400 Arrested as China Gears Up to Choke Off Dissent

BEIJING — As China’s sophisticated apparatus of repression geared up to reassert strict political controls, state-run television announced Saturday the arrests in Beijing of more than 400 people.

Additional arrests were made elsewhere of protesters who fled the capital after last weekend’s martial-law crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, according to the television report. These came in surrounding Hebei province, the cities of Tianjin, Shanghai, Wuhan, and other locations, it said.

Those arrested were accused of burning military vehicles, destroying other government property, beating soldiers, stealing weapons, attacking government agencies or spreading rumors.

Also on Saturday, China carried out its first expulsion of a foreign journalist since the current crisis began, and authorities launched a harsh verbal attack on the Voice of America, a key source of information about events here for many Chinese listeners.

Propaganda Barrage

In a heavy propaganda barrage that began several days ago, the official media outlets are portraying last weekend’s bloody crackdown, which ended seven weeks of escalating pro-democracy protests, as a response to violent “counterrevolutionary” rioting.

This reverses the actual order of events. The weeks of pro-democracy demonstrations, which began in mid-April, were nonviolent and usually festive.

The rioting, which involved heavy destruction of military vehicles and the killing of some soldiers, came as a response to the deaths of hundreds or perhaps thousands of unarmed people in Beijing as martial-law troops, using automatic weapons and tanks, moved into the city a week ago Saturday night and the next morning to clear protesters from Tian An Men Square.

Most deaths were of Beijing citizens who poured into the streets to try to block the military assault on the square. A large majority of the several thousand students who remained in the center of the square through the pre-dawn hours Sunday--and perhaps nearly all of them--were allowed to leave shortly before dawn. They left the southern side of the square and dispersed through the city.

Foreign correspondents in Beijing generally remain uncertain about what happened in the northern part of the huge square during the final half-hour before dawn, as it appears that no foreigner was able to fully witness events in the area during that critical period. Chinese who claim to be eyewitnesses give conflicting reports about what happened.

What is absolutely clear is that hundreds of unarmed citizens were killed on the western side of the city as advancing troops fought their way through crowds, and that at least several dozen people were shot and killed on Changan Avenue, at the north side of the square, during the early morning hours Sunday before the protesters at the center of the square were forced south.

The Chinese Red Cross initially reported that night’s death toll as 2,600, and estimates widely circulated within the diplomatic community put the figure at 3,000 or more. The Chinese government, however, now insists that only about 300 people died and that the majority were soldiers.

It appears that proof of the true figures will never be obtained. Bodies have already been cremated, and for Chinese to claim that the government figures are wrong is now the martial-law crime of “spreading rumors.”

Many of the destroyed military vehicles, including armored personnel carriers, were abandoned during the day Sunday by troops presumed at the time to be unwilling to kill unarmed citizens. It now appears that the vehicles may have been ordered abandoned for the purpose of obtaining dramatic videotapes of destruction by supposed counterrevolutionaries. These videotapes are now being repeatedly shown on state-run television.

Propaganda Barrage

In Beijing, it appears that few people believe the government line. But the current propaganda barrage may have a strong influence on people in outlying provinces. Even for those who know the government reports are false, it has become dangerous to publicly deny them. There are also severe, but somewhat ambiguous, restrictions on foreign reporting on events in Beijing.

Some journalists were shot or beaten while covering the army’s move into Tian An Men Square last weekend, but none were killed or critically injured. In recent days, authorities have issued vague warnings to foreigners that appear aimed in part at chilling news coverage of the current wave of arrests. Some correspondents have been issued specific warnings that they have violated martial-law rules. But there has not been any concerted effort to impose a genuine news blackout on the Chinese capital.

On Saturday, Peter Newport, a journalist with London-based Independent Television News, was ordered out of China after trying to cover a student protest in Shanghai, according to reports from that coastal city.

An ITN spokesman in London told Reuters news agency that police destroyed Newport’s videocassettes and gave him 24 hours to leave China. He later arrived in Hong Kong, the agency said.

Tourist Visa

It appeared that the pretext on which Newport was expelled was that he was working on a tourist visa, according to reports from Shanghai.

The government also issued harsh criticism Saturday of the Voice of America, which beams English- and Chinese-language broadcasts to China. A letter said to have been written by an unidentified teacher accused the radio station of false reporting.

“The teacher described the report by Voice of America as irresponsible, saying that it aimed at instigating hatred and resistance,” the official New China News Agency said in a report. The letter was also published in the official People’s Daily newspaper and broadcast on state-run radio.

One of the martial-law press restrictions is that “Chinese or foreign journalists are strictly forbidden to utilize press coverage to make instigating and inciting propaganda.” The wording of the letter thus appeared aimed at preparing the groundwork for some sort of action against Voice of America.

Another VOA attack came during the evening television news. A man identified as a “rumormonger” was shown telling a foreign reporter and a small crowd of listeners that martial-law troops had crushed and beaten people to death. He first claimed to be an eyewitness, but then changed his story to say that he had heard it on Voice of America. The scene concludes with the narrator declaring: “We hope the people will turn in rumormongers like him.”

The television news announcement on the arrests in Beijing reported that among those detained was student leader Guo Haifeng. According to the report, he was arrested at Tian An Men Square when he was about to use a gasoline-filled bottle to try to set fire to an armored car.

Vigilant Residents

News announcers said that some student leaders had given themselves up or had been turned in by vigilant residents of Beijing who answered a request to phone in the whereabouts of “inciters of the counterrevolutionary rebellion.”

The broadcast showed some of the detainees being led at gunpoint by a phalanx of police into interrogation cells. Their heads were forced down by guards in a ritual display of submission.

One by one, they sat forlornly in a corner, evidently giving self-incriminating evidence to a pair of note takers. Then they were handcuffed and led away.

The media have identified most of those arrested simply as “ruffians” and lawbreakers, and it is not clear how many are students. But it appears that many, if not most, of those arrested so far are not students.

The arrests were viewed by foreign observers as a sign that government power had been consolidated, at least for the moment. The night before, senior leader Deng Xiaoping appeared on television in the company of hard-line conservative leaders and a flock of army generals. Saturday’s edition of the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, and every other paper in the city published a front-page picture of Deng alone shaking hands with army officers.

“The message seemed to be that this is the man who controls the guns,” said a Western diplomat, referring to the photo.

Fall From Grace

Nothing has been heard of reformist leader Zhao Ziyang, who is technically still the head of the Communist Party but who fell from grace for sympathizing with student demands and opposing the crackdown.

The bulk of the arrests seemed to be carried out by combined police-army sweeps in neighborhoods in Beijing. Soldiers have fanned out to all neighborhoods of the city, converting what was once martial law in word only into a very visible reality.

The government has taken pains to get the city back to normal after a week of chaos, but most residents remained indoors. Bus service was renewed on a limited basis, and many shops and factories remained closed. Most roads were cleared of debris left from the popular resistance to the army’s move on the square.

Despite the wave of arrests and the more widespread positioning of martial-law troops--who stood 50 feet apart along some stretches of major roads and engaged in foot patrols through other areas--the random shootings of the past few days subsided and it seemed reasonably safe Saturday to move through the city.

Tian An Men Square, however, was blocked off except for city bus traffic allowed to pass through its northern side along Changan Avenue.

Pedestrians and bicyclists who passed the southern side of the square gawked at 10 tanks parked to face them, but they were quickly shooed along by armed soldiers if they paused too long.

Voice of Anguish

“Why did they have to do this?” one Chinese bicyclist said with anguish in her voice as she passed the square. “It was perfectly peaceful on June 3.”

Short convoys of empty troop trucks, usually about five vehicles long, moved out of the city Saturday afternoon bearing banners declaring “People’s Liberation Army rice-for-the-people transport team.” By early evening, the same or similar trucks, apparently laden with supplies for the troops still occupying Tian An Men Square, were parked behind the Great Hall of the People, which faces the square.

Parked in the main part of the square Saturday evening were about 50 tanks and about 300 apparently empty troop transport trucks. Soldiers armed with automatic rifles stood guard at the four corners of the square, while a few tanks and armored personnel carriers were positioned at two locations outside but near the square.

A group of about 90 Americans were bused from the coastal city of Tianjin to Beijing in a U.S. Embassy convoy, with the intention that they would immediately leave the country from Beijing airport on a special flight. The flight was delayed, however, for reasons that were not clear.

The diplomatic motorcade from Beijing had to leave one American couple behind. The two had not completed the final legal formality for adoption of their Chinese-born infant, and under U.S. law it was impossible to issue the child a visa.

Another evacuee, Don Wycoff, a 39-year-old research chemist from St. Louis, said repression of the student pro-democracy movement would cost China a whole generation of future leaders.

“The Chinese haven’t had this kind of repression before,” Wycoff said. “Before, it was political repression, with mass movements and all that. This time it was sheer force by the police and army. It will take 15 years to repair the damage--at least.”

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing organized the motorcade to take the foreigners to Beijing, where they could catch flights out of the country, after U.S. business people stationed in Tianjin were unable to arrange transportation. John P. Cragin, president of Management Technologies International Inc., a Tianjin-based consulting firm, said the Americans were refused a special flight, and when buses were privately chartered Thursday, police barred the drivers from leaving.

“We felt trapped here,” said Cragin, whose home is in Los Angeles. “They wouldn’t even let us on an empty plane.”

Saturday’s television news showed Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong addressing a meeting and calling for a moment of silence to honor the soldiers and police officers who died during the assault on the square. He also accused those who resisted the troops of having engaged in rioting.

China News Inside

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CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE--The status of Americans employed at Occidental Petroleum’s coal mine project is suddenly in doubt.: Page 9

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