Crackdown on Sect Going Strong Despite Talk of Liberalization
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
November 17, 1999
Beijing - On Monday at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound, President Jiang Zemin warmly greeted U.S. officials, applauding a landmark bilateral trade agreement that commits China to far-reaching liberal economic reforms and international ties. On Tuesday, just on the other side of Chang An Avenue, President Jiang's security police forcibly detained more than a dozen members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual group, who had dared to unfurl a yellow banner and meditate in Tiananmen Square. The past 24 hours have amply illustrated the contradictory impulses that are driving China, a country that at one moment seems to be hurtling ahead toward a more open future and the next seem stuck behind in narrow Communist orthodoxy and the intolerance of the past.
On Tuesday, one day after the announcement of a trade deal that is likely to lead to World Trade Organization membership early next year, China's state controlled media uniformly gushed over the deal's benefits for business as well as for foreign relations. The pact will ''improve relations with other major powers, particularly the U.S.,'' said the Beijing Youth Daily, a newspaper that just four months ago was castigating America as an imperialist invader for its bombing in the Kosovo air war. ''There are a lot of paradoxes in China now that are difficult to resolve,'' said Minxin Pei, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington.
Many experts in an out of China, as well as President Bill Clinton, have predicted that the opening of the economy required for entry into the WTO would ultimately push China to liberalize in noneconomic spheres as well, promoting, for example, more freedom in the media and the rule of law. But for now, the contradictory facets of China remain mostly uncoupled, creating the odd juxtapositions of the past 24 hours. ''The economic dimension of China has been transformed to allow for market forces and private property,'' said He Qinglian, a noted author and economist from Shenzhen. ''But the other dimensions - politics and ideology - have changed very little. The political system has changed only as much as demanded by economic change. And in ideology, there's been very little change at all.''
This is partly because China's leaders are much more unified on the need for economic than political reform, said Mr. Pei of the Carnegie Endowment. And Chinese citizens are, for the moment, far more concerned with improving their living standards than voting, he added. But other experts point out that there is a unifying impulse behind the leader's seemingly contradictory actions: maintaining the power of the Communist Party. ''The furthering of reform and opening characterized by the WTO deal and the intensified crackdown on the sect and dissidents are both fully in line with Deng Xiaoping theory, which calls for 'both hands being aggressive,''' said a researcher at the Institute of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Theory of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He referred to policies of China's late paramount leader. He said the leaders hoped that the WTO deal would bring foreign investment to maintain high economic growth, which would in turn promote stability. ''If they can achieve these goals it can help consolidate the rule of the Communist Party, which - remember- is the most important of Deng's Four Principles.''
In the past year, the Chinese government has grown increasingly at home living in this divided world, making little effort to link liberalizing economic and social policies, with politics at home. In 1997 and 1998, in the months preceding Mr. Jiang's and Mr. Clinton's exchange state visits, the Chinese routinely released dissidents as a goodwill gesture, held few political trials, and even tolerated the development of an embryonic democratic party.
But this fall, even as Mr. Jiang toured Europe and chatted on the phone with Mr. Clinton in pursuit of a WTO agreement, Chinese courts were sentencing pro-democracy activists to long prison terms after brief trials without lawyers, and Chinese police detained thousand of members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement for practicing a form of exercise and meditation that the government had banned. Falun Gong is an idiosyncratic blend of traditional Chinese exercises and Buddhist and Taoist religious beliefs. It was widely popular among middle-aged Chinese for its supposed health benefits before the government banned it in July. Ever since, the government has been conducting an old-style Maoist propaganda campaign to wipe out what it has labeled an ''evil sect,'' complete with re-education for members and detention or labor camps for those who continue to practice it. But in a China now filled with Internet cafés and Hong Kong cable TV, campaigns do not work like they used to, and this one has fallen flat both among more devoted practitioners and many Chinese who see the group as mostly harmless.
On Tuesday, a crisp fall morning, a dozen or so practitioners unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square reading ''The Great Law of Falun'' and held out their hands to begin their exercises, a small protest designed to attract the attention of Secretary-General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, who is visiting Beijing this week. Police officers - on bicycles, in vans and on foot - were out in large numbers, and the protesters were kicked and then shoved into vans, which sped out of the square, witnesses said. One women, a bystander, was hit by the van as it raced away. She did not appear to be seriously injured. Experts say it is unclear how long China's leaders can aggressively open their economy to the outside world while pursuing a totally closed political system at home. ''I think the whole process of economic pluralism inevitably leads to pluralism in ideology and other spheres, because it leads to diversity of economic interests which in turn produces distinctive needs and values,'' said Miss He, the author.
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