explains that the great Qing Dynasty Emperor Qian Long had sought the advice of his doctor to cure a persistent cough. “If you want to cure your cough, you must first quit smoking,” the People’s Daily said.

Since the only difference between the pronunciation of quit smoking and martial law is a minor tonal change, alert Chinese readers would have caught this sarcastic allusion to “Emperor” Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, calling in the troops.

Included in the list of illustrious people who gave up smoking was Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, believed to be under house arrest for opposing the imposition of martial law. “In the past, he smoked a lot, but when he said he would quit, he quit,” the article explained.

It was a way of getting Zhao’s name into print in the People’s Daily in a positive way, something that could not have been done in an article more obviously about politics.

Even the government’s English-language newspaper, the China Daily, has gotten into the act.

On Wednesday, the newspaper ran on its front page a story about a Chinese writer of children’s songs. The headline said: “Chinese Peter Pan Never Grows Old.”

That seemed to be a reminder that other people in China do grow old, a dig at the group of Communist Party elders, all over the age of 80, who have been leading an ideological crackdown since the imposition of martial law.

Inside the next day’s edition of the China Daily, an article about a new work of Beijing Opera said, at one point: “The tragedy of massacring intellectuals of different ideas . . . shocks the audience.”