LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS WILT

...But for the most part he was ignored while the Party's "pragmatists," led by Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, rehabilitated the surviving intellectuals and rebuilt the economy...

...All this is exactly what the present era needs...

...When necessary," he said, "we must deal severely with those who defy orders...

...I am writing plays and novels," Bai responded...

...Cultural life quickens as writers, academics, artists, civil servants, and factory workers take up the challenge...

...And still others have taken the risky course of advocating what is now being denounced as "total Westernization...

...That was worth fifteen years in the slammer...

...and by postponement of a visit to Princeton he had been scheduled to make in January 1986...

...At the door of the Great Hall of the People, Xinhua reported, "Hu shook hands with Bai Hua, a writer who has been demobilized from the army...

...Chinese students in the United States gathered more than 1,000 signatures on an open letter to the Party and the government, expressing concern that modernization will again be derailed by attacks on the intellectuals...

...Not so amazingly, the film was never released and Bai was severely criticized by the Party's cultural arbiters...

...And they are likely to direct their fury at "intellectuals," meaning those who have more than a high-school education...

...This time, Deng promised, the Double Hundred would not be followed by an Anti-Rightist Campaign...

...Deng replied that the maintenance of "stability and unity"—the opposite of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution—required adherence to "the four cardinal principles": the socialist road, the people's democratic dictatorship, the primacy of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought...

...These dissidents were not "intellectuals...

...rivative and tributary of Chinese civilization, they are both thrilled and appalled by what they see...

...On December 25, 1980, Deng warned that protest activity endangered "stability and unity," and said he would use all the weapons of people's democratic dictatorship and even declare martial law, if necessary, to maintain order...

...Let a Hundred Rowers Wilt China cracks down again BY RON DORFMAN Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, reported in a 126-word item on November 13 that Hu Yaobang, general secretary of the Communist Party, had led a delegation of bigwigs at a photo opportunity marking the end of a six-day meeting of the council of the Chinese Writers Association...

...One object of the Hundred Flowers campaign was a discussion of "political reform," and one aspect of political reform on Fang Lizhi's agenda was getting intellectuals out from under the thumb of people like the mayor of Peking...

...The only exception has been a recent one—the obvious Western superiority in science and technology...

...Perhaps unwittingly, Deng included in Directive No...

...The debate between advocates of greater democracy and advocates of traditional Chinese hierarchical order intensified in the months that followed...

...What are you writing...

...long ago, after all, that we were afflicted by our own version of the Committee on Un-Chinese Activities, and we still have communities in the United States where dancing is considered sinful...

...But for the moment, at least, Deng had the last word...

...The Univer'Freedom, democracy, and human rights are the common treasures of humanity...

...Very good," Hu said...

...We must continue friendly relations with the West and learn business methods, but in the ideological sphere we must struggle to the end...

...Zhu Houze, the liberal director of the Party's propaganda department, urged young people to "be bold in airing divergent views" and told them that Red Flag, a Party theoretical journal, spoke only for itself...

...At the end of December, as speculation mounted that students at prestigious Peking University would march on New Year's Day to Tien'anmen Square, Deng apparently panicked...

...There were reports of strikes in factories where Deng's deregulation program had pushed commodity prices up at a rate that wage increases could not match...

...Spiritual civilization would maintain respect for Chinese traditions and culture...

...They are said to be reconstructed from notes taken by students who heard Fang speak...

...it was not so Ron Dorfman, a free-lance writer newspaper columnist based in Chicage, has taught journalism and American law in China and has worked there as an editor of China Reconstructs magazine...

...In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin's crimes at the Soviet Communist Party's Twentieth Congress, Mao Tse-tung launched the first Double Hundred campaign—"Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend...

...And we can begin b plating the fact that China isn't quite "strange" as we are tempted to believe...

...Foreign diplomats, academic ists scrambled to divine some plausible These exercises are never wholly satisfactory, since it is usually impossible to discover, within journalistic timeframes who has done what to whom and why we can know enough not to be pletely by surprise each time nd blows...

...The idea was to give China's intellectuals some breathing room and to restore their commitment to the revolution and the Party, which had been built and was largely run by peasant-soldiers...

...But he was not killed or imprisoned or put to slopping pigs in some commune in Qin-ghai...

...We can afford to shed some blood...

...The issue was joined: Would China preserve its 2,000-year-old system of politics behind palace walls, or would it move toward open debate and elections...

...Two weeks later, students at Fang's university in Hefei began the series of demonstrations for democracy and academic freedom that eventually spread to a dozen cities and led to the greatest upheaval within the Party since Deng took control in 1978...

...Last September, conservatives attending a Party conference managed to push through a resolution advocating development of "spiritual civilization," a response to the ferment of "spiritual pollution...

...Barely two months later, however, the flowers had wilted...

...1 a challenge to Western friends of democracy...

...Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and one of the principal figures in the drama that has played itself out in China in the last few months, is reported to have told colleagues of his frustration and anger when, in October 1985, fourteen of the twenty-four places in the Chinese delegation to an international scientific congress in New York were taken by bureaucrats, including the mayor of Peking...

...The Movement, rooted in the popular demonstrations of April 5, 1976, that led to the overthrow of Mao's widow and the Gang of Four, had received encouragement from Deng Xiaoping and his allies in the struggle for control of the Party...

...Nevertheless, the intellectual revival had again been thwarted...

...they were of the generation that the Cultural Revolution had robbed of formal education...

...When Xinhua reported last fall that Hu Yaobang had shaken hands with Bai Hua, it was a sign that the most recent call for criticism and creativity was still in effect...

...He argues that China needs her...

...Two generations of educated Chinese were lost...

...by making foreign goods and their purveyors suspect, it threatened economic development, and Deng put a stop to it after only a few months...

...in 1966, he summoned Chinese youth to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which would last, in phases, until his death ten years later...

...More and more money was circulating, including hard currency that made it possible for growing numbers of ordinary Chinese to buy imported goods...

...Wang Ruowang, a prominent Shanghai writer and official of the Writers' Union, has been expelled from the Party...

...Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—were killed...

...The heavy hand of officialdom was everywhere...

...Party leaders, apparently responding to serious problems in the reorganization of the urban economy and disaffection on the part of many workers, thought it necessary to fire up the intellectuals once more for support and creative approaches...

...Just as the historical sources and cul-McCarthyism or of reli-fundamentalism in the United camplex and richly textured, Chinese struggle over cultural freedom and the limits of ideological dissent...

...The president and vice president of the Academy of Sciences have been dismissed...

...But Mao and the Party were unprepared for the flood of criticism that rushed at them once the gates were opened, and their apprehensions were heightened by the Hungarian revolt that erupted later that year...

...Wall posters subsequently appeared in Peking describing Fang Lizhi as "China's Sak-harov...

...They belong not only to the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, but to everyone,' said Fang Lizhi, since expelled from the Party...

...General Secretary Hu Yaobang lost his position, though he remains in the leadership...

...If you don't struggle, you will never get them...

...One of the incomprehensible aspects of the affair is that Fang Lizhi has been known as a man close to Hu's successor as party chief, Premier Zhao Ziyang, and has sometimes been said to be Zhao's mouthpiece, articulating ideas the Premier could not express directly...

...We put him behind bars, and the Democracy Movement died...

...In March, Wei Jingsheng published "The Fifth Modernization," in which he argued that political democracy "is a prerequisite for rapid economic modernization...

...Others continued to write and publish, and they too were arrested...

...Mao, under attack for incompetence, successfully resisted efforts to unseat him...

...Amazingly, Bai did not tack on a happy ending...

...Fang has been dismissed from his academic post and expelled from the Party, though he is still working as a research fellow at the Peking Observatory...

...Bai Hua had been attached to an army film unit in the late 1970s and had written the script for Bitter Love, China's first film about a persecuted intellectual...

...When the Leap faltered, China suffered three years of famine in which millions starved and survivors ate bark and grubs...

...These statements by Fang are reported in the magazine China Spring, published in the United States by expatriate Chinese intellectuals who have some ties to Taiwan...

...His public criticism of the mayor, he said, was answered in terms he had not heard since the Cultural Revolution ("Which Headquarters do you belong to...

...Mao couldn't stand it...

...These are said to be workers or former students who allegedly tried to incite or manipulate the demonstrators...

...As for freedom, democracy, and human rights," Fang said, "these are the common treasure of humanity...

...Hu Sheng, president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that while Marxism is a guide for social-science research, "there is no forbidden zone...

...and research may be conducted in all subjects that are conducive to national construction and the development of science...

...He continued to write and even received awards for other work, and this relative forbearance was taken to mean that the Party might learn, after all, to tolerate the intellectuals, who had been denounced during the Cultural Revolution as "the stinking ninth category" of society...

...Deng's single-minded drive to build the economy and the nation's technological capabilities continued...

...You can only get them through struggle...

...They belong not only to the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, but to everyone...

...For the last hundred years or so, Chinese reformers have been engaged in a poignant quest for a way to appropriate the technology without sacrificing the "national essence...

...Party conservatives have sent "spin patrols" to university campuses to convince students of the error of their ways—and, no doubt, to remind them that the Party still controls assignment to jobs once they finish their studies...

...Deng had returned from exile determined once and for all to establish market socialism and the search for "truth from practice"—testing theory against the real world—as the Party's basic policies...

...For the most part, China has resisted the embrace...

...Smuggling, bribery, and corruption were also on the increase, and the influx of foreign entrepreneurs, tourists, and teachers fostered the spread of foreign manners, fashions, and ideas...

...Total Westernization may mean, as it has in the recent past, listening to the music of Beethoven or the Beatles...

...There will undoubtedly be more turmoil...

...and British news media...

...When it extends to challenging authority, however—proposing to replace the power of the Communist Party with meritocratic, technocratic, or democratic approaches— those who find life in China quite comfortable the way it is are likely to lash out...

...Bai Hua's hero suffers through all these events and at the end of the film, apparently near death, he tries to dissuade his daughter from going abroad...

...That December, in China's first direct election of delegates to powerless district-level "people's congresses," students at Peking University and other major campuses insisted on hearing the candidates debate—something the Party had not contemplated...

...Most members of the Party do not qualify as intellectuals...

...Wei Jingsheng, for example, the editor of the underground journal Exploration and author of the seminal essay "The Fifth Modernization," was an electrician for the Peking Public Service Company when he was put on trial in 1979...

...Schools and universities were closed...

...The hero's story was paradigmatic, a tale of horror intimately familiar to every educated Chinese...

...Look at Wei Jingsheng," he said...

...Hu asked...

...In his courtroom defense, he declared: "The democratic trend is this age's revolutionary current, while those autocratic conservatives who stand in opposition to the democratic trend are the real counterrevolutionaries of the age...

...Others have assumed they could blend what was useful from the West with what was most desirable in Chinese culture...

...This was followed in 1958 by the Great Leap Forward, in which it was imagined that "the people," through sheer force of will, could accomplish miracles of invention and production without expertise or equipment...

...He was charged with failing to keep the discussion of reform within bounds...

...Westerners, from Seventeenth Century Jesuit missionaries to today's American academics, have tried to persuade the Chinese that they could master the technology only if they accepted the ideology-be it Christianity, capitalism, Marxism, or pluralistic democracy—that supposedly produced it...

...We must struggle against bourgeois liberalism and out-and-out individualism," Deng declared...

...Several newspapers have been closed...

...sity's president and vice president resigned, reportedly under criticism for failing to deal sternly with the students...

...Some leaders, including Mao Tse-tung in his more malignantly manic moments, have rejected the need for any technology that peasants could not devise for themselves...

...The Democracy Movement's activities—lively public debates posted on Peking's Democracy Wall and elsewhere, poorly printed but eagerly read magazines arguing everything from the rule of law to the Yugoslav economic model, public demonstrations supporting the Four Modernizations—contributed to Deng's success at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978...

...Whenever this stage is reached, the Party slams the lid back down...

...Not to worry...

...They've always bent to the authorities...

...Though the drama is being played out in today's political context, it moted in long-established Chinese atThrough several centuries of contact between China and the West, most Chinese lea have regarded their civilization as sup to that of the barbarians...

...Xinhua's apparently innocuous paragraph signaled that all was well with the new Hundred Flowers program of wide-open cultural and intellectual debate...

...We haven't released him, but that didn't raise much of an international uproar...

...On Novemfber 24, Fang Lizhi told the Shanghai newspaper World Economic Report: "Many people in society have complained that the young people of this generation lack ideals, and that they think too much of themselves...

...And there were serious economic problems: The freedom of enterprise that had transformed the countryside was not easily transferred to the more complex and interdependent economies of the cities, and much commerce was still mired in the swamp of Chinese bureaucracy...

...When these reformers look at modern Japan, once a deWhen Westernization extends to challenging the authority of the Party, those who find life in China quite comfortable the way it is respond by lashing out at the intellectuals...

...Almost immediately, however, Deng turned on the young democrats...

...Propaganda chief Zhu Houze has also been reported out, and Liu Binyan has been expelled from the Party...

...In a certain sense, it is precisely because of this that we place our hopes on intellectuals of the 1980s, because intellectuals of the younger generation have their own independent morality and have begun to show a strong desire for mastering their own fate...

...By 1983, the trend was so strong and disquieting to traditional Chinese sensitivities that conservatives in the Party organized a campaign against "spiritual pollution...

...By last summer, however, a new Hundred Rowers campaign had been proclaimed on the thirtieth anniversary of the first one...

...Day after day, the debates drew large and enthusiastic crowds and were reported by the Western press...

...The economy was wrecked again...

...In meetings with groups of students and faculty colleagues in Peking, Shanghai, and Hefei, where Fang was vice president of the national University of Science and Technology, he told intellectuals they would have to look beyond their own narrow specialties, unite in defense of common interests, and maintain a sense of social responsibility...

...Fang Lizhi's appeal for solidarity seems to have gotten through...

...In 1957, they unleashed their Anti-Rightist Campaign, which directed vilification and persecution at the very intellectuals and artists who had accepted Mao's invitation to speak out...

...Just try as much as possible not to kill anyone...

...Without this precondition, modernization of production and livelihood is impossible, all pledges by any Great Man to the contrary notwithstanding...

...Those who subscribed to this hopeful attitude, however, had to ignore the plight of several dozen young Democracy Movement essayists and editors who were being put behind bars at about this time...

...1, the new year's first directive to Party members, Deng reprised his 1980 warning about "bourgeois liberalism" and the critical need to maintain stability and unity...

...He was speaking to a receptive audience-thousands of Chinese students who had returned from abroad with doctorates in electrical engineering and at least a passing acquaintance with the workings of American, French, Japanese, and British democracy, and especially with the operative antidogmatism of Western university life...

...Chinese intellectuals have historically not formed a real force," Fang said...

...But the campaign went too far...

...So far, the only individuals known to have been imprisoned are about a dozen figures on the fringes of the student demonstrations...

...That's all there was to the story, and one might have wondered why Xinhua bothered...

...But an organization of some fifty million members, sitting fat if not happy atop the labors of one-fourth of humanity, is not easily persuaded to change its course...

...The Democracy Movement was a loose coalition of groups of young people who were disillusioned with the Cultural Revolution and sought alternatives to the politics of madness...

...Sometimes, when China's pursuit of progress seems to have reached a dead end, the Party finds it expedient to relax its grip on public expression, and it issues a call for full debate on how to move the country forward...

...She replies with a question that haunts every Chinese intellectual: "You love your country, but does your country love you...

...The Thought of Mao Tse-tung became a gobbledygook catechism...

...Wei was arrested in April...

...As always, the sudden shift in the Party line seemed incomprehensible...

...Hu Yaobang had been deposed as general secretary, prominent writers and acdem-ics had been expelled from the stripped of their offices, and the tual climate had settled into a deepfreeze...

...They are, however, consistent with statements Fang has made in official Chinese media, including Peking Review, and with interviews students have given to U.S...

...As these discussions shift into high gear, the Party itself is inevitably identified as the chief obstacle to progress, since its principal social function is to preserve the system of privilege it has built since its days of struggle...

...Liu Binyan, a People's Daily writer who is China's counterpart to Ralph Nader or Seymour Hersh, said China needs publications "that inform readers of their civil rights and tell readers of proper ways to protect their rights...

...in China, as in the hula, every little movement has a meaning all its own...

...In remarks to Party leaders that were later issued as Document No...