Seeking a Motive Behind China Leak

Who leaked the Tiananmen Papers--and more important, why? What does this leak reveal about the Chinese regime today?

Those are the questions raised by the publication of nearly 500 pages of internal documents, intelligence reports and phone conversations of Chinese leaders in the fateful months before, during and after the regime called in the army to end nationwide demonstrations in June 1989.

The papers were published in New York City this month after they were brought out of China by a “compiler” pseudonymously named Zhang Liang.

It turns out Zhang was quietly shopping his files to Chinese dissidents in this country before giving them to Andrew Nathan, a Columbia University scholar on China.

“He didn’t know where to go or how to get the papers published,” explains Xiao Qiang of Human Rights in China, a New York-based group.

Nathan and Princeton University professor Perry Link, who collaborated to translate and edit the docu-dump, are protecting the identity of their source.

The editors tell us what they can. They say the leaker wanted to revive political reform in China, which was put into deep freeze after the 1989 crackdown and has remained there ever since.

Before then, under Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, Beijing was flirting with modest changes--a freer press, greater legislative oversight.

An interest in “political reform” is pretty vague. What was motivating China’s Daniel Ellsberg? There are, essentially, three different theories.

* Deep Throat: The Tiananmen papers were leaked by a lone individual high up in the Chinese hierarchy who was outraged by the Tiananmen massacre and now wants the truth to be known. He doesn’t represent any political faction or interest.

That’s possible. But the task of compiling the documents and spiriting them out of China seems so complex and risky that you have to wonder if a single person could do it. “You don’t get secret Politburo documents out of the country, especially to the United States, without a hidden agenda,” notes a diplomat with long experience in China.

* Reversal of Verdicts: The leaker is acting on behalf of a hidden network of those within the Communist Party who were thrown out of power in 1989, like Zhao and his political aide Bao Tong. They want to overturn the power structure that emerged after the crackdown--not just President Jiang Zemin and National People’s Congress Chairman Li Peng, but the whole hierarchy.

The drawback with this theory is that it doesn’t seem as if the documents could have been obtained and made public without help from people in power today, or well after June 4, 1989. Whoever collected the files had access to them in late June of that year, after Zhao was confined and Bao was in jail.

* Current Politics: The leaker is acting on behalf of some people within today’s Communist Party leadership who are seeking to ascend to power and are courting the support of dissidents and others outside the party.

China is now in the early stages of a long political campaign. Next year, the party faithful will choose new leaders.

Among the many adherents of the Current Politics theory is Wei Jingsheng, the long-imprisoned dissident released into exile in 1997, who ever since has been groping to carve out a role for himself in the United States.

Wei believes that the Tiananmen Papers were leaked by a group within the party’s leadership that includes Deng Xiaoping’s old protege Li Ruihuan and, perhaps, Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao. Their goal, he thinks, is to damage Jiang and Li Peng, whom the papers show in an unflattering light.

“One faction in the Communist Party is using these Tiananmen Papers to overcome another faction. You can’t call these people reformers,” Wei says.

That may be overly conspiratorial, although from Wei, it’s understandable. He was the victim of a similar ploy 22 years ago.

In 1978, as Deng was seeking to gain control over the Communist Party, he suggested he was interested in political reform. Once in power, he kept the party’s tight grip over political life--and Wei was thrown into jail for nearly two decades.

Curiously, Wei thinks that those outside the Chinese Communist Party should seek a balance of power within it. “It’s not to our advantage that Jiang Zemin’s and Li Peng’s faction gets completely eliminated,” he says.

That’s merely one dissident’s strategy. For Americans, the lessons are different.

The leak of the Tiananmen Papers suggests that the political infighting in China is intense. As outsiders, we can’t know what hidden agendas are at work.

We have a strong interest in democratic changes that will make China freer and more stable. We should judge Chinese leaders by the political reforms they actually adopt, not by what they hint they’ll do in the future.

We shouldn’t look for a closet Communist Party reformer or democrat, a Chinese Gorbachev. Instead, we should await concrete, far-reaching political changes, if they ever come. In China, let’s root for results, not for people.

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Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.