Beware The Dunce Caps

By William R. Doerner

To Liu Anyi and his wife Li Lanting, the street scenes in Beijing last week seemed eerily reminiscent of another spasm of unrest that began to rock China 23 years ago. Then, as now, students marched in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, waving red flags and chanting slogans defying an entrenched political establishment. Destination: Tiananmen Square. Then, as now, the demonstrators vilified aging national leaders -- including, as he must have recalled bitterly last week, Deng Xiaoping, then Communist Party General Secretary, who at one point was paraded around Beijing wearing a dunce cap.

The students of 1966 were the Red Guards, and for nearly a decade their movement convulsed the country in chaos, violence and dictatorial excess. Millions of Chinese, including nearly everyone who enjoyed a privileged status, were sent to "re-education camps" in the countryside, where they underwent humiliating rituals of "self-criticism." Political leaders who had been trying to modernize China's economy were branded "capitalist roaders" and in many cases were read out of the party and power. In the name of glorifying the "masses" and "bombarding the bourgeois headquarters," libraries were ransacked, factories and schools closed, and the country turned completely inward, virtually shutting off a billion people from the rest of the world.

Liu Anyi, then a senior manager in the Ministry of Petroleum, found himself a target because he had worked on Taiwan prior to choosing to return to the mainland shortly before the Communist takeover in 1949. "The Red Guards branded me as a big capitalist and an undercover ((Taiwan)) spy," Liu, 71, recalls with a wry smile. "They kept me in solitary confinement for over a year and later organized a pictorial exhibit of my crimes." These included photos of various articles of Western-style dress belonging to Liu and his wife that Red Guards had found in the course of ransacking their apartment.

Is Liu afraid that the current unrest may lead to a second Cultural Revolution? No, mostly because the first explosion was inspired and directed by the country's leader, Mao Zedong. "Today's protest is a genuine student movement, spontaneous, yet well disciplined," he says. "We do not feel threatened." In fact, Liu's son and daughter-in-law have gone to Tiananmen Square to show their solidarity with the protesters.

But it was with great reluctance that the Lius allowed their granddaughter to visit the square. "I fear that a single incident could set off a mass panic," says Liu. Liu also concedes that this innocent movement could deteriorate into a government backlash that might not carry the widespread vindictiveness of the Cultural Revolution but that nonetheless would result in a shake-up at the top.

Furthermore, despite the uncertainty as to where the student demonstrations may lead, there is no evidence that the movement is running amuck. Yang Ting (not his real name), a 20-year-old Red Guard in 1966 and now an interpreter, recalls with a shudder the killing and widespread looting during those years. "From the very outset this time, the movement was well organized and the students did not harbor any intention to tear apart the Communist Party." Another positive sign, he says, is that the "students' demands conformed with the wishes and will of the broad masses, especially the calls for a crackdown on corrupt officials."

Liu Binyan, a former top journalist on the official People's Daily now attending Harvard University as a Nieman Scholar (and no kin to Liu Anyi), notes that not all the similarities between the Cultural Revolution and this year's protests are superficial. "The two major causes of both events -- official corruption and the contradictions in ideology among the leaders -- are quite similar," he says. Liu speaks as another of the Cultural Revolution's victims: as an "unrepentant rightist," he was among the first group of 15 intellectuals purged at Mao's order. Readmitted to the party in 1979, he was kicked out again in 1987 for the alleged sin of supporting bourgeois liberalization and today is one of the country's most prominent dissidents. "Mao was right in attacking the privileged party leaders and the emerging new bureaucratic class," he says. "His mistake was in pushing the mass campaign without changing the political system."

Most of the youths who participated in last week's demonstrations are too young to remember the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution. According to Liu Binyan, however, graduate students and university lecturers who lived through the turmoil of those years may have played an important role by giving their advice and support to the student movement. For them, says Liu, the Cultural Revolution serves partly as an inspiration for today's protest -- but also partly as a cautionary tale. "People learned a great lesson from the Cultural Revolution. They can no longer follow a leader blindly."

With reporting by Oscar Chiang/New York and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing