Indoctrination Intended to Neutralize Reform Movement : Beijing Students Slog Through Political Study

A steady drizzle fell Wednesday on the sprawling campus of People’s University, as thousands of Chinese students made their way mechanically through a second day of mandatory political re-education.

A student of Chinese literature, asked about these classes, smiled sardonically and replied: “Look at the weather. Right now the weather looks about the way I feel about these classes.”

The young woman’s mood was typical of that on Beijing campuses this week, as the students’ spring of hopeful discontent has given way to futility and retribution.

This is back-to-school week here, and as tens of thousands of students who had formed the backbone of the pro-democracy movement stream back to their campuses, they are quickly learning that the bloody army crackdown of June 3-4 was only the beginning of the reassertion of power by China’s hard-line leaders.

Other Changes for Students

The intensive week of political study for returning students is the mildest of a series of new measures aimed at neutralizing the student movement for political reform, a movement that filled the streets with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators last April and May and won the support of much of the Chinese populace.

In a series of announcements this week, the hard-line Communist Party leadership under Deng Xiaoping has ordered that all freshmen at Beijing University, a focal point of the failed protest movement, delay their studies and spend a year in “socially productive military training.” In the past, such training has taken only a few weeks.

The authorities have also reduced new enrollment at the university from 2,000 to 811--mostly in the departments of history, art and social sciences--in a move that one diplomatic analyst said was aimed at eliminating lecturers in those departments. The party, he said, suspects that these people were “the brain trust of the trouble.”

Not even recent graduates are immune. The newspaper China Daily reported recently that last spring’s graduates from all colleges and universities will have to spend a year or two at manual work in villages or factories before they can go on to graduate studies.

On Wednesday the party announced that most new college and university students must start paying part of their tuition fees. In the past, these had been totally subsidized.

In explaining the philosophy behind these new measures, the state-run New China News Agency cited a recent national conference of political science scholars, which decided that “more efforts will be made to enhance education in basic Marxist theory, moral character training and patriotism.”

The agency said the scholars had found “ideological confusion” among the students, and blamed ousted party chairman Zhao Ziyang for “a laissez-faire attitude . . . toward bourgeois liberalization.”

‘Students Aren’t Buying It’

Independent analysts and diplomats had a different interpretation of the new measures’ intent. Most said they are likely to be counterproductive for Deng, the aging Chinese leader whose health, reportedly failing, has been as widely discussed on campus as the new rules.

“What it all adds up to is great distrust for the whole next generation on the part of the nation’s leaders,” said an Asian diplomat who has spent several years in China. “And the old boys in the party are resorting to the only solution they know--more political indoctrination. The problem is, the students aren’t buying it.

“There is no way this approach can solve this generation gap. Just the opposite. This is going to feed personal resentments, deepen the frustration and anger and, eventually, it will backfire. In the long run, it’s not a politically smart thing to do, unless you plan on dying in the next two years.”

In an effort to contradict this widely held view of the new policy, the government’s propaganda machine has been churning out a stream of colorful and personalized positive accounts of the university reopenings in Beijing this week.

The Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, quoted a recent university graduate Monday as saying he was impressed with Deng’s new policies.

“There are several things I did not expect,” the unidentified student said. “I did not expect, for example, that Comrade Deng has such a clear mind, even at age 85.”

The newspaper quoted another graduate student, a woman, as saying in her “self-criticism” dissertation--a political exercise required of all students graduating in June--that the so-called Goddess of Democracy statue erected in Tian An Men Square during the protests was a symbol of student confusion rather than genuine aspirations.

“Since the reforms in the country, young students took in a great deal of Western ideology and culture,” she was quoted as saying. “But very few of them could digest it. They blindly worshiped a bourgeois democratic system, which is not the correct one for our nation.”

The party has taken pains to make its new policy as physical as it is ideological. Returning students at People’s University, for example, found huge red banners throughout the campus. A few months ago there were banners urging “Down with Deng” and “Yes to Democracy.” The new ones say “Down with Bourgeois Liberalization” and “Firmly Follow the Socialist Way.”

Most of the students have reacted coolly to the new posters--and also to the week of political study--but this does not seem to be encouraging for the future of the pro-democracy movement.

“If it’s not dead, it’s certainly been forced into a sound slumber,” a Western diplomat said. “For the students, there’s just too much to lose, and no apparent way to make any gains. There is so much to fear and so few to lead; they’ll just go through the motions and put their minds on something else.”

Two young female accounting students at People’s University, on their way to the dining hall from a morning class in political re-education, started giggling when they were asked about the morning class.

“The stuff they were reading to us in class just wasn’t interesting enough to keep our minds busy,” one of them said. So, they said, they sat in the back and quietly discussed the relative merits of the men in the class.

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