For Chinese, Time Stopped June 4, ‘89, a Day of Infamy : China: A year after Tian An Men Square, the currents of discontent among the people run swift and deep. The leaders have lost legitimacy.

NEW YORK —  I had last been at the Shanghai Airport in 1979. Not much has changed. The baggage claim area is dark and dingy. Young men in military uniforms wander about arguing, having nothing else to do.

As soon as I left the airport, however, I began to see China had changed dramatically. Unimaginable numbers of people still clog the streets. But the depressing conformity conveyed by the sea of blue and grey Mao jackets has given way to a buoyant stream of color and fashion. Modern buildings dot the skyline in many cities. Passers-by now eye Westerners with curiosity, but then go on their way. In 1979, I was usually followed by 50 or more, all bewildered by their first contact with a foreigner.

China is no longer in isolation. With the political and economic reforms of the 1980s, the Chinese became part of the international community. The success of this decade of transition--economic gains, new diplomatic and academic contacts, political liberalization--made the violent repression of the student movement on June 4, 1989, more painful for the Chinese. “Not only has reform ground to a halt,” one student told me, “we’re actually moving backward.”

I was invited to China in the spring to give a series of lectures on international politics. The itinerary included a hectic week of meetings in major cities as well as a leisurely week of travel in more remote regions. For this, my rusty Chinese proved indispensable, few speak English outsie the coastal cities. Virtually everyone I met wanted to talk about June 4 and how it changed their lives. Nor were these casual chats. People spoke with an urgency, a passion. The fearful events of June 4 stirred up powerful currents of discontent that have yet to subside. Massive opposition to the government runs strong beneath the illusive surface of calm.

The student movement captured the hearts and minds of much of the urban population, despite continuing debate over exactly what the students were after. The ambiguity of the movement actually proved to be the key to its popularity--everyone identified the objectives of the movement with his own specific grievances.

For intellectuals, the movement was about democracy--a catch-all phrase that stood for political liberalization. Beijing University students who participated in the demonstrations admitted to me that they took to the streets without mapping out their objectives and how to attain them. But they agreed that freedom of expression and accountability were the unifying themes. “Our main aim,” one graduate student put it, “was to express our frustrations openly and to demand government officials start being held responsible for their actions.”

For workers, the movement was about fighting inflation and corruption. During the second half of the 1980s, high inflation had been eating away at living standards and pervasive corruption only made matters worse. A worker from Sichuan Province explained: “The corruption is so bad that it now touches everyone. Bribing officials has become a way of life. It was the students’ demand for an end to corruption that linked the workers to the democracy movement.”

For the older generation, the movement was of symbolic importance; the specific grievances addressed were less significant than the message that students were sending. “The student demonstrations restored my faith in China’s youth,” a woman in her 60s told me. “Before, I thought students just wanted to dance and prepare their language exams in order to study abroad. I thought they did not care about the country. Now, I am hopeful about the younger generation.”

Sympathy for the student movement, pervasive in China’s coastal cities, begins to wane in the country’s rural interior. About two hours southwest of Kunming, not far off the highway that runs from Yunnan’s capital to Burma, I pulled over to chat with farmers sweeping up grain they had left on the road to be threshed by the tires of passing cars.

After the necessary discussion of this year’s crop, I turned to the student movement. The peasants said they had supported the demonstrations until the imposition of martial law. “After that,” one said, “the students had to be stopped to prevent turmoil and chaos from spreading all over the country.” This was the same line the government had presented on the television news. “What do you expect?” a student in Kunming said. “The farmers are very isolated from the cities. Forty percent of Yunnan is illiterate. Most people have no reason not to believe what they hear on TV.”

Lack of sophistication, however, is not the only explanation for the more conservative attitudes of the countryside. The farmers have economic incentives for supporting the status quo: Many benefitted enormously from economic reforms. Workers in cities, in fact, are beginning to resent the growing economic disparities between urban centers and countryside.

Peasants and government officials were not the only ones fearful that the student movement might lead to political chaos. Many intellectuals who supported the students’ objectives questioned their methods. For those who had experienced the violence of the Cultural Revolution, the demonstrations conjured up terrifying images. “I lived through the Cultural Revolution,” an intellectual in his 50s said. “It was out of control. The damage to China was great. We cannot live through that again.” Another scholar agreed that the situation in Beijing bordered on chaos. “How would the U.S. government react,” he asked, “if hundreds of thousands of people surrounded the White House and brought the center of Washington to a standstill for several weeks?”

This fear of disorder is not simply a product of the Cultural Revolution and other excesses of the Mao era. It is grounded in a more fundamental appreciation of the challenge involved in maintaining political order in China. Before the Communist Revolution in 1949, the country suffered through decades of economic and political fragmentation. Many Chinese view the establishment of centralized authority as one great achievement of the Mao era. “We live in a country of 1.1 billion people,” a recent graduate of Beijing University told me. “Except for a few roads and rail lines, our interior provinces are cut off from the coastal cities. Feeding and keeping control of the country are very difficult. If we push for radical change, we will only end up worse off.”

Intellectuals who led the demonstrations acknowledge that change must come slowly to China. but they disagree that the students went too far. “What are we supposed to do, write a letter to Deng?” a student at Fudan University in Shanghai said, “Demonstrations are our only means of expressing opposition.”

The government’s continuing efforts to suppress overt opposition has made life more unpleasant for many Chinese. Academics and journalists have been hit the hardest. They face increased supervision, harassment and, sometimes, arrest.

On the campuses, organized opposition to the government has been virtually eliminated. At Beijing University, a few students were reading on the grassy area next to the statue of Cervantes, where the democracy movement was born last spring. The wall once covered by pro-democracy posters sported advertisements for dances and films. “We sometimes gather in the dorms in groups of three or four to talk about the democracy movement,” one student said. “But that’s it.”

The general populace has suffered too. Virtually everyone faces more frequent and intrusive political education classes at the work place. Public discourse has become sterile; searching debates that, before the crackdown, took place in parks and newspapers have moved behind closed doors. Economic conditions have also worsened. The government has instituted an austerity program to bring down inflation.

The violence used to extinguish the student movement and the less hospitable environment that emerged thereafter have taken a spiritual toll. Confusion and disorientation hang over the country. The reforms of the 1980s not only raised expectations, they indicated that the country was moving in a certain direction: towards a mixed economy, a more open relationship with the outside world and a more liberal domestic order. Now, many believe the country is floundering. Deng Xiaoping, the supporter of reform, has become the culprit behind the Tian An Men Square tragedy.

Confusion about the present translates into uncertainty about the future. The hard-liners are now in control, but the current leadership is in dire straits. Rural residents--some 70% of the population--remain a source of support for the government. But the peasants are geographically and politically isolated from the center of power. It is the urban population that the government must placate--a daunting task.

June 4 stripped the government of whatever legitimacy it enjoyed after several years of rampant corruption. Ideological mobilization is no longer possible. I met no one who took the required political education classes seriously. Even a government official admitted, “We Chinese are now very cynical about ideology.” Students have little interest in reading the works of Mao or Lenin and are instead turning to religion. Since June 4, studying Buddhism and Christianity has become a fad.

Events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have only compounded the plight of the ruling elite. The government has failed in its effort to convince the Chinese people that the collapse of Communism is unique to the Soviet Bloc. On the contrary, it is Soviet-style reform that the Chinese people are hoping for. As a student at Beijing University put it, “We are waiting for Deng to die in the hope that we will get our Gorbachev.”

A joke now popular in China goes as follows: “We Chinese used to say, ‘Only socialism can save China.’ Now we say, ‘Only China can save socialism.’ ” The cynical smiles that follow make clear that saving socialism is not a task for which much enthusiasm remains. There is indeed wistfulness over the failure of communism and appreciation that the party is responsible for saving millions of Chinese peasants from abject poverty. “Nevertheless,” one young woman told me, “Communism is now seen as an ideal, a dream that will never come true.”