Fear Silences Beijing’s Bold Student Voices Mood Is Grim on 83 Campuses in Capital

Feelings of fear, desolation, devastation and pain are almost universal among the estimated 156,000 students on Beijing’s 83 university campuses a month after authorities cracked down violently on the student-led pro-democracy movement.

“The atmosphere on campus and all around the city has changed 180 degrees,” said a graduate student, speaking in a tiny dormitory room on the campus of one of Beijing’s top scientific academies.

Beads of sweat formed on the student’s nose and his voice dropped to a near-whisper as he nervously described the mood on campus.

“During the movement, everywhere I went I heard people talking about democracy and freedom. That’s all people talked about in the cinema, in the cafeteria, on the public buses. There was so much excitement.

“Now, people talk about anything but the student movement. In the cafeteria now, I hear, ‘Will you graduate this year? What work unit will you join?’ We’re all still thinking about politics, but we can’t speak about it. We don’t know who the plainclothes police are. We don’t even know what our friends feel in their hearts. Maybe they will call to report us as counterrevolutionaries to improve their chances of a promotion.

“We never speak about these things in public, and, even in private, we speak only to our heart-to-heart friends.”

Finally, his voice dropped even further when he explained how dangerous it was for him to be speaking even now, in his private dorm room, to one of the few American teachers remaining on his campus after most were evacuated soon after the People’s Liberation Army moved into Tian An Men Square with tanks and machine guns June 3-4.

“You, you have two homes--China and America,” the student said. “If things get bad in China, you can go back.

“We, we have two homes, too--the university and a prison. That’s why we must be so careful.”

As the days have passed since the brutal crackdown that Western military analysts calculate left at least 1,000 dead around Tian An Men Square and elsewhere in Beijing, China’s hard-line leadership has gradually tried to project a softening in its position toward those students who merely joined in the protest.

On Sunday, the Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, published the most detailed version yet of the leadership’s offer of leniency to all but “those who engineered and commanded the turmoil and rebellion in Beijing.” The latter, it added, “we shall strike and punish.”

Lenient Policy Pledged

Quoting hard-line Premier Li Peng, the People’s Daily reported that Li pledged to “take a lenient policy toward those students who took part in demonstrations, sit-ins and fastings (hunger strikes) and even made extremist statements and did extremist things . . . although we are not in favor of their way of doing things.

“We hope they will make an earnest review and learn a lesson from the past.”

The paper said Li’s remarks were made during a meeting here Saturday with Daniel K. Wong, the former mayor and current councilman of Cerritos, Calif. Wong told Western reporters that he came to China to request clemency for students.

Based on interviews by The Times on Beijing campuses, students are indeed learning lessons from the past, as Li advises, but they do not seem to be the kind of lessons the leadership has in mind.

“When I consider it now, we learned a lot about America and about the principles of democracy during the recent demonstrations and what came after them,” said a young muralist at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. “In fact, the democracy movement came about here because we listened to music from the West and studied your art, and we began to realize how free and individualistic you could be.

‘Lessons Cannot Be Forgotten’

“These are lessons which cannot be forgotten,” said the muralist, whose thoughts were echoed by several other students sitting on plywood bunks inside one of the academy’s dark, cell-like dormitory rooms.

Their campus devised and sculpted the “Goddess of Democracy” statue, a kind of replica of the Statue of Liberty that stood like a political lightning rod in the center of Tian An Men Square before the army moved in.

Asked whether the government’s crackdown succeeded in destroying their movement or whether it is merely dormant, one of the art students said, “It is more like a hibernating animal--it is like a snake that has gone into hiding.”

A visiting American journalist suggested that hibernating animals often are stronger when they emerge from their sleep, but the student replied, “It is not a perfect analogy because if the government corrects itself--if it fixes its mistakes, if it cleans up corruption, if it institutes more democratic reforms--then the student movement will no longer be needed.

“But if they do not, then a new group of leaders in their early 20s, just like this one, naturally will rise up. In the short term, though, nothing will happen. It would be a stupid thing to do just after they came in and gunned us all down to stand up and say, ‘Down with the party.’ People must protect themselves a little bit.”

In fact, the only time a visiting journalist heard that slogan--one that was often shouted during the protests--in the past week was at a student’s birthday party inside a locked dormitory room and well after midnight.

At a prominent polytechnic institute on Beijing’s outskirts, another group of students disagreed somewhat with the art students’ assessment of the movement’s future.

‘Enemy of the People’

“While the army is here, there’s nothing we can do,” one said, again sitting in a dank room, typical of Beijing campus dormitories, with the door closed and speaking in a hushed tone. “But when they leave, it will start to grow again--not immediately, but we know it will happen. We know our movement is right.

“The People’s Army is now the oppressive enemy of the people. But they cannot suppress us forever.”

Even those students agreed, though, that the leaders of the recent pro-democracy movement, most of whom have been arrested, went into hiding or escaped to the West, have been successfully neutralized by China’s hard-line leaders and that it may take years for a new generation of leaders to emerge on their campuses.

The students interviewed in the past week, all of whom agreed to talk only if their names, and in some cases the identities of their schools, were not made public, were even more emotional about the party’s decision to try to destroy the last vestiges of the movement through intensified party propaganda and formal political indoctrination classes.

There are signs of that new policy on every campus--huge party banners and posters demanding loyalty to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and his so-called four cardinal principles of rule. There also are posters listing the names of top student leaders wanted by the security police, their ages and physical descriptions and telephone numbers students should call to turn them in.

‘Policy of Teaching Ignorance’

And there are classes scheduled on campuses throughout Beijing this summer in intensive political re-education--classes one young art student said are part of a policy known on campus as “the policy of teaching ignorance.”

“They can force us to sit through political study, but they can’t make us believe it,” said one student at the polytechnic institute. “It makes us even more angry that we will be forced to attend political study that cheats and lies to us.

“You know, I’ve heard some people say that they now regret having bought a color TV. It’s a waste, they say, because all you are able to see on it is the government propaganda--not even a good entertainment show.”

The mood that the leadership has created on campus now has also taken a toll on the students’ work and creativity, they said.

“From the beginning of this movement, my feelings have been very strong,” said the young muralist at the fine arts academy. “But since June 3, I haven’t been able to paint at all. I have just felt despondent--devastated. These feelings inside my heart, I feel I must purge them somehow.”

‘Hearts, Minds Not on Work’

The graduate student at the scientific academy added: “It’s so difficult to work now. Our hearts and our minds are not on our work. We can’t forget the excitement and the hope we had just one month ago.”

Aside from their memories, however, there is very little left in the gray, sanitized Beijing to remind the students of the days when the world almost began to believe that their movement actually could triumph.

At Beijing Normal University, one of the most active campuses during the movement and the home campus of now-exiled student leader Wuer Kaixi, there is only the faintest reminder of those days on the announcement boards that are now plastered with party slogans and wanted lists.

Underneath one large, hand-lettered poster naming the top student leaders on the arrest list at Beijing Normal, there are only the torn corners of the students’ own posters that, just six weeks ago, begged their nation’s Communist Party to heed a popular call for democratic reform.

And on those tattered corners there remain only the dates of more promising times. “May 13,” one read, and another, “May 16”--the only physical reminders left on campus that a movement capable of drawing more than 1 million Chinese people into the streets to demonstrate had ever happened.

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