China In Turmoil : Chinese Students in U.S. Seeking to Foil ‘Tip’ Lines

In the last few days, a strange flood of phone calls from America has been pouring into several telephone hot-lines in Beijing set up by the Chinese government to receive tips on student protest leaders.

The government, which labeled the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tian An Men Square “hoodlums” and “anti-communists,” established the hot-lines so Beijing residents could report students who had joined in the movement. But Chinese students in the United States have recently begun a feverish effort to keep the lines busy to prevent such calls.

“We photocopied all the numbers and have been telling everyone to call,” Cheng Mo, a Brandeis University graduate student, said in a telephone interview from Boston on Saturday. “It’s no problem; they only have 15 hot-lines.”

The effort to jam the Chinese government’s telephones is one of a series of attempts by Chinese students in this country to grapple with the lightning devastation of the student movement back home.

Assume New Role

With the violent suppression of demonstrations there, Chinese students here have begun to assume a new role as the distant but surviving standard-bearers of the shattered movement.

“Now it’s our turn,” said Cheng, who is coordinating activities in the Boston area. “The students in Beijing can do little now. It’s our turn to keep the movement alive.”

Xu Xiaonian, a graduate student at UC Davis, said: “The only ones who can carry on are the students of the United States and Western Europe.”

Throughout this country, Chinese student groups have begun to plan how best to grapple with the new situation in China, where hundreds of students have been arrested or gone into hiding. Talk has begun of a national coalition of Chinese students to continue the work of the Tian An Men protesters in this country.

“We have started thinking about this so suddenly that we are not very organized,” Cheng said. “But we are trying. We have a different mission than from before.”

Cheng said that one of the most pressing tasks is documenting the massacre of demonstrators. Since students in this country have made frequent phone calls to all parts of China for the past week, they may have a more complete picture of the massacre than their compatriots.

Compile List of Casualties

Several groups of Chinese students have asked--through a computer network linking many universities--for help in compiling a list of the dead and missing.

“Two weeks ago there was nothing much we could do to affect the situation in China because we are so far away,” said Xie Wen, one of the leaders of Chinese students at Columbia University in New York. “But now, because no one can speak out in Beijing, we must do the work.”

Fund-raising efforts that were once geared to sending money back to China have shifted to raising money to pay huge phone bills in this country. A three-minute call to China from Los Angeles costs between $5.13 and $8.54. At Columbia University, students collected $20,000 to send back to China. “But there is no way we can get the money to them,” Xie said.

He said students have started a new account, which has about $10,000, to pay for organizing in this country.

Over the past few weeks, students at UC Davis raised $6,000 to help the demonstrators in China. “We will eventually send the money to the families of the dead,” Xu said. “One day we will, but not now.”

An estimated 40,000 Chinese students are studying in the United States. Many are now planning to take advantage of U.S. promises to extend their visas until the situation stabilizes in China, said Guo Zhanxiong, a leader of the Chinese students at UCLA.

But Guo said some students who actively supported the student movement are still worried because the extension would only be temporary.

The phone-jamming effort by American students is one of the more unusual schemes hatched in the last few hectic days.

Some students have called the government hot-lines in China and told operators that they want to report a good friend as a counterrevolutionary. After a rambling discussion, they eventually name Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng.

Others have called and used the time to relay the latest news about the student movement to hot-line operators.

“The operators are just ordinary people, like us,” said Xie. “Some are very moved.”

In the early weeks of the student movement, Chinese students in America helped by raising money, buying printing equipment and passing information to demonstrators.

Their most powerful tool was the telephone, which they used to contact classmates and student groups throughout China.

In the last few days, personal phone calls to China have largely stopped because of the danger of government surveillance. The calls that have been made are guarded and cryptically worded.

“Of course we do not talk about politics,” Cheng said. “We suggested to some friends that they take a vacation now. I hope they understand what we were trying to tell them.”

Chinese students in America relied heavily on facsimile machines to transmit news articles to businesses and government offices in China. They have continued to use the machines because the messages do not endanger individuals.

But that method has always been unreliable because the students have no way of knowing whether their dispatches are read or destroyed.