China Maintains Uneasy Calm a Year After Protest

The middle-aged peasant woman, resting briefly from the backbreaking work of planting rice seedlings, needed only a moment’s thought when a visitor asked what suggestions she had for her government.

“Fertilizer costs too much,” replied E Maoxin, who lives in a village near Wuhan in central China. “We can’t buy enough at state-set prices, so we need to buy the rest on the market. But the market price is too steep.”

One year after the peak of dramatic pro-democracy protests in Beijing, which ended with bloody suppression and reimposed ideological controls, an uneasy calm reigns across China.

Peasants worry about the cost of fertilizer and the price of grain. Urban workers want higher living standards but are afraid to strike. University campuses are sunk in despair.

And behind the high vermilion walls of the central leadership compound in Beijing, politicians of a successor generation battle for power while waiting for Deng Xiaoping, the 85-year-old senior leader, to die.

Should that hidden struggle break open, with some top leaders openly turning to the masses for support, the streets of the Chinese capital could again fill with surging crowds or firing troops.

But as long as the Communist Party and the army maintain an appearance of unity, there seems little chance that the people of China could rise against their government.

Students and intellectuals can change little by themselves, observers agree. Urban workers could have real power, but they too are cowed. Peasants can riot against corrupt local officials, but cannot organize to challenge central power.

“I don’t think there will be any strikes,” said one university graduate working at a factory in Wuhan. “The workers know the army would be used against them. The army is so big. Besides that, China has so many peasants, and the peasants don’t know much about politics. Workers can’t win anything by striking.”

A year of political repression and well-orchestrated government propaganda, which reverses the order of the events of last June 3-4, appears to have had its effects. Many people now say they believe that troops opened fire only after widespread rioting and destruction of military vehicles; in fact, the killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students and Beijing residents came first.

Residents of Beijing know the truth, and thus the capital remains sullen and tense. But by creating widespread uncertainty in the rest of the country about what really happened during that violent night, the government seems to have defused much of the anger that erupted last June into protests in at least 80 cities.

“America really was interfering in our internal affairs,” one small-town official in southwestern Yunnan province said. “The students were instigated by the U.S. government and Voice of America. I saw the reports on television.”

Not all ordinary people have swallowed the Communist Party line, however. In towns and villages widely scattered across China, foreigners have found local people who are highly skeptical of the official explanation for last June’s events. Many say they have mixed feelings and question whether so much killing was justified. Sympathy for the students remains high.

Few will speak for attribution without official approval--but private conversations can be frank.

Members of a peasant family in a Hubei province village, alone with a visitor from Beijing, brought up the subject of the June killings. “It’s something that shouldn’t have happened,” one said.

In the ancient walled city of Xian, a long-haired young man said he still believes that “the students were good.”

“They are patriotic,” he said. “They wanted to make a contribution to the country.”

But this man, a private entrepreneur who makes a good living by Chinese standards, is not about to take to the barricades of any future rebellion. He, too, supports parts of the party line. “The followers included good and bad people,” he said. “Some unemployed youths set military vehicles on fire just for the excitement.”

China has announced the release of a total of 784 people detained after the crackdown last June. The official New China News Agency reported earlier this month that 431 people were still in custody in connection with the protests. However, Western diplomats and human rights organizations estimated that thousands were arrested last year. There is no way to confirm how many remain in jail.

In Beijing, especially on its university campuses, a mood of deep gloom prevails even though martial law was lifted in January. But paramilitary forces still stop cars for late-night security checks.

There are only scanty signs of resistance, such as an attempt to put out an underground student newspaper and the rare appearance of anti-government posters. China’s security apparatus is so pervasive that widely organized opposition is impossible.

The anniversary of the massacre next week will mark another high point of tension, and it could be the occasion for small acts of protest. But few people say they expect anything major to happen.

“We’re waiting for someone like Lincoln,” a Beijing engineer in her early 30s said. “We’re just like slaves in many ways, waiting to be freed. The small potatoes can’t do anything in China. We have no control over our lives.”

Yet for the vast majority of China’s 1.1 billion citizens, politics is clearly secondary. The Chinese people have rising material expectations that are not easily fulfilled, even in boom times. And for the past year, a strict austerity program aimed at battling inflation has caused living standards to stagnate.

The 1980s marked a decade of market-oriented reforms and doubled incomes, but it also posed new dilemmas that cannot be easily solved, analysts say. Forces for change remain strong--but what happens next is unclear. Much rides on the outcome of the struggles at the top.

Politics in China is sometimes portrayed as an epic battle of reformists, who favor a market economy and political liberalization, versus hard-line, Stalinist-style central planners.

In this view, the reformers are now in disarray, having lost their leader, former Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, ousted last June for refusing to endorse the military crackdown.

The central planners are seen as headed by Marxist economist Chen Yun and Premier Li Peng, while Deng, who has been China’s paramount leader for more than a decade, favors economic reform but political dictatorship.

Although useful as a quick guide to the overall outlines of Chinese politics, this analysis misses the complexity of the situation, according to observers. Many economic reformers do not favor democracy, while Li and Chen, despite their determination to retain important elements of central planning, also support many reforms.

Indeed, China’s leaders are united in their desire to rationalize the economy while retaining Communist Party control. No one doubts, for example, that Li is willing to use market forces, or that he sincerely wants more foreign investment. All the top leaders have repeatedly asserted that reforms will continue, and most Chinese are inclined to believe them.

“Everybody supports reform,” said a Chinese woman in Wuhan who sympathized with last year’s demonstrations. “I believe the nation’s leaders support reform too. Maybe they’re worried about chaos, but they want the nation to be strong and people’s lives to improve.”

Bitter arguments within the leadership surely exist, but they reportedly are mostly about the speed, order and manner of change--and about who will be the next boss.

General Secretary Jiang Zemin, 63, an economic technocrat and political hard-liner, is Deng’s chosen successor. President Yang Shangkun, 83, a military man with more personal influence over the army than Jiang, may actually be second to Deng in real power today. But it is not clear that either of these men can consolidate power when Deng leaves the scene.

Meanwhile, the government is left desperately trying to increase the efficiency of a half-planned, half-market economy.

Compared with a year ago, large state-run industries increasingly operate under strengthened central plans that impose production quotas, provide low-cost raw materials and enforce set prices for products. But smaller collective and rural enterprises continue to buy and sell on the free market--and they are still expanding more rapidly than the state-owned sector of the economy.

It is a similar story in agriculture. Peasants receive subsidized fertilizer to grow grain that they must sell the state at low prices, but they must buy more expensive fertilizer to grow vegetables sold at free markets. In an attempt to avoid the corruption invited by such two-track pricing, the private resale of fertilizer is banned. And examples like this abound.

Under Zhao, many observers thought this two-track system might soon be abandoned in favor of the marketplace. But China’s leaders now stress that this “planned economy with market adjustment” is to be retained. A key question is whether this mixed system will last or will prove to be a transitional stage on the way to a predominantly market economy.

China’s leaders say they realize they must increase the productivity of big industry, now dominated by inefficient state-run firms, by somehow creating incentives for more efficient management and harder work. But although steps such as management autonomy and worker bonuses have been taken toward this goal, state ownership and set prices still tend to sap initiative.

Hesitancy to take bolder steps comes not only from ideological concerns but also from fear that industrial workers--accustomed to the unbreakable “iron rice bowl” of lifetime job security--might rebel against a capitalist-style transformation that led to bankruptcies, layoffs and a stepped-up pace of work for those not fired.

“They need to figure out a way to restructure the urban labor force, and until they do, then no amount of price reform or juggling or fiddling is going to help,” said Bert Keidel, a Washington-based economist now in Beijing with other U.S. scholars for talks with top Chinese researchers.

Some Chinese, proud of the accomplishments of the past decade, say they feel that improvement already is happening as fast as possible and is sure to continue.

“China can’t possibly become prosperous so quickly as you foreigners think it should,” complained a young economics instructor in Xian, who was interviewed on a Sunday while he earned extra cash selling soda at a friend’s family-run stall. “The population is too big. We have to make progress step by step. But there will be no turning back on reform. The Chinese people wouldn’t allow it.”

Times researcher Nick Driver contributed to this article.