PACIFIC PERSPECTIVE : Beijing Continues to Assault the Spirit of Press Independence : Rights: Since last June, many Chinese journalists have been purged, jailed or humiliatingly compromised.

He was young, good-looking in an austere way and spoke excellent, British-inflected English--not surprising, given that he listens to the BBC English-language service every day in Beijing (that is, when his government doesn’t have it jammed).

He wore exactly the intent, searching expression we had seen so often on the faces of the Chinese student demonstrations on television a year ago. Yet his words--a confession that could have been taken from “Darkness at Noon”--seemed to spring out of a unreconstructed past.

“I was in the Democracy Movement,” he explained, “but I didn’t know what I was doing. I shouted slogans with everybody else, but I didn’t know what they meant. We were demanding a free press, but what does that mean? There is no need for an independent press in a country like China, where the Communist Party truly represents the will of the people.” He has seen the light, the young journalist says, and has repudiated the Democracy Movement and his involvement in it; when he goes back to China he will be formally investigated by the Communist Party, but he feels he has “nothing to fear.”

The young man’s humiliating compromise is clearly one that is necessary now for any Chinese journalist who wishes to continue in the profession. Liu Binyan, China’s most famous journalist-in-exile and a victim of many purges himself, captures the sense of moment when he quotes the proverb, “The greatest sadness is the death of one’s spirit.”

According to Liu, in the wake of the past year’s crackdown on the Democracy Movement in China, journalists have suffered more sweeping, and lasting, retaliation that any other category of intellectuals. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ latest reckoning holds that 20 Chinese journalists have been arrested since June, 1989. Of these, only one, Dai Qing (an offspring of Communist Party elite), was reported to be among the 211 detainees released by the government in mid-May. The other 19, including Song Yuchuan and Wu Xuecan of the People’s Daily and Xu Xiaowei and Zhang Weiguo of the Shanghai World Economic Herald, are presumed to remain in detention.

Scores of others who have escaped imprisonment have lost the right to work as journalists. At the country’s leading newspaper, the People’s Daily--the Communist Party’s mouthpiece--about 100 journalists have been driven out, including the editor-in-chief, the director and almost all middle-ranking editors and department heads. Most of those removed were placed under house arrest and obliged to write self-criticisms; they were replaced by editors from the army news paper and editors shipped in from provincial party papers, untainted by first-hand knowledge of the massacre. China’s most prestigious independent publication, the World Economic Herald, has been closed.

The intense young man I met, like the vast majority of Chinese journalists, will remain at their publications, however dead in spirit. The party “investigation”of his activities will probably beginwith small group meetings in which he will have to pronounce and sign a confession of his “errors.” If he is a party member, he will also be obliged to write a letter of self-criticism--or three or four if the first is too weak. His access to foreign travel will be limited. No doubt at least part of his speech to me was directed at his Chinese colleagues in the room who might be reporting back to Beijing.

With the ground-breaking publications and leading talents of the Chinese media silenced or obliged to recant, the readership encounters a press whose familiar hallmarks are conformity and acquiescence to Communist Party policy. Until 1985 three subjects were taboo: human-rights violations, military abuses and the corrupt activities of high-ranking party cadres and their children. For a brief time, open discussion of these issues galvanized Chinese journalism, but they have disappeared from China’s news pages again. But even more distressing is the number of journalists who have disappeared into China’s jails as political prisoners, many of them because of their profound commitment to freedom of expression, a concept Americans regard as a basic principle.

There are ways to help. Unfortunately, one was missed last month, when the Bush Administration renewed China’s most-favored-nation trade status. Many Chinese, including Liu Binyan, feel it would be a mistake to revoke it entirely. But Liu believes that MFN--or similar instruments--could have human-rights conditions attached, such as the release of political prisoners. Such a measure would leave China open to positive foreign cultural and trade influences, while still sending a message to Beijing that all is not forgiven, or forgotten.