TURMOIL IN CHINA: Protests For Democracy : Beijing Move to Oust Zhao Appears Stalled : No Sign of Anticipated Party Action; Troops Are Still Massed, but Life Goes On in Capital

By JIM MANN

May 31, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BEIJING — The capital passed its 10th day of nominal martial law Tuesday with China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, still unable to win enough backing to resolve the power struggle within the Communist Party leadership or to replace party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang.

According to one Western diplomat, provincial and municipal Communist Party officials who had gathered in Beijing over the weekend returned to their hometowns without taking any official action against Zhao or the reform leaders allied with him.

It had originally been expected that these party officials from around China would convene a formal, plenary session of the 175-member Communist Party Central Committee and oust Zhao from his job. Zhao refused to endorse the decision of Deng and Premier Li Peng to declare martial law in Beijing after at least half a million pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets.

“They are just not able to get the Central Committee to put out something,” said one Western European diplomat.

“If you held a formal meeting, you would have to vote on things, and I don’t think anything is settled right now,” said another diplomatic source.

Some unconfirmed reports circulating in Beijing said members of the Central Committee were kept isolated in small groups at hotels here while the hard-line supporters of Deng and Li sought to persuade and “educate” them about the importance of replacing Zhao and his allies.

The delay in any formal action by the Chinese Communist Party leaves Beijing in perhaps as strange and paradoxical a situation as any world capital has ever seen.

Outside the city, 150,000 to 300,000 troops from around the nation have massed. Yet downtown, most Beijing residents eat, sleep and work in normal fashion, seemingly unbothered by a troop strength large enough to lay siege to the city or to conquer a smaller nation.

Officially, Beijing remains under martial law. Yet it has not yet been enforced, and in the city center, at Tian An Men Square, pro-democracy demonstrators continued their encampment Tuesday, with a new Styrofoam-and-plaster “Goddess of Democracy,” modeled on America’s Statue of Liberty, serving as a new crowd-gathering attraction. Authorities quickly branded the 33-foot-high statue “an insult to the national dignity and image.”

The ruling 47-million-member Chinese Communist Party is still formally headed by Zhao, its party secretary. Yet the head of China’s ruling party has not been seen for 11 days now, is widely reported to be under house arrest and has reportedly been branded a counterrevolutionary in internal party meetings and documents.

Deng himself has not appeared in public in China since Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev wound up his summit meeting here two weeks ago. In recent days, the party leaders given the greatest prominence in the state-controlled news media have been a small group of senior or retired officials, all of whom are past the age of 80 and some of whom are too infirm to appear on television.

The most likely reason for the political stalemate here, most diplomats believe, is that the hard-line party leaders allied with Deng, Premier Li and President Yang Shangkun have not yet been able to reach a consensus on exactly what action to take against Zhao or how many other party leaders should be purged with him.

“They’ve got the main elements of their temporary solution. Li Peng is up and Zhao Ziyang is down,” said a Western diplomat. “But they haven’t settled on the nature and severity of the charges against Zhao, the kind of punishment he should get or the width of the net they will spread beyond him.”

The long delay in announcing any action against Zhao has even begun to raise some hopes here that perhaps the Communist Party Central Committee will refuse to go along with the efforts to fire him.

“We all take it for granted Zhao is out of power. But this Central Committee is Zhao’s Central Committee,” said one Asian diplomat. “One has to assume there are people loyal to him. I don’t think it will be as easy as people believe to get rid of him.”

The Central Committee was selected in November, 1987, at a time when Zhao enjoyed strong backing from Deng.

Action Could Boomerang

Another factor adding to the political uncertainty is the awareness of Chinese leaders that any action they take against Zhao now could come back to haunt them later on. Deng is now 84, and at some point, perhaps after his death, Zhao and other reform-minded leaders allied with him could regain control of the Communist Party.

“I’m sure there are voices inside the party saying, ‘If you want to call Zhao Ziyang a counterrevolutionary, be careful.’ They don’t want to make a martyr out of him,” said the West European diplomat. “They all remember the experience of 1976, and they don’t want to make the same mistakes.”

In April, 1976, with an enfeebled Mao Tse-tung in the final months of his life, Deng, then one of the party’s top leaders, was stripped of all his party and government posts for allegedly helping to instigate a huge demonstration at Tian An Men Square. After Mao’s death, some of Deng’s opponents were arrested, and he eventually took control of the Communist Party.

Even if the party manages to reach agreement on getting rid of Zhao, many of his supporters will probably remain inside the party and the government.

Too Many Allies to Purge

“They just don’t have the will to run a purge of the magnitude they need to get rid of all of Zhao’s allies,” said the Asian diplomat. “You can’t do a complete purge. People in half of China’s ministries have been on the streets (in the pro-democracy demonstrations). Many members of Communist Party organs have been out on the streets.”

Although the Chinese leadership seemed no closer Tuesday to settling its internal divisions, the regime showed signs of growing impatience with the demonstrators at Tian An Men Square.

On Tuesday, the evening news show on China’s state-controlled TV network showed film of goose-stepping People’s Liberation Army soldiers carrying AK-47 rifles on the outskirts of Beijing.

The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau reported that 11 leaders of a motorbike group called the Flying Tigers who served as messengers during the demonstrations have been arrested for “disturbing public order.”

According to the New China News Service, the Chinese motorcyclists “attacked factories and prevented military vehicles from entering Beijing. On May 20, about 100 riders rode in front of the Capital Iron and Steel Works to incite workers to go on strike.”

Beijing police officials said that the 11 arrested persons included some parolees, “rascal ruffians and idle businessmen and workers from private enterprises.”

Beijing authorities also threatened to take strong action against the “Goddess of Democracy” statue at Tian An Men Square.

The statue “is extremely disrespectful,” city officials said in a statement. “. . . People of the whole nation will also resolutely oppose it.”

A broadcast report quoted an unnamed intellectual as saying the statue should be removed by Thursday. But demonstrators showed no sign of any plans either to leave the square or to take down the “Goddess of Democracy.”

Statue Is ‘Symbol of Goals’

“It is a symbol of the goals of our movement,” one student at a Beijing university, who asked not to be identified by name, said Tuesday night. “It puts our hopes in a concrete image. Just like a national flag, this is our symbol of the national Chinese people’s movement.”

According to the British news service Reuters, students joined workers Tuesday to confront police over the fate of three missing union leaders. About 500 students and workers marched to the Ministry of Public Security and camped there after blocking the gates of Beijing’s police headquarters for over five hours to press for information on the three.

Leaders of the unofficial Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, which backs the students, said the workers had been taken away by police before dawn, apparently for taking part in pro-democracy protests. Defying warnings that their assembly was illegal under martial law, the students said they would leave only after receiving word about the three.