Signs of Fervor Nearly Erased From Beijing

Most signs that there once was boiling political fervor on the streets of Beijing have been all but erased. The city is like an air-brushed photograph in which key images have been eliminated. One begins to wonder if they ever existed.

No one appears to dare to put up posters denouncing the June 4 military assault on Tian An Men Square and its peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators. Once, hastily posted messages and photocopied photos competed for attention with the government’s martial-law orders. Now the denunciations have disappeared. So have any pro-democracy posters.

All the burnt-out armored cars and buses have been removed from streets and intersections where they were left by outraged Beijing citizens retaliating against the army’s crackdown. Thoroughfares have been swept by legions of soldiers and municipal workers.

The government boasts that this city of 10 million is back to normal and in a way it is: normal for the early 1980s, or perhaps before 1979, when the last prolonged drive for democracy blossomed and then withered in Beijing and other cities.

In a 10-day period, once-vibrant, open discussion has receded from the lips of many Beijing residents, replaced by evasion and suspicion. The atmosphere has reverted to those earlier, gloomier times.

Before June 4, political questions stimulated uncommonly passionate speeches about government corruption, ineffectiveness and the need for democracy. Now, the favored response is, “It’s not clear.”

One longtime Western resident of the city driving past the Beijing Hotel spied a long, red banner with the words, “Long Live the Great, Glorious and Correct Communist Party.”

Slogans Like Museum Pieces

“These are like pieces out of a museum. I don’t think anyone thought these kinds of things would come back,” he said of the banners.

A veil is being pulled across the events that rocked the city. To seek accounts of the civilian dead or missing is to run into virtual silence.

On Tuesday at Babaoshan, the city’s main cemetery and crematory, reporters sought information on the numbers of victims whose bodies might have been brought there after the massacre.

A civilian standing guard at the gate of the cemetery’s crematory grounds said there was no registry of arrivals. Told that a caretaker at the front entrance had assured visitors that such a registry was available, the guard said that foreigners could have access to only the registry of foreign deaths and that in any case, one would need government approval to get a look at that or anything else.

Shrine to Dead Soldier

While virtually no trace of the civilian dead from the army invasion of the city can be found, the site of a place where a soldier was killed became an official shrine Tuesday.

At a pedestrian overpass at Chongwenmen, near the train station, government-affiliated groups, including the Beijing Women’s Federation, marched to hang wreaths from the bridge where the soldier was burned and hanged by a mob.

Schoolchildren waved paper flowers while adults bowed three times before the spot where the soldier had died. State television recorded the scene for broadcast throughout the day.

Before the crackdown on pro-democracy students and their supporters, and for a day or two after, political talk on the street was angry, defiant and unrestrained. Now, there is fear of talking out of doors or in groups.

Still, Beijing residents occasionally find ways to overcome their fears. Mobile conversations sometimes take place in a crowd of cyclists when one rider pulls up alongside another and begins to talk, without ever looking to the side.

The conversation sometimes turns to desperate concerns.

“Is it hard to get a visa to the United States?” asked one such mobile talker. “There is no hope for China.”

At a snack shop, a request to light a cigarette might be a pretext to exchange a few words, at least until someone else enters the room.

No one has to tell the Chinese directly not to talk. There are plenty of indirect ways to break up talk about the events of Tian An Men Square.

Plainclothesmen Interrupt

Increasingly, conversations on the street are interrupted out of the blue by someone in plainclothes who butts in and makes an insulting remark.

“This is an internal matter. This is not a foreigner’s business,” interjected one such stranger during a conversation near the Beijing Hotel on Changan Avenue.

The small crowd that had gathered to listen to a discussion of a shooting that occurred last week slowly broke up, with everyone going in different directions.

Reporters visiting Beijing University the other day found that their parked car had, in their absence, been surrounded by a group of plainclothesmen of ambiguous intent.

As the driver and passenger entered the car, they were jostled briefly by the men, who then kicked the side of one door as the foreigners left.

Protesters Now Phantoms

On the campuses of universities, it is almost as if the students who protested--and the ones who died--were phantoms.

Last Friday, the mother of one dead student, Xiao Zhi, went to the People’s University campus to collect her son’s books and belongings, his dormitory mates said.

The students told a reporter that Xiao, 20, who had been a hunger-striker at Tian An Men Square, had escaped the crackdown of June 4. But he returned to the vicinity of the square the next day after buying a train ticket for his home in Sichuan province.

During an army thrust down Nanchizi street near the Forbidden City, Xiao “froze for a moment, turned to look at the solders and was shot in the chest,” one of the students said.

Cremated at Cemetery

Xiao was a communications student at the university who had hoped to become a television news announcer. He was cremated earlier this week at Babaoshan Cemetery, the students said.

The cramped room that he shared with seven other students contained the usual clutter of Chinese university students: books, electric fans, laundry strung from bed to bed.

With Xiao’s things now removed, one of his roommates had placed some cartons on his now bare bed; amid the mess hardly anyone could tell that someone else had once occupied that space.