China: More Wintry Days of Discontent

• Share

(2 of 2)

The police showed extraordinary restraint in controlling the crowds. Authorities kept track of the marchers' progress from a dozen police vehicles equipped with two-way radios, but made no effort to block the marchers except at the State Guesthouse in western Peking, where public gatherings are strictly forbidden. The ranks began to thin when Peking University Vice President Sha Jiansun announced over a police loudspeaker that all student detainees had been released. By the time those who persisted had completed the ten-mile trip to Tiananmen Square at 3:30 a.m., the size of the crowd had dwindled to only 1,000 or so.

Precisely how large a threat the continuing demonstrations pose to Deng's government remained exasperatingly unclear. The senior vice chairman of the State Education Commission, He Dongchang, estimated the number of student protesters who have joined the current campaign at 40,000, or only about 2% of China's 2 million college students. Indeed there is little evidence that the student demonstrations have found much sympathy with Chinese workers, as some officials had feared. Last week the Workers' Daily scathingly compared today's student protests to the rampages of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

Even so, some local authorities believe the outbursts are serious enough that they have acknowledged a key student grievance: the lack of choice in electing candidates to district legislatures. At the prestigious University of Science and Technology in Hefei, for example, students last week were able to send one of their own to the local people's congress after a rule was abolished that permitted only a single candidate selected by the Communist Party to seek office. Perhaps more tellingly, the government for the first time in the crisis pointed an accusing finger at outsiders for fomenting student unrest, a signal to some of growing official alarm in Peking about continued student protests. The government accused Taiwan of ordering its "agents" to exploit the demonstrations, with the goal of toppling the party from power.

Chinese officials also implicitly criticized the Voice of America, which broadcasts English- and Chinese-language programming into China. The New China News Agency singled out one VOA report that quoted "independent-minded" U.S. Journalist I.F. Stone as saying that the Chinese demonstrations were a "comfort to dissidents elsewhere." VOA officials defended their decision to broadcast the remark on the grounds that support for the protesters from Stone, a longtime sympathizer with the Peking regime, was news. For all their cautious restraint so far, China's rulers last week seemed to be casting an increasingly disapproving eye on the actions of their unruly children.