24 Dead in China Train Blast; 15 More Arrested in Crackdown

The death toll in a dynamite explosion on a crowded passenger train rose to at least 24 Tuesday, and Chinese officials labeled the incident near Shanghai an apparent case of sabotage.

The explosion occurred in a lavatory on a third-class car just before midnight Monday on the No. 364 passenger train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. Eleven people were seriously injured, according to news reports.

Several observers in the capital suggested that the explosion could bring a further toughening of the government’s nationwide crackdown on dissidents, in which authorities announced the arrest of 15 more people Tuesday. However, there was no indication that the blast was linked to China’s recent wave of popular unrest.

There were indications Tuesday that the hard-line policy of the Chinese leadership already is becoming tougher. At a meeting of the government’s State Council, headed by China’s hard-line Premier Li Peng, the Chinese equivalent of a cabinet approved in principle a strict new law covering street rallies and demonstrations.

Even if investigators do link the explosion to student dissidents, however, Western diplomatic sources in Beijing stressed that the train explosion is not likely to herald a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare on the part of frustrated members of the crushed pro-democracy movement.

China “would be one of the least accommodating places to carry out guerrilla warfare,” said one Western diplomat, adding that “there are occasional blasts on trains even in the best of times.” But the diplomat did not exclude the possibility that the earlier blasts also were the work of saboteurs.

Asked the cause of Monday night’s explosion, a city government spokesman in Shanghai said only that it was caused by dynamite and that it appeared to have been “an intentionally set explosion.” The spokesman stopped short of naming suspects.

In Beijing, meanwhile, the government’s crackdown on dissidents suspected to have masterminded or participated in the pro-democracy campaign that China’s leadership calls a “counterrevolutionary rebellion” continued with more arrests, and diplomats speculated that as many as 100 intellectuals and student leaders are being hunted in nationwide dragnets.

The state-run Beijing Daily News reported Tuesday that nine dissidents were arrested, and it prominently reported a grisly account of the disembowelment of a soldier by one of the defendants, Zhang Jianzhong, 26, during the height of the protests earlier this month. The report apparently was aimed at bolstering the government’s campaign to project the protesters as thugs, convicts and criminals.

In the south, the Yangcheng Evening News, a paper in the city of Canton, said six people were arrested Friday for crimes committed during protests against the army’s actions in Beijing.

The government’s evening news programs and its New China News Agency also gave prominence to Li Peng’s Cabinet meeting, in which they debated ways to “strengthen” the law governing street demonstrations. The draft will be one of the highlights of Thursday’s special meeting of the Chinese legislature, which is also expected to endorse last weekend’s purge of so-called moderates from the Communist Party hierarchy.

The Chinese leadership Tuesday also used visiting foreign delegations to pound away at a second key public relations theme in the aftermath of the army’s brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations on the night of June 3-4--namely, that neither the army’s assault on the city center nor continuing martial law will curb continuing economic reforms in China.

Addressing a Bolivian delegation, Wan Li, the head of China’s National People’s Congress who has professed liberal ideas in the past, declared that China will continue opening up to the outside world--perhaps even more quickly now that the government has strengthened its hand.

In justifying the crackdown on dissidents, Wan echoed the party line in saying of the demonstrators: “They aimed to overthrow the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, subvert the socialist People’s Republic of China and turn China again into a state dependent on imperialism.”

Wan declared the government “now stable,” adding, “This event has made us sober-mindedly draw experience from the past and look forward to the future.”

In a separate meeting with Pakistan’s visiting Senate President Wasim Sajjad, Chinese President Yang Shangkun, who has strong ties to the army, also promised that China will never change its policy of reform and “opening to the outside world.”

Responding to the West’s almost universal condemnation of the crackdown, the Chinese leadership also showed signs of going on the offensive, particularly against the United States, which imposed limited sanctions on Beijing after the army assault on Tian An Men Square. The Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily, quoting Li Xiannian, China’s former president and a party elder who apparently was a key architect of the current hard-line strategy, said the sanctions constitute “interfering in China’s internal policies. The Chinese government and people are firmly opposed to this.”

Li did not name the United States, which has cut off weapons sales to China and suspended military and high-level diplomatic contacts. But an editorial Tuesday in the People’s Daily overseas edition compared China’s crackdown with arrests of U.S. civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s.

Said the paper: “ . . . What China did was to suppress the counterrevolutionary rebellion, but what the American government did was to suppress the democratic movement of the American people.”

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