China faces dark memory of Tiananmen

 A protester shouts pro-democracy slogans during a mass rally in Beijing on 17 May 1989

 Pro-democracy campaigner Szeto Wah (right) at a protest outside the Legislative Council in Hong Kong

 Security personnel seal off a street leading to Tiananmen Square in Beijing in August 2008

By Robert J. Saiget

BEIJING (AFP) — Authorities in China are bracing for the 20th anniversary of the deadly June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, a pivotal moment that still haunts the nation.The way the government will likely mark the sensitive date on Thursday -- with deafening silence -- shows it is keenly aware of the emotional scars that remain after the army ended six weeks of peaceful rallies in central Beijing.

China's Communist leaders have made any discussion of the brutal quelling of the student-led demonstrations -- in which hundreds, maybe thousands, were killed -- taboo, but dissidents say the public could yet hold them accountable.

"People remember this date because they want the Communist Party to take responsibility for the crimes it committed," said 53-year-old Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg after being shot by troops near Tiananmen Square.

"It reminds them the party will resort to unbridled violence whenever it feels threatened."

In a bid not to rankle the wary authorities, the main public commemoration planned for Thursday will probably be silent.

Activist groups have called on citizens simply to wear white -- the traditional colour of mourning -- to honour those killed in the mayhem that erupted when tanks and troops rolled in to crush the protests.

The year 1989 was a disastrous one for communism across the globe and in China the ruling party found itself in a struggle with democracy activists who challenged its authoritarian rule over the world's most populous nation.

The Tiananmen movement began in mid-April, when public grief over the death of former party leader and popular reformer Hu Yaobang gradually morphed into bold calls from students for political reform and steps to combat corruption.

Young students started to occupy Tiananmen Square, the symbolic centre of political power in China. A sense of euphoria saturated the plaza as they took part in rallies no one would have thought possible just weeks earlier.

"There were banners everywhere. This was the first unauthorised political demonstration in the (history of the) People's Republic of China," recalled one of the student leaders, Wang Dan.

Calls for democracy and freedom filled the square, thousands went on hunger strike, and one charismatic activist, Wu'er Kaixi, brazenly challenged Premier Li Peng during a meeting broadcast live on state television.

Indeed, the whole world was watching, as news crews from around the globe gathered in Beijing to cover the historic visit by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, only to stumble upon an event that would be far more significant.

In the corridors of power, the protests drove a wedge between hardline leaders led by Premier Li and moderates headed by Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang.

The hardliners won, with patriarch Deng Xiaoping, China's most powerful man, tilting the balance in their favour. Zhao was removed from his post as party leader and spent 16 years under house arrest until his death in 2005.

The student movement was declared a "counterrevolutionary rebellion", and soldiers of the People's Liberation Army descended on the capital, crushing the democratic dreams of an entire generation.

The number of people killed in the night of June 3-4 remains a mystery. China's official death toll is 241, including 36 students. Dissidents say thousands may have died.

The crackdown set off a wave of condemnation across the globe, and for several years China was treated as a near-pariah, as Western governments offered asylum to student leaders fleeing into exile.

The international community has long since welcomed China back into the fold, and Beijing's communist leaders have cemented their hold on power, transforming the country into the world's number three economy.

But they have shown no willingness to change their position that the protests threatened Communist Party rule and had to be quelled in order to maintain economic reforms.

"Facts have proven that the socialist road with Chinese characteristics that we pursue is in the fundamental interests of our people," foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told journalists in May.

But, undeterred, victims of the crackdown have called for renewed international pressure on Beijing to reverse the official verdict on the quelling, saying failure to stand up to a rising China tacitly abets the repression.

"So far, the international community... has adopted a policy of appeasement towards the Chinese government," said Ding Zilin, 72, whose teenage son was shot dead by the army.

Bao Tong -- a former aide to Zhao who was jailed for seven years following the crackdown -- said the world has failed to push China to be more open about the events of Tiananmen because of Beijing's increasing global clout.

"Not wanting to offend China means they cannot help China, cannot help China's people attain their own rights, and cannot help the world community gain a reliable, stable, peaceful member," Bao told AFP recently.

"This is not a good thing," he added.

Bao has since been ordered to sit out the anniversary at a resort more than 1,000 kilometres (625 miles) from Beijing -- evidence that the authorities in the capital are not yet ready to reopen the Tiananmen wounds.

Web-savvy & cynical: China's youth since Tiananmen

By ALEXA OLESEN 
KAIFENG, China (AP) — Twenty years ago, on the night of June 3, rumors were flying about an impending military crackdown against demonstrators in Beijing. 

That's when Feng Shijie's wife went into labor in his hometown, Kaifeng.

The baby born the next morning, June 4, is now an undergraduate at Kaifeng University. 

After class, he plays games online or shoot hoops at a campus basketball court. He can list the latest Hollywood releases and NBA stats. But he knows next to nothing about the pro-democracy movement that ended in a bloody crackdown the day he was born.

"My parents told me some incident happened on Tiananmen Square on my birthday but I don't know the details," says Feng Xiaoguang, an upbeat graphic design student in faux Nike shoes and an imitation Prada shirt.

Xiaoguang is one of China's 200 million so-called 'post-1980' kids — a generation of mostly single children, thanks to the one-child policy, born on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom. Aged between 20 and 30, they are Web-savvy, worldly, fashion-conscious — and largely apolitical.

Asked what kind of reform the Tiananmen students were after, Xiaoguang says he doesn't know.

"Did it have something to do with the conflicts between capitalism and socialism?" he asks.

It would be hard for him to know more. The subject is taboo. The demonstrations are classified as a counter-revolutionary riot and rarely mentioned in public. Textbooks touch on them fleetingly, if at all.

Few young people are aware that millions of students, workers and average people gathered peacefully in Beijing and other cities over seven weeks in early 1989 to demand democratic reform and an end to corruption. 

They are not told how communist authorities finally silenced the dissent with deadly force, killing hundreds.

Chinese leaders today argue that juggernaut growth and stability since the early 1990's prove that quelling the uprising was the right choice. 

Indeed, young Chinese people are materially better off now than they have perhaps ever been, with annual income per capital soaring to about 19,000 yuan ($2,760) in 2007, up from just 380 yuan ($55) in 1978.

But the tradeoff has been that young Chinese have no real role in shaping their country's future — and may not be very interested in having one.

An official survey released this month found 75 percent of college students hoped to join the Communist Party, but 56 percent of those said they would do so to "boost their chances of finding a good job." 

The rest wanted to join for personal honor — 29 percent — while 15 percent were motivated by faith in communism, said the Internet survey of 12,018 students by the People's Tribune.

An accompanying commentary said students today are clearly "cold" about politics and cited concern from education experts about "extreme egotism" among the youth.

At Peking University, a hub for the 1989 protests, only one political group cracked the top 15 extracurricular clubs — the elite Marxism Youth Study Group, reputed to be good for career networking.

The generation that demonstrated on Tiananmen Square grew up surrounded by political discussion, scripted as it often was, and lived through mass movements that demanded full public participation, notably the tumultuous Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.

But the 1989 crackdown put an end to most public debate on the topic of whither China. Few now risk serious political discussion even behind closed doors, with good reason.

Consider The New Youth Study Group, a short-lived club of young Beijing professionals that met privately to talk about political reform and posted essays online, including one titled "China's democracy is fake." 

Four of the members were convicted of subversion and intent to overthrow the Communist Party in May 2003 and sentenced to between 8 and 10 years in prison.

With this fear of political dissent, it's hard to tell whether young people like underground musician Li Yan are being shallow or shrewd when they shrug off Tiananmen. 

Li Yan, also known as Lucifer, was born in May 1989 and is a performing arts student in Beijing with a cultivated rebel image.

"Young kids like us are maybe just more into popular entertainment like Korean soap operas. ... Very few people really care about that other stuff," says Lucifer, before mounting the stage at a Beijing club to belt out "Rock 'N Roll for Money and Sex."

Tiananmen veterans read the reaction as apathy and lament it.

"All those magnificent ideals have been replaced by the practical pursuit of self-centered comforts," says Bao Tong, former secretary to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathizing with the 1989 protesters. "The leaders today don't want young people to think."

According to Bao, 76, China's youth are in the arms of the government being fed candy. They could continue this way if the economy remains strong and the government distributes wealth more equitably, he says, but he doesn't think either is likely.

Others say the reckless optimism of the Tiananmen era is the reason young people today lack ideals. The fearless naivete of 1989 serves as a cautionary tale, not inspiration.

Sun Yi's father was a Tiananmen-era dissident. In a self-published magazine in 1990, he openly criticized the crackdown and was soon imprisoned for speaking out. She admires her father but wonders if his sacrifices, a broken marriage and seven years in jail, were worth it.

"It was a really heroic undertaking, but still I feel he gave up so much, too much," says Sun, a 22-year-old engineering student in Sydney, Australia. "His voice was heard by some of the people but not many, not many compared to the population in China. Is that worth it?"

Wu Xu, 39, was a Tiananmen participant. His generation was plagued by insecurity, he says, and hoped that China could "catch up" to the West politically and economically.

"This generation is totally different," says Wu, author of a recent book about Chinese cybernationalism. "There is no kind of feeling of inferiority... They have had the advantage of the last thirty years of China's economic performance."

Wu contends that China's youth know more than they let on, and while they tend to be fiercely proud of their country they are also highly critical of their government. He calls them "a double-edged sword with no handle," because their opinions cut in many directions and are not guided by any single ideology or organization.

Xiaoguang, the boy born that June 4, bears out the theory. He criticizes the United States for the "inadequate apology" it made after a mid-air collision between an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet in 2001. He is angry at CNN for allegedly exaggerating Chinese military brutality against Tibetan rioters last year. Both views parrot the government. 

Later though, he scoffs at classmates keen to join the Communist Party and grouses about corruption.

His convictions are worn loosely, like a fashion, and have not translated into action. Like many Chinese people today, he appears satisfied with his hobbies, pop culture and other distractions.

He lives with his parents down a dusty dirt road in a simple concrete home. A grapevine snakes up a trellis in the courtyard. The family is supported his mother's monthly 800 yuan ($117) retirement pension and his weekend odd jobs.

In his bedroom, he can watch downloaded pirate copies of Hollywood films like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" with slapdash Chinese subtitles. At the same time, he texts friends on his Nokia phone and sends instant messages online.

His parents have scrimped and borrowed to provide their only child with these luxuries — 2,800 yuan ($410) for the computer and 500 yuan ($73) a year for the Internet connection — because he says he needs them for school.

An anxious scowl steals across Xiaoguang's usually cheery face as his father recounts the night he was born.

A debilitating stroke ten years ago has made speaking difficult. But, with help from his wife, Feng told how he dropped his wife at the hospital on the evening of June 3, 1989, then dashed to Kaifeng's Drum Tower where a crowd had gathered in solidarity with protesters in Beijing.

He spent an hour there and the experience inspired his son's name, which means light of dawn.

"His name has great significance. I had just seen China's dawning promise and possibility."

Zhao Ziyang’s Tiananmen Memoir Sells Out in 1st Chinese Edition

By Le-Min Lim
May 29 (Bloomberg) -- The Chinese version of Zhao Ziyang’s “Prisoner of the State,” a memoir recounting the decisions that led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, sold out hours after it went on sale in Hong Kong bookstores today.
All 14,000 copies of “Gaige Licheng,” which means “Path to Reform” in English, went out to bookstores in unmarked trucks this morning, said Cheung Ka-wah, a spokeswoman at distributor Greenfield Book Store.
Many readers lined up outside shops to get their copies of the book, which retails for HK$128 ($16.50).
Greenfield has received an order for “at least another 14,000” copies, she said. “The phones just keep ringing,” Cheung said in a phone interview. “It’s been stressful.”
The Chinese version is published by Hong Kong-based New Century Press.
“Are we rewriting history? We are restoring history,” New Century’s publisher and editor Bao Pu said in a phone interview. “What you find in this book is closer to the truth than the official version.”
The late Zhao was purged as China’s Communist Party chief after he opposed using force against pro-democracy demonstrators in the square 20 years ago this month. His memoirs detail the bargaining within the country’s top leadership and reveal the triggers that led to the June 4, 1989, crackdown.
China is bracing for the anniversary next week.
The book was compiled from about 30 hours of recordings Zhao had secretly taped while he was under house arrest for his pro-student sympathies. He spent his last 16 years, up until his death in 2005, in seclusion.
Hong Kong and mainland China share a border, which hundreds of thousands of Chinese cross daily to work, study and exchange goods.
The book is being released in Hong Kong because the city isn’t subject to direct mainland rule under the “One Country, Two System” policy.

Why China Won't Do More With North Korea

By John Pomfret
Reading all the stuff about North Korea's nukes, one thing strikes me: the United States seems to want to outsource not just its jobs to China, but also its diplomacy. 

"It's up to China!" and "China can do more!" are the operative phrases emerging from DC-think-tanks and the US government. As if...

Here's where those easy exhortations break down and why I think it's naïve of us to expect that China can "do more," or in the words of John Bolton, "end this thing tomorrow."

First, there's a silly assumption in Washington that our interests (no nukes in North Korea) are the same as China's. 

But they're not. 

China's first interest in North Korea is making sure the Kim regime doesn't collapse. China's second interest? Making sure the Kim regime doesn't collapse. From Beijing's perspective, nukes in North Korea rank somewhere around 10th.

Why is China so intent on "regime maintenance"? 

If North Korea collapses a few things happen.

First, about 2 million people will rush into China's northeast as refugees. Not fun -- and a huge tax on China's already poor infrastructure. (An estimated 250,000 North Korean refugees already move back and forth between the two countries.)

Second, China will be faced with a tough decision: dispatch the PLA into North Korea? What happens if the PLA meets up with the South Korean or U.S. armies heading north?

Third, remember all that South Korean investment in China? We're talking billions. It would all go home, into building a united country. (China is South Korea's biggest trading partner, by the way.)

Fourth, a North Korean collapse means that China can forget about turning North Korea into an economic vassal state. (Talk to any South Korean interested in investing in North Korea. Any mine or industrial facility with any prospects of a profit is already a target of Chinese investment.) If Kim collapses, China's firms are going to lose out to the Korean brothers from the south.

Fifth, how would a united Korean peninsula change China's geopolitical position? It definitely wouldn't help it. Right now, Beijing has an (admittedly wacky) Commie buffer state on their border. But at least it's Commie. With a democratic, capitalist, united Korean peninsula, China loses out. (One of the under-reported stories in China is the depth of South Korea's cultural influence in China. In the West, we like to think that China's youth are "Westernized" or even "Americanized." The reality is that they're "South Koreanized." That formulation is definitely unwieldy, but it's closer to the truth.)

Six, China's ethnic Korean population along North Korea's border is not known for being restive. But what happens to those folks once the Korean peninsula is united? Greater Korea, anyone?

Another broader factor also plays into the problems on the Korean peninsula. And that's this: For decades the United States has assumed that it could mold China into an ally. We had limited success in yanking China into our battle with the Soviet Union. But an exception doesn't prove the rule. 

There's a lot of hyperventilating in Washington these days about the "G2" and about how the United States and China together will solve the world's problems. 

On the Korean peninsula -- the very peninsula where China and the United States fought a nasty war 59 years ago -- those assumptions have run aground. 

We can't outsource the solution to North Korea's nukes to China because China views its interests a lot differently than we do. 

Sure, China would rather not see Pyongyang have the bomb. But if given the choice between a nuclear-armed North Korea and no North Korea at all, Beijing will go with the latter.

So, this is the maw that China is staring into as Washington demands more action from Beijing. So what will Beijing do? My guess is encourage more talks.

Pelosi Avoids Human Rights on China Visit

 U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attends a climate-change conference in Beijing on May 27, 2009

By Austin Ramzy / Beijing

In a speech on Tuesday at a Beijing conference on climate change, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that global warming "is a game changer in the U.S.-China relationship." 

For the California Democrat's relationship with China, it already has been. 

She has gone from being one of the most officially reviled public figures in China to someone who is tolerated, if not exactly celebrated. 

A year ago, Pelosi was labeled a "disgusting figure" in a commentary by the state-run Xinhua news service. 

Her longtime support of human rights — as a U.S. Representative in 1991, she helped unveil a banner in Tiananmen Square honoring "those who died for democracy in China" — is seen by some mainland observers as a means to intimidate the country. 

When riots erupted across Tibet in March 2008, Pelosi met with the Dalai Lama in India and denounced China, calling on the world to pressure the Chinese leadership. 

Xinhua responded by saying that "she confused right with wrong on ... Tibet, held double standards to interfere in China's internal affairs (and) hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and impaired China-U.S. relations." 

Ahead of this week's visit to China, Pelosi's first as Speaker of the House, there was some nervousness in China that the high-ranking Democrat would publicly raise human-rights concerns at a sensitive time in Beijing — just one week before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. 

But thus far, the American politician, who is facing questions at home about what she knew of the CIA's waterboarding of terrorism suspects, has given her hosts little to worry about. 

When she did mention human rights, it was in the broad context of international relations, rather than specific criticism of China's record. 

"In every country, not just China and the U.S., the global climate crisis is best surmounted with transparency and openness, respect for the rule of law and accountability to the people," she said in her Beijing talk.

The new approach has been welcomed in China. 

"At the beginning, I was surprised," says Zhu Feng, a international studies professor at Peking University. "She is a big mouth and a very harsh critic of Chinese human rights and Tibetan issues." 

Zhu believes that the environment will be a key issue in the future of Sino-U.S. relations and that Pelosi is smart to embrace it. 

Her approach follows the tack taken by Hillary Clinton in February during her first visit to China as U.S. Secretary of State. Clinton, who has also been critical of China's human-rights record, said she wasn't going to allow the issue to hamper cooperation on climate change and the global economic crisis.

Still, Chinese observers aren't ready to declare a new era in relations with the U.S. 

"I think it's evidence of a broader approach," says Zhu. "For Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the human-rights tool remains on the table, but this time they pick up another one from the tool kit. I don't think their deliberate silence over the human-rights controversies between two countries means that now human-rights differences are truly fading away. The stipulation is when it will be coming back."

Indeed, ahead of Pelosi's arrival in Beijing, there were signs that the issue still inflames passions. News footage shot outside a Beijing train station showed hundreds of petitioners — people who regularly come to the capital to ask the central government to right injustices they face at home — protesting on the street. 

One group held up a sign that read, "Welcome Pelosi. Pay close attention to human rights. SOS."

Beijing protest honours Pelosi's visit

 Chinese workers clean the walls of the news office of the State Council

By Robert J. Saiget 

BEIJING (AFP) — At least 100 Chinese with grievances against their government staged a protest in honour of US congresswoman Nancy Pelosi in Beijing Wednesday, little more than a week before the Tiananmen anniversary.

The protesters, or petitioners, from all parts of China, gathered in front of the news office of the State Council, China's cabinet, passing out leaflets and scrawling graffiti on the office gates.

"Pelosi we warmly welcome you, Pelosi we love you," they wrote in red paint on the gate of the compound in central Beijing. "Human rights matter, down with corruption."

Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives and a vocal critic of China's rights record, is visiting China for meetings on the nation's climate change agenda.

The protests occurred as she held meetings Wednesday with China's top leaders, including President Hu Jintao, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and parliamentary head Wu Bangguo.

Up to 50 uniformed police and an equal number of plainclothes officers quickly cordoned off the area around the gate of the news office, dispersing the crowd and scrambling to pick up their discarded leaflets.

These appeared to mostly detail the petitioners' personal complaints, typically about land and economic disputes, police brutality and medical malpractice.

The protest came a week ahead of the anniversary of the June 4 crushing of the Tiananmen democracy protests, when the military violently ended six weeks of peaceful protests, killing thousands of unarmed citizens.

Protesters said up to 1,000 petitioners, who had come to Beijing to urge the central government to address their complaints, had attended the demonstration, snarling traffic in front of the news office.

The number could not be independently confirmed.

By the time AFP journalists arrived, more than 100 protesters were seen lingering outside the police cordon.

Several were seen being taken away by police, with protesters saying up to 20 had been carted off in police vehicles.

"You can't take her away," one protester, Han Dongmei, shouted as police tried to load her wheelchair-bound 11-year-old daughter into a waiting police van.

A group of six policemen eventually picked up the screaming Han, her sobbing daughter and the wheelchair and loaded them into the van.

Han has petitioned the government since 2005, when doctors in western China's Xinjiang region mistakenly gave her daughter an injection for cerebral spinal meningitis, which paralysed the girl from the waist down.

"After all these years, the government has not been able to resolve our problem," Han said in her petition document which she gave AFP.

"Instead our rights have been violated, and because we have been seeking justice, we have become criminals in the eyes of some officials."

China's parliamentary head Wu recently ordered local authorities to stop petitioners from bringing their grievances to the central government in Beijing -- a centuries-old tradition -- and ordered such issues to be resolved locally.

But petitioners say they have only brought their cases to Beijing because local officials refuse to adequately resolve their complaints.

Pelosi's visit comes as President Barack Obama's administration appeared to relax rights demands on China in an effort to work with Beijing on matters such as the economic downturn and the nuclear-weapons issues surrounding North Korea and Iran.

China's New Deal: Modernizing the Middle Kingdom

 Farmer Wei Xinyuan plows his field in the shadow of the Baling River Bridge in Guizhou province.

 Light at the End: A tunnel leading to the Bailing River Bridge is part of a project that will dramatically reduce travel time between the provincial capital Guiyang with the nearest big city Kunming.

By Simon Elegant / Beijing and Austin Ramzy / Guanling

Guizhou province, in southwestern China, is a place of striking natural beauty: jagged peaks surrounded by fields of bright green rape, ridges slashed with limestone outcrops and plunging waterfalls. 

But these days the region's grandest sight is man-made: the Baling River Bridge. 

Due to be completed early next year, this 1.4-mile (2.25 km) marvel of engineering is a jarringly conspicuous splash of 21st century technology amid Guizhou's farms and rice fields, which haven't changed much in thousands of years. It's as if the Golden Gate Bridge had been dropped into some bucolic Middle-earth mountainscape.

Out of place as it may appear, this is no bridge to nowhere. Soaring a quarter-mile (400 m) above the Baling River, the $216 million span will reduce travel time considerably for the stream of trucks and cars traversing a highway that connects the provincial capital, Guiyang, with the nearest big city, Kunming, the capital of neighboring Yunnan province. 

Far from resenting the bridge as a white elephant, the residents of nearby Guanling, a one-stoplight town where the average income is less than $150 a year, view it as crucial to economic development and improvement in their lives. 

"I really cannot wait for the bridge to be completed," says Yuan Bo, 25, a graphic designer who takes a two-hour bus ride every week from his home in Anshun to help in his family's Guanling restaurant.

What's good for Yuan Bo and Guanling is good for China. 

While the recession-racked West debates the wisdom of borrowing billions of dollars and spending it on economic stimulus, China is reaching into its vast financial reserves to launch one of the most ambitious and expensive public-works programs ever undertaken. 

The Baling River Bridge is only one of hundreds of infrastructure projects — ports, airports, bridges, schools, hospitals, highways, railroads — on which China plans to spend about $450 billion over the next several years. 

Announced in November, this pumped-up New Deal is aimed at more than cushioning China's economic fall as the global recession bites deeply into the country's manufacturing and export sectors. 

The new projects will make it much easier for commerce and people to move around China, hence stimulating domestic demand and reducing China's economic reliance on exports, vital as rich world consumers rebuild their balance sheets and international trade contracts.

China's leaders are using the financial crisis as an opportunity to consolidate gains already made in the country's global competitiveness while laying a foundation for even greater progress in the future — and for the international power that economic prowess can bring. 

Nationalist voices in the media are already framing the crisis as a transformational moment in China's rise and the decline of the U.S. 

"They've criticized the dollar and asked for a new global reserve currency. They've criticized the U.S. role in the International Monetary Fund," says Beijing-based China scholar Russell Leigh Moses. 

Premier Wen Jiabao recently pleaded with Washington to safeguard China's investment in U.S. bonds, which will decline in value if the dollar weakens on foreign-exchange markets. That too, says Moses, was a reminder to the U.S. that "you aren't in the driver's seat anymore and maybe you should move over." 

For an economy like China's, which is the world's third largest but is still just a third the size of the U.S.'s, the scale of the package is staggering. Total new spending is pegged at $586 billion, about 16% of GDP. In contrast, the $787 billion stimulus package approved by the U.S. Congress in February is just 6% of GDP. 

While upwards of 75% of Chinese spending will go toward infrastructure, just 10% of U.S. spending will. The difference to an extent reflects the fact that the nations are at different stages of economic development: America's railroad networks were built in the 19th century (and show it), and its interstate-highway system was mainly constructed in the 1950s and '60s. 

But it also speaks to the sheer scale of China's ambition to modernize itself.

Inevitably, some critics complain that Beijing has released few details of where the money will go and that some of the funding is not new: the package, for example, includes $147 billion for reconstruction in areas of Sichuan province that were devastated by a 2008 earthquake, money that would have been spent in any event. 

But wherever you go in China now, you come across projects that boggle the mind. 

In late March, for example, the government began soliciting bids for the Hong Kong — Zhuhai — Macau highway, a bridge-and-tunnel complex 16.5 miles (26.6 km) long that will allow connections among 35 ports in the Pearl River Delta, the cradle of China's economic boom. 

When completed in 2015, the $10 billion project will cut driving time from Hong Kong to the industrial area of Zhuhai from about four hours to just 30 minutes.
 Arts Center: The Chongqing Grand Theatre in Chongqing is a part of a development that will also include skyscrapers and a science museum.

 Air Traffic: Chongqing is also expanding its airport, by adding another runway.

 All Roads: The lower part of this bridge in Chongqing will support a light rail line.

Looking to the West
Are such huge projects really necessary? 

China, with its gleaming coastal cities and modern transport hubs, is already the envy of developing countries like India. And from Alaska to Japan, there are plenty of examples around the world of infrastructure projects that owed more to local politicking than to real economic need. 

Most of China's stimulus spending, critics note, will be supervised by local governments. This will undoubtedly mean that some money will end up lining the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats.

Yet there are early signs that the massive influx of government spending is already accomplishing its main goal: easing China's economic slowdown, which has been headlined by double-digit declines in exports, thousands of factory closures and the layoff of about 20 million workers. 

Economic statistics for the first quarter of 2009 were surprisingly positive, leading some economists to conclude that the rate of contraction was slowing and that China might be on the road to recovery. 

Power-generation and transportation statistics, key indicators of the economy's direction, registered modest increases in March after months of decline. Banks lent money at record levels, investment showed signs of recovery, and auto sales grew nearly 3.9% in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, thanks to subsidies for new-car buyers and lower sales taxes. 

The results led Wen to conclude that "Chinese government policy has been timely, correct and decisive."

China, of course, has certain advantages when it comes to managing shifting economic winds. There's no peskily powerful Congress to worry about, for one thing; what the Chinese government wants in the way of policy, it gets. 

Christopher Wood, chief Asia strategist for the brokerage and investment firm CLSA, says the fact that China's economy is a hybrid of capitalism and a socialist command economy has given the government much greater flexibility to intervene. Beijing more or less ordered Chinese banks to increase lending in response to the global financial meltdown. 

Wood, a former journalist well known for predicting the bursting of Japan's bubble 20 years ago, says he expects the beneficial effects of China's stimulus spending to continue for three to six months. 

While other Asian economies are expected to suffer sharp contractions in 2009, CLSA is predicting that China will hit its government-set GDP growth target of 8% this year, following a drop in the first quarter to 6.1%, the slowest annual growth rate since at least 1992.

But for any recovery to last beyond the end of the year, China's crucial manufacturing and export sector must revive. 

Otherwise, Wood says, stimulus spending could result in a "skewed outcome": billions of dollars in loans made to artificially boost growth could start to go bad, dragging down China's banks; at the same time, the country would remain saddled with a glut of factories producing a vast surplus of goods no one wants to buy.

While the stimulus package has risks, it also affords China a chance to rebalance the country's growing wealth. 

One by-product of China's prolonged expansion is that coastal regions — marked by boomtowns such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen and Tianjin as well as their hinterlands — have grown much faster than the country's interior provinces, which have always been poorer. 

For years the central government has tried various policies to lift western China, without much result. 

The infrastructure push gives Beijing another chance to address divisive and potentially explosive wealth gaps that have grown between east and west, rich and poor.

 Bridge to Somewhere: China hopes that its plans to spend $480 billion over the next several years on infrastructure projects will ease the economic slowdown which has already forced thousands of factories to close and layoff around 20 million workers.

 Work and Wages: Infrastructure projects in Chongqing have already created 20,000 jobs in the city. This woman is laying tiles on a recently constructed sidewalk.

City on a Hill

These divisions, and the government's push to reduce them, are evident in the southwestern megalopolis of Chongqing. 

Built on the hilly banks of the Yangtze River, this ancient trading center was the effective capital of China during World War II and today is one of the world's largest municipalities, with a population of 31 million. 

The brightly lit buildings along the Chongqing riverfront display a cosmopolitan sophistication. But that impression quickly fades as you leave the city for the corrugated hills outside. 

"In Chongqing, the transportation system and so on are quite developed," says Shen Xiaozhong, deputy director of the city's office of the National Reform and Development Commission. "But go out 30 km from the city — not that far — and the conditions are still pretty poor." 

Truth to tell, they're bad enough in parts of the city itself, where legions of "stick stick" men line the sidewalks hoping to earn a few dollars carrying goods up the town's steep hillsides, reminding all who see them of China's lingering poverty.
Shen says government infrastructure projects have already created 20,000 jobs in Chongqing this year, mostly in construction. 

He outlines development plans that could pass for a battle strategy, with lines of attack — in this case, faster rail lines — spreading from Chongqing across the country. In response to the economic crisis, Beijing accelerated its schedule for improving the country's rail networks by five years. 

As a result, travel time for a train journey from Chongqing to Beijing is expected to fall from 25 hours to seven by 2015. That's just the start. 

Another runway will be added to Chongqing's airport, the electrical grid will be upgraded, $5.8 billion will be spent on improving public water supplies, and wastewater treatment will be expanded to cover 90% of urban sewage, up from about 70% now. 

In Chongqing, signs of public-works programs are everywhere. 

A walk through the extensive stairways and underground markets that make up the city's downtown is interrupted by detours and periodic detonations, the result of work on a new light-rail system scheduled to be completed by 2011. 

"We still need at least 20 years to develop infrastructure to catch up with developed countries," says Shen. "For China, the infrastructure projects are not only temporary measures to get the country out of the downturn but an opportunity to prepare for the economy to take off in the future."

China is using the stimulus package to play catch-up on another front: the environment. 

Three decades of rapid, unchecked economic growth has turned many of the country's rivers into cesspools and lands into wastelands and much of its air into grimy soup. 

Some $30.9 billion has been officially allocated under the stimulus plan for "environmental projects" to help clean up the mess and put the country on a path to more sustainable development. 

The government of Jiangsu province, for example, recently announced a $16 billion plan to clean up Lake Tai, once famed for its beauty and abundant fish but now better known for the choking algae blooms caused by industrial runoff that has made the water undrinkable for the millions who depend on it. 

"We are not taking environmental protection as a second priority," Jiangsu Governor Luo Zhijun recently told local reporters. 

"For us, it is just as important as economic development."

Mountain High, Emperor Far Away
No matter how well intentioned, China's stimulus package may provide little more than a short-lived growth blip if officials are unable to control the perennial bugbear of Chinese economic development: pervasive corruption in local and provincial governments, which make their own way far from the brilliant technocrats in Beijing. 

Take the case of a project already under construction in Yan'an, the end point of the Long March, a place steeped in symbolism for Chinese people. 

A few steps from a memorial to Zhang Side — a soldier who, after being killed while hauling charcoal in 1944, was picked by Mao Zedong to serve as an example of selfless communism — is the entry to a tunnel. Someday it will be part of a highway that leads west from Yan'an. The key word is someday. 

The Shazuimao tunnel, which faces a mountain that bears giant characters in Mao's calligraphy reading SERVE THE PEOPLE, has been delayed four times by workers protesting over unpaid wages. 

The city's transportation department and the local Communist Party discipline office are investigating allegations that the company originally hired to dig the tunnel subcontracted the work to an unqualified firm while pocketing a portion of the funding. 

"There's always money and corruption involved," grumbles a farmer named Wang who lives nearby. 

Authorities haven't completed their investigations, but there's no denying the delays. A banner at the mouth of the tunnel announces a completion date of October 2008. 

"This project has been a disaster for us," says Wang. "We would be lucky to have it done by this October."

Graft was rife in construction projects long before the current downturn. 

"Public spending is already subject to considerable siphoning off and, perhaps even more critically, waste," says Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist and Chinese-corruption expert at the University of Nebraska. 

During the boom years, such waste mattered less because growth was so robust. But if China's GDP expands only 6% to 8% this year, as some predict, corruption could dampen recovery. "What really matters is not if funds will be siphoned off or how much will be siphoned off," Wedeman says, "but rather whether the siphoning will have a clear and negative impact on the central government's efforts to restimulate the economy."

But notwithstanding the amounts that will disappear into bank accounts in Hong Kong, casinos in Macau and the gaudy houses that stud the outskirts of every Chinese city, China stands to gain more than it loses through its building campaign. 

The scale of its needs remains immense: the country's leaders are, after all, attempting to move more people out of dire poverty and into something like comfort in a shorter time than has ever been seen before in human history.

And so the work goes on. 

At the base of a $527 million bridge being built across the Yangtze River in Chongqing, dozens of dump trucks and backhoes rumble amid boulders and mud to prepare an access road to the span, scheduled to be completed this month. 

"It's good not having to worry about finding work and getting paid," says a laborer named Yang, who is helping construct the Chongqing Grand Theater, a magnificent music and opera house being built on a river headland within sight of the Chaotianmen bridge. 

"There are so many public projects going on, there will always be a place for me."

Dark documentary on China underbelly chills Cannes

 Zhao gives voice to Chinese legal petitioners at Cannes 

By Claire Rosemberg 
CANNES, France (AFP) — At a festival chock-full of cinematic violence, a documentary by a young Chinese film-maker brought more darkness to Cannes with a harrowing portrayal of life in Beijing's underbelly.

"I'm relating reality as it is in China today," director Zhao Liang told AFP in an interview.

His "Petition" documents the plight of China's judicial "petitioners" -- people from across the land who gather in Beijing in the hope of righting legal wrongs suffered back home.

"These people are sacrificing themselves for China," said Zhao, whose work is one of 15 feature-length films selected for screening by the festival but showing out-of-competition for the Palme d'Or award.

"There is a lot of corruption. China's problem today is that justice is not independent," he said.

Often from the most disadvantaged social classes, the petitioners come to Beijing's Complaints Office of the Supreme People's Court after failing to win cases lodged at local or regional level.

Filmed over a decade in alleyways and makeshift huts near the city's South railway station -- a teeming area once known as "Petitioners' City" -- the two-hour documentary focuses on the dire living conditions of the petitioners and their often hopeless quests for judicial redress.

Living off waste, sleeping rough, and locked in relentless red tape, they also face bands of thug "retrievers" sent by local authorities to shoo them home -- which often means jail or a mental hospital.

A 2006 scene shows a group recovering a jaw, a severed hand and other body parts left on a railway track where an old woman was cut down by a passing train while trying to escape retrievers.

The tale of a mother and daughter is told over a decade, from when the girl is 12 to her decision at adulthood to leave a life on the streets and marry. During her fight for justice, the mother spent five years locked up, including months drugged in psychiatric wards.

"Although we are on the road to openness, there is a still a lot to do in China," Zhao said. "This film aims to inform people about the petitioners."

"I see myself as a doctor looking at an ill person," Zhao said. "It is urgent to cure this sickness and look after the ill."

The 38-year-old film-maker said that because "Petition" was a documentary, he did not need to request an official permit in order to film nor did he require official authorisation to show the work at Cannes.

The film is scheduled to screen at a Chinese independent film festival this month. 

"There is space in China nowadays for this sort of film to be shown," he said.

The "Petitioners" area was razed ahead of the 2008 Olympics, when Zhao's film stops, to make way for the new South Station, Asia's largest rail terminal. But the petitioners are still in Beijing, pushed further away deep into the suburbs.

Peppered with their criticism of party officials and calls for pro-democratic revolt, Zhao said: "I can't say I agree with the petitioners in the film. I have merely related reality."

"I'm interested in the humanity of these people," he added. "In China networks are essential and these people can't pull strings."

"These people are sacrificing themselves for the good of China. I would never become a petitioner myself. I don't have sympathy for them but I do have respect."

Will China's Egg last or will it crack?

 The National Center for the Performing Arts, a.k.a. the Egg, cost more than $400 million and sports a futuristic look

By Henry Sanderson
Beijing -- It cost more than $400 million. Critics complained about its futuristic Western look in the center of China's capital.

Nonetheless, the 18-month-old National Center for the Performing Arts is turning out to be at least a partial success -- something that can't be said for some of the other grand architectural projects that have risen recently in Beijing.

The center, a shining oval dome of glass and titanium rising out of a pool of water, hosted nearly 1,000 shows in its first 13 months and has 600 more booked so far this year. In a city notorious for free ticket giveaways to officials and police, paid ticket sales have been high enough to cover 70 percent of the operating costs, the center's president says.

The true test, though, will come with time. Many theatergoers seem more interested in the unusual building than the performances. Long-term success depends on whether appreciation for the performing arts spreads in China, artists and promoters say.

Yu Long, conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, says the 300 yuan ($44) tickets for most performances are expensive for most Chinese and will be a challenge to sell as curiosity in the building wanes.

Still, the initial success is gratifying for the government, it also illustrates the rapid pace of change in a country where most classical music was all but banned as "bourgeois" a little more than 30 years ago.

Today, the government subsidizes 30 percent of the center's annual 400 million yuan ($58.6 million) operating cost. The center also gets next to nothing from corporate sponsors.

"In the old days, they wanted to educate people politically, but today they want to educate people from a cultural perspective and from a nationalistic perspective," says Jindong Cai, a Beijing-born conductor who teaches at Stanford University in California. "The government wants to demonstrate how China's leaders are pro-art."

The complex is never expected to be fully self-supporting and, in contrast to many Western venues, it gets next to nothing from corporate sponsors. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., receives 19 percent of its funding from the government, 42 percent from ticket sales and the rest from fundraising.

The Chinese center's music director, conductor Chen Zuohuang, was among millions sent to work in the countryside during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when then Chinese leader Mao Zedong launched an attack on traditional culture.

"In China for many, many different reasons, including political reasons in the past, people have been forbidden from appreciating classical music," Chen says. "But I think things are changing and changing quite quickly."

The center, dubbed the Egg because of its appearance, was designed by French architect Paul Andreu. Opened in December 2007, it sits near Tiananmen Square and the historic imperial palace known as the Forbidden City.

A spacious and light interior houses an opera house, concert hall and theater. Warm wall panels of Brazilian wood contrast with the marble floor.

After some initial bureaucratic infighting, the center appointed three experienced artistic directors for dance, drama, and music. That, together with the government's support, has enabled it to book strong acts, musicians say.

"They are all very professional, they have extensive experience in China and overseas," says Cai, the Stanford conductor.

The center's success contrasts with some other new landmarks.

The $450 million Olympic stadium known as the Bird's Nest is little more than a tourist site. Visitors pay 50 yuan ($7.30) to walk on the stadium floor. Only a handful of events are planned.

The opening of another major project, a Rem Koolhaas-designed headquarters for state broadcaster CCTV, has been delayed after a fire destroyed a luxury hotel going up on the site.

At the performing arts center, visiting performers of Western classical music -- from the Chicago Symphony to German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter -- have been the most popular, says the center's president, Chen Ping, a career bureaucrat with the Beijing government.

A recent performance of "Tosca" in the cozy 2,398-seat opera house saw audiences excitedly shouting "Bravo" and "Hao," the Chinese word for good.

The center has also staged its own productions of western classics -- including a performance this month of the opera "La Boheme" set in contemporary Beijing -- along with Peking Opera and Communist revolutionary operas, which are popular with older audiences.

"The tickets sold well because the theater provided the audience a variety of choices with a broad range of products, like a supermarket," says music critic Liu Xuefeng.

But he agrees that the building itself has been an attraction and estimates only a third of the attendees have been true fans of the performing arts. Companies also bought blocks of tickets to reward employees.

While millions of younger Chinese are learning to play classical music, more needs to be done to educate potential audiences, including the youth, experts say.

"So far, China has been an exporter of talent," said Eli Marshall, a composer from Montville, Maine, who lives in Beijing and directs the Beijing Music Ensemble, a chamber group. 

"The next step is going to bring this talent back, and that's beginning to happen. The next step is to find more professional opportunities for people to stay in the country and that's going to mean audience development."

Anonymous memoirist recounts a life of excess in modern China

By Le-Min Lim 
Welcome to ZZ's world: a whirl of good weed, wild parties and wilder girls. In Beijing.
This is no joke. 

The seat of China's age-old civilization is as seamy on the inside as it looks imposing from the outside, judging from "China High," a memoir scribbled under the nom de plume ZZ by a Shanghai-born, U.S.-trained lawyer in his 20s.

Written before the global credit meltdown, "China High" lifts a curtain on a side of Beijing seldom seen by tourists. 

ZZ captures the nocturnal buzz of a city where rave parties in derelict factories are a staple and orgies have become a rite of passage. Then there's the pot, which locals call the Big Numb.

Beneath the froth lies a serious message: The world's largest developing economy is seething in social tension, displaced people and hypocrisy. 

It's a land of official sexual equality run by men who often keep under-30 mistresses, aka their "little honeys," on two-year contracts. A country given to bouts of xenophobia among people who fawn on foreigners.

A Chinese national, ZZ graduated from Brandeis University and Boston College Law School, says his publisher, St. Martin's Press. Then he went to Hong Kong in late 2000 to work for Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP (now Sidley Austin LLP) and transferred to its Beijing office in late 2001.

An administrator at Sidley Austin in Hong Kong declined to comment. The managing partner of the regional office, William Fifield, didn't answer an e-mail seeking comment.

By 24, ZZ was earning $250,000 a year. He took the Beijing posting for thrills and got some chills to go with them.

A few pages in, our protagonist learns that a woman he has bedded is 18, not 22. She's pregnant, and he takes her for an abortion ("encouraged" under China's one-child policy, he claims). 

He later discovers that she was two-timing him with a filmmaker, he says.

Thus begins ZZ's initiation into Beijing's world of commerce, conflict and concupiscence. 

China meets "Sex and the City" as our young lawyer describes his flings with models, Mrs. Robinsons, kept women and what he delicately terms "local girls with jungle fever" in the Sanlitun bar district.

The city is so freewheeling that ZZ doesn't hesitate to smoke the Big Numb in public, betting that the police don't know any better and that his accent-less English gives him immunity. He's wrong, and spends two weeks in jail for his mistake.

With a chatty and assured voice, ZZ details the high jinks of his stay in the capital during China's fastest economic growth since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. 

His prose swaggers, though it can turn purple in places. ("I saw the twinkle in her eyes, those coquettish lashes demanding my attention with every blink," he writes.)

Like a good fable, "China High" uses jest and anecdotes to satirize the forces that govern China. No subject is taboo.

The Communist Party, he says, stays in power by reminding citizens of how it saved the nation from foreign encroachments stretching back to the British opium trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. As for those second wives, they earn up to 50,000 yuan ($7,325) a month, along with a Land Rover to drive, a platinum American Express to take shopping and 2 million yuan in severance pay when their contracts expire, ZZ writes.

ZZ offers tips on how to navigate Beijing, right down to what the worst swear words mean and how to use them to best effect. 

He exposes the hidden high costs of doing business in labor-rich China by describing his struggle to start a food-delivery company staffed by locals with little English and no inkling of quality service.

He also challenges the assertion that the key to getting anything done in China is "guanxi," or connections. In prison, guanxi got him little more than a few extra dumplings, he says.

What does work wonders is being a foreigner, he says, rightly observing how the Chinese, long cut off from the world, now revere all things from abroad. 

An expatriate, he says, draws praise, envy and opportunity just for being different.

It's "the perfect recipe for an ego trip," he writes.

Nonfiction

 TITLE: "China High: My Fast Times in the 010: A Beijing Memoir"

 AUTHOR: ZZ

 PUBLISHER: St. Martin's Press

 PRICE: $24.95; PAGES: 368

China has long way to go to dislodge dollar

By Geoff Dyer
China is on the offensive. Long a bystander in international economic affairs, Beijing has in recent weeks announced a string of initiatives for remoulding the global financial system. And they all have one target – knocking the US dollar off its perch.

Last month, China said it hoped eventually to see the US dollar replaced as the main global reserve currency by a basket of significant currencies and commodities. 

Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the central bank, argued that the current dollar-based system was too vulnerable to financial crises.

China has set up a series of swap arrangements with other central banks, including Argentina, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Belarus, through which it will make its currency available to the other countries if they run out of foreign exchange.

This week’s initiative involves trade. China and Brazil are to begin talks on a scheme for bilateral trade to be settled in the renminbi and the real, rather than the dollar. Beijing has found a willing partner in the Brazilian government, which mixes conservatism in economic policy at home with developing worldist flourishes abroad.

Big changes will not happen quickly. The dollar’s position is the result of powerful economic realities, not the decision of a room full of bureaucrats. But China is putting down some important long-term markers and all of a sudden, the dry arena of international financial arrangements has become loaded with the symbolism of economic power shifting from west to east.

China’s language may be impeccably multilateral but the goal is to boost its position in international economic affairs and limit space for the US to do its own thing.

Yet the curious thing about China’s attacks on the dominance of the dollar is just how much they are motivated by short-term, domestic politics. And in the process, the really important questions about China’s growth model and its future role are being pushed to one side.

The government has been stung by domestic criticism of its $2,000bn (€1,440bn, £1,250bn) in foreign exchange reserves, about 70% of which are invested in US government securities.

Why is a country that is still poor, people are increasingly asking, lending so much money to a rich country – especially when officials warn constantly about a possible slump in the dollar. Beijing has also reacted angrily to anyone who suggests its huge build-up in foreign currency reserves contributed to the orgy of liquidity in global financial markets.

Some of the outrage is understandable – who does not believe that profligacy in the US was at the heart of the crisis? 

Yet China’s huge exposure to the dollar is partly a trap of its own making.

If the Chinese currency had appreciated more rapidly in recent years, the economy might not have experienced such turbo-charged growth rates – but its reserves would not have exploded so quickly and the much-needed shift to domestic demand would be more advanced.

It is all very well for Beijing to criticise irresponsible behaviour in the US, but for China to run a current account surplus of 8-9 per cent of gross domestic product, as it has been doing, someone on the other side of the ledger must be running big deficits.

If China wants a bigger international role for its currency, it will have to make other difficult shifts. 

For a start, the renminbi is not yet fully convertible and there are still a battery of restrictions on bringing funds in and out of the country. Why would a Brazilian exporter to China choose to be paid in renminbi, when the dollar is so much easier to trade and hedge against?

China’s international leverage would also be enhanced if it could lend money overseas in its own currency– to the US, for instance. But until China has a deep and open bond market where interest rates are set by the market and not the government, there will be only limited takers for such renminbi assets.

There are plenty of reasons for China to be cautious about such changes – after all, the financial crisis is unlikely to have made Beijing more comfortable about lifting its capital controls.

But if China really does want to promote the renminbi and reduce the space for US economic unilateralism, it is these questions – and not toothless agreements about using the renminbi for bilateral trade – that it needs to address.

Openness in China About Memoir Proves Short-Lived

 Bao Tong, a former Communist Party official, last week in Beijing. Mr. Bao now says he is not allowed to accept interviews.

By JONATHAN ANSFIELD
BEIJING — For more than a week, Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official now under strict surveillance, openly promoted an insider’s account of Chinese political infighting sure to be banned in China.

The book is the posthumous memoir by Mr. Bao’s boss, Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party chief fired in 1989 for opposing the use of troops to quash pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. 

Before his death in 2005, Mr. Zhao furtively recorded his account of that period.

When the memoir became public last week, Mr. Bao, the most senior Communist Party official imprisoned after the crackdown, quickly claimed responsibility. 

In a string of interviews with the foreign press that security officials did not initially seek to prevent, he said he had collaborated with other liberal party elders to slip the cassette recordings out of the country for publication.

“In the past, the minute these things appear, the party would say, ‘This is turmoil; we must crack down,’ ” he said in one telephone conversation early this week. “But if the party can maintain this current calm, then maybe it can eventually be saved.”

By Friday, though, the government’s restraint appeared to be wearing thin.

Highlights of Mr. Zhao’s memoir and audio clips of his original dictation, which were accessible for days within the mainland on the Web sites of American newspapers, including The New York Times, now appear to be blocked.

And Mr. Bao’s run of unfettered press availability ended. 

Mr. Bao said by telephone late Friday that he had just been informed he could no longer accept interviews “starting right now.”

Shortly beforehand, he said, security officials barred him from receiving a CBS television crew. Chuckling apologetically, he added, “If you want an interview with me, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until after June 4.”

The mix of approaches — seemingly relaxed oversight at times, an iron hand at others — is characteristic of government efforts to prevent major commemorations of the June 4, 1989, crackdown without calling too much attention to Beijing’s methods.

This year, facing a number of major political anniversaries and a stumbling economy, the party has put one of its most senior officials, Vice President Xi Jinping, the presumptive heir to President Hu Jintao, in charge of a special unit to “preserve stability” and to prevent unauthorized political activities.

The authorities have tended to respond to perceived threats more surgically and subtly than they might have 5 or 10 years ago, a number of activists said.

Top leaders now seem more sensitive to the outcry that tough tactics to suppress dissent can provoke online, overseas or within different wings of the party itself, and they often avoid immediate, draconian responses to issues like Mr. Zhao’s memoir or Mr. Bao’s interviews.

“The authorities have modified their strategy,” said a democracy advocate, Zhang Zuhua, a top official in the Communist Youth League in the 1980s, who was dismissed for backing the democracy protests. “They are not loosening up. But they also do not want to make trouble for themselves by creating an incident.”

He said small groups of mourners had gathered privately in Xi’an, Hangzhou, Shandong Province, Guangdong Province, Beijing and other places to mark June 4 early. 

He counted at least five or six cases of activists’ being interrogated, searched or stopped during activities. But to his knowledge, he said, “no one has been newly arrested because of these activities.”

On Sunday in Beijing, a contingent of more than 50 parents of young people killed in the crackdown, the Tiananmen Mothers, gathered to mourn. Zhang Xianling, who hosted the event, said state security officials found out about their plans two or three days before, but permitted the gathering, provided the parents did not stage demonstrations or invite foreign journalists or others outside their families.

The group’s gatherings this year have been larger and freer from harassment than 5 or 10 years ago, though security officials did stop its founder, retired Prof. Ding Zilin, from attending Sunday. “It’s a superficial improvement, not a fundamental one,” Ms. Zhang said.

New generation puts jobs over democracy

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing
Zhang Hao first heard about China's 1989 student democracy movement when he was in high school. 

But now that he is a university student himself he is eager to declare that his views are worlds apart from the generation who gathered in Tiananmen Square to demand democracy.

At 25 the second-year graduate student at Beijing Sports University is worried about his future, but he believes the Communist party is taking China in the right direction. 

"Our generation thinks that ours is a government which helps us raise our heads and grow up," he says.

"We are not like them," Mr Zhang declares of the students who grabbed the world's attention in 1989. "I can understand that they wanted to pursue freedom and democracy, but I think they were partly misled. They knew nothing."

Dozens of students interviewed at Peking University, Tsinghua University and Beijing Sports University in recent weeks said they knew about the 1989 movement.

Many had seen "The Gate of Heavenly Peace", a 1995 US-produced documentary on the Tiananmen movement and the June 4 crackdown that brought an end to the protests thanks to copies obtained online or from friends. 

Most heard about 1989 from their parents or high school teachers. Many confess to disillusionment with the Communist party.

"My father told me about 1989. He said it was all plotted by Jiang Zemin single-handedly," said a 23-year-old female student from Tsinghua University. "What kind of government is it which guns down its own people?"

But in online debates students spend most of their energy discussing corruption and patriotism. Their biggest personal concern is unemployment. The government estimates that up to 3m from the classes of 2008 and 2007 have yet to find a job, and another 6m will join them on the market next month.

The only job Mr Zhang can look for with his martial arts degree is teaching, but he says selection in the education system is plagued by corruption. He might have a better chance of finding work in his home province of Anhui, but is terrified of going back to the poverty of the farming village he came from. 

"Sometimes I worry so much that my stomach hurts all the time. I'm so depressed," he says.

Shi Guoliang, who researches the political and social attitudes of the young generation at China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing, says those sorts of pragmatic concerns are the main difference between the Tiananmen generation and those of today. 

"The '89 student movement was a generation of fanatics while today's students are a generation of reason," Mr Shi says.

His view is very much that of the political establishment, but some civil rights and freedom of speech activists agree. Zhou Shuguang, a 28-year-old university drop-out who is one of China's best-known bloggers, says to him the 1989 student leaders' speeches feel like overemotional grandstanding. "They were brought up in a socialist tradition, and that's what they knew."

Today's students view themselves as more mature in their approach to politics, the outside world and China's future.

"In 1989, the door had just opened a little bit, and they had no reliable information about the reality in the west, they were led by an idea of democracy," says Mr Zhang. "Look how much more access to information we have. Many people have been abroad to study, and we can read about everything online."

Although Beijing controls and censures the internet , it still provides new avenues for information and debate. "Students don't do sit-ins, they blog and use Twitter," says Mr Shi.

Tight surveillance of universities ensures students rarely erupt. 

With armed police stationed on campus and every gate manned with police asking for identification, Peking University students have "become a flock of sheep," says Mr Zhou.

But tensions occasionally burst into the open. 

Students in Hangzhou held a candlelight vigil for a young man killed by a speeding driver and thousands of students clashed with police in Nanjing after a female student was beaten by a local official. 

According to the Hong Kong Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, 30 students were injured and a police car smashed up.

U.S. Speaker Pelosi Visits China Next Week

 Pelosi at Tiananmen Square in 1991

IAN JOHNSON
BEIJING -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is due to visit China next week, in what observers here hope will be an improbable continuation of the Obama administration's charm offensive in China.

Widely regarded as one of China's sharpest and most public critics, Ms. Pelosi will arrive Sunday and stay a week, according to China's official Xinhua news agency. 

A Pelosi spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment, but an official from the U.S. embassy in Beijing confirmed that Ms. Pelosi will visit China next week.

According to Western diplomats here, she will head a delegation of members of Congress and is expected to travel to Beijing and Shanghai.

Ms. Pelosi has been one of the most vocal critics of China, most famously unfurling a banner on Tiananmen Square in 1991, where pro-democracy protests in 1989 led to a government crackdown that killed hundreds of people. 

During the 1990s she was a regular opponent of normal trade relations with China. 

Last year she earned a series of condemnations from Beijing for suggesting that President George W. Bush boycott the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and for visiting Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, at his base in India.

Next week's visit is especially sensitive because it comes just 10 days before the 20th anniversary of the 1989 uprising. 

The government's official verdict is that the soldiers had to clear Tiananmen Square of troublemakers in order to preserve social stability. 

But in recent weeks, new Chinese critics have begun to publicly challenge this interpretation, with a group of academics holding a meeting that called for the event to be re-evaluated and with the posthumous publication of the Communist Party's former general secretary's memoirs, which criticized leaders for not pursuing a peaceful strategy.

"It's not great timing, but it's positive that she comes to China," said Yan Xuetong, head of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University. "Her image of China is still of the time of the Tiananmen events; this might help her change her view."

James Zimmerman, a leader in the foreign business community in China, said the meeting could work out well. 

"The Speaker's visit is an opportunity for both sides to listen, observe and learn from one another."

The visit will have a green focus, with Ms. Pelosi due to give the keynote address at an environmental energy forum. 

Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is also due to speak, according to organizers of the conference.

Although the Obama administration has been in office only a few months, so far it has played down human rights as a major theme in China. 

During a visit in February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had little to say publicly on the matter, instead focusing on economics.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, according to people with long experience in dealing with China, because China rarely responds positively to public criticism. 

William McCahill, formerly a senior diplomat in the U.S. embassy and now a consultant with JL McGregor & Co., said the most effective critics come to China with a carefully researched list of political prisoners and behind closed doors put pressure for their release. 

Human-rights groups say the country still has about 30 people in jail linked to the Tiananmen Square crackdown.