Anger Expressed Privately : Public Reaction Guarded in Shanghai, Other Cities

Just days before Chinese troops killed hundreds of people in Tian An Men Square over the weekend, a student leader predicted that “only when the square is washed in our blood will the people of the whole country wake up.”

In Shanghai, residents are gathering in thick knots on nearly every street corner to express outrage at the massacre.

Workers have pulled buses across Shanghai’s main streets, a protest style echoed across China.

Yet whatever the student movement hopes for a mass uprising in the provinces, the actual mood seems relatively quiet, with demonstration crowds since the massacre nowhere near as large as the 1 million marchers in Shanghai and similar big gatherings elsewhere in the few days after martial law was declared May 20.

Chinese sources and foreign diplomats here and in other cities suggested that many student leaders became discouraged after their triumphant student strike--which closed nearly every university in the country--failed to bring the government around on reforms.

“A lot of the students went home,” one diplomat said, “and the massacre caught them by surprise.”

And scattered reports from residents in other cities show a relatively mild reaction to the massacre so far.

In the absence of the student organizers, the democracy movement in Shanghai seems unable to muster a march of significant numbers. Workers are left to become the active in the movement through tactics such as blocking intersections to encourage a general strike. Some Chinese here and in Beijing have noticed that many of the most active workers have a motorcycle-gang quality, wear black clothing and seem to delight in producing social mayhem.

But there apparently have been no vehicles set ablaze, now a standard feature at Beijing intersections, and there have been no confrontations here between troops and demonstrators.

On Shanghai’s Bund, the old riverside waterfront, about 200 demonstrators and onlookers gathered in front of the City Hall at midnight to discuss the Beijing massacre.

Several of them went over to hold whispered conversations with some of the 10 soldiers in front of the locked City Hall doors.

Although there has been much talk about a general strike here--a van driver said it was “inevitable”--industrial disruption appears to have been brief.

“It’s a way to get a holiday,” said a foreigner who has lived here two years. “Few people went to work today, often because the bus barriers allowed them to say they couldn’t get to work, but most seemed to use the time for household chores, rather than marching down the Bund.”