Zhao Tied to ‘Conspiracy’; Crackdown Defended

China’s leadership released a 25,000-word document Thursday, stating its case for last month’s brutal army crackdown on the pro-democracy movement and linking ousted Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang and some of the country’s most prominent intellectuals to a “political conspiracy” to overthrow the party’s conservative leaders with help and financing from abroad.

The document asserted that Zhao “tolerated and connived” with the pro-democracy movement, which the party calls “a counterrevolutionary rebellion.” It accused him of playing golf “as if nothing had happened” rather than attending a critical party meeting as protests grew into a nationwide movement in late April. It said that Zhao, once viewed by the outside world as China’s most progressive champion of reform, refused to attend the key meeting in which paramount leader Deng Xiaoping issued the order to declare martial law in May.

The report alleges that Zhao, who was later stripped of all his party positions, was responsible for refueling the protests with a speech he delivered when the movement was waning in early May. And it condemns by name nearly a dozen intellectuals--several of them for the first time--who were instrumental in shaping economic and political reform in China for the past eight years.

Diplomatic analysts said the report strongly indicates that the party’s ongoing purge of moderates will continue and broaden.

Calling for a widening of the crackdown that Western diplomats and military experts say left at least 1,000 civilians dead and nearly 2,000 others in prison, the document said: “A handful of counterrevolutionary rioters refuse to recognize defeat and still indulge in sabotage, and even dream of staging a comeback. We should mobilize the people completely . . . and spare no effort to ferret (them) out.”

(A report in the July 2 edition of the Sichuan Daily, received in Beijing on Thursday, said two more people have been sentenced to death for offenses during rioting in the southwestern city of Chengdu on June 5 that followed the Beijing violence. The report did not say whether the sentences had been carried out. Authorities have reported a total of 27 people executed for their part in the demonstrations.)

Trying to ‘Pin It All on Zhao’

Diplomats and other analysts here said the report on the protests was based largely on partial truths--”a heavily edited historical account,” one said.

“This is very definitely an attempt to pin it all on Zhao and his circle of intellectuals,” one Asian diplomat said. “It is also the leadership’s definitive attempt at defending themselves, and they’ve done it beautifully.”

The report, delivered by Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s nominal legislature, on June 30 but not made public until Thursday, was unanimously approved Thursday afternoon on the final day of a special session.

The legislators also approved a new law that restricts future street demonstrations in Beijing and adopted a resolution expressing “strong indignation” over U.S. economic sanctions imposed against China in response to the army crackdown.

The People’s Daily newspaper, meanwhile, assailed the June 29 vote in the House of Representatives in favor of further sanctions against Beijing.

“To those people in the American Congress who deliberately distort the facts and interfere with China’s internal affairs, we cannot but express our indignation,” the Communist Party newspaper said.

Another official condemnation of the United States came Thursday from the Foreign Ministry in a formal response to Monday’s protest by the U.S. Embassy, charging that Chinese troops deliberately fired into the apartments of American and other Western diplomats three days after the crackdown.

The ministry called the June 7 shooting, in which Western experts say soldiers fired hundreds of shots into the Beijing apartment building, “an act of self-defense,” adding that the U.S. allegation of a “premeditated” attack was “a sheer fabrication.”

Rejecting the protest, the ministry repeated its charge that the U.S. Embassy has committed “gross violation of the norms of international law” by giving refuge to dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and his wife. Fang was cited and extensively quoted half a dozen times in the party’s report on the months leading up to the protest movement and the crackdown.

Analysts said that the report--selective in key parts and exhaustive in others--is testimony to the efficiency of China’s Public Security Bureau.

Details of Private Meetings

It gives page after page of details of basement meetings held by Fang and other dissident intellectuals and of campus meetings of student leaders. Its narrations are filled with direct quotations from protest leaders’ “private” meetings on Tian An Men Square, which became the heart of the pro-democracy demonstrations.

The report quotes Zhao directly during a private meeting with two personal advisers, depicting him as ordering that the state-run media be allowed to report the protests in full.

“There is no big risk to open up a bit by reporting the demonstrations and increasing the openness of news,” Zhao was quoted as telling former Communist Party Central Committee member Hu Qili on May 6.

The day after that meeting, the report said, Hu, who was also later stripped of his party posts, personally conveyed orders for openness to a meeting of the official media’s top editors. The party’s report said that ensuing coverage of the demonstrations, with party print and broadcast media reporting the protests and displaying photographs and film of banners calling for Deng and other aging hard-liners to step down, brought hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life into the streets.

“For a time, it looked as if refusal to join in the demonstrations meant ‘unpatriotic,’ ” Mayor Chen’s report stated. “(The) demonstrations threw social order in Beijing into a mess and seriously disrupted the Sino-Soviet summit, which was closely followed worldwide.”

The party’s report then charged that Zhao had “used the opportunity of meeting Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on May 16, deliberately directing the fire of criticism at Comrade Deng Xiaoping and making the situation even worse.”

During their meeting, Zhao told Gorbachev that Deng was still in control of China, despite the fact that the 84-year-old leader had given up all his posts except the chairmanship of the party’s powerful Central Military Commission, the report said.

The following day, the report stated, the protest leaders launched “their most furious and vicious” attacks on the party leadership, raising banners that declared, “There is still an emperor in China” and condemning Deng as “a senile, fatuous autocrat.”

“Slogans like ‘Support Zhao Ziyang,’ ‘Long Live Zhao Ziyang’ and ‘Zhao Ziyang be promoted chairman of the Central Military Commission’ could be seen and heard in the demonstrations and at Tian An Men Square,” the report said. “Plotters of the turmoil attempted to use the chaos as an opportunity to seize power.

“The situation in Beijing became increasingly serious, with anarchism viciously spreading and many areas sinking into complete chaos and white terror.”

Diplomats, journalists and Western expatriates in Beijing at the time flatly disagree with that interpretation.

‘People Were Happy’

“There was no terror,” one diplomat said. “The people were happy. There was elation. The People’s Daily even ran an editorial reporting on the ‘new spring’ that had dawned in Beijing.”

Another Western diplomat said, “The one thing this report never deals with is the simple question of why there was so much popular support for Zhao, for a freer press and for political reforms and why Deng was so universally unpopular.”

Throughout the report, the party keeps returning to its major themes: that a movement to bring down the party was hatched months, even years ago, that it was organized and directed by “a tiny handful” of “counterrevolutionaries,” that it received thousands and perhaps millions of dollars in aid from sympathetic donors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States, and that it had grown so large and had so deeply split the party that the leadership was left with no alternative but to order the military to use lethal force.

Throughout, the party document says Zhao had an “unshirkable responsibility.”

The report then details how Zhao’s personal secretary, Bao Tong, used a key party think tank--now known to be a center for Zhao’s reformists--to leak advance word of martial law to the students in the square. The report says the students thus “gained time to organize people and coerce those who were in the dark to set up roadblocks at major crossroads to stop the advance of troops.”

In the days thereafter, the report alleges, pro-democracy organizers used their “strong financial backing” to hire thugs and ex-convicts to attack the troops, purchase weapons and attempt to solicit defections from the army.

“During the whole operation (of clearing the square), no one, including the students who refused but were forced to leave, died,” the report asserted in a conclusion disputed by many eyewitnesses, who said they saw tanks rolling over students and soldiers shooting unarmed civilians.