Public Calm and Official Unity Prevail in Beijing

Cities across China remained calm Thursday as Beijing’s leaders presented a united front the day after senior leader Deng Xiaoping died in the capital.

A nationally televised memorial service with 10,000 invitees, including villagers from Deng’s hometown in remote Sichuan province, was set for Tuesday in the cavernous Great Hall of the People.

In keeping with the request of his family, the ashes of the man who survived three purges to lead China to unprecedented economic heights will be “cast into the sea” following his memorial service.

The Funeral Committee for Comrade Deng Xiaoping, made up of 459 top party officials, announced that at 10 a.m. Beijing time on Tuesday the “whistles on trains, ships, warships, or factories will be blown for three minutes in mourning as the memorial meeting begins.”

Meanwhile, diplomats in the capital awaited the official eulogy, written by a select committee, to see if it foreshadows a power struggle. Historically, this carefully phrased homage has been the source of subtle but powerful hints about the future direction of the country and the relative status of its leaders.

“This is where you get straws in the wind that there is some jockeying for power going on,” one Western diplomat said.

The formal eulogy is expected to be issued as early as today.

In a move that promised to give the United States an early peek into the workings of the new regime--finally freed from the hoary presence of its “paramount leader”--the Chinese government appeared ready to go ahead with the scheduled visit to Beijing on Monday by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

“Senior leaders have told us they want this meeting to happen,” a U.S. diplomat said.

But officials traveling with Albright said all of her sessions with the senior Chinese leaders will now occur only on Monday so she can depart before the Tuesday funeral.

Embassies in Beijing on Thursday received diplomatic notes that social events would be canceled in the six-day mourning period but that the schedule of diplomatic meetings would be maintained.

In the first such meeting on Thursday, State Council member Luo Gan told visiting Venezuelan Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Burelli Rivas that China intended to “carry on the reform and opening up policy advocated by Deng Xiaoping,” the official New China News Agency reported.

To some observers, Deng’s death marked an end of strongman rule in China. The new leadership, likened by one diplomat to a “gelatinous center moving along together,” is a balance of power among several key senior officials, each with his own sphere of power.

Foremost among those in power is the triumvirate made up of:

* President Jiang Zemin, who is also commander in chief of the military and general secretary of the Communist Party.

* National People’s Congress Chairman Qiao Shi.

* Prime Minister Li Peng.

But by most estimations, Jiang appears firmly in charge as the “first among equals” in this amorphous collective leadership, as the world’s most populous land enters the post-Deng era. Li, for example, now regularly refers to the “Chinese leadership under Jiang Zemin.”

In the official 11-page obituary published in most newspapers on Thursday, Jiang’s name took the place once reserved for Deng in the formulation--”under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Jiang Zemin at the core.”

Extensive domestic television coverage of Deng’s death featured testimonials from ordinary citizens as well as important leaders.

“We will turn our sorrow into strength,” one People’s Liberation Army soldier said.

Because of the pervasive preoccupation with Deng’s death here, South Korean officials in Seoul announced the temporary suspension of negotiations over Hwang Jang Yop, a senior North Korean official who took refuge in a South Korean Consulate building in Beijing last week after asking for political asylum.

“China and South Korea share the same Asian tradition, and you just don’t want to disturb mourning people,” a South Korean Foreign Ministry official said. “We will refrain from raising Hwang’s issue with Chinese officials for the time being.”

Even before arriving in Beijing on the last stop of her world tour on Monday, Albright has started out on the wrong foot with Chinese leaders, who have chafed at her comments criticizing Deng’s role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

In her reaction to Deng’s death, Albright praised the late senior leader as a “historic figure.” But she added that his role in the crackdown of pro-democracy advocates--a military action that caused the deaths of hundreds--prompted a “mixed assessment.”

Nothing could be more out of keeping with Chinese cultural tradition when it comes to proper behavior after the death of a prominent individual. And nowhere is the post-mortem protocol more refined than in China as to the formulation of memorial remarks.

The eulogy, one elderly Chinese cadre noted, is “not personal, it’s the estimation of the whole party and the whole nation. It’s official, a very serious thing. During the funeral you never say how much good and how much bad, an overall assessment--never at a funeral. When a person is dead, you don’t mention their shortcomings at the funeral. The eulogy is a collective work, written by a group because their use of words is very, very subtle. It’s by the words that you give your estimation. The Chinese people know by the terminology used in the eulogy what kind of estimation is being made of the dead person. So, in the remarks at the funeral, nothing can be wrong with it. It must be checked and rechecked.”

In assessing any political message hidden in the eulogy for Deng--whose eyes, officials here noted, will be donated for transplant--diplomats in Beijing said they will be looking for several key points.

During the past year, for example, Jiang has personally led a campaign to establish “spiritual civilization”--a general term to describe a combination of Confucian autocratic and socialist central authority--across China.

In practice, this campaign, while receiving much ink in the state press, has had little real impact on Chinese society, which seems thoroughly distracted by new appliances or the stock market. But not to mention it at least once in Deng’s eulogy could be considered a slap to Jiang’s authority.

Similarly, the document might be used as a way to revive the sensitive issue of responsibility for the deaths at Tiananmen Square. During a recent 12-part documentary, state television aired footage in which Deng took personal responsibility for declaring martial law.

Even obliquely mentioning the events of 1989 could open the door to what many believe is a needed reassessment and assignment of blame in the incident. In that event, the loser would likely be Li, the hard-line prime minister who ordered martial law at Deng’s behest.

As for the cultural importance of memorial statements in China, Jung Chang described in her family memoir, “Wild Swans,” the tense negotiations over the wording of the eulogy for her father, a middle-ranking provincial cadre, at his 1975 memorial service.

Chang’s mother fought for an acceptable eulogy, Chang wrote: “This speech was extremely important, because it would be understood by everyone to be the party’s assessment of my father. . . . There were set patterns and fixed formulations for such a speech. Any deviation from the standard expressions used for [a] party official . . . would be interpreted as the party having reservations about, or condemning, the dead person.”