China may avoid impact of Tiananmen papers

By Paul Eckert

BEIJING (Reuters): The Tiananmen Papers have excited Chinawatchers and dissidents, provoked fresh tears from mothers of massacred students and sparked predictable anger from Beijing's Communist government.

But the documents purporting to reveal the internal debates which led to the bloody 1989 crackdown were not likely to damage China's current leaders, rekindle a long-frozen political reform debate or bring about a government reassessment of the killings, Chinese and foreign sources said on Wednesday.

Analysts said that, at most, the book just published in the United States was a reminder to the Communist Party that it cannot suppress information in the age of the Internet.

Even government opponents agreed with the crux of China's response to the documents: that it would not change its hard-line official verdict that the protests were a counter-revolutionary rebellion which justified the use of force.

"I don't expect even slight change in the Communist Party's verdict as a result of these revelations," said dissident Ren Wanding, who was jailed seven years for speeches he made in 1989.

"On the contrary, they might even get harsher, because the evaluation of Tiananmen cuts to the core of party legitimacy."

Su Bingxian, whose son was killed in the crackdown, sobbed as she compared her recollection of events with the excerpts she had read from the documents. She said bereaved families drew moral support from the disclosures but did not expect change.

"This system is not like a Western democracy, where leaders apologize and even resign for wrongdoing. Here, they cling to power at all cost," she said.

Diplomats in Beijing disagreed with assertions by editors of the papers that the revelations could sully the reputations of Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Communist Party number two Li Peng, whose support for the crackdown helped their political careers.

They said the Tiananmen papers, which showed fierce disagreement among China's leaders about how to deal with weeks of protests in the heart of Beijing, only underscored a principal lesson the Communist Party drew from the turmoil.

"The whole deal that was done among leaders after Tiananmen was that they don't squabble in public anymore and the people in power are beneficiaries and inheritors of that pact," said a Western diplomat.

"This is a real can of worms -- once you open it up and start apportioning blame and reassessing events, you don't know where it will stop and it could easily spin out of control," he said.

Analysts said they doubted there would be any immediate political impact from the treasure trove of smuggled documents, which the government denounced as fabrications.

"It's hard to see how it can change things really -- it makes clearer the continuing rule of man at the highest decision-making levels," said Sophia Woodman, research director of the New York- based group Human Rights in China.

Moves toward political reform, a major goal of the 1989 protests which vanished when then Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang was purged for opposing the bloodbath, would stay locked in a deep freeze, Ren said.

"We cannot look to the Communist Party for political reforms. The impetus for change can only come from outside the party," he said, and predicted that any stirrings were probably a decade away.

Chinese and Western analysts agreed that one of the most interesting aspects of the Tiananmen Papers was that the Internet would allow more Chinese than ever before to learn what happened in June 1989.

But Ren said most of the fuss about the book would still take place outside China, among Western scholars and exiled Chinese intellectuals.

The diplomat said debating Tiananmen inside China involved "too many taboos" and warned against overblown Western media hoopla surrounding what was largely an overseas publishing event.

"Inside China, it will linger and reverberate a bit, but it will pass," the diplomat said.