The Foreign Service Journal, May 2005

M A Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51 The Situation Deteriorates As it turned out, the editorial exacerbated the situa- tion. Once the student movement had been denounced as “anti-party, anti-socialist” turmoil, the stakes were raised; students were right to be concerned that as long as that judgment stood, the party could “settle accounts after the fall harvest” (i.e., students could be arrested or given poor job assignments after the movement died down). So the students mobilized for a major demon- stration on April 27, 1989. Yet, although the police were out in force, they did not beat the students. On the con- trary, the students broke through the police cordons and marched on to Tiananmen Square. But this outcome made things even more difficult. University leaders and school party organizations were “crestfallen,” according to Zhao. They worried that “student work,” as it was called, would be even more difficult to do in the future. When Zhao returned from North Korea on April 29, he found the situation very difficult to deal with. On the one hand, there was the fact of Deng’s talk and the edi- torial, and the students’ demand for its retraction. On the other hand, Li Peng and the Beijing CCP Committee refused to back down, saying that the editorial reflected Deng’s words. Zhao comments, in some frustration, “In fact, it was they [the Politboro Standing Committee] who determined the nature [of the student movement] first, and Deng’s talk came after” (p. 572). Despite this difficult situation, Zhao says that the majority of the Politburo Standing Committee still agreed that they could take steps to gradually ameliorate the situation by not talking about the April 26 editorial anymore. This is what Zhao tried to do in his May 4 address to the Asian Development Bank, which was then meeting in Beijing. Zhao argues that the situation was still difficult — “the students were still uneasy, believing that my talk was empty” — but he argues that “if we had kept on with dialogue and pressed ahead with our work, the situation would have taken a turn for the better” (p. 572). F O C U S