Reacting to China's 'Red Terror'

...In purely legal terms, the United States government was on shaky ground in continuing to provide embassy protection for Fang and his wife...

...At first, on June 3, Secretary of State James A. Baker III spoke with elaborate evenhandedness of violence on both sides, and referred to Molotov cocktails in the students' possession...

...The street corner cameras bought from a British company for traffic control were turned into instruments for people control...

...A policy that Lenin termed "red terror" called for the use of unsparing violence not only to crush any rebellion but to wipe out the will to resist...

...This belief was most recently articulated by former President Reagan in London on June l2...

...In fact, he seemed out of sync with Congress and an American public that had come to identify personally with the student heroes seen on television...

...In Europe, in the wake of the visits of Presidents Bush and Gorbachev to West Germany, relatively little attention was being paid to the Soviet-American strategic nuclear talks that resumed in Geneva on June 19 with scant prospect for any early progress...

...Painfully we learned that technology has no ideology, let alone a morality of its own...

...Now that dialogue seems to be shifting to the danger of environmental disaster...

...It also endorsed aEuropean Community proposal to establish limits on the production of those chlorofluorocarbons threatening the earth's ozone layer...

...There he remained for 15 y ears, the phantom of the legation, stalking the corridors at night from his top-floor apartment, leaving cigar butts on attaches' desks...

...Under present conditions, the cost of red terror is high—the sacrifice of some of the gains made in 20years of effort to open China's door to trade and improve the country's image in the world...

...Predictably so in the Soviet Union, which has reason to worry about the delegitimization of Communist regimes and the issue of using force to maintain, or restore, public order...

...Then, at his news conference of June 8, the President condemned the Chinese Army for excessive violence, but sought to exempt the political leadership, and especiallythe"forward-looking" Deng, from responsibility...

...As though in response to Bush, Deng went on Chinese television the next day with his Politburo and his generals, making it clear that he was in charge...

...The theory is that, in the age of satellite television receivers, computer networks and fax machines, a regime can no longer immunize its people to the infection of knowledge and ideas...

...Not about to endanger the newly-forged "normalization" of relations with China, Gorbachev managed to limit the Soviet Congress to a tepid resolution on China that urged "wisdom, sound reason and a balanced approach...

...Under public and Congressional pressure, the Administration reluctantly escalated its criticism of the Chinese regime and the U.S.' well-modulated sanctions...

...And that was before the June 18 European Parliament elections, in which the environmental Green parties almost doubled their strength by taking38 seats (they previously had 20...

...In Britain the Green Party won an amazing 15 per cent of the vote...

...Deng Xiaoping said in his April 25 statement that set the stage for the crackdown, "We must not be afraid of people cursing us, of a bad reputation or of international reaction...

...He told a group of American environmentalists that, on his recent European trip, he found the environmental issue coming on "like a freight train...

...Mikhail S. Gorbachev has yet to speak clearly on the use of force in Armenia and Azerbaijan and the resort to toxic gas in quelling riots in Tbilisi, Georgia...

...The policy that "granting of asylum is not recognized as a diplomatic function" had not been enunciated in 1956, when Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty was given refuge in the American Legation in Budapest during the suppression of the Hungarian anti-Communist uprising...

...It is value free in the service of freedom and repression...

...The Bush Administration, having concluded that there is no way it could surrender Fang without the President being branded a grand global wimp, has sought to keep talks going while awaiting a better climate...

...Soviet officials have been encouraging the American government to come up with environmental initiatives, and ecological matters were on the agenda for the President's July trip to Poland and Hungary...

...Belatedly, the Administration has moved to convene a conference on global warming...

...As Reagan put it, "The biggest of Big Brothers is helpless against the technology of the Information Age...

...The Fang Lizhi Factor It was unclear, as this was being written, whether the Chinese government was prepared to do what President Bush prayed it would not do—press to the point of confrontation its demand that the U.S...

...The other would be to break relations with the United States and order the embassy closed...

...A corollary is that repression becomes more difficult when "the whole world is watching...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Reacting to Chinas 'Red Terror' In the brutal crackdown on China's prodemocracy demonstrators launched the weekend of June 3, President George Bush saw a manifestation of "the Middle Kingdom Syndrome," suggesting a reversion to xenophobic insularity...

...But when regime and system are perceived to be in danger, the price is acceptable...

...turn over the famous dissident physicist Fang Lizhi and his wife, who had taken refuge in the American Embassy...

...Greater excitement seemed to be generated by the doings in Strasbourg, where the outgoing European Parliament rattled some of the governments of the European Community by forcing on them tougher emission standards for small cars than they had wanted...

...That refers to the brutal suppression by Lenin and Trotsky, in 1921, of a prodemocracy uprising among sailors at the Kronstadt naval base...

...Out of geopolitical concerns and perhaps sentimental ties with China and its leaders, President Bush was similarly disposed to speak with restraint...

...Yet that would fit Beijing's campaign to maketheU.S...

...Longstanding State Department policy opposes the principle of diplomatic asylum...

...In the Congress of People's Deputies, populist Boris Yeltsin linked Tbilisi and Beijing as he denounced "a crime against their own people and against humanity...

...Big Brother Is Watching China has obliged observers to rethink many things, including the "irreversibility" of democratic change and the role of communications...

...At the next Soviet-American summit, whenever that happens, there will be a fifth item added to the standard agenda of arms control, human rights, and regional and bilateral issues...

...Finally, as part of a general détente in 1971, the Hungarian government, the Nixon Administration and the Vatican negotiated a deal for Cardinal Mindszenty to be taken to Rome, and shortly afterward he went to Vienna...

...Americans would like to believe, with Ronald Reagan, that information is "the oxygen of the modern age," and that the communications revolution will be "the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever known...

...If it wants a propaganda issue, it has it...

...For four decades the peril of nuclear war has dominated the international dialogue...

...It pirated a satellite transmission to record an ABC interview and trap a leader of the student prodemocracy movement...

...The U.S...

...Its television tape editors fashioned a massacre of soldiers out of a massacre of students...

...Nonetheless, in China the Communist regime turned out to be far from helpless...

...President Bush, who announced an unexpectedly stringent clean air program, is apparently alive to the increasing potency of environmental concerns as a political force...

...does support "temporary refuge for humanitarian reasons in extreme or exceptional circumstances," such as pursuit by a mob...

...the whipping boy for the prodemocracy uprising...

...Labeled "global" or "transnational issues," it includes cooperation in dealing with threats to the environment...

...Like the Big Brother in Orwell's 1984, it has used communications technology as an instrument of surveillance and repression...

...A deal for safe conduct out of China would be the preferred American solution of the Fang problem, but the Chinese government has rejected any such arrangement...

...There also seemed to be a reversion to something more recent that might be seen as the Kronstadt Syndrome...

...Trend-spotting from close up can be a risky business, but unless the signs deceive, pollution control is beginning to rival arms control as an international issue...

...Perhaps, but not always, and not everywhere, and certainly not today in China...

...It blew up still frames from footage of demonstrations to add names to its "most wanted" list...

...A New Peril Leaving the subject of China (which is hard to do), a word about other matters...

...If it wants Fang, there are only a couple of ways to get him...

...But it would demand the surrender of any American fugitive —say, a draft dodger during the Vietnam War—receiving sanctuary in an embassy in Washington...

...One of the fondest of American assumptions is that the communications revolution inevitably advances the democratic revolution, and that the Information Age will be the age of freedom...

...One would be to storm the embassy—a move not excluded by American observers, although regarded as unlikely...

...He spoke of knowledge wafting across booby-trapped borders, and of electronic beams blowing through an Iron Curtain reduced to lace...

...Indeed, the initial reaction was remarkably muted...

...If Vietnam was America's first "living room war," the demonstrations in Tienanmen Square were America's first "living room revolution," and their suppression went deep in the American psyche...