China In Turmoil : 1,500 at Consulate in L.A. Mourn Beijing Dead

Chinese students in Los Angeles replaced the blue ribbons they have worn to support the struggle for democracy in their homeland with black and white ones of mourning Sunday when 1,500 demonstrators gathered at the Chinese Consulate to grieve for the dead in Beijing and to condemn the government that carried out the violence.

It was an emotional gathering in front of consulate headquarters in the mid-Wilshire district--one that united students from China, who had only recently arrived here to attend college, with Chinese-Americans who have lived in the United States all their lives.

During the course of the five-hour demonstration, the students staged a mock funeral procession in memory of those killed, played a tape-recording of a telephone conversation that took place on Saturday between students in China and the United States, then read a “letter to the world” condemning the actions of the Chinese government and calling on the world community to investigate the Beijing massacre.

Although many of the songs, chants and speeches used during the protest were in Mandarin, the emotions and actions of the demonstrators spoke a universal language.

There was the quiet sobbing that permeated the stillness when six men, in the center of a small procession, carried a gray coffin through the crowd, laid it on the steps of the consulate and covered it with a red, white and blue flag symbolizing Chinese solidarity.

There were the solemn expressions and tears of the protesters as they listened to a 12-minute tape in which a student at Beijing University told students at Caltech in Pasadena to let the people know “that the darkest and bloodiest tragedy in human history is happening in China. But . . . the final victory belongs to the people.”

There were also moments marked by bursts of applause and song. The crowd clapped when Weichang Li, 32, a UCLA graduate student and lifelong Chinese Communist, stood up and, with tears in his eyes, denounced his party. They clapped when a student representative, speaking for the Southern California Chinese Student and Scholar Assns., asked for all Chinese people to unite and told China’s leaders that “in the heart of 1 billion Chinese people, you are dead.”

And they sang. The song was called “If We Unite, We Will Have the Power,” said Chang Lei, a 29-year-old student at USC.

The tune was appropriate, the students said, in an ironic way. It was the song the Chinese people sang during the Communist revolution, which triumphed 40 years ago.