Chinese Media Treat S. Korea Verdicts Openly

One of the intriguing questions after the sentencing of former South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan to death and of his successor, Roh Tae Woo, to a long term in prison was how China’s official media would treat the story, given the obvious parallels between the Korean case and the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

Both Koreans were convicted on charges in connection with the 1980 army massacre in the city of Kwangju of more than 200 pro-democracy demonstrators, who were protesting Chun’s martial-law rule. In 1989, after Chinese Premier Li Peng declared martial law, People’s Liberation Army troops opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, killing hundreds--and some accounts put the toll in the thousands.

Some Chinese dissidents and prominent academics have called for a reassessment of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, branded by the government as a “counterrevolutionary rebellion.”

If such a reassessment does occur, along with assignment of blame, most analysts expect it to take place after the death of ailing 92-year-old senior leader Deng Xiaoping, who reportedly gave the final order to fire.

Despite the similarities of the two cases, the Chinese media played the story fairly straight.

The mass-audience China Central Television evening news, which reaches a potential viewership of 800 million, aired a brief account of the sentencing, with footage of Chun being led into court.

The influential People’s Daily newspaper, official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, ran a surprisingly colorful account of the sentencing on its international news pages under a headline declaring it a “historic verdict.”

All of China’s major newspapers carried accounts of the sentencing. But only the English-language China Daily, which caters primarily to Beijing’s large foreign community, described the Kwangju protesters as “democratic opposition.”

The People’s Daily described the May 18, 1980, Kwangju protest as “civil turmoil” caused by Chun’s and Roh’s “sabotaging of constitutional rule and suppressing the masses of people in order to grab state power.”

The Beijing Evening News reported that Chun and Roh, both former army generals, were convicted of “using armed force to suppress the anti-martial-law movement.”

Some veterans of the Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations viewed the Korean sentencings and relatively open media treatment of the story as a good sign. “It made me think that the same thing could happen here someday,” said one 26-year-old former student who was active in 1989.