Turmoil In China : The Struggle for Power : Hong Kong Activist Detained in Shanghai : Student Arrested at Airport After Seeking Help From British Consulate

SHANGHAI — Authorities detained a Hong Kong Chinese student attempting to board a flight home from Shanghai’s airport Sunday, and there were clear signals that China’s leaders are also expanding their campaign of political intimidation from Beijing to provincial cities.

The arrest of the student, Yao Yongzhan, 19, was reported on government-controlled Shanghai Television Sunday evening along with accounts of raids on a local political party, a dissident association and an underground labor organization.

Yao, whose name is rendered Yiu Yung Chin in Cantonese and who also is known as Zhang Cai on Shanghai campuses, feared arrest for his participation in the pro-democracy student movement and contacted the Shanghai British Consulate for assistance in leaving China, a spokesman for the Foreign Office in London said. A British diplomat escorted Yao to the airport Sunday afternoon, but the student was taken into custody while going through an immigration check, the Foreign Office spokesman said in a telephone interview.

Shanghai’s official Wen Hui Bao newspaper reported today that Yao was a leader of the city’s outlawed Autonomous Student Union. He was arrested for carrying “forbidden things” and failing to abide by a municipal decree requiring student activists to register with authorities, the paper said.

Second Incident

It was the second time in a week that Chinese authorities had detained a Hong Kong resident who was trying to leave the country.

Last Monday, a labor activist was apprehended while boarding a special charter flight that was evacuating Hong Kong residents from Beijing. The activist, an ethnic Chinese who had reportedly brought $260,000 in donations for pro-democracy demonstrators, was allowed to return home later in the week after undergoing questioning.

Hong Kong Chinese travel in China on special visitors’ permits, not passports, and have only limited rights to diplomatic protection from the British, who acknowledge Chinese sovereignty over the colony and plan to turn it over to Beijing in 1997 with assurances that the political system will remain free and autonomous under Communist rule.

In Yao’s case, however, British authorities are treating the incident “as if he were holding a British passport,” said Martin Lee, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative council. Hong Kong authorities registered an immediate complaint with the New China News Agency, Beijing’s de facto diplomatic mission in the colony, and the British Embassy in Beijing has made inquiries with the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

It was not clear whether Yao, a third-year student at Shanghai’s Fudan University, would face formal charges. But hundreds of others rounded up over the past few days, in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities, are being accused of “counterrevolutionary” activities in connection with the student-led democracy movement.

Under Interrogation

Local and national television broadcasts showed scenes of dissidents being led into procurators’ offices Sunday with their heads bowed as they underwent interrogation by finger-wagging officials.

In Shanghai, China’s largest city and its most important industrial center, two men belonging to the China Youth Democratic Party, an illegal opposition party, were hauled in front of the camera and accused of plotting to overthrow the Communist regime. Another man associated with the “Freedom Association,” apparently a dissident political organization, was shown being booked on charges of spreading counterrevolutionary propaganda.

Filmed Under Detention

Additionally, several members of the Shanghai Autonomous Worker’s Union were filmed under detention, including at least four women. Student activists say the nine founding members of the union were nabbed Friday after participating in a pro-democracy demonstration in central Shanghai.

Three leaders of a similar autonomous union in Beijing were detained by public security officials on May 29, but they were released two days later after vociferous protests by students and fellow workers. Members of that union who survived the bloody military assault on Tian An Men Square, where they had joined student squatters, are believed to have been arrested in the sweeping roundup that took place at the end of last week.

Exact numbers of arrests were impossible to ascertain as of Sunday, but China’s official news media have reported arrests of at least 589 people suspected of resisting the military in Beijing a week ago, among other counterrevolutionary offenses. Also detained were about 130 people who allegedly set up bus barricades in a civil disobedience campaign that paralyzed Shanghai traffic for the first three days of last week.

Meanwhile, a deadline set by Shanghai student protesters for concessions by the city government passed Sunday without incident, suggesting that the protest movement had gone underground as its leaders had previously indicated it would.

Subdued and Deserted

The campuses of the two university campuses at the vanguard of the democracy movement in Shanghai were subdued and virtually deserted Sunday.

At Fudan University, a mock funeral tent erected by students at the base of a huge granite statue of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung had been taken down--although a replica of the Beijing students’ “Goddess of Democracy” was left standing.

Handbills describing events in Beijing and facsimile copies of Hong Kong Chinese newspaper articles that were plastered across the city for the last week were scraped off bulletin boards at East China Normal University.

Assembled by the university gates, along the major avenues and near People’s Square--the site of Friday’s protest rally--were squads of middle-aged worker “volunteer guards” wearing tractor caps. The Shanghai government had hired them--according to one Chinese source, at the relatively generous rate of $5 a shift--off factory lines to help maintain public order.

The deployment of the volunteers appeared to be an attempt by city authorities to demonstrate they are in control of the streets while at the same time reassure the public they need not fear intervention by the military.

No Confirmed Reports

Unlike the situation before the massacre in Beijing, there have been no confirmed reports that army units are positioned near the city.

In any event, many observers say a military occupation of Shanghai, where anger toward the government is lurking beneath a passive surface, would prove to be disastrous.

“If they placed troops in the center of Shanghai, it would bring the city to a screeching halt,” said an American businessman based here for several years. “Since Shanghai accounts for some 20% of China’s industrial output, they can’t afford that. They have no choice but to take a very cautious approach.”