But for a tiny minority of Chinese, a chill wind of repression is blowing. After a perfunctory secret trial, Zhang Shanguang, 42, was sentenced last week to 10 years in prison for ““illegally providing intelligence to hostile foreign organizations.’’ His offense: he told a reporter for the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Asia about a tax protest by a small group of farmers in Hunan province. ““Everyone knows about the event,’’ complained his wife, ““so how can this be considered a national secret?''
Zhang was one victim of a harsh new crackdown on dissidents. In the past month, the authorities have rounded up nearly 30 activists. Three leaders of a would-be opposition movement, the China Democratic Party, were sent to prison for challenging the Communist Party’s exclusive grip on power. And last week two New York-based activists who illegally slipped back into China were sentenced to three years in a labor camp.
The crackdown might already have led to a crisis in U.S.-China relations if Washington weren’t so distracted by impeachment. Certainly, the warmth generated by Bill Clinton’s visit to China last June has disappeared. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright rejected an internal proposal to host a party in Washington this month to mark the 20th anniversary of U.S.-Chinese diplomatic ties, and 60 members of Congress urged Clinton to get tough with Beijing. Relations were further strained last week when a congressional committee charged that, for 20 years now, China has improperly obtained U.S. military technology. The committee hasn’t released a declassified version of the report, but some U.S. government analysts believe that two American companies helped China significantly improve the performance of rockets that could be used to launch satellites or ballistic missiles. The companies deny wrongdoing.
Were Beijing’s arrests an overreaction to the challenge from political activists? The dissidents wanted pluralism, not revolution. ““Our original hope was to abandon mutual suspicion with the Communist Party, open up to each other and interact positively,’’ Xu Wenli, 55, a founder of the China Democratic Party, wrote after being sentenced to 13 years for subversion. But President Jiang Zemin made it clear Beijing would not tolerate any organized opposition. In a speech to police officers, he said: ““Any factors that could jeopardize our stability must be annihilated.''
An old Chinese saying–““Killing the chicken to scare the monkey’’–may explain the crackdown. Economic problems have made the regime particularly fearful of unrest. The Asian financial crisis began to lap at China’s shores just as the leadership embarked on a risky campaign to downsize inefficient state enterprises, lay off redundant workers and reduce the military’s involvement in commerce. The result: increasing unemployment and a dramatic rise in social tensions. Beijing’s nightmare is that the political intelligentsia will find among disaffected workers millions of angry allies with nothing to lose–a bonding of chickens and monkeys that could lead to revolution.
In 1999 the burden of history poses a special problem for China’s rulers. This year brings some round-number anniversaries that may stir unrest: the Tiananmen massacre (10 years), the Tibetan uprising (40 years) and the establishment of the People’s Republic (50 years). Already, Jiang is feeling pressure from party hard-liners, led by Li Peng, the former prime minister who now chairs the National People’s Congress. Li, who played a major role in the Tiananmen crackdown, recently told a German newspaper that the rise of a political opposition would invite ““chaos’’ comparable to that of the Cultural Revolution. The advocates of democracy argue that Li has it backward. Without an aboveground political opposition, they say, China will lack a peaceful escape valve for the social tensions that are likely to build up in 1999.
