China Softening Up the Hard Line

By Michael S. Serrill

Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong listened, stern-faced, as a student questioner bore down on him and other local officials about the nepotism and corruption that now pervade the Chinese bureaucracy. As television viewers at home watched intently, Chen, an unpopular hard-liner, seized the microphone and answered defensively. "I'm a grade-twelve cadre with a monthly income slightly over 300 yuan (($80))," he protested. "None of my family members are high-ranking officials. My son is a junior cadre in the Beijing civil affairs bureau, and my daughter-in-law is an ordinary clerk."

That China's aloof and secretive officials would submit to such an interrogation might have seemed absurd a few weeks ago. But the nation's student uprising, now three weeks old, has thrown official China into confusion. Having failed to carry out its threat to crack down on the immense student march that engulfed Beijing two weeks ago, the government last week launched a soft offensive, blitzing the public with self-serving propaganda in support of its policies. When the leaders of the new independent student union announced that they would go ahead with a march across the capital on May 4, the 70th anniversary of the birth of China's student movement, the newly pliable bureaucrats indicated that they would not interfere.

An estimated 30,000 students demanding democracy and the legalization of their newly formed independent student union poured out of 40 Beijing colleges to take part in the ten-hour trek from their campuses to Tiananmen Square, a short distance from Zhongnanhai, where China's leaders live and work. Again tens of thousands of workers joined them, shouting encouragement. One worker held up a sign in crude English letters: I LOVE YOU. A waitress scribbled a message on a piece of paper and pasted it on the window of a bus. "You must be exhausted, students," it read.

The marchers included 200 journalists employed by 40 state-controlled publications. Their demands: more press freedom and the reinstatement of Qin Benli, who was fired three weeks ago as editor of China's most outspokenly liberal journal, the weekly World Economic Herald in Shanghai. The journalists acknowledged the students' complaint that the official press had distorted the goals of their movement. "We can't solve our problems if we can't even write about them," said Chen Zongshun, a correspondent of the Workers' Daily.

The government's placid tolerance of such heresies is largely a matter of timing. With 3,000 international delegates attending the annual meeting of the 47-member Asian Development Bank last week in the Great Hall of the People, within earshot of Tiananmen Square, officials wanted to avoid any unpleasantness. And the protest came just days before the scheduled May 15-18 summit meeting between Chinese officials and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

While there is no guarantee against reprisals once Gorbachev goes home, Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang sounded a conciliatory note when he told the governors of the A.D.B. that the best way to deal with the students is . through "extensive consultations and dialogues," not force. But Zhao is a liberal whose influence has lately been on the wane, so it is impossible to know how much weight his promises carry. Given the gap between the students' demands and senior leader Deng Xiaoping's aversion to substantial political reform, the government's soft line on dissent is likely to be severely tested in the coming months.

With reporting by Sandra Burton and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing