The New Truth in China

...That path, of course, would lead the country right back to 1979, theyear Deng Xiaoping looked at the Chinese economy and decided central planning could not work...

...The hardliners are confronted, in short, with precisely the problems that the Zhaoists were trying to solve...

...In those years the press, encouraged by Zhao and his close advisers, was beginning to explore new ideas...

...At best, heisatemporaryanswertothequestion of succession with which Deng has tried to wrestle...

...The reality is that the country is faced with runaway inflation, an irrational pricing system, inefficient factory production, scarcity of raw materials and energy, dwindling foreign reserves (the loss of tourism this year will cost it about $1 billion in hard currency), and a sharp drop-off in new foreign investment...

...He has insisted that the Communist Party be in charge...

...The dissident physicist Fang Lizhi, who took refuge in the American Embassy as troops moved into Beijing, is denounced as a "traitor" who colludes with "imperialism...

...The newspapers have actually resurrected the vocabulary of the Cultural Revolution...

...True, it was thought that the telephones weremonitored, and that the internal security police kept an eye on the activities of foreigners...

...Its bill for services rendered no doubt includes more money for defense and more seats on the Party Central Committee...

...Few Chinese are willing to risk talking with foreign journalists...

...The new Party leader, Jiang Zemin, brought up from Shanghai, has no national power base...

...Last fall, the government paid many with IOUs, and that will not sit well for this year's harvest...

...Whether these shootings are the work of isolated individuals or of an inchoate resistance movement, many of the basic concerns that sparked the mass demonstration in May continue to rankle today...

...The old veterans of the Long March and the Revolution, though, are not yet readyto "join Marx...

...After dark, the secret police come to take people away for interrogation...

...some disappear altogether...

...Soldiers carrying AK-47 machine guns enter a small, private bar late at night and check the identity papers of the few patrons...

...No one is above suspicion—the street sweeper, the taxi driver, the worker bicycling along Changan might not be who they seem...

...Indeed, the curtain of secrecy has come down hard...

...Whether Zhao will be tried for his "crimes" remains unclear...

...Hesays he has tape-recorded a soldier's firsthand account of the massacre at Muxidi, a Beijing intersection where some of the heaviest civilian resistance to the attacking military was mounted and dozens of unarmed Chinese were shot...

...Certainly the local Party apparatchiks, remembering how only recently they were fighting for survival against the onslaught of reforms, can be expected to do everything they can to advance the process...

...The most detailed official account of the "counterrevolution" claims it was fomented by a "handful of ruffians and hooligans" supported by foreign "enemies," first and foremost the United States...

...At 84, Deng himself is visibly aging and his stamina is ebbing...

...The thousands of Chinese who have simply been detained for questioning by the police and then released will be haunted by their newly created dossiers as long as the Old Guard rules China...

...One team that merely tried to get shots of soldiers guarding a bridge at 1 a.m...

...President Yang Shangkun, and senior Politburo members Qiao Shi and Prime Minister Li Peng also supported the use of force...

...They see the Chinese going about their daily affairs— cyclingto work, buying vegetables, strolling along the streets with their children on Sundays...

...To make things worse, the present leadership is unstable...

...Hisplan of passing power from the first, to the second, to the third "echelon" of leaders is in shambles...

...Still, it seems only a matter of time before the leadership will have to contend once more with overt discontent...

...In the view of one Western diplomat, they see the present moment as their "last great opportunity" to change the course of the reforms...

...He will almost certainly be expelled from the Party, a final disgrace for a man who less than two years ago met with hundreds of foreign journalists in the Great Hall of the People to celebrate his appointment as Party leader...

...Then there is the problem of the students and intellectuals...

...Although they have largely fallen silent out of fear, there have been reports of nightly sniper attacks on soldiers...

...Articles appeared arguing for the transformation of state factories into publicly held corporations...

...These are the "ruffian" and "hooligan" cases the leadership has used to construct its version of the events of May: A tiny minority of Chinese attempted to engineer a " counterrevolution...

...So far, none is known to have been among the more than 30 people executed and dozens sentenced to prison...

...It is impossible for foreign television crews to film nighttime arrests...

...So the economic modernization and open-door policy still in place may in any event simply wither away...

...The government's alternative is to print increasingly worthless yuan that will chase too few goods...

...More ominously, the chances of further popular unrest are high...

...They are fearful of jeopardizing the safety of anyone outside official circles who might be willing to speak to them...

...The victims do not turn up again for days...

...Too many video cameras there," he explains...

...Some student leaders have fled the country...

...The police have first dealt with those who set fire to Army trucks or are said to have killed soldiers or assaulted police...

...The Party has gone through two general secretaries in as many years...

...The Chinese who demonstrated for political reform, civil liberties and an end to corruption encompassed all social ranks in every major city...

...But the Army surely wants more than words...

...Deng asserts that the economic reforms will continue, but as the man who introduced them he can hardly say otherwise without losing his main claim to legitimacy...

...In a move to alleviate some of the people's grievances, the Politburo has banned children of senior officials from running independent commercial enterprises, and barred Party leaders from drawing on private food supplies and buying imported cars...

...A few weeks later he was sentenced to 10 years in prison...

...Former Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, under investigation since his dismissal, is blamed for everything—splitting the Party, supporting the "counterrevolution," tolerating if not encouraging corruption, kowtowing to foreign capitalism, ruining the economy...

...If he were to die this year or next, China would be in the hands of the conservatives, and the stage would be set for an internecine struggle between Li Peng and Jiang, or others in the ruling Politburo...

...Their nostalgia might lead to more centralized control of the economy, less interest in foreign investment and less willingness to open China to the outside world...

...was picked up and harshly interrogated by an Army officer for the next four hours...

...One of them, boasts the heavily censored press, was turned in by his sister...

...On a personal level, Chinese and Westerners could meet easily in public, in restaurants and hotels...

...This accounts forthe Old Guard's relentless propaganda campaign portraying young soldiers as heroes...

...That the heavy oppression of the students and their sympathizers has received less attention internationally than the shocking climactic events in Tiananmen Square is a reflection of the changed situation here...

...After the 1986-87 student demonstrations, and the temporary conservative backlash, it seemed that China had finished with the hardliners and was setting out on the long, tough and somewhat boring road of creating a market economy and a pluralistic (if non-Western) political system...

...One hears a lot of rhetoric about selfreliance, austerity, hard work, thrift...

...Finally, and perhaps most important, in the coming months the government will have to tackle China's severe economic troubles...

...The Central Committee has already announced that those who participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations, not only in Beijing but in over a dozen major cities, must be expelled from the Party...

...Whatever the decision, it seems likely that the hardline leadership will try to finish with the main arrests and trials before the fall, when students return to the universities, and in time for the October 1 national holiday, when a huge parade celebrating the40th anniversary of the Revolution will be held in Beijing· Probably before that time as well the regime will want to have paid of f the Army...

...As more students and intellectuals on wanted lists are rounded up, the question before the authorities will not be whether to imprison the most prominent of them, but merely how many, and whether the trials should be publicized or carried out in secret...

...In China today that means he was interrogated for hours, had to write a "self-criticism," and is under daily surveillance...

...In May the hundreds of thousands of banner-waving students and workers jamming Beijing's streets were shown nightly on China's central television network countrywide...

...Moreover, China's millions of peasants, who were relatively untouched by political demonstrations in the cities, want a better price for obligatory sales of grain to the state...

...Since the lines where the reporter lives are monitored, the phone call itself could get the young man 15 years in Qinghai—a Western province with one of the largest labor camp networks in the country...

...The telephones are tapped...

...Others are in police custody...

...MARK Hopkins, a frequent NL contributor, has just returned from a four-year stay in the People's Republic of China...

...Besides officially naming 10 of them "martyrs," at the June 9 meeting Deng specifically extolled the Army commanders' resolve in defending the Communist Party leadership and saving the country...

...He is the government's supreme scapegoat...

...The Old Guard now has to decide what to do with Zhao, who was last seen on Chinese television May 19 in his tearful meeting with students at daybreak in Tiananmen Square...

...A young man telephones to nervously cancel ameeting at aforeign journalist's apartment complex...

...A man filmed by ABC News was arrested two hours after the police pirated and broadcast the footage...

...The leadership has to deal, too, with the thousands of Zhaoists in the Party ranks...

...What solutions will the Old Guard pursue...

...While a legal case has been built against him, a show trial could only further damage the regime'simageabroad...

...Now its news broadcasts show political leaders praising the Army and calling for the "resolute suppression of the counterrevolutionary rebellion...

...But it is difficult to see where the strategy he introduced will get the new muscle it obviously needs at a time when the very intellectuals who could supply it are being arrested, investigated and intimidated...

...DengXiaoping, who launched China's economic modernization a decade ago, has always made it clear that he did not favor substantive political change...

...And Zhao, in announcing his East Coast development program, suggested that anybody, foreigner or Chinese, who could run a factory profitably should be put in charge of one...

...Western military analysts are convinced that the Army's generals are not particularly proud of what they ordered their troops to do...

...The second demand can only be handled by a special Party conference—a gerrymandered congress with the power to name the Central Committee...

...Yet the Old Guard has proven that it cares little about international opinion when it feels its survival is at stake...

...To foreigners who lived in China during the mid-1980s, and particularly after Zhao became Party leader in the fall of 1987, Beijing has become a nightmare...

...From his warm approval of the assault on Beijing, expressed in a June 9 meeting with Army commanders, there can be no doubt he was fully behind the decision to employ armed force to put down the May demonstrations...

...The consensus throughout the country was that political reforms were essential to economic progress...

...The visiting business representatives are told that China continues to welcome outside investment, even as the state media denounce a dark plot by foreigners to make China capitalist...

...Troops could be mobilized again, but sooner or later the Old Guard is bound to find that it is impossible for an Army of 3 million, let alone a much smaller internal security police force, to control an adult population of 500 million...

...Some ofthosewho experienced the Long March and in the 1950s began to build the "new" China (albeit with massive Soviet aid) probably do believe in selfreliance...

...Those who committed violence are to be brought to court...

...In Shanghai, always a more outward looking city than Beijing, young editors of the now defunct World Economic Herald, the most daring press voice for change, dropped all euphemisms in talking about Party leaders...

...That is the new truth...

...There were discussions of a liberal press law...

...Pictures of the students now being hunted down appear in newspapers and on television...

...A student leader of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations tells another foreign journalist that he has been treated "leniently" because he turned himself into thepolice...

...But there was little sense of apprehension...

...Foreign correspondents, meanwhile, are reluctant to try to penetrate the uncanny silence...

...To the few tourists and business people again visible in Beijing the oppression is not apparent...

...In one apartment building along Changan Boulevard—a main thoroughfare, where only weeks earlier people tried in vain to stop the tanks and armored personnel carriers on their way to seize Tiananmen Square—three residents are arrested...

...The propaganda machine functions according to the Orwellian logic of newspeak and unspeak...

...Undercover security police, everyone assumes, are everywhere...