Beijing Calls Envoys Home in Campaign to Repair Its Image

China’s hard-line leadership Wednesday escalated a campaign to renovate its shattered image at home and abroad by summoning most of its ambassadors to Beijing for consultations and launching an internal propaganda campaign that glorifies China’s 84-year-old senior leader, Deng Xiaoping.

The aging face of Deng, who is widely believed to have ordered the June 3-4 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, appeared uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on state-run national television Wednesday night. He was shown delivering a June 9 speech that laid out the policy behind the crackdown and its aftermath.

For almost two weeks now, Chinese have been urged to be ready to study the speech. Although key quotations have been cited in the official media and an English-language newspaper in the British colony of Hong Kong published what it said was a full text, its release Wednesday morning in the government press was the first full publication for the Chinese public.

Analysts here noted that it was accorded a prominence that no other leader’s words have received since the death in 1976 of Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

At the same time, many Chinese embassies in Asia, Africa and Europe confirmed that their ambassadors have been recalled to the Chinese capital, a measure that diplomats here said has not been taken since the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

Los Angeles officials said they were told by Ma Yuzhen, the Chinese consul general in Los Angeles, that he is being summoned to Beijing “for consultation” and hopes to return to Los Angeles soon. But the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that Ambassador Han Xu had not been called home.

There was no official confirmation or explanation of the recall in Beijing, but several diplomats speculated that the leadership is trying to avert additional diplomatic defections abroad--there have been as many as 20 worldwide since the crackdown--and that it plans to hold a meeting next week that will arm its envoys with the official version of the crushing of the movement that Beijing calls “a counterrevolutionary rebellion.”

“We assume they’re going to give them the government line,” one diplomat said.

Jiang Urges Punishment

China’s new Communist Party chief, Jiang Zemin, underscored that line in a speech late Wednesday, declaring that “severe punishment” must be meted out “to the plotters, organizers and behind-the-scene commanders who staged the turmoil and rebellion. For them, not an iota of forgiveness should be given.”

Jiang added that the party and the government “are still facing many problems and difficulties,” and he stressed that a key part of the solution will be the intensification of political education in party principles for China’s masses to bring about “a unity of thinking.”

But the basic blueprint of the government’s line was Deng’s speech, which was delivered to senior martial-law commanders and top Communist Party leaders less than a week after the army’s assault on the demonstrators in and around Tian An Men Square.

As is the custom in China’s Communist Party structure, the speech has circulated among high and mid-level party officials for two weeks, and its release Wednesday was, in effect, both a call for unity within the party and an appeal to China’s 1.1 billion people to throw their support behind Deng and the military.

Implicitly addressing the hatred that many Beijing residents, and perhaps many outside the capital, now feel for the army after its violent suppression of the movement, Deng said in the speech: “The army is still the People’s Army. This army retains the traditions of the old Red Army.”

He added that the crackdown “shows that the People’s Army is truly a great wall of iron and steel of the party and country.”

In delivering the party line on the turmoil that has engulfed China for nearly two months, Deng declared that the protesters were not just “misguided” students or intellectuals but also included “a rebellious clique and a large quantity of the dregs of society.”

“Their goal was to establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West,” Deng continued, constantly jabbing the air with a finger and slashing the air with a trembling left hand. “Some comrades didn’t understand this point.”

Says Leadership Was Confused

The 84-year-old leader also explained a still-puzzling period at the peak of the crisis when many analysts suggested that it was unclear who was in charge of the nation. In his speech, Deng conceded that the leadership itself was confused.

In a part of the speech already widely cited, Deng stated the leadership’s commitment to economic liberalization and openness to the West. But he stressed that “in reform and adopting the open policy, we run the risk of importing evil influences from the West.”

Deng concluded that his leadership’s decade-old economic liberalization policy was not the cause of the pro-democracy turmoil; rather, it was the failure of the leadership to adequately indoctrinate all of China’s masses through what he called “political education.”

Deng specifically criticized the United States for protesting the Chinese government’s use of force, setting the tone that has filled the state-run airwaves for days now.

Although the June 9 speech was the most comprehensive version of leadership strategy, there were additional insights in three other recent Deng speeches, which have yet to be published but were leaked to Western journalists.

The aging leader indicated in those addresses that the current strategy is a short-term one and repeated twice his often-stated intention to resign in the near future. He indicated that he is well aware that his leadership has lost popular support, and he outlined a plan in which the party should attack corruption as a way to regain that popularity.