3 Sentenced to Die for Burning Shanghai Train

China’s crackdown on demonstrators in the pro-democracy movement escalated Thursday when authorities sentenced to death three men accused of torching a train during a protest in Shanghai early last week.

The three were part of an angry mob that attacked the Beijing-Shanghai Express on the night of June 6 after the train plowed through a crowd blocking the tracks, killing six people, state-run Shanghai Television said.

Nationwide television announced the arrests of two more fugitive pro-democracy leaders named on recently publicized lists and broadcast scenes of a show trial of 26 protesters in the northeastern city of Changchun.

Protesters Blocked Tracks

Although the circumstances of the train accident and subsequent fire in Shanghai are not entirely clear, it appeared that protesters were blocking the tracks in part of a citywide civil disobedience campaign to halt public transportation in a protest of the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing the previous weekend. Students and workers erected barricades across Shanghai that snarled traffic and nearly shut down the city from June 5 through June 7.

Authorities have described the initial incident in official news reports as a “traffic accident.” They denounced as “hooligans” those who set fire to the train and allegedly attacked railway security officials and firemen attempting to douse the flames.

The incident was the climax of protests in Shanghai, China’s most populous city, as citizens reacted to reports that hundreds and perhaps thousands of people were killed when the army shot its way into central Beijing on the night of June 3-4 to clear pro-democracy protesters from Tian An Men Square.

Shanghai Mayor Zhu Rongji defused the situation with a conciliatory June 8 speech reassuring citizens that the military would not be called into Shanghai. City officials then hired hundreds of worker “volunteers” to remove commandeered buses blocking major intersections and to patrol the streets.

As many as 23 people have been reported arrested in the train incident, out of more than 150 students and workers detained in Shanghai in connection with protests and more than 1,000 arrests nationwide. Thursday’s verdicts were the first death sentences made public in the crackdown.

State-run television showed the three men in court listening impassively to the verdict.

“Their crime is very serious,” the judge was quoted as saying. “We will punish them heavily and as soon as possible.”

The men were given three days to file appeals. Death sentences in China are sometimes suspended for a period, and may be changed to life imprisonment upon good behavior.

The official New China News Agency identified the men as Xu Guoming, a worker at a Shanghai brewery; Bian Hanwu, an unemployed worker, and Yan Xuerong, a worker at a Shanghai radio factory. It was not clear whether the three men had been protest leaders, or whether they simply were unlucky enough to be arrested.

The New China News Agency portrayed their actions as purely criminal, making no mention of the protesters killed by the train or the political context.

“On the evening of June 6, when a traffic accident took place at the Guangxin railway crossing, the three criminals and other scoundrels frenziedly smashed the railway carriages and set fire to police motorcycles and the carriages,” the news agency said. “They also prevented firefighters from extinguishing the fire and beat them cruelly.”

The defendants in the Changchun trial were shown on television with their heads shaven, being led by police onto a stage in front of a crowd in a packed hall. The men were accused of having “stopped traffic and advocated a strike among workers.” Placards hanging around the necks of some of them gave their names and accused them of instigating social unrest and spreading rumors.

State-run television also showed scenes of detainees being led into police stations in the painful posture called “the airplane position”--arms wrenched behind and in the air.

Television news reported that Xiong Wei, 23, a Qinghua University student who was one of 21 student leaders included in a most-wanted list broadcast nationwide Tuesday gave himself up to authorities at the urging of his mother. He was shown being questioned.

Also arrested was Liu Qiang, a leader of the Beijing Autonomous Workers Union. Liu was shown in handcuffs being taken off a train in Inner Mongolia.

The Australian press, quoting anonymous sources, has reported that another fugitive student leader, Chai Ling, 23, a graduate psychology student at Beijing Teachers University, has been given refuge inside the Australian Embassy in Beijing. Chai had disappeared a few days before the June 3-4 army crackdown, after saying that she had decided to go into hiding.

Australian officials have declined to comment on the reports.

China’s most famous pro-democracy advocate, astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, and his wife, Li Shuxian, a Beijing University physics professor, have been granted refuge inside the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. action, confirmed by officials in Washington, has prompted bitter criticism in the Chinese media.

Chinese media also have bitterly attacked the Voice of America for its reporting on the pro-democracy protests and their suppression. The New China News Agency continued these attacks with a report issued early today repeating its assertion that the U.S. government-funded station “has ceaselessly created various rumors on the student unrest, turmoil and counterrevolutionary rebellion” in China.

In addition to its reports showing the full force of China’s security apparatus employed against the dissidents, the television news has been filled with reports praising the soldiers who imposed martial law on Beijing against the resistance of huge crowds.

A spokesman for the Chinese Red Cross, which had displayed considerable sympathy for the student protesters, had initially reported 2,600 deaths in the June 3-4 massacre.

The government, for its part, at first said that only about 300 people had died, then reduced the official figure Wednesday to about 200. Under martial law regulations in Beijing, it now is an illegal act of “spreading rumors” for Chinese citizens to say that more people died.

Red Cross Retracts Figure

The Chinese Red Cross issued a statement Thursday retracting its previous figure, which had been issued orally to reporters.

“The Red Cross Society of China has never published any figures about the deaths in the June 4 incident in Beijing,” a spokesman told the New China News Agency.

The news agency also referred to reports that a senior official of the Japanese Foreign Ministry recently cited the 2,600 figure and attributing it to the Chinese Red Cross. The Red Cross spokesman said Thursday that this figure “does not conform to reality and is sheer fabrication,” the news agency said.

Gruesome scenes were broadcast Thursday of soldiers using shovels to remove the charred remains of six soldiers who were killed by crowds that blocked their truck during the night of June 3.

Infuriated crowds did kill some soldiers and police officers--nearly 100 by official count--while resisting the army’s advance. Some corpses were doused with gasoline and set afire. In one incident, the charred body of a soldier was hung from a pedestrian overpass.

Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong was shown on television Thursday offering words of comfort to the mother of this soldier.

“Your child is very glorious,” Chen said. “Thank you for having such a good son who died for the defense of the Communist Party leadership, the motherland and the capital.”

Schoenberger reported from Shanghai and Holley from Beijing.