New Words but Same Old Music

Premier Li Peng took to China’s airwaves yesterday to announce that martial law was being ended in Beijing, seven months after it was decreed in a move to crush swelling popular protests. As Li finished his 10-minute speech, the official radio began blaring a concert of triumphant martial music. The irony, however unintended, was clearly appropriate. Still fully in place, along with a heavy presence of troops in the capital, are other repressive measures that make it a crime to strike, to display political posters, to take part in anti-government demonstrations. Though martial law has been lifted, the Chinese are no freer the day after that event than they were the day before.

To be sure, not everyone sees it that way. Vice President Dan Quayle, for one, has hailed the ending of martial law as a “step forward for human rights” and a vindication of President Bush’s policy of engaging in secret high-level contacts with Chinese leaders starting just a month after the June 4 massacre of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of protesters in central Beijing. It may well be true that National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, on his two unannounced visits to Beijing, urged China’s leaders to ease up on repression so as to forestall further punitive responses from Congress. But it’s insulting to all those who died last June or who have been imprisoned or executed since to confuse an expedient and cosmetic lifting of martial law with any genuine improvement in human rights.

Economic woes couldn’t have been far from the mind of the leadership when it decided to end martial law. The World Bank is considering a $700-million loan package to China, which helps explain Li’s insistence that his country is now “stable politically, economically and socially.” The White House said Wednesday that it might well support the Chinese loan application. But federal law forbids endorsing loans to a country that is a “gross and consistent violator of human rights.” Tragically for its people and unhappily for their economic future, China continues to fit that bleak description.