Beijing The Forbidding City

Aisin Ghiorroh Pu Jie, the brother of the last Chinese emperor, Pu Yi, appeared on television the other night to express support for the army’s massacre of Chinese workers and students on the streets of Beijing two weeks ago. He, and hundreds of other faces familiar to the Chinese, have been summoned to voice their gratitude to the army and police for suppressing the “counterrevolutionary rebellion,” so labeled in the newly minted political lexicon. It is now clear that this rebellion, as the Chinese leadership sees it, was nationwide in scope, an outburst of rage and protest against the tyranny and corruption of the Communist Party. To defend itself, the party has called on even this fragile, doddering remnant of a feudal, imperial past.

To watch Chinese television today is to witness the shackling of people’s minds, the visible evisceration of truth, the banality of terror. History is being rewritten before the eyes of those who made it, events distorted before those who participated and ideals trampled before those who dreamed them. China’s propaganda machinery, dormant for the past decade, has shuddered to life, a brutish resurrection of the real soul of Chinese power.

For days, Chinese television viewers have been bombarded with images of arrested workers and students, branded baotu, thugs, or daitu, evildoers, their faces swollen from beatings. Wanted posters are flashed on TV screens, calling for a nationwide roundup of workers and students who demanded their government accede to basic demands for democracy and liberty, for an end to the corruption that has eaten into the heart of government and for a life free of fear.

In a report tinged with smug glee, a television announcer described how a sister had turned in her brother, a leader of an independent students union. A model Chinese citizen, the sister spoke of the deed as she bounced an infant son on her knee in the living room of her apartment. Meanwhile, the citizenry of Beijing was told to inform the security forces if they know any threats to the nation. A poster in the Lili Restaurant near Tian An Men Square advises residents in the Chaoyang district, for example, to telephone 59.5013 with the names of neighbors who “stirred up counterrevolutionary turmoil.”

For the first time, too, China’s people have seen pictures from hidden surveillance cameras. A student leader, Wu’erkaixi, was shown eating in the Beijing Hotel, his actions captured in grainy black and white by a camera tucked into the dinning room ceiling. Images from street corner cameras, sold to the Chinese by a British company for “traffic control,” recorded the spread of the army assault, and the resistance by unarmed people. There is, the message says clearly, nothing you can do that is not known to the state.

A portrait of post-massacre China is being drawn nightly on television, the lines and shadows of how the country’s leadership intend their land to appear. The picture, starkly etched, provides insights into the minds of this leadership and illumines the way a people, brutalized so many times in the past, responds to this new terror. As one Chinese intellectual quietly put it, “They have learned much from Dr. Goebbels.”

Before the slaughter, Beijing hummed with a buoyant street life, an enthusiasm that bubbled from the weary demonstrators on Tian An Men Square onto the sidewalks of the capital, an expectation that maybe, for once, life would change for the better. Everywhere, in the free market stalls that sell cabbages and beans, in the dingy dumpling shops south of the ancient Qianmen, or Front Gate, outside government buildings, people talked incessantly about the latest wrinkle in the protest, about the final demise of the sclerotic, octogenarian leadership. Nowhere could a foreign reporter walk or ride a bicycle without being questioned or offered opinions about the future of China. This, more than anything else, was the new China.

Today, Beijing hums only with the wheels of bicycles carrying silent pedalers to work or home, their faces displaying a blankness of self-preservation, their eyes avoiding contact with any person, whether Chinese or foreigner. People talk not of politics but of weather. The vibrancy of two weeks ago has been frozen by fear.

In workplaces, the political cadres have begun the task of political education, hours of reading from newspapers and party documents, intoning the vocabulary of the new reality, the version of a truth that has been created to efface the blood bath from Chinese memory. A man who works in a large Chinese company told of the mood of these lectures: “In the past, whenever there were political meetings, people read a book or dozed off. Now, everyone sits up straight and takes notes. Sometimes we have to say we support suppressing the counterrevolutionaries.”

Behind this regimenting of the Chinese consciousness are men whose conception of politics and intellectual life was honed in the caves of Yanan and the battlefields of China. What stood in their way was gunned down, what was said in opposition was shouted down, what was imagined differently was remolded. They envisioned a socialist China much like that of the Soviet Union, one of Stalinist intolerance, central control and collectivist enterprise. It is these men who are now around the table of leadership and it is their spirit that fuels the tide of propaganda washing across China.

Deng Xiaoping, at 84 years old, holds no position on the Politburo or the Communist Party Central Committee, his only formal post being the chairmanship of the party and state military commissions. While his image as an economic reformer, a man of vision, has been burnished in the West, little attention was paid to his intolerance of political or intellectual diversity.

Deng was the man who orchestrated the fierce repression of China’s intelligentsia in 1957, a campaign that sent tens of thousands of writers, artists, professors and students to labor camps for criticizing the party. He has, in this decade, been the leading voice in denouncing “spiritual pollution,” or “bourgeois liberalization,” evils imported from the West, particularly the United States.

He is joined by men like Peng Zhen, 87, who oversaw the murder of tens of thousands of Beijing residents after the Communist Party took power in 1949; Wang Zhen, 81, a ferocious xenophobe who views all Western influences as contaminating; Chen Yun, 85, who crafted the centralized economy of the 1950s, and Yang Shangkun, 82, the Soviet-trained commissar believed to have given the final order to the army to move against the protesters on Tian An Men Square. Officiating in public for these men is Li Peng, a 59-year-old engineer trained in the Soviet Union in the last years of Joseph Stalin’s reign.

What they ordered, they are now telling the Chinese people, was the suppression of counterrevolution, turmoil instigated by “very, very few” people who sought to overthrow the Communist Party. There was no massacre, there was only the army’s heroic actions, freeing the city from the grip of thugs and hoodlums. There was no popular resistance, only the rioting of those hooligans and former criminals.

This is the picture they have put on television. No students were killed, only soldiers. No workers crushed to death by tanks, no protesters gunned down by troops with machine guns and assault rifles. The only funeral wreaths allowed are for soldiers; the white mourning carnations adorning the gates of universities have been torn down, memories of a historic event that never officially happened.

Even as China’s formal legal system, little more than perfunctory tribunals, begins to work--the first death sentences have been pronounced in Shanghai--the Chinese people are being told that normality has returned.

Happy foreign tourists are filmed laughing on the Bund in Shanghai and at the Great Wall. Foreign businessmen are shown manning their desks, holding meetings with Chinese partners. There is much hand-shaking, clapping, laughing. That it is the normality of lies. For the country’s rulers, it is the painted curtain drawn across the Chinese stage that is the play.