The Shattered Dream: CHINA /1989 : CHAPTER 2 : Dissidents, Democracy and a Missed Dinner

“Before the banquet, without consulting with the Chinese side, the U.S. side sent an invitation ... to a certain individual unacceptable to the Chinese side.” --Chinese Foreign Ministry

A few weeks before New Year’s, on Jan. 6, the phone rang at Perry Link’s apartment in Beijing’s Friendship Hotel. It was Fang Lizhi on the line. They had met the previous September and had seen each other a few times since. Fang had enlisted Link’s help in an unsuccessful effort to persuade Chinese authorities to let him travel to the United States for a scientific conference.

“Would you come over?” Fang asked the American professor.

Link hopped on his bicycle and rode the short distance to Fang’s apartment building in the Haidian district of northwestern Beijing. From Fang’s 11th-floor apartment, he could see the usual midwinter smog settling over the city.

Link sat down, and Fang tossed a letter into his lap. “Look,” said Fang. “I wrote this letter to Deng Xiaoping.”

Link scanned the letter. Fang was proposing that Deng use the coming anniversaries of the founding of the People’s Republic or of the nationalistic protests of 1919 “to announce a general amnesty within China, and in particular to release Wei Jingsheng and all other political prisoners.” Such an action, Fang wrote, “would be a humanitarian gesture and would have a beneficial effect on our social morale.”

Wei, leader of the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s, had been in prison for a decade. In December, 1978, Wei, then a 29-year-old electrician, published an essay called “The Fifth Modernization,” arguing that China needed political democracy along with economic modernization. The following year, he was arrested and convicted at a closed trial of conducting “counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation.” He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Despite such cases, China’s official position is that the country has no political prisoners. Wei, and others like him, are classified as “counterrevolutionaries”-- and therefore criminals.

Link put Fang’s letter down. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“Do whatever you want,” replied Fang.

Fang put a regular eight-cent stamp on the letter and mailed it to Deng, who did not reply. Link, meanwhile, took a copy back to the Friendship Hotel, translated it into English, called several reporters and gave them copies.

The letter was quickly published in Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, the United States and throughout the world. By February, intellectuals inside China were organizing petitions in support of Fang’s letter.

Fang Lizhi is a chubby, somewhat awkward man who wears the emblematic black-rimmed glasses of a Chinese intellectual. Three years ago he was an obscure figure, his name recognizable to only a few Chinese and almost no foreigners. He was a Communist Party member and a scientist, although, like many intellectuals, he had spent two years in the Chinese countryside during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, working on railways and mining coal.

In late 1986, while serving as vice president of the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, Fang had encouraged some of his students to demand more open elections to the local legislature after Communist Party officials had tried to include only their own candidates on ballot lists. Student demonstrations in Hefei spread to several other cities, including Shanghai, where tens of thousands of students had taken to the streets.

Fang’s actions angered the party leaders, including Deng. The following month, Fang was expelled both from his university job and from the Communist Party. But he was not jailed or exiled--and he was not silenced.

In the two years since his expulsion from the party, Fang gradually sharpened and honed his attacks on China’s leadership. Marxism, he said, is “like a worn dress that must be put aside.” Moreover, he said, the Chinese Communist Party “has achieved nothing of value during the past 30 years.”

Last winter, Fang took things a step further and began denouncing corruption by party leaders and their families. While on one trip to Australia last year, he publicly repeated rumors that many Chinese leaders and their families maintained foreign bank accounts.

On Feb. 20, a cool, cloudy day in the Washington area, President Bush assembled with his top foreign policy advisers and a group of Asia scholars at Camp David, Md. They were making plans for Bush’s first overseas trip as President, a visit to Asia with the primary stop being Tokyo for the funeral of Japanese Emperor Hirohito.

In addition to Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle sat in on the talks. So did Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

In the meeting, the scholars discussed the question of how Bush should raise human rights issues on his trip to China. And, outside the meeting, they discovered that he had decided to do something that neither he nor any other American President, vice president or Cabinet secretary had ever done.

Bush was planning to invite a small group of Chinese dissidents to a dinner he planned to host for Chinese leaders in Beijing. Among the dissidents to be invited would be Fang Lizhi. Since the Richard M. Nixon Administration’s opening to China in 1972, no senior U.S. official had met with or recognized any sort of domestic opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.

Bush’s invitation to the dissidents was a momentous decision--yet not, from an American point of view, a particularly surprising one.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz had repeatedly met with Soviet dissidents. And the previous summer, during a trip to Moscow, President Ronald Reagan had invited a large group of dissidents to the U.S. Embassy. Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had proceeded without any major disruptions.

If the Soviet Union could tolerate American recognition of its dissidents, then couldn’t China? After all, China had launched its reform program well before the Soviets, and it had enjoyed much closer relations with the United States.

The Bush Administration may have had other reasons for extending the invitation. By all indications, the CIA in 1988 was giving U.S. policy-makers much more pessimistic reports about the state of China’s economic reforms and the popularity of Deng Xiaoping’s regime than at any previous time over the past decade.

By inviting Fang and other dissidents to dinner, the Bush Administration was hedging its bets, sending out a signal that its relationship with China did not rest exclusively on its ties to the senior leadership. The United States was, in effect, officially acknowledging the existence of China’s small but growing democracy movement and, more broadly, the extent of popular dissatisfaction with the Chinese leadership.

“We wanted to make a statement, but to do so in a way that was not confrontational to the Chinese leaders,” explained one U.S. official. Administration officials realized there was “some risk” that the invitation might anger Chinese leaders, but they decided to take the risk.

Shortly after the Camp David meeting, a special messenger sent by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing arrived at Fang’s apartment to deliver banquet invitations to Fang and his wife, Li Shuxian. Other dissidents invited by the White House included Marxist theoretician Su Shaozhi, playwright Wu Zuguang and political scientist Yan Jiaqi.

The invitations, no matter how small a step they might have seemed to the United States, represented a dramatic break in U.S. policy toward Beijing. And that is exactly how they were perceived in China, both by the top leaders and by the dissidents.

The Chinese leadership accepted with relative equanimity the invitations to Su, Wu and Yan. But the morning after the Camp David planning session, when The Los Angeles Times broke the news of Fang’s invitation, Chinese officials reacted with fury. “Deng and (Chinese President) Yang Shangkun were especially outraged,” said an American diplomat.

For five days, while Bush traveled from Washington to Tokyo to Beijing, Chinese officials tried to persuade Washington to withdraw the invitation to Fang. The United States refused.

After Bush arrived in Beijing, Chinese officials announced that Yang and Premier Li Peng might not attend the President’s dinner unless he withdrew the invitation to Fang. U.S. officials again refused, although they agreed to a compromise in which Bush would not move from table to table at the banquet and thus would not clink glasses with Fang. That concession seemed to mollify Yang and Li, who agreed to attend Bush’s dinner.

On the night of Sunday, Feb. 26, Link and his wife attempted to escort Fang and his wife to the banquet at the Great Wall Hotel in northeastern Beijing. Link had arranged for a car, a white Nissan, with a driver. Fang was wearing a Western suit and Li an evening dress.

They never made it. About 700 yards from the hotel, Chinese authorities had set up a barricade to clear all guests for the banquet. The other dissidents were allowed to pass. But when the car carrying Fang arrived, police told the driver to pull over. When he parked, they were surrounded by men whom they believed to be plainclothes police officers.

Fang, holding his invitation, was told he was not on the official guest list. And over the next two hours, police blocked his repeated efforts to reach the banquet.

Inside, the banquet proceeded on schedule. Bush and President Yang delivered the customary toasts to one another.

“We went through the banquet thinking Fang was there,” said one State Department official. “It was only afterward that we found out he wasn’t there.”

Later that night Fang appeared at the Shangri-la Hotel, where the American press corps was staying, and recounted, in a series of television interviews broadcast around the world, how Chinese police had blocked him from attending the dinner to which he had been invited. It was a remarkable demonstration of how sensitive Chinese leaders were on the subject of political dissent and of the extent to which they would go to avoid confronting it.

Afterward, Bush and other White House officials tried to play down the affair’s importance. But the American invitation to Fang, and the Chinese reaction to it, had been an important episode, one that helped set the stage for the more dramatic events of the spring.

To Chinese students, the American invitation to Fang was encouraging. It showed that at the highest levels of the U.S. government, there was interest in and recognition of the cause of democracy in China.

To leaders such as Deng and Yang, the episode served as a warning. Dissidents like Fang, and their campaign for democratic reforms and human rights, could pose a threat to the Communist Party’s power.