Regime Cites Their Presence as Sign of Stability After Crackdown : Foreigners in China Wary of Propaganda Role

The handful of Westerners who have returned to Beijing’s residential Yongan Apartment Hotel in the weeks since China’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators believed that the management was just trying to be nice when it invited them to a cocktail party. Few of them took note of the photographer in the corner.

But in China these days, even parties, it seems, are political.

When they awoke Wednesday morning, the visitors saw the result. There they were again, beaming and holding their glasses high to toast the hotel’s Chinese general manager, in a huge photograph at the top of the front page of the China Daily, a government-run English-language newspaper.

“The hotel suffered a big loss after June 4, as 187 of 222 foreign families who lived there went home. But now, since the situation in the capital has become stable, many have returned,” the caption declared.

For hundreds of foreign business people and tour-group operators, the aftermath of last month’s shootings in central Beijing and the crackdown on dissidents have found them weighing not only safety questions and moral dilemmas involved in whether to return to business as usual but, increasingly, the propaganda factor as well.

“It’s simply a question of not wanting to be used by people who run over their students with tanks--no matter what the price,” said one Western businessman in Hong Kong who pulled out of Beijing after the crackdown, which Western military experts estimate left at least 1,000 civilians dead and provoked limited economic sanctions by nations throughout the world.

The sanctions will limit American business activity in China, where hundreds of millions of dollars worth of U.S. military and high-tech items have been blocked under the Bush Administration’s order. Non-military trade also will be severely affected, as many American importers are deciding on their own not to do business with Beijing as a moral protest.

Western diplomats and economic analysts here added, though, that more and more businessmen and tourists are deciding to stay away, at least in the short term, simply to avoid becoming grist for the hard-line party leadership’s propaganda mill.

Sensitive to Manipulation

“There is a great sensitivity on the part of the American business community here not to be used or manipulated as part of a propaganda campaign,” one senior Western diplomat said last week. “Companies are keeping their people out of China for just that reason.”

Said one South American businessman based in Beijing, “The only time I go out any more is with other foreigners. The last thing I want to see right now is myself on TV.”

An American businessman who did decide to stay behind throughout the turmoil complained, only half-jokingly, that he has never felt as popular in China as he has in the past few weeks. Almost every day, he said, he has received invitations to government dinners, lunches and cocktail parties. Each time he sent his regrets, specifically because he did not want to be photographed or filmed. Finally, he did attend one party and, sure enough, he said, the cameras were there.

Extensive footage of American, European or Japanese business people who have either actually attended government-sponsored functions or even accepted invitations is now a regular segment on state-run television’s evening news. As the camera pans over smiling and relaxed executives, a news reader explains how each one was profusely thanked for showing his or her “farsighted view” of bilateral trade with a leadership that has repeatedly stressed its continuing commitment to an open and liberalized Chinese economy.

Laurence Bates, an American who heads his U.S. law firm’s Beijing office, agreed that the propaganda factor is a risk, but he is among those American expatriates who have returned to the Chinese capital because they believe the risk is far outweighed by the importance of a continued American corporate presence here.

“Just the fact we are here means we could be used,” conceded Bates, who left Beijing during the foreign exodus June 8 but came back to stay just a few days ago. “All they have to do is get you for two seconds without a grimace on your face, then they put on their own voice-over, and they can use you that way.

“But I don’t think there should be a knee-jerk reaction to this government, because it’s the same government we’ve been dealing with for the last 10 years. And the (party) hard-liners would be perfectly happy to go back to their isolationist policies.”

Simply by being here, Bates said, American and other Western business people are a hedge against that regression.

As a lawyer, Bates added, he sees another pragmatic reason to avoid what he called “disinvolvement with the Chinese government”--foreign clients in need, such as Western hotels, which he described as “an example of a kind of operation that can’t just pick up and leave without suffering huge losses.”

The hotels are a key component in the Chinese government’s propaganda offensive, as foreign tourists also have been increasingly targeted in the campaign.

Recently built, ultra-modern hotels throughout the country are still reporting occupancy rates of as low as 5%--and almost none higher than 30%. Dozens of lucrative tour groups have canceled reservations for tens of thousands of Western and Japanese tourists who had been due to arrive both now and in the fall--the peak of the season.

“No Overseas Tourists Injured in Beijing Riots,” declared the headline on one article in the English version of the government-run New China News Agency soon after the crackdown. “Guarantees Offered to Bring Back the Tourists,” declared another headline in the state-controlled China Daily newspaper.

But then there was this headline four days later: “Beijing Seeks Ideas to Revive Its Tourism.” The story reported that soon after the crackdown, prominent hoteliers boldly told tourism officials that the decision to keep martial law in force in Beijing is a principal cause of the continuing slump in tourism.

“Everything is normal, except for one thing,” Yuan Weiming, general manager of the Yanshan Hotel, was quoted as telling party tourism officials. “There is still the curfew in some areas. For foreign tourists, this is a very serious matter. They will not come when soldiers are in control.”

‘Worry Tourists’

In an interview this week, Weng Peng, tour coordinator of the Holiday Inn chain’s Lido Hotel in Beijing, noted, “Soldiers and rifles worry tourists a little bit, I think.”

Still, martial law, declared May 20, remains in force. Troops carrying assault rifles fill the city. And Wednesday, soldiers armed with submachine guns pursued three buses full of Japanese tourists from Tian An Men Square to the Friendship Store several blocks east and confiscated rolls of film, according to the tourists and a spokesman for the Japanese Embassy. Martial law makes it illegal to photograph soldiers.

The troubled Chinese economy already is beginning to suffer the loss of large amounts of foreign exchange revenue, according to Western economists and other foreigners in Beijing.

Tourism is an industry that had been booming since the world’s most populous nation opened its vast archeological and scenic riches to the outside world in earnest more than half a decade ago. Foreign visitors nearly doubled in the past six years, from 110,000 in 1983 to about 200,000 last year.

Now signs of the downturn are everywhere.

At the Great Wall in the town of Badaling, about 50 miles north of Beijing, one can walk for hours these days atop China’s traditional showcase for Western tourists without seeing a Western face. The souvenir shops are still open, but the clerks are desperately trying to hawk their Great Wall key chains, T-shirts and plastic chopsticks to the largely uninterested Asian tourists who pass through.

And, in China’s principal tourist towns of Xian, Guilin and Hangzhou, managers of posh new hotels report that their recently completed buildings are virtually empty.

As a result, China’s state-run media have all but staked out key tourist sites, waiting to record on camera the rare Westerners who do venture out.

In their media campaign, the tourism authorities have even begun to make a virtue out of the dearth of tourists. In Wednesday’s China Daily, for example, the headline of a story placed right next to the large photograph of the Yongan Apartment Hotel’s cocktail party proclaimed, “Railways See Sharp Fall in Travelers.” But the story looked on the bright side: “Railway passengers have been having the unusual experience of comfortable travel recently, because there has been a sharp fall in their numbers.”

Perhaps for the first time, the story noted, foreign tourists can now enjoy rail travel in China.

Nick Driver, The Times’ research assistant in Beijing, contributed to this story.