A World of Shock and Aftershock : CHINA: Brutal Suppression

BEIJING — As dawn broke Sunday, a Chinese tank rolled over a luminously white statue of a woman, her two arms holding a symbolic flame above her head, that had stood for 10 days in the heart of the capital. It is said on Beijing’s campuses that the tank also crushed to death 11 students who had linked arms in a protective circle around the statue, a figure they called “minzhuzhishen” the goddess of liberty.

It was a week of indescribable horror for the citizens of Beijing, for the people of China. The jubilant if weary weeks of pro-democracy protest were truncated by the tanks and machine guns of China’s leadership which, the world now knows, responded to yearnings for a freer society, with mass slaughter. This massacre, an act instigated by the brutish primal instincts of a Communist leadership honed not by debate but by discipline, not by compromise but by diktat , not by persuasion but by force, has profoundly, and in many ways indelibly, changed modern China.

In the past decade, volumes have been written depicting China as a nation that had found itself, a nation that had escaped the devastation of the Cultural Revolution and was emerging as a society with values and virtues approaching those of the West. China was becoming a stable, modern country, one that recognized the need to adhere to international standards of behavior economically, as well as the more basic humanitarian principles accepted as an essential component of a civilized society.

Much was done to bolster this image by the United States. In recent years, visits by U.S. officials, from the President down to mayors of small cities, encouraged this perception of a China at ease with itself and the world. Foreign companies looked gleefully at this newly emergent respectability and fought each other to invest here. Modern hotels sprang up like stands of new pine. Their restaurants served Chateau Lynch-Bages and goose liver pate. The U.S. ambassador routinely hailed the stability and wisdom of the leadership to American reporters, insisting at every occasion that periodic bursts of repression were anomalous twitches of a maturing polity.

At every turn, suggestions that there were fundamental contradictions between China’s modernizing process, one that favored free markets and entrepreneurialism, and the rigidities of a Communist Party weaned on totalitarianism were contemptuously dismissed.

China’s students, in those weeks before the tanks thundered down the Avenue of Heavenly Peace, shared that optimism, that sense that there was no turning back to the black years of repression and hopelessness. China was becoming more open, they said repeatedly. In classrooms, students skimmed Karl Marx but they poured over Adam Smith, Walt Whitman and Sigmund Freud. “There is nothing we cannot read. There is nothing we cannot write. There is nothing we cannot say,” a Chinese professor said some months ago. And the students were reassured by their leaders, doddering men who had learned their politics on the battlefield, that yes, China would never retreat.

That conviction, that feeling that history’s momentum would carry them forward to a China of genuine liberties and freedoms, guaranteed not by the promises of self-anointed leaders but by the institutions they created, spurred tens of thousands of students to demand those rights, and lured hundreds of thousands of Beijing citizens to follow. If, in their heart of hearts, they suspected the Communist Party was, in the end, immutable, they never allowed those fears to surface.

But China’s leaders, the senior ranks of the Communist Party could not tolerate demands on it, demands to loosen its grip once and for all upon the lives of the Chinese people. Some among the leaders--former party Secretary Zhao Ziyang is the one most often cited--seemed more sympathetic to the students, but the men who controlled the levers of power, the army, the police, the vast propaganda apparatus, refused to countenance this challenge to their authority.

The days of marches, the hunger strikes, the encampments on Tian An Men Square were not, they determined, peaceful petition and protest. This was counterrevolution. This call for democracy and freedom was a threat to the survival of the Communist Party itself. And of course, these leaders were right.

Even as the tanks rumbled into Tian An Men Square, their headlights illuminating the frail line of unarmed students who stood determined and frightened before them, there were flickering signs that some in the army, some in the party, would never stomach the slaughter of civilians. But these voices of moderation were stifled by the rattle of assault rifles, the clatter of cartloads of bodies frantically being pushed to overburdened hospitals, the determination that military dictatorship was preferable to reasoned discourse.

In the days that followed the carnage, underground student presses continued to churn out broadsheets describing the army’s massacre and urging the people of Beijing, as one put it, “never to forget this blackest day in China’s history.”

But the army had retaken the city, its buildings and squares, its avenues and marketplaces. Every night, the crack of automatic weapons fire echoed through deserted streets as army patrols imposed the new reign of terror. In the neighborhoods of Beijing, residents would point to ugly dark stains on sidewalks. “An old man was killed here,” a fearful neighborhood resident would say, “shot in the head.”

And now, within the last few days, the army and armed police have turned their attention in earnest to the instigators of this “counterrevolution”--the men and women of China’s universities and scholarly institutions, the people who had fashioned China’s intellectual resurgence, its resurrection from the systematic tyranny over the mind that endured until a mere decade ago. Columns of troops swept into the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the home for some of the country’s most progressive thinkers--men such as Yan Jiaqi, Su Shaozhi and Liu Zaifu--and began a systematic search for “evidence” of counterrevolutionary activities. The military occupation of the city’s universities, now nearly drained of terrorized students, is imminent.

There is little question what China will look like in the coming months and years. Ideas will be displaced by empty slogans, discussion by silence, hope by fear, humanity by violence. Many, many people will be arrested. Public trials will be held and executions will be touted as “victories” in the struggle against counter- revolution. The best of China’s minds will be shackled by a repression this country once experienced during the Cultural Revolution, but the world ignored.

This time, graphically, the world has seen what China’s leaders really are and, for China, the world will never be the same.

But the men at the apex of the Communist Party and the army simply do not care what the world sees. That China’s economic growth, tied increasingly to international trade and investment, will be set back a decade or more is irrelevant to leaders whose sole concern is the preservation of armed power. That China will no longer sit at the world table as a respected member of the international community matters not one wit to men for whom the grinding poverty of authoritarianism is preferable to an affluence of pluralism.

What Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun and Li Peng have won, though, is a victory of generals, a victory of occupied territory, of secured street corners and recaptured monuments. What they have not won, what they cannot win, what they have lost forever, are the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. Two enormous banners on the gate posts that flank the entrance to Beijing University put it succinctly: “It is not that the people have no government, it is that the government has no people.”

The soldiers armed with assault rifles that march through that gate will never see that banner--the advance wave of party zealots have had it effaced. But its message will linger for years. Indeed, in the darkest days of repression yet to come, there will remain vivid memories of the murderous rampage let loose by China’s leaders, and more, the memory that there were better days before and there may be some still ahead.

A university student riding his bicycle through the war-torn streets of Beijing pedaled quietly for a while before speaking. But when he spoke, his words, colored by the tragedy of the week, told of a deeply rooted certainty that the Chinese people would overcome even this calamity. “There must be blood to have democracy,” he said. “In Chinese history, there has always been blood.”