Like Clockwork, China Cracks Down on Dissent

Excitement hung thick in the air as progressive political ideas began bubbling to the surface in China. Allow freedom of speech, demanded some. Eliminate government corruption, cried others. Guarantee human rights. End harassment of intellectuals.

Dissidents tried to coordinate their protests throughout the country. “The Communist Party is at the end of its tether,” one group reportedly predicted. But in the end, the Beijing regime cracked down, shipping its detractors off to jail and quashing any hope of lasting political reform in the Communist behemoth.

Sound familiar? It should--but not merely as a depiction of China in recent weeks, which saw the imprisonment of several political activists after a period of increasing openness. The events described above occurred more than 40 years ago, during a sudden burst of greater democratization known as the Hundred Flowers movement, which Mao Tse-tung himself initiated--then crushed when it veered out of his control.

The pattern of events in 1957 and in the past several months--namely, a political expansion followed by a contraction--is one that has been repeated in China since the People’s Republic was founded in 1949.

Like a sea anemone that cautiously opens to test the water but closes like a fist when threatened, the Communist regime has flirted with greater political, cultural and social liberalization nearly once a decade, only to pull back when it felt its grip on power was being challenged.

In the ‘50s, it was the Hundred Flowers movement, so called because Mao urged officials to “let a hundred flowers bloom” in a short-lived plug for cultural diversity. It happened again in the ‘70s, with the exciting but abortive Democracy Wall campaign. And the open-close cycle played out once more in the ‘80s, when intellectual ferment led to protests, which in turn triggered the 1989 massacre of demonstrators in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The harsh prison sentences meted out last month to four dissidents, three of whom had tried to take advantage of an increasingly relaxed atmosphere by forming an opposition party, are part and parcel of China’s political history over the last half a century. Even President Jiang Zemin’s ensuing announcement that “subversive” activities must be “nipped in the bud” has an echo of the floral metaphor introduced by Mao.

At the same time, analysts caution against regarding the current political chill as identical to previous ones. Certain China watchers overestimated the degree of openness that had blossomed in the last several years, and some scholars say that the extent of the current tightening should not be similarly overestimated.

Crackdown Limited to Political Targets

The target appears to be restricted to the political arena. About three dozen dissidents have been questioned, detained or tried for their role in trying to register Communist China’s first opposition party. U.S. officials are expected to take up the matter with representatives of Beijing when they meet today in Washington to discuss human rights issues for the first time in four years. But, while cause for concern, the number of those targeted is far smaller than in the ruthless “purification” campaigns of the past.

Moreover, the day-to-day freedoms enjoyed by most Chinese--the ability to move, work and live as they please with little interference from the state--remain greater now than at any other time in modern history. Most citizens pay scant attention to the government, which is returning the favor.

“This crackdown, depressing and severe as it is, is more limited in that it’s not focusing on, say, ‘bourgeois tendencies’ or vague charges [against] people who have taken the ‘capitalist road,’ but on people who are seeking a pluralist, multi-party political system,” said Orville Schell, a Sinologist at UC Berkeley.

The activists who tried to register the China Democracy Party in several provinces last summer ran up against the overriding tenet of the Communists: The ruling party brooks no rivals or organized opposition to its leadership of the world’s most populous nation.

When Mao made his famous call for new ideas back in the ‘50s, he was unprepared for the avalanche of criticism about the Communist Party that followed. Protests sprang up in cities such as Nanjing and Wuhan. Backed into a corner, the ruling elite lashed out, rounding up 300,000 intellectuals, branding them as rightists and shipping many of them off to labor camps or prisons.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, also seemed to be encouraging the free flow of ideas during the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 and 1979. However, after 30,000 people converged on Beijing demanding to be heard, the police arrested prominent dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng, who had called on the government to implement democratic reforms.

In the mid-1980s, China experienced a heady period of freewheeling debate as more and more critics of the government began to speak out without their former fear of reprisal. The decade culminated in the protests of 1989 in the capital, which drew demonstrators from all over China demanding democracy and other civil liberties. The prospect of a coordinated, nationwide opposition movement unnerved the Communist regime enough that it sent tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.

This latest round of expansion-contraction can be traced to 1992, when the political atmosphere lightened up again, partly to boost the nation’s halting economic reforms.

Think tanks began issuing books on modest political reforms. Salon discussions brought up the once-taboo topics of democracy and human rights. Liberals were further emboldened in October when Beijing signed--though it did not ratify--a U.N. treaty on civil and political rights.

Party Won’t Brook Direct Challenge

However, discussion was one thing, organized action another. There was never any indication that China’s rulers, despite their being led by the relatively moderate Jiang, would allow a direct challenge to Communist supremacy--hence last month’s trials and convictions of the China Democracy Party members for plotting to “overthrow the state.”

Since the trials, Jiang has said the government will quash any “subversive” activities and root out anything found in computer software, films and publications that might “endanger state security.”

Yet hard-hitting books on Chinese economic policy, magazines containing articles critical of the government, and historical texts questioning past mistakes of the Communist Party, such as the disastrous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, can still be bought.

The proliferation of fax machines, cell phones, computers and the Internet also has diminished the regime’s ability to control information.

Still, many Chinese are no doubt taking the crackdown seriously; some will probably censor themselves for a while, Schell said.

Some analysts consider the current political contraction a warning shot. Several potentially sensitive anniversaries fall in 1999: the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, the 20th anniversary of the Democracy Wall movement, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic and the 80th anniversary of the May 4th movement, a progenitor of student activism in China.

The Chinese, who are big fans of numerology, have used anniversaries in the past as an excuse to mount new protests. The recent crackdowns may be the regime’s way of making them think twice.

Another motivation may be the economy, which has run into trouble after years of nonstop growth.

To shore it up, the regime has begun imposing stricter economic controls. It also is afraid that unrest is growing among the rising ranks of China’s unemployed; indeed, many of the China Democracy Party’s founders were involved in an effort five years ago to form an independent labor union, which the authorities smashed.

“I would say the political atmosphere was relaxed in 1977 to 1979, 1984 to 1989, and 1992 to 1999,” said Andrew Nathan, a China specialist at Columbia University. “Each was cut off by a political tightening normally connected with an economic tightening.”

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Anthony Kuhn of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.