The Course of China’s College Protests: Students Keep Mum, Keep the Movement : Repression: Ordered to spy on one another, under the scrutiny of police, students continue a private pro- democracy curriculum.

Returning to the People’s Republic of China in August, 1989, was a shock.

In spring I had been living on a university campus in a large city in China. The student-led pro-democracy protests had just begun. One friend was excited about his role in organizing the first demonstration on our campus. The atmosphere was festival-like as the protests grew larger and it seemed that China was on the verge of a new, hopeful era.

How different the mood was in August. My Chinese friends could only shake their heads in despair. “China has no hope,” they lamented. The students had never expected the government to order the People’s Liberation Army to shoot demonstrators. Nor had they anticipated the brutal suppression of dissent that followed. The failure of Congress to override President Bush’s veto of a bill protecting Chinese students in the United States certainly won’t bolster their attitudes.

By late August, the government campaign to ferret out its opponents (qingcha) on university campuses was well under way. The senior theses of the previous year’s graduates had been re-read for evidence of “bourgeois liberalism.” If such sentiments were detected, graduates were ordered back to campus to rewrite their papers. One person I knew got into trouble for asserting that China’s Olympic athlete-training programs needed to be Westernized.

Returning students were required to write “thought reports,” descriptions of what they had thought, done and seen in April and May. They also had to fill out a form asking them if they had gone to Beijing during that time and if they had written a big-character poster while there. Students who admitted their “mistakes” were promised immunity from government punishment and forgiveness by the university. Most students had no faith in these promises; they lied.

Once they’d completed their thought reports, the students were forced to share them in group meetings. After each one read his or her “recollections,” the listening students had to vote whether or not to “pass” the report. One friend told me that no student ever “failed.” That, he explained, was a way to thwart the system that was intent on turning student against student.

The communist administrators at the universities hadn’t anticipated this degree of student loyalty. One student, I was told, even agreed to admit to all the misdeeds committed by his classmates during the protests. Similar self-sacrificing acts were not uncommon. Another student was informed by his political instructor that he could get a government scholarship to study in the United States if he would profess his allegiance to Beijing and renounce any solidarity with the students who had protested. He flatly refused.

Perhaps the most insidious weapon used by the government against students was the political study session, held each morning and afternoon during the first week of school. The aim of the sessions was to persuade the students that no demonstrators had been killed by the army in Tian An Men Square.

First, a four-hour video of the government’s account of the events was shown: The demonstrations were the work of a small group of counterrevolutionaries; only soldiers were killed. The video contained graphic pictures of the burned bodies of soldiers, with flies buzzing about them.

Following the visuals, students listened to a tape also asserting that no demonstrators had been killed in Tian An Men. Political instructors reinforced this account during post-tape discussions. Sometimes, though, they conceded that non-soldiers had died in the square, the result, teachers claimed, of bullets ricocheting off concrete. Water canons, not guns, would have been used, the students were instructed, if the water pressure in Beijing had been better.

Later, a government-sponsored exhibition of the events of June 4 was set up at a municipal museum nearby. Exhibits included photographs of charred bodies of soldiers and burnt-out tanks, reputed evidence of the actions of the “counterrevolutionaries.” Attendance was mandatory for students and teachers at many schools in the city.

Not one student with whom I spoke believed the government account. To them, the truth had been told by the Voice of America and the BBC during and immediately after the Beijing massacre. But the incessant government propaganda since then had distorted their memories of what actually had happened in June.

Many of my friends insisted that I tell them what American television had reported about the army assault on Tian An Men. They also asked to see any U.S. magazines that contained pictures of slain demonstrators.

Students were not hesitant to express skepticism toward--and anger at--the government version of events, a courageous act considering that only by professing faith in the official account could they obtain their college degrees.

One student asked how it could be legal for Premier Li Peng to declare martial law when the Chinese constitution forbade such a declaration. Another said he believed that the protesters’ motives were good and that it was wrong for the army to shoot at well-intentioned, unarmed people.

During a study session on new laws that virtually outlawed demonstrations, students took turns declaring them unconstitutional.

One reason for the students’ boldness was that their indoctrinators had themselves been participants in the demonstrations. Many quietly tried to undermine the government’s qingcha campaign. As a result, the number of student punishments handed out was far lower than anticipated. University officials kept saying that the issue is “under investigation.”

Young professors were not as lucky, since the government has come to consider them a greater threat than students. Some are still in jail.

At least for the current semester, then, the hope that was born and grew in spring, 1989, is gone. I had thought the students might try to stage a demonstration on Dec. 9, the anniversary of a 1935 student protest. But my friends said they didn’t dare, not since plainclothes police had recently been dispatched to campuses to detect and prevent anti-government activity.

Still, students seemed especially agitated after leaving a movie theater that night. One suddenly started shouting; others soon joined in. For a minute, it seemed something might happen. My Chinese friend asked: “Could it be?”

But as soon as he saw the plainclothes police closing in on the crowd, he quickly realized the answer.