Beijing University Reopens 4 Months After Crackdown

China’s most prestigious university opened Saturday for the first time since soldiers crushed the massive pro-democracy protests its students helped lead last June.

Students gathered to buy books at the center of the Beijing University campus near a long red banner that urged them to uphold Marxist principles and take a clear stand against Western capitalist values.

Few were willing to talk about the protests that ended in gunfire and the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Beijing and other cities, the ouster of Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and the arrests of thousands of dissidents.

“Most students have become more realistic about the situation, and now they want to study,” said one. But they reported that among themselves, and on other Beijing campuses, students have taken to sarcastically singing the jingle from a pesticide commercial that goes, “We are the harmful insects.”

There were noticeably fewer students on campus, however. The freshman class is absent--first-year students are undergoing a year of military and political training at an army academy outside the capital.

The school has an enrollment of about 10,000, but students said some upperclassmen failed to return, fearing investigations of their roles in the protests.

Other colleges are still continuing such investigations two months after reopening, with special teams pressuring teachers and students who were heavily involved to write fuller “self-criticisms.”

An official notice posted in several places at Beijing University said the government would be lenient toward those who “turn themselves in, confess or render meritorious service”--which it explained meant reporting the crimes of others or providing evidence.

Other schools reopened early, in August, to complete the spring semester’s unfinished work and hold special ideology classes. But Beijing University’s opening was delayed until after the Oct. 1 anniversary of 40 years of Communist Party rule, apparently for fear its students would disrupt the festivities.

The party newspaper, the People’s Daily, said Friday that Beijing University was a “major disaster zone” during the protests. It called for strengthening school management, saying that people with “bourgeois liberal,” or anti-socialist, views took advantage of its past free atmosphere.

But university President Wu Shuqing, a Marxist economist who replaced the relatively liberal Ding Shisun after the protests, said in an interview last week that he is confident the students will be “more healthy” this year.