Peking hardliners hold on to power

Press, 25 May 1989, Page 8

Peking hardliners hold on to power

NZPA-Reuter Peking Hardline Chinese leaders held on to power yesterday in a struggle with reformists but the Army still appeared to be refusing full support for military action against a rebellion for democracy in Peking.

Asian diplomats said the attitude of the Army, which stepped in to ensure reformists defeated the “Gang of Four” after Mao Tse-tung’s death in 1976, might-finally decide the outcome of the struggle.

Students in Tiananmen Square, whose five weeks of democracy protests have sparked the biggest anti-Government protests since the communists took power in 1949, camped out there again overnight and more marchers poured in during the morning. The students vowed to keep up their vigil until the hardline Prime Minister, Li Peng, resigned and the authorities reversed official criticism of their movement. Official Chinese media gave conflicting signals on the progress of the power play, issuing messages of support for Mr Li but also, in at least one report, favouring his rival, the

Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang. The “People’s Daily,” the party newspaper, printed on its front page messages of support for Mr Li from party committees in the Air Force, the Navy, two provincial military districts and seven provincial party organisations.

But the messages appeared to hint that not all the military forces were readily obeying orders from the party and the central military commission, headed by the senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, aged 84, which is widely believed to be backing the hardliners. . “The party committee of the Air Force appealed to all personnel to follow firmly the directives of the party centre and the military commission in order to make a contribution towards suppressing chaos and protecting social order,” the newspaper quoted one message as saying.

The Army moved convoys of troops to the edge of Peking as Mr Li declared martial law on Saturday to end the popular uprising but thousands of students and ordinary citizens blocked their way.

The Army sat for three days without taking decisive action and most of the troops now appear to have withdrawn to barracks.

The media report favouring Mr Zhao was an item issued overnight by the New China News Agency, saying a million people had marched through Peking on Tuesday chanting slogans against Mr Li — 10 times the number of protesters estimated by Reuter correspondents watching the marches.

State radio reported yesterday that the Thai Prime Minister, Chatichai Choonhavan, had invited Mr Zhao to visit Bangkok, another sign that Mr Zhao was surviving.

Western diplomats said

the picture was still highly confused. “All these statements of support have been pretty well engineered,” a Western diplomat commented. “I don’t think it means very much except that the party apparatus is still working.” “It simply looks that there continues to be a power struggle and there is no agreed line at the top,” he said. The diplomats said China’s leadership met in crisis session on Tuesday but contradictory accounts emerged from the meeting.

While some accounts spoke of Mr Li under pressure to resign, other sources said Mr Zhao, aged 69, stood accused by the party politburo of “four crimes”, including weakness in the face of the student pro-demo-cracy movement and giving away State secrets to the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who visited China last week.