Party Icons Replace Fallen China Goddess

At the spot in Tian An Men Square where student demonstrators set up a “Goddess of Democracy” this spring, there now stand the figures of a worker, a peasant, a soldier and an intellectual.

These “socialist art” icons of Chinese communism, set up for the Oct. 1 National Day celebrations, and the students’ statue, which was modeled after the Statue of Liberty and destroyed by martial-law troops on the night of June 3-4, symbolize two clashing visions of China’s future.

The new, 25-foot-high figures symbolize the old Maoist dream of dictatorship by a worker-peasant-soldier alliance, combined with new emphasis placed during the past decade on respect for technical and scientific skills.

Over the past few months, China’s still-dominant octogenarian revolutionaries have sought desperately to crush the vision symbolized by the “Goddess of Democracy” and reimpose stability based on the type of hard-line Marxist ideology represented by the new statues.

Emphasis on the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s dictum that art must serve socialism is only one of many elements in this attempt to suppress all opposition and reinforce political orthodoxy.

Arrests and Executions

Thousands of arrests, at least 30 executions, a continued search for fugitive pro-democracy activists, purges of reformist officials from party and government positions, waves of televised propaganda and new political indoctrination sessions in schools and at workplaces--all are aimed at consolidating more restrictive political and economic policies and ensuring that street protests do not break out again.

Orders also have been issued that many young university graduates in Beijing are to be sent to provincial cities or rural towns for a year or more of lower-level work experience. These transfers are aimed especially at people who graduated within the last five years and now work in central government offices or Communist Party organizations. Many college graduates who wish to enter graduate school are also being required to work at a job for at least a year before continuing their studies.

The summer-long crackdown has restored a superficial calm in Beijing and throughout the country. But helmeted soldiers still stand guard at major bridges and intersections in the capital, and police are making spot checks of personal identification cards.

In what amounts to a symbol of continued instability, Tian An Men Square, the center of this spring’s protests, remains closed to ordinary pedestrian traffic, although Chinese and foreign visitors in organized groups can receive permission to sightsee in the square.

Publicly announced figures on arrests are in the range of 5,000, but it is clear that far more people--perhaps 10,000, perhaps more than double that figure--have in fact been detained. Arrests are still continuing, although the current rate is impossible to determine. Some of those detained have already been released after periods of intense interrogation and ideological indoctrination and, at least in a few cases, beatings.

Executions have taken a toll of uncertain magnitude. China has officially announced about 30 executions that appeared to be related to the June unrest, but whether much larger numbers of protesters have been executed secretly is impossible to know.

Wang Meng, a respected writer associated with less restrictive policies toward the arts, has been removed from his position as minister of culture, and a more orthodox ideologue, He Jingzhi, has taken over his duties.

Liang Xiang, a key reformist ally of ousted Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, was fired earlier this month from the post of governor of Hainan province. Liang’s ouster came as part of an anti-corruption drive--he was accused of “abusing power for private gain”--but this effort appears to be partially intended as a tool for attacks on Zhao’s supporters.

Crackdown on Media

As part of an effort to reassert hard-line control of the media, editors of several of the nation’s most important official newspapers have been replaced and at least a dozen journalists were detained, although some were subsequently released.

A heavy-handed propaganda campaign is playing a key role in the process of control. It aims to rewrite the history of this spring’s student protests and establish an official version of events, officially described as a “counterrevolutionary rebellion,” from which public deviation is dangerous.

But there are many indications that at least in Beijing, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in support of the pro-democracy student demonstrators who were at the core of the protests, the government has had little success in convincing the public that the bloody crackdown in June was justified. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people died that night as the army shot its way into the city against crowds seeking to block its path.

“I’m a Communist Party member,” one Beijing area university student told a foreign acquaintance a few days ago, “but I still think the (student) movement was right.”

More remarkable than that sentiment is the fact that the young man made his statement in front of three other Chinese. He acknowledged that he could lose his party membership for such a comment but expressed confidence that he could trust those who were with him not to turn him in.

This is one of the most profound differences between the current crackdown and earlier waves of political repression in China. On campuses and also in many work units, friends and colleagues know that everyone resents the government’s actions. Many Chinese are cautious, but some feel they need not be. In general, only those who were deeply involved in the pro-democracy protests are genuinely afraid.

In many instances, however, it is an act of some bravery for Chinese to talk to foreigners these days. While there are no restrictions on casual conversations between foreign tourists or business people and Chinese, students at some Beijing campuses have been warned they will be punished if caught talking to foreign diplomats or journalists.

“The view I’ve been getting is that the events of the past three months were horrible and very deeply upsetting to China’s intellectuals, but they tend to take a long-range view . . . that things haven’t really permanently changed course or direction,” a visiting American scholar commented recently.

“They very much want the outside world to see it that way,” he added. “They do not want to be punished (by foreign rejection of academic contacts) and they do not want China to be punished. . . . (But) there is an underlying feeling of anxiety. They’re not sure how much further the current atmosphere of scrutiny of intellectuals will be carried. There is this sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Harsh Rhetoric

This sense of foreboding is reinforced by harsh rhetoric, some of it reminiscent of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, that has reappeared in the state-run media over the summer.

A mid-September commentary in the official Guangming Daily declared that “class enemies” have opposed the “people’s democratic dictatorship” by spreading the theory that “class struggle has been wiped out” and by advocating “bourgeois democracy, freedom and human rights.”

Such class enemies, the commentary declared, must be “firmly, precisely and ruthlessly” attacked.

As part of National Day preparations, some billboards in Beijing also have resumed carrying propaganda messages.

“Support the Four Cardinal Principles . . . Carry Forward the Construction Work of Socialist Modernization in the Capital,” declares one such message.

The Four Cardinal Principles are socialism, the “people’s democratic dictatorship,” the leadership of the Communist Party and “Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse-tung thought.”

The government also has launched a new wave of censorship against publications deemed to be pornographic or politically subversive. Particular efforts have been made to suppress the works of reformers who have fled overseas. In Beijing alone, 490,000 banned books and periodicals have been seized, according to a report Friday by the official New China News Agency.

The crackdown has alienated virtually an entire generation of educated youth, who until the June slaughter had placed great hopes in the possibility of rapid liberalization of the Communist Party itself. Ambitious, educated young people in China today have only one dream: to study abroad. Only a tiny percentage will succeed, but many have turned their energies to studying English and trying to work through the bureaucratic maze of domestic and foreign hurdles they must overcome if they are to escape China through this route.

For most of these students, the greatest hurdles still lie abroad--in winning university acceptance, arranging financial assistance and, in the case of the United States, convincing consular officials that they do not intend to become immigrants, as such an intention disqualifies them under U.S. law from receiving student visas.

New Restrictions

But the Chinese government has also imposed a variety of new restrictions on the pursuit of study abroad, including cuts in funding for certain categories of students and imposition of a new rule requiring those who receive a foreign visa to go back to a public security office for final approval to leave China.

Even so, the lines outside Western embassies this summer have been longer than ever, and the study of English has never been so popular.

An American English teacher in Beijing described the situation this way: “One of my students from last year . . . told me that he tries to spend all his time working on his studies and exercising now, partially to keep his mind off the ‘environment,’ which he says depresses him, and partially to improve his chances of going overseas.

“He said he and his classmates have all been feeling very depressed lately, and all of them . . . are working harder than ever to improve their chances of going overseas.”

Students also have taken songs praising socialism or the Communist Party and used them either as calls for rebellion or as vehicles for ridicule, all without needing to change the words.

During this month’s Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, a time when friends traditionally gather at a pleasant spot outdoors to view the full moon, a group of students met on a Beijing campus for a songfest.

This was no happy occasion, however, according to one of those who participated. The songs were superficially acceptable to authorities--tunes such as “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China,” “The Sky Is Bright Over New China” and a song about how the People’s Liberation Army liberates the Chinese people. But as the students sang, many of them cried.

Educated young people are not the only ones who have tuned out the government’s propaganda drive.

Among the most politically reliable individuals in China are the maids and drivers of the Diplomatic Service Bureau, an agency of the Chinese Foreign Ministry that enforces a monopoly on the provision of service personnel for diplomats and journalists stationed in Beijing. It is an open secret that part of the function of these people is to spy on the foreigners for whom they work.

But when a foreign resident in Beijing got a chance recently to stand near the door of a meeting room and watch a political education class for maids and drivers of the bureau, it was clear that most of those in the study session were exceedingly bored or on the verge of falling asleep.