Riding the Iron Rooster

But I was wrong. This American group, which outdated the Beach Boys (who were their sometime collaborators), had undergone a recrudescence and were yapping to beat the band, actually singing "Surf City" in Shanghai, twenty-nine years after they had released their first record. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. After all, Mr. Tian had sung me a Neil Sedaka song in the Langxiang wilderness only a month before.

Mr. Hong said, "We liked Jan and Dean very much. The students were excited. Jan and Dean invited some students onto the stage to dance. They were dancing and enjoying themselves. But afterwards those students were accused by the police of being disruptive."

"What happened to them?"

"They were taken into custody. They were beaten."

This also fueled the students' enthusiasm for a demonstration. But there was a feeling that the students had been led into a trap, since the conservatives used the demonstrations as an excuse to call for a limiting of the reforms.

Everyone agreed that what was happening in China indicated a power struggle in the inner Party, between the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping and the eight or ten so-called leftists, who were antireformers, led by Peng Zhen (chairman of the National People's Congress). In spite of his dogmatic Maoist views, Peng had never been purged. These puritanical old troopers, many of whom had shared the privations of the Long March, were outraged by students who were making demands. Their American counterparts might be the VFW, who also hated student protests. The problem was that there were also people in the inner Party who were pushing harder for reform.

I paid a call on Mr. Brooks, the American consul-general, who had impressed me so much a few months before by telling me that he didn't have the slightest idea of what would happen next in China.

"The Chinese will go on doing business," he said. "Foreign investors aren't concerned with student demonstrations. What would worry them is a return to Stalinism."

We then talked about Deng's successor. Would it be Hu Yaobang, Deng's bridge partner? Deng himself had indicated this.

Mr. Brooks said that Deng had hoped to step down, but that he wanted to make sure his policies would continue. When Deng went he wanted to take all the doubtful people with him.

"The trouble is," Mr. Brooks said, "Mr. Hu has disappeared from view. A foreign minister told a visiting Japanese delegation, 'He's tired.' In Chinese terms that means he can't do the work."

I listened to the radio that night and heard a news report that Hu Yaobang had been forced to resign after a session of self-criticism in which he said he had "made many mistakes."

So, just like that, Mr. Hu was gone, and Deng didn't have a successor.

Dr. Xie Xide, the president of Fudan University, was a member of the Central Committee. I saw her the following day and asked her how she had found out about Mr. Hu's resignation.

"I heard it on the Voice of America," she said. "But I was not surprised. He tended to make decisions without consulting anyone. For example, once he was on an official visit to Japan. He was very enthusiastic. He invited three thousand Japanese students to visit China."

"To study?"

"No. Just for a visit," Dr. Xie said. "But we are a poor country. We can't afford that sort of thing."

Mr. Hu had often had his foot in his mouth. He had begun to wear Western suits, and although he had been designated a sort of official greeter of Eastern Bloc delegations (the nine Poles in porkpie hats, the Rumanian wrestlers, the representatives of the Hungarian joint venture in making paprika), Mr. Hu's sympathies were with the Western capitalists. He became very excited at one stage about contagious diseases and he advocated the abandonment of chopsticks in favor of knives and forks. And why not have individual portions, he exclaimed, instead of the Chinese common dish in the middle of the table, and everyone shoving his chopsticks in? He had recently gone to Tibet and suggested that the Han people should leave the region forthwith and let the Tibetans run it themselves. (In itself it was a bold thought, but it would have set a disastrous example to other autonomous regions, like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.) He had also said, rather tactlessly (considering his past as Party Secretary), "Marxism cannot solve China's problems."

The official version of Mr. Hu's departure was that at "an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee, Hu Yaobang made a self-criticism of his mistakes on major issues of political principles in violation of the Party's principle of collective leadership." This was reported by China's official mouthpiece, the Xinhua News Agency. Mr. Hu was further accused of having caused "a slackening of ideological control."