China In Turmoil : Army’s Attack on Civilians Called ‘Incredible Blunder’

The savage attack of the People’s Liberation Army on unarmed Chinese civilians was an “incredible blunder” that will inspire further turmoil and bloodshed, seems likely to jeopardize the country’s hard-won economic gains and may even doom the aging Chinese leadership, according to academic experts in the United States.

“The way the Chinese leadership has put down the student movement is an absolute disaster,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, a former member of the British Parliament and a professor of government at Harvard. “The students will become martyrs. The Communist Party will never live this down. And the People’s Liberation Army will come to be regarded as the Army of the People’s Oppression.”

Although the weekend’s violence left the army in command of Beijing’s Tian An Men Square and hard-liners in control of the Chinese Communist Party, “China is not a society that you can rule purely through force,” said Michel Oksenberg, a professor at the University of Michigan. “And (senior Chinese leader) Deng Xiaoping is about to find that out. The degree of alienation among the people is enormous, as is the contempt for the party.”

UC Berkeley Prof. Robert A. Scalapino, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, called the PLA attack an “incredible blunder” and expressed doubts that either the party or the army has the situation under control.

Sees More Turmoil Ahead

“China is destined for more turmoil,” he said. Noting press reports that some students managed to disarm Chinese troops and confiscate their weapons, Scalapino added: “The degree of violence is difficult to predict, but there’s great potential. A fuse has been lit that is not going to go out.”

“The ferocity of the PLA attack” stunned him, Scalapino acknowledged, and may indicate that Deng left it to unit commanders to decide how much force to use. “When there’s indiscriminate firing on civilians, when unit commanders and their troops, who are peasant boys from the provinces, are calling the shots, then it’s safe to say the party really has no control.”

The risk of further violence is heightened by the combative attitudes of student demonstrators and many Beijing citizens. After seven weeks of demonstrations, “There’s been a qualitative change in the willingness of the Chinese people to stand up for themselves,” said Oksenberg, a former member of the National Security Council staff. “They’ve been bullied for 40 years, they’ve been forced to bend with every political wind and accept what their leaders hand down, and now they’re saying, ‘No more.’ ”

Assassinations Possible

Even political assassination, though rare in Chinese history, cannot be ruled out. “Students have threatened to kill a top leader for every student who dies,” observed MacFarquhar. “And though I think there’s a good deal of bravado in such statements, there are certainly a lot of weapons available within the populace. People say that, for a price, you can buy any kind of gun.”

Because university campuses are regarded as hotbeds of dissent, they are particularly vulnerable to future attacks. “If the army’s orders are to root out dissent, the troops may end up storming the campuses” of Beijing University and People’s University, said MacFarquhar. “So much blood has already been shed that there may be very little reluctance to shed more, either on the students’ part or the soldiers’. A lot of people could be killed on the campuses, and the rest carted off to labor camps.”

China’s economic reforms and efforts to attract foreign investment may also be casualties of the battle at Tian An Men, at least temporarily. “Law and order has broken down on the main street of Beijing. Who is going to put new investment into such a country?” asked MacFarquhar. “For the foreign businessmen who already have joint ventures going, who are already established, the situation may be different. But I think you can forget any new investment for a while.”

Economic Reforms Imperiled

The damage to the domestic economic reforms will probably depend on what happens to Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang--who has reportedly been branded a “counterrevolutionary” and held under house arrest since May 19--and his liberal-minded followers.

“If Zhao is put on trial and there’s a systematic uprooting of his supporters, all of whom are identified with the economic reforms and the opening to the West, then the reforms will come to a halt,” predicted Richard Baum, a professor of political science at UCLA. “That would send a chill throughout the economy, in fact, throughout the whole society.”

Other academicians, however, believe that Deng will never allow the market-oriented economic reforms that he instituted a decade ago to be sacrificed.

“The reforms may be put on hold for a while but they won’t be scrapped,” said Ezra Vogel, a Harvard sociologist who writes widely about China and Japan. “Even before this happened, there was widespread acknowledgment that the government was going to have to slow down the reforms in order to tighten up on inflation. But, after this, I wouldn’t expect major back-tracking. Within a year or two, further reforms should be possible.”

Vogel noted that even Premier Li Peng, the official who declared martial law and earned the enmity of the students, only a few weeks ago was urging the Japanese to invest more heavily in special economic zones along the coast. “The conservatives may hate what the students have done, they may attack some of the foreign influences in China, but they’re unlikely to turn their backs on the rest of the world,” Vogel said. “Some foreign trade deals may collapse because of the violence, but I doubt there will be any major, long-lasting economic impact.”

Now a ‘Transitional’ Regime

There is more consensus about the political fallout. Sending troops into Tian An Men was “such a disastrous error that it will be extremely difficult for the government to cope with the situation,” said A. Doak Barnett, professor of Chinese studies at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington. “Deng may survive all this, but his reputation is very badly tarnished. This is a transitional leadership.”

UC Berkeley’s Scalapino was blunter: “This regime is doomed. The only real questions are the timing and method of its demise.”

“The regime is held together by Scotch tape, and the name of that Scotch tape is Deng Xiaoping,” said Harvard’s MacFarquhar. “Deng may still have enough stature to hold everything together for a while and impose his will, but he’s an old, sick man. And once he’s gone, all kinds of scenarios are possible--and most of them spell trouble.”

Although Li Peng, the premier, has assumed a prominent public role, most U.S. experts discount him as a potential successor to Deng, particularly because he is so closely identified with martial law. A more likely prospect, they say, is President Yang Shangkun, like Deng a veteran of the Chinese revolution and a former military commander closely linked to the PLA. The troops who carried out the weekend’s attacks are thought to be from the 27th Army and loyal to Yang.

Party May Be Paralyzed

The party may be so badly split over martial law and the use of force that it cannot even hold a Central Committee meeting and choose a successor to Zhao, several experts speculated. “The shock of this (attack) could cause great dissension and debate even among the top leaders,” said Barnett, “and Deng may be reluctant to call a plenum unless he knows the result. There’s a kind of paralysis.”

Like others, Scalapino speculated that the long-term beneficiary could be Zhao, the reformer, because he made known his opposition to martial law. “It’s hard to see how Deng or anyone else in the current regime could overcome the tremendous legacy of bitterness,” said Scalapino. Although Zhao has been blamed for 30% a year inflation, “he might still be asked to pick up the pieces. He looks pretty good.”

Among U.S. China-watchers, there was also speculation about why the assault on Tian An Men Square was finally ordered, after the government waited out the student protests for seven weeks. “This may have been a case of Deng and the old revolutionaries panicking at their inability to control the political forces they unleashed,” said Barnett. “Deng encouraged liberalization, encouraged the opening of the West and the spread of new ideas, but it got away from him.”

The PLA attack was “not an act of strength but of desperation,” said Oksenberg. “Deng may have thought that everything he had ever worked for--the supremacy of the Communist Party, the unity of China, maybe the future of socialism--was threatened by a bunch of kids demanding democracy.”

Deng Reported Hospitalized

UCLA’s Baum suggested that Deng, said to be hospitalized with prostate cancer, may be so cut off from meaningful information that he could not calculate the political damage. “He may be like Mao Tse-tung in his final days--old, sick and isolated, out of touch with current political thinking,” said Baum.

By erecting a Styrofoam-and-plaster figure resembling the Statue of Liberty in Tian An Men Square, the students may have inflamed the situation, MacFarquhar said. “That alien symbol would have been hard for Deng and the other old revolutionaries to accept,” he said. “These guys fought to rid China of foreign domination, and the students chose a foreign statue to symbolize their highest aspiration. That must have been pure gall and wormwood for Deng.”

MacFarquhar blamed the shootings and the underlying turmoil on a political system that he said had never kept pace with the economic reforms.

“Deng gave the people the freedom to set up businesses, choose their own jobs, even go abroad, but he has stuck with the same rigid political controls that were used in the ‘50s,” said MacFarquhar. “When discontent surfaced, he became very law-and-order minded. The brittleness of this authoritarian approach had been hidden for a long time, but now it’s public, it’s cracked wide open. The old political system won’t survive Deng.”

Linda Mathews, editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, was The Times’ bureau chief in Beijing in 1979 and 1980.