Wilting Flowers

Deng cools the liberalization

When Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p'ing) stepped up the Four Modernizations campaign in November, there were hopes that China's interest in American technology would extend to such Western values as human rights and intellectual freedom. No such luck. The Peking government is now trying to stamp out those pernicious notions in what seemed to be a reprise of the anti-intellectual purge in 1957 that crushed Chairman Mao's short-lived 'let a hundred flowers bloom" campaign.

The main targets of the new crackdown are wall posters that have appeared along Peking's "democracy wall" and in other major cities. The posters' bold demands have ranged from freedom of speech to sexual and romantic liberty. One poster pleaded with President Carter to "pay attention to the condition of human rights in China," another quoted from the Declaration of Independence.

Both the Peking Daily and the Worker's Daily have attacked the posters' call for human rights as "a slogan of the bourgeoisie and not of the proletariat." A front-page editorial in the Peking Daily contained one of the most ferocious assaults on capitalism to appear in China in several months. Said the paper: "Capitalist society is a mercenary slave system, involving police persecution, suicides, prostitution and so on." The Daily also castigated "certain young comrades" for their "lack of patriotism" in "begging for the support of imperialism in their espousal of human rights."

In a recent speech to party leaders, Deng accused several individuals of disclosing classified information to foreigners. One person arrested was a woman: Fu Yuehua, 32, a human rights advocate. The Vice Premier was also evidently shocked by pictures of Chinese dancing the hustle with Americans on the eve of ceremonies marking the restoration of diplomatic relations with the U.S. last January. He promised to imprison those who "sold state secrets" on the dance floor. Since then, Chinese seen dancing with foreigners at Peking's International Club have been evicted by plainclothes police officers.

Some analysts speculated that Deng had ordered the crackdown under pressure from hard-lining Politburo members in exchange for the right to pursue his modernization program. The new campaign has already had a visible effect on the democracy wall. Last week only one poster defended human rights. The others called for nothing bolder than catching up with the West by the year 2000--in weapons and industry, of course.

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