China Reopens Peace Gate, Troops Stay

Combat troops, armed with assault rifles and electric cattle prods, searched thousands of Chinese tourists entering the Gate of Heavenly Peace on Saturday, the first day the gate at the north end of Tian An Men Square has opened to the public since China’s bloody June 3-4 crackdown on pro-democracy students who used the square as their rallying point for more than a month.

Martial-law officers signed autographs on souvenir booklets. Their troops mugged for tourist snapshots and goose-stepped in formation around the Forbidden City adjacent to the square. On the rooftop of the gate, where Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, 1949, soldiers stood guard with AK-47 assault rifles.

This was, in part, how the hard-line leadership of the Chinese Communist Party celebrated the party’s 68th anniversary Saturday, four weeks after it ordered the army to use tanks, armored personnel carriers and automatic weapons to suppress what it calls “a counterrevolutionary rebellion” and began the purge of moderate and pro-democratic forces from its ranks.

In an editorial Saturday in the party newspaper, the People’s Daily, the leadership acknowledged that last month’s carnage tainted its popular image.

“A dim shadow appeared which is not easy to wipe out in the people’s minds,” it conceded. “So, much of the party’s prestige and reputation were lost.”

But, in marking one of the darkest anniversaries in its history, the party said that the solution is simply to eliminate what it called “serious impurities in party ideology, organization and style.” It applauded China’s tough, 84-year-old leader Deng Xiaoping for stripping his moderate party chief, Zhao Ziyang, of all his posts.

Borrowing a Phrase

And, quoting a phrase coined by Deng’s one-time nemesis Mao, the party said that its problems could be solved only by “ideological liberation, seeking truth from facts and brave exploration.”

A Chinese tourist in his mid-30s from the northeastern city of Changchun, who said he was visiting Beijing for the first time Saturday, appeared to be following that advice, but in his own way.

“I’m going to look,” he told one of the few Americans in the square.

Asked whether his visit was connected to the bloody army crackdown, the man said: “What I’m really going to do is seek truth from facts. You know this statement? They have all these signs and pamphlets telling us what to think. I don’t want to do that. I want to seek my own truth from the facts. Just that.”

Western tourism, a booming business in China before the crackdown, has all but dried up, and most diplomatic dependents, among them Americans, were evacuated soon after an apartment building in a diplomatic compound was shot up by soldiers four days after the army’s citywide crackdown.

The U.S. Embassy here provided an even sharper illustration of that void Saturday than Tian An Men Square.

Troops, armed with machine pistols, ringed the embassy compound as fewer than 200 Americans joined in the diplomatic mission’s annual Fourth of July celebration.

The Independence Day reception, which is sometimes held a few days early on a weekend, traditionally has drawn as many as 1,000 Americans here. In past years, the entire block outside the embassy compound has been roped off. An American fast-food chain has always flown in hamburgers from Tokyo, and hundreds of children have played in the street in what have been described as authentic American block parties.

On Saturday, the few Americans remaining here gathered quietly inside the compound, ate locally made hamburgers, purchased T-shirts commemorating an occasion that few felt like celebrating and, as the flag was lowered at sunset, spontaneously broke into an emotional rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

U.S. Marines at the embassy gate refused to let party-goers take cameras inside. One said it was a “security precaution,” presumably to protect China’s leading dissident, Fang Lizhi, who has been in the compound since he took refuge there in the first week of June after the crackdown began.

Fang’s presence on the embassy grounds has strained Sino-U.S. relations, but an embassy spokesman said Saturday that official contacts have resumed between the Chinese leadership and embassy officials.