Anger Lingers on Beijing Campuses; Intellectuals’ Role Now in Question

The song is just a simple television advertising jingle about insect spray, probably inspired by American commercials: “We’re bugs, we’re bugs. Aaagghh! Enemy killers are coming. Run quick!”

But when students at Beijing University banged pots and pans late one night a few weeks ago and sang the bug-spray jingle, “The Internationale” and China’s national anthem, no one could mistake the message.

“The Internationale” and the national anthem, which both call for uprising against oppression, had been adopted as theme songs of this spring’s student-led pro-democracy protests. And for students to sing the bug song draws a not-subtle comparison to the night of June 3-4, when the Chinese army put an end to the demonstrations by shooting its way into Beijing, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who sought to block its path.

Anger Continues to Smolder

As the fall semester gets under way, anger continues to smolder on Beijing’s campuses. In central government offices, the youngest members of China’s future elite live in fear of being sent away from the capital. A new wave of anti-intellectualism threatens to undermine the nation’s attempt at rapid economic modernization.

“The damage already exists,” commented a European diplomat. “The atmosphere is that people just don’t want to work any more: ‘Have you finished that report?’ ‘Oh, I’m not feeling well--the weather is so hot.’ The role of intellectuals in society has been set back 10 years. Alienation has set in again.”

On the surface, there is mostly silence.

The late July outburst of pan-banging and singing at Beijing University, which involved a few hundred students, is the only campus protest to have broken out since June’s martial-law crackdown. The alleged ringleader, a graduating senior who had not yet left campus, was quickly denied his diploma.

Indoctrination Classes

The most important student leaders of the spring demonstrations are under arrest, in hiding or in exile. Returning students must attend political indoctrination classes focusing on the thoughts of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

With the apparent exception of older students who have had work experience before entering college, the entire freshman class of Beijing University, the most prestigious school in the nation, is scheduled to spend a year at a military camp before doing any course work.

Authorities also have announced that this spring’s graduates, especially those in the social sciences, in most cases will not be allowed to pursue advanced degrees without first getting at least a year of work experience. For many, this could mean a move to a provincial town, with no guarantee of being able to return to Beijing or another big city.

“The students are all really angry, but they don’t dare speak about it,” declared one undergraduate.

“I’m not afraid of the new government policies,” said another student. “I just hate the government. My friends at Beijing University and Qinghua University feel the same way.

“That’s why they were out there beating on plates and bowls and singing ‘The Internationale’ and the national anthem. They want to sing other songs, anti-government songs, but they know they will be kicked out or put in jail if they do. So they just go to their political study classes and pretend to agree with Deng’s speeches. Then they leave with the same feelings of hatred and ridicule.”

Cut Off From World

An attempt is also being made to cut students off from a watching world. At some schools, students have been warned that they will be punished if they speak with foreign diplomats or reporters.

The loss to China seems even more stark when a comparison is made with what might have been. When this spring’s student-led wave of street protests first erupted, a key demand was for improved living and working conditions for China’s educated elite, who generally draw salaries no higher than factory workers’ wages.

Even before the demonstrations, the government was drawing up plans for educational reforms aimed at raising the status of schoolteachers, especially those in the countryside, at increasing the independence of universities and at switching to a system by which college graduates find their own jobs rather than receiving assignments from the state.

Part of Working Class

Now, in the wake of the June crackdown that ended the demonstrations, Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin is telling intellectuals--meaning people with more than a high school education--that they are part of the working class and that policy toward them will not change.

The irony is that in today’s political environment, Jiang’s comments are meant to be reassuring. What he means is there must be no return to the virulent anti-intellectualism of Mao Tse-tung’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when educated people were condemned as the “stinking ninth category.” This was a new classification of evildoers added to eight previously labeled categories that included criminals and so-called counterrevolutionaries.

Jiang’s reassurances are needed because echoes of Cultural Revolution policies, which called for intellectuals to go to the countryside to be “re-educated” by the peasants, are reverberating through Beijing once again.

The dreams of the Beijing Spring, including hopes that college graduates would routinely earn more than high school dropouts, that China would direct far more funding to education, that freewheeling discussion of how to solve China’s immense problems would be allowed on campuses and in the press--these dreams have been shattered.

A Chilling Order

But beyond that, a chilling order has been transmitted through the central bureaucracy, demanding that all people working in government or Communist Party jobs at the national level who graduated from college in or after 1985 are to be transferred to low-level provincial jobs for at least one to two years.

The full implications of this order are not yet clear, and it may never be rigorously carried out. In China, rules are bent by those who enforce them. The theoretical purpose of the order is to raise awareness of China’s economic and social realities among the future elite. But there is widespread suspicion that the rule is meant to be selectively enforced, primarily against those who participated in the pro-democracy protests.

“Theoretically, it applies to everyone in the central government and central party organizations (who graduated in or after 1985),” commented a Western diplomat. “(But) it would be inconceivable to think this thing would be enforced universally and fairly.”

Another diplomat first predicted flatly that the order would prove to be meaningless.

“They need these people,” he said. “They have nobody to replace them. They are not going to waste them.”

But after a moment’s thought, he added: “That could change. It’s a very contradictory picture.”

If the order were to be carried out, he said, “It would be devastating--and Deng Xiaoping knows it would be devastating.”

Retaining ‘Chinese Way’

As long ago as the late 19th Century, and again during the past decade, some Chinese leaders have hoped to modernize the nation by bringing in Western science and technology but retaining a vaguely defined “Chinese way” of doing things--basically meaning the essence of the system in place at the time.

In the political spectrum of today’s China, Premier Li Peng is often placed in this category, as someone who favors technical and scientific training but opposes the liberalizing influences of Western society.

Others, including some of the key advisers who until recently were gathered around former Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, a reformist, have advocated far more fundamental changes in the structure of society and greater individual freedom as prerequisites for sustained economic growth.

“You can’t just import technology and expect it to do wonderful things for you,” commented one of the diplomats. “You have to adopt a way of thinking that uses that technology efficiently. For example, if you don’t have a free flow of information linking scientists to each other, that slows down the bouncing of ideas off other people and it slows down results.”

Severity Unknown

It is still too early to know how harsh the treatment of educated young people and of intellectuals in general may be in the months and years ahead.

China’s top political leadership remains delicately balanced between those who wish to slow the pace of reform and those who wish to accelerate it. Deng, at 85, is unlikely to last for very many more years as China’s paramount leader, and the succession struggle is already unfolding.

“The best of China’s elite is now alienated,” said the European diplomat. “These people were not anti-Communist. They had a chance to be part of the game, and now they are excluded from the game. But they can be put back in again if things change quickly.”

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