Searching for a Champion, China’s Students Happen on an Unlikely Hero

BOLINAS, CALIF. —  Hu Yaobang would have chuckled. At his funeral the only person not wearing a Mao suit was Hu himself. Every Chinese leader who came to pay final respects to the man they had deposed as party chief wore the sober ideological battle dress. Just two years ago, when Hu was forced from his position in the tumultuous wake of a month of nationwide student protests, the TV newsman announcing this appeared ominously in a Mao jacket, a departure from his usual sports jacket and tie.

Tense and subdued, Zhao Ziyang, new party chief and the man who set the new sartorial standard for China’s leaders, was not flashing cuff links at the edges of his silk-sleeved suit jacket. Li Peng, the prime minister who swiftly moved into the highest ranks after Hu’s firing, looked more comfortable in Mao garb than in the Western suits he has worn in recent years. The only man who never appeared in a Western suit, Deng Xiaoping, looked grim. This Chinese leadership, which only last month announced that the country should prepare to face at least two years of stringent austerity, was under siege.

In the Great Hall of the People, Hu, his body clad in a black suit and tie, was hailed as a great proletarian revolutionary. Outside, some 150,000 students from Beijing’s colleges and universities chanted and shouted slogans for a more democratic China, walled off from their leaders by solid ranks of soldiers. For a week before, the students had marched daily to Tiananmen Square, the heart of the capital, to place wreaths and memorial scrolls extolling Hu for his supposed championing of greater freedom. They clamored for China’s leadership to acknowledge that Hu had been wrongly pushed into political oblivion. And in the days before that, they sat in protest outside Zhongnanhai, the old imperial compound where the party leadership works, and some even live, alternately shouting denunciations of dictatorship and paeans to democracy.

It has been an extraordinary two weeks in China, a consequence of rapidly rising aspirations clashing with a sclerotic political leadership intent on punching air out of the country’s expanding balloon of opportunity. Liu Binyan, the much-heralded muckraking reporter, formerly with the People’s Daily, said in a speech in West Germany last year, “China’s university students have always been one of the most highly tuned expressions of the Chinese people’s will.” That is sometimes true, but it is increasingly difficult to talk about “the Chinese people” as an entity, still less the notion of their single will.

The diversity of China today, a nation of desperate poverty and surprising affluence, rabid anti-intellectualism and literary accomplishment, islands of capitalism and seas of socialism, precludes any real commonality among the country’s 1.1 billion people. Agreement over modernization dissipates amid debate over the process of development; unanimity over national pride evaporates in contention over what the nation is. The interests of the private factory owner in Fujian are ultimately inimical to the Communist Party functionary in, say, Hunan Province. The needs of the farmer in Jiangsu must clash with the factory worker in Beijing. The factory owner and the farmer work for themselves; the bureaucrat and the factory worker labor in a system that rewards compliance not initiative.

The relative economic bounty enjoyed by China’s family farmers, or its tiny but growing entrepreneurial class, has come after decades of impoverishment and political turmoil. During a decade of dramatic economic growth, much of it on the coast and in the south, the beneficiaries of economic liberalization--farmers, factory owners, private bankers, restaurateurs--see political unrest and uncertainty as a threat. To mold the political order to suit their economic needs, private business and agriculture used the only weapon available: money. And with it they have corrupted local bureaucracies, and hence the Communist Party itself, so thoroughly that many think corruption has become the soul of China.

By contrast, the student marchers in Beijing--protests have been almost exclusively in the capital, unlike demonstrations of two years ago that swept across the country--appeal to broader political ideals, rooted partially in conceptions of Western models of governance. The existing structure of the Chinese state and dominance of the Communist Party ensure that most university students have little control over their own lives. The work they do and where they live are likely to be determined by the state’s ponderous bureaucracy. That they chafe at this is hardly surprising.

Every day, on radio, on TV, in the papers, these students hear of democratic movements in neighboring countries, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and, most important, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In each case, democratic activists have succeeded or are seeing progress toward more open societies. China’s students want no less.

So shallow are the roots of their democratic movement, however, that students grasp at Hu’s memory, trying to expropriate it as a symbol of progressive thinking. Certainly Hu was less severe in his ideological bent, more willing to experiment with new economic ideas and less inclined to suppress broader expression. But Hu was no democrat, no subversive within the party. He sometimes disagreed with his colleagues but never questioned the party’s right to rule.

Hu was a Marxist-Leninist devoted to building a modern, powerful China that would become a “socialist spiritual civilization with communism at its core.” Hu, as so often noted, urged the Chinese to adopt Western dress and use knives and forks--not because he embraced Western culture but because these are accouterments of modernity. Hu defended the reportorial exposes of Liu Binyan, not because he embraced free expression, but because journalists like Liu shed light on defects in the system, not failings of the system. China’s students have shouted “Overthrow the Dictatorship,” and “Long Live Democracy.” Neither sentiment would have found sympathy from Hu.

Just as Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s remolding of Soviet society is measured in terms of economic restructuring and greater openness-- perestroika and glasnost-- China’s students expect economic liberalization accompanied by political reform. Material rewards of the last decade have fueled expectations for freer expression, broader civil rights and greater political participation. When the students went onto the streets to beg for money to support the protest movement, office and factory workers thronged to give a few cents from their meager incomes. Student slogans resonate with these people for they imply, for the first time in the People’s Republic, a sense of individual rights and freedom. For the students, a democracy of competing political goals can mean only one thing, wresting from the Communist Party the exclusive control of government. This, the party leadership has said, it will never allow.

Initially the leadership hinted at a Draconian response to the protests, referring to the onset of a “grave political struggle” in front-page editorials. Then it appeared to back down, agreeing to open some kind of dialogue with the students. However the 1986-87 protests were crushed by threats and selective arrests, followed by a harsh regimen of political education and mandatory military training. It seems certain the authorities will ultimately respond in like fashion now--the threat to party hegemony is too great.

Despite a decade marked by one political campaign after another, the Communist Party has failed to imbue the Chinese people with an ideological orthodoxy that justifies the absence of personal and political freedoms. Students and democratic activists, repressed in 1979 again in 1986, reemerge in greater numbers and with more passion this year. They speak not only to the need for change but for its inevitability. As the leaders don their Mao suits for yet another round of repression, the rhetorical cudgels they wield fall with diminishing effect. China’s leaders have yet to realize, as Gorbachev does so acutely, that a modernization process nurturing the stomach and not the soul is destined to fail.