One Too Many

Curtailing dissent

"You love your motherland. But does your motherland love you?" the distraught young woman asks her father, as she helplessly watches him being victimized by fanatical Red Guards. That snippet of mildly unpatriotic dialogue comes at the conclusion of Unrequited Love, a new cinematic potboiler about the Cultural Revolution that brought turmoil to China in the late 1960s. The heroine's plaintive appeal would not ordinarily seem to be politically explosive, but last week it was singled out for official opprobrium in a stepped-up curtailment of political and artistic freedom in China. In a more threatening manifestation of Peking's fear that the drift toward democracy has gone too far, secret police also rounded up two key dissidents, the first such arrests since 1979.

The latest dip in the ebb and flow of China's uncertain liberalization came in a sudden midnight raid by Public Security Bureau agents. Their targets: Xu Wenli, 37, and Yang Jing, about 30, the editors of a hand-mimeographed dissident newsletter, April Fifth Forum, named for a 1976 antigovernment demonstration. Though Chief Editor Xu scrupulously avoided outright criticism of China's leaders and shunned the label of dissident, he has been outspoken in demanding more freedom of expression. Last year he noted that "if only views that echo the leadership are allowed, there is no way to speak of real freedom of speech." Though April Fifth Forum had a circulation of only 1,000 before publication was suspended early last year, it was, according to one Western diplomat, "a twinkle in a vast void." Thus the arrests of Xu and Yang further weakened an already anemic democratic movement. It has been on the retreat since Dissident Leader Wei Jingsheng was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in October 1979, two months before the Democracy Wall was stripped clean and put off-limits.

In a savage blast in the Liberation Army Daily against the now banned Unrequited Love, the regime also signaled its intent to make liberal artists toe the party line. In the first place, the commentary charged that the script was rife with "anarchy, extreme individualism and bourgeois liberalism." It even took aim at the movie's recurrent image of flying geese in formation--a sinister symbol of emigration from China. Furthermore, it said, the gloomy picture that Unrequited Love drew of the Cultural Revolution besmirched the party's leadership. Said the commentary: "Criticizing mistakes of the party is not patriotism, but an insult to patriotism. The film gives the impression that one could feel some warmth for the old society, while pain and tragedy are everywhere in the new socialist China."

The two-pronged attack on dissidents and artists seemed to climax in a carefully calibrated drive for greater party discipline and ideological conformity. China-watchers were reluctant to read more into the latest crackdown than an attempt by the party leadership to prevent liberalization from getting out of control while it determines the exact place Mao should have in history. Said one Western diplomat in Peking, paraphrasing the late Chairman: "This government may still believe that they should let a hundred flowers bloom, but they don't feel they want one hundred and one."

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