STILL VERY FLAT, SHANGHAI

China's shrewdest city stands to do well out of the bloodbath in Peking, reports Murray Sayle

Shanghai ARRIVING two weeks ago at the dead of night the only foreigner on a thinly patro- nised last flight from Hong Kong and being disinclined to pronounce the word 'Hilton', I directed my taxi driver to take me to the venerable Peace Hotel in the heart of China's biggest city. The convenient balco- nies and choice location of the Peace on the corner of Nanjing Road and the Bund would, I reasoned, give me an excellent view of the hew Chinese civil war then generally expected to break out at any minute.

Sentiment may have coloured my profes- sional judgment. The now dowdy Peace was formerly the fabulous Hotel Cathay, completed in 1930 by the cotton and opium tycoon E.V. Sassoon (of the poetry and hairdressing family) and it was in the newly opened Cathay that Noel Coward wrote most of Private Lives. I have often fancied that the view over the dreary mudflats of Pudong and the grey tile roofs stretching from Suzhou Creek to the horizon may

`It'll never never get off the ground.' well have inspired the Master, scribbling in a silk dressing-gown between drags on a long jade cigarette holder, the deathless line, `very flat, Norfolk'.

Certainly the doomed, brilliant Shanghai of the interwar years was very much our Noel's speed. With three English naval officers he visited 'the lower and gayer haunts of the city' with its cosmopolitan bars, taxi dancers, sing-song girls and opium dens freely serving only the best of British, shipped in by P&O from fat-off Assam. 'It is life itself wrote Aldotis Huxley, another dazzled Shanghai visitor of the 1920s. 'Dense, rank, richly clotted life. Nothing more intensely living can be imagined.' All this glitter rested on a total absence of taxes for foreign and Chinese entrepreneurs and the labours of millions of peasants who flocked into Shanghai to work around the clock in the textile mills and engineering works where, in a typical case, one lucky general manager drew the Yearly wages of 14,070 of his industrious workers.

No one was more scandalised by what primitive industrial capitalism looks like close up than the band of young intellec- tuals who gathered there in the 1920s, inspired by the latest foreign intellectual fad, Lenin's rewrite of Marxism. Thete was tall and skinny Mao Tse-tung, former chairman of the library committee of Changsha Normal School, one of the 12 Chinese plus one Comintern agent who founded the Chinese Communist Party in a girls' school in the French Concession closed for the summer holidays of 1921, a little later Chou En-lai, son of a mandarin, fluent in French, soon to be joined by short and bouncy Deng Xiaoping, another idealistic Paris veteran who worked under- ground with the Shanghai Communist Par- ty until the brutal police crackdown of 1929.

These self-righteous young men saw in industrial Shanghai not modernisation but the self-indulgence of vile old men, traitors to their country and culture. Mao and his comrades proposed a shining path, quite different, for China - a land simple and pure, where men freed from greed and dissension would live as equals and brothers under the leadership of the CCP. The clash of sincere youth and corrupt, worldly old age is deep in Chinese history and not very different from that which motivates the followers of the Revd Sun Myung Moon, the late Ayatollah Khomeini or, for that matter, rebellious and credulous youth down the ages.

In the fulness of time Mao's vision came to pass, more or less. In power he became stout and paranoid, the party he helped create complacent and disobedient. Mao turned to the next generation of idealistic youngsters to tear down the mighty (him-

self excluded) from their seats and once again cleanse corrupt China in a fiery furnace. The Red Guards began their reign of terror in Shanghai, and scarcely was the Chairman cold in his mausoleum than his fourth wife, the former Shanghai movie starlet Jiang Jing, now ringleader of the Gang of Four, used the former Sassoon racing stables in suburban Shanghai as operational headquarters for her bid to make herself first Chairwoman of the People's Republic.

She failed, of course, but her logic, that no Chinese revolution will get far without the workers and intellectuals of its biggest city, still seemed sound as I passed customs on a sultry Shanghai night two weeks ago. A man in plain clothes studied me intently, as if he'd seen me somewhere before. An immigration official in uniform scarcely glanced at my tourist visa as he stamped me in. No one opened the innocent- looking shoulder-bag in which I had hope- fully concealed a tiny video-camera (is there any crisis from which the Japanese reap no profits?), the great two-handed engine of regular television coverage being, after the stunning footage of Tianan- men, far too conspicuous to be brought into China or used in public, and now, I suspect, obsolete, a relic of lost innocence.

Unexpectedly, I found Shanghai in a flat calm. Policemen lolled on street corners, sweaty men in singlets played billiards on open-air tables under bare lightbulbs, pam- pered children (the one-child law is strictly enforced in this sardine-packed city) slurped noodles under the eyes of indul- gent parents. At the Peace I could have, they said, any room I wanted. The guest book listed painters, teachers and company directors, but almost everyone I saw was a journalist. We had noisy reunions from as far back as that sad forerunner, the Prague spring of '68, but in Shanghai, '89, they said, there was nothing to photograph and not much to write about. The local party boss, one Jiang Zemin (no friend of the foreign press it seemed), had the city sewn up.

Shanghai is not under martial law, and reporting by foreign journalists is not, as such, forbidden, although no more are being let in. But an order circulated to consulates requires reporters to give ten days' notice of their intention to cover `special events'. These are riots, demon- strations, arrests, trials and executions news, in short — none of which is announced in advance. The authorities refuse to accept a blind booking for any special event occurring ten days hence. Only accurately foreseen events can, there- fore, be covered. Nice one, Jiang. Reporters here are therefore reduced, like the rest of China, to watching televi- sion, talking to people we meet, and trying to make sense of a blur of events. Chinese television shows a seemingly efficient police repression in action nationwide (and China is, as Noel said, very big): endless mugshots taken from student registration cards of wanted young people, ages 19, 20, 22 and thereabouts, occasionally some five or six years older, probably junior teachers (several have been picked up on trains); clandestine black-and-white police surveill- ance films of meetings of students in restaurants and cafeterias; suspects drag- ged before the camera in the humiliating pose Chinese call the letplane', arms twisted behind their backs; interminable meetings of provincial and municipal bran- ches of the communist party where cadres who look like prosperous alderinen from quiet shires condemn the counter- revolution and laud the heroic army for repressing it; weeping widows of soldiers who allegedly died fighting the 'rebellion' being comforted by elderly generals; views of bandaged soldiers in hospital, some with limbs in traction, and gruesome shots of the charred bodies of others, one with an unburnt army cap stuck on his head as proof of who they say he was.

From this propaganda, all we can deduce with any certainty is that there was a harsh moment of truth in Peking on 4 June and the rest of the country a day or so later, but what the truth was is still not obvious, and meanwhile the world has been vertiginous- ly turned upside down. The predicted Chinese civil war never got going, and Deng Xiaoping, only yesterday the cud- dliest communist of our time now stands unmasked as a poison dwarf, his policy of pragmatically bedding down with com- plaisant capitalists apparently in ruins. The bruising shock has been worldwide, and nowhere more than in Hong Kong, where hopes built on illusion flourished highest.

Insulated from the passions of both Peking and Hong Kong, the peaceful Peace in Shanghai has given an opportun- ity to ponder the press of events, and the news that the wily Jiang is now general secretary of the whole party and thus number two in Peking suggests that the suspicious calm here somehow fits into the puzzle. All accounts agree that the cycle which culminated in Tiananmen began with the death of Jiang's predecessor but one, Hu Yaobang, in Peking on 15 April, and this solemn occasion gives us a conve- nient starting point.

Hu had two attributes to make his funeral important to the students; he had been dismissed for being too tolerant of their campaign to embarrass the govern- ment, and he was dead, an event which sentimental Chinese, like the Irish, regard as allowing a certain licence to mourners to go beyond the normal bounds of conven- tion. A previous wave of student unrest, it will be recalled, began similarly at the funeral of Chou En-lai in 1976 and ended with the rehabilitation of the disgraced Deng Xiaoping and the installation of the present Chinese leadership/dictatorship in power. Again the students followed the well-worn track, abandoning study, pre- paring posters calling for the resignation of top government and party officials, and marching to Tiananmen Square.

On the evening of 19 April the local police baton-charged a crowd of some 5,000 students in the square, only to have an even larger number of townspeople join them. The square was temporarily cleared after some 300 students and sympathisers were beaten up. The students were back in the square for the funeral of a Marxist hero who had performed 'immortal' deeds. A deputation of students was allowed in to the Great Hall of the People for a dialogue with a high official, still unidentified, who reportedly assured the demonstrators of their personal safety. The entire proceed- ings served both to rehabilitate Hu and, the students believed, confirm their belief that they had hit on a technique for winning debates with the government and even influencing policy without the con- sequences normal under dictatorial regimes.

On 26 April a People's Daily editorial warned that the students, by their con- tinued occupation of the square were fomenting dai luau and should desist forth- with and return to their classrooms. This expression, which has been translated as 'turmoil' or 'rebellion' literally means 'big chaos' and in the Confucian tradition is a very serious charge indeed, with no real Western equivalent — when big chaos reigns the established order collapses, rice is unplanted, the canals silt up, the people die. Anyone promoting big chaos is a public enemy, outcast from the commun- ity, not worthy to live.

What, then did the students want? Their demands are generally described as 'vague calls for democracy'. Under examination they turn out to be rather more concrete, and to have been widely misrepresented. The first was the retraction of the 26 April editorial. All along they insisted they were reformers of the communist system, not rebels against it. Two townsfolk who splashed paint on the huge portrait of Mao which has presided benignly over all the horrific events in Tiananmen were apprehended by students and turned over to the police. Many students displayed 'A feature film in 81/2 minutes.' portraits of Mao and Chou, and some even waved Little Red Books, now unprocur- able, which must have been treasured like family Bibles.

Next the students wanted free speech and an end to corruption. The desired free speech was not Hyde Park Corner style cacophany — they already had something like that — but specifically the freedom and facilities to expose corruption. By corruption they meant the abuse of public office for private gain, and this is the issue on which they attracted mass support all over China, with eventually something very like big chaos looking briefly on the cards.

This corruption is a direct consequence of the liberal economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping. Communist China now has nearly half a million private and semi-private enterprises, 225,000 of them in the coastal cities. The Peking police, for instance, are in the restaurant business. The People's Liberation Army opened their new hotel in Peking, the Palace, just three months ago. This 40-storey mon- strosity, lined with imported Carrara mar- ble is a joint venture with Filipino interests at whose suggestion two gold-finished Rolls Royces wait permanently outside to whisk guests to the Great Wall. The People's Liberation Navy operates ship- ping world-wide and thus collects a rake- off from all imports including, it is said, smuggled cars and even buses. More generally, raw materials and goods made in state-owned factories are released to these myriads of private enterprises at prices set by officials who are members of, or close to the Communist Party. All political com- missars attached to the Army are party members and so are most ambitious offic- ers and businessmen.

'Squeeze' has thus entered the entire system to the benefit of the party-army- business triumvirate. China's problems are thus not so much accountability in the political area as accountancy in the Fraud Squad sense, one of the many institutions indispensible to capitalism which Deng Xiaoping in his innocence failed to intro- duce. The outward and visible sign of corruption or, more precisely, the divided market/flat pricing mechanism is wide- spread unemployment and galloping infla- tion, the latter, interestingly in inverse relationship to the severity of the recent troubles, running at 25 per cent in Peking, 30 per cent in Shanghai and 40 per cent in Canton where there was scarcely a flicker in response to events in the north.

The students' insistence that they were not anti-communist, highly embarrassing to the authorities, was thus by no means a tactical manoeuvre, but romantic nostalgia for the purity of the Mao years (which the students were too young to have personally endured) the rock-ribbed egalitarianism of the Chairman's spell in the caves of Yenan, which the students were symbolically re- creating in their makeshift shelters on the concrete wilderness of Tiananmen. Far from taking up Adam Smith Thought, the students saw themselves as the young Maos and Chous of their generation defending their Chinese spiritual birthright against alien pollution — one of their demands was for a stronger stance by the leadership against economic encroachment by the Japanese, who after a decent interval of two weeks are now leading the business- men's rush back to Peking. Why, then the students' Statue of Liber- ty and frequent citations of Thomas Jeffer- son and the Gettysburg Address, which non-American English-speakers would not Instantly identify as the source of their,or anyone's liberties, preferring perhaps a replica of Big Ben or a weeping bust of Bob Hawke? The references have been immensely flattering to Americans (and thus doubly embarrassing to Deng Xiaop- ing) because they sound just like a high school civics lecture, which is no doubt their ultimate source — many of the younger lecturers at Peking studied in the United States, and real American students at the university were prominent in night- long dormitory discussions with their Chinese colleagues.

It is easy, therefore, to see in retrospect why the authorities initially treated the student's heroic camp-in at Tiananmen so circumspectly. The current Chinese con- stitution allows freedom of assembly, and the government itself constantly denounces corruption and occasionally shoots a bla- tant offender. Sandwiched between the visits of Deng's old bridge partner, George Bush, and the guru of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev, they had the television eyes of the world, East and West upon them, and a very real dilemma about what, if anything to do about peaceful pro-communist pro- test. Accounts of what happened next are split across the best-known divide of histor- iography, that the otherwise inexplicable is either the result of a cock-up (c/u) or conspiracy (consp.) and, China being big, backward and devious, elements of both no doubt shaped the final catastrophe. When it rains in China, they say, there must have been a plot in the Politburo.

Gorbachev came, fraternised, and went. On 19 May, the then Party General Secret- ary Zhao Ziyang, who was also vice- chairman of the Central Military Commis- sion and reportedly hand-picked by Deng to shepherd China further along the capi- talist road, visited Tiananmen and talked to the students, who by then, scenting success, had begun hunger-striking and being rushed to hospital at prime time to enforce their demands that the leadership disclose their salaries and perks and debate with them on television. Zhao was either trying to talk them into going home (c/u) or seeking to encourage them in a bid to topple Deng Xiaoping (consp.) Neither, in the event, happened, and next day martial law was declared in Peking, with a promise that the army would nevertheless not be used against the people (read students). This promise was either meant at the time (c/u) or was a ploy to get the army closer to Tiananmen without fighting (consp.).

The result, however, was that the de- monstrators built roadblocks on all the approaches to the square — largely symbo- lic affairs made out of the portable railings around flower beds — and the students' careful insistence that their aim was reform and their method non-violent began to erode as more and more 'townspeople' joined them. The night before the final showdown, an army battalion wearing uniform trousers and civil tee-shirts marched into Tiananmen, were instantly recognised and beaten up, some severely, and driven out by the demonstrators. This was either (c/u) a harebrained last try to clear the square by a ruse, without lethal violence, or (consp.) a plot by the army command to crush any sympathy the troops may have had with the students. Meanwhile some of the soldiers approaching roadblocks were attacked by the crowd, and a small number were burnt in or alongside their vehicles.

At four a.m. next morning, a classically military hour, the lights of Tiananmen were extinguished and the remaining de- monstrators lit the prepared fires which are so dramatic in the television coverage. Armoured vehicles broke through the roadblocks, shooting at demonstrators who resisted them and probably at many who did not. In the square there was a lot of shooting in the air (the television films clearly show 45 degree tracer) and some that was not. Most of the demonstrators went home, as Richard Nations reported in The Spectator, but a few made a fight of it and were cut down. From dawn on there was a lot of what the military would call mopping up, and plainer folk describe as shooting at anything that moved around the square. In all a maximum of 1,000 dead in Peking, perhaps 20 of them soldiers, up to 200 students is as good an estimate as we are likely to get. Some of the dead were out-of-town students and other sympathis- ers who had rushed to Peking to join the protest, some travelling free on the trains.

Meanwhile, the Peking violence was being shown to the whole Chinese nation on television, far more than any individual could possibly have witnessed, either (consp.) to show the heroism of the army, and who was boss, or (c/u) because no one thought to tell the television news people not to. The reports led to more protest riots and demonstrations throughout the country, the severest in Chengdu, where a department store was burnt out, the most ominous (from the viewpoint of the Peking authorities) in Shanghai, where demon- strators tried to block the main railway line, a train reportedly carrying the mail ran them down, killing six, and the enraged crowd set fire to the train. Three 'hooli- gans', reportedly belonging to something called 'The Wild Goose Dare-to-Die Team' were arrested, tried and have already been shot for destroying state property. The Party boss and former mayor who defused explosive Shanghai so expeditiously, Jiang Zemin is now in the hot seat successively vacated by Hu and Zhao.

What are we to make of all this? The conspiratorial view that the whole ghastly mess was a ploy by Deng to isolate his protege Zhao and then sack him would seem, like the ancient Chinese method of roasting pork by burning down the house, hard to swallow. The c/u analysis, that a man of 84 lost his grip on events and underlings could not agree on what to do, seems more plausible, and gains colour from a report that Deng was away part of the time with prostate trouble.

The immediate consequences, however, are clearer. The China tourist trade has, for the moment, dried up. But free enter- prise brothels are already operating over the border from Hong Kong, and taxi- dancing and sing-song girls have, I am told, made a discreet return to Shanghai. The army-Party-bureaucrat triad has shown that it can handle dissent, all the more harshly because of a real glimpse of big chaos, and it stands even readier to do business with anyone with money to spend. Thin as the chance is, crude exploitative capitalism under a corrupt authoritarian regime seems the only prospect China now has of a low-level niche in the world economy, let alone ever catching up with the computerised capitalist leaders. The cruellest disappointment has been felt in Hong Kong, whose people really thought, for a heady moment, that peace- ful methods that might work against a benign colonial government could reshape China itself before the calendar runs out on them — but then again Hong Kong is the source of much of the money that is corrupting their big neighbour, and money is something Hong Kong has, uses and understands. All honour, then, to the idealistic young martyrs of Tianamen and, if you fancy such things, book now for the gala reopening of the fabulous Hotel Cathay in clever, cowed, corrupt Shanghai.