chi@vlsi.uwaterloo.ca (Bo Chi) (01/14/90)
| +---------I __L__ ___- i \ ------I +----+----+ | ___\_\_ | \./ | | -----+- | | | | | __ \/ | --+-- |--- | |---| | I----+----I | I__J/\ | __|__ | | | |---| | | | _____ \ | /| \ | | | L__-| | I I---------J / J \/ | | V | _/ * C h i n a N e w s D i g e s t * (ND Canada Service) -- Jan. 13 (I), 1990 Table of Contents # of Lines Brief News: Romania outlaws Communist Party, etc.......................17 1. China is putting on a smiling face without relaxing control.........54 2. China seeks to draw on Japanese credit line.........................35 3. China, Soviet Union reach agreement on Cambodia.....................20 4. Gorbachev on his difficult mission to Lithuania.....................52 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brief News ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [UPI/izzyq00@uclamvs.bitnet] China's ambassador to Great Britain, Mr. Ji Chaozhu, defended the June massacre as "absolutely essential ... to restore law and order." "No country in the world could possibly allow tens of thousands of demonstrators sitting in their main square for weeks at a time without doing something," he said in an interview with the BBC. [ND Editor's note: by the way, those are almost the exact words Henry Kissinger used in defense of the June massacre.] [AP/yawei@aqua.bacs.indiana.edu] Romania's Interim President Ion Iliescu Friday told a crowd of anti-Communist demonstrators the Communist Party has been outlawed in Romania because "it is against the national spirit and our ancestor's law." Demonstrators yelled ''Down with Communism! Kill the Communists!'' and burned a Romanian Communist flag and Communist identification papers. Iliescu, however, didn't say what the decision would mean for current members of the party. Much of Romania's new leadership, including Iliescu himself, were former Communists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. China is putting on a smiling face without relaxing control ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [UPI/izzyq00@uclamvs.bitnet] In the long-awaited lifting of martial law in Beijing, China is taking a calculated gamble that it can show the smiling face of relaxed repression to the world and still keep a firm grasp on political and economic discontent at home. Diplomats in the Chinese capital say the end of nearly eight months of martial law, imposed before the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in June, chiefly is for international consumption, intended to win back friends and influence benefactors. Chinese, meanwhile, have begun explaining the meaning of the decision with an old saying, "Nei jin, wai song." It translates as "tense atmosphere within, relaxed appearance without." The consensus that the move is largely symbolic spells a risky game both for China, which will try to keep the lid on a pressure cooker of unrest, and the countries it hopes to impress. They will be challenged to separate image from reality. Analysts agree the pivotal Chinese audience is the United States, to which other nations are looking for leadership in any reversal of economic and political sanctions imposed on China. The 85-year-old Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, who is said to have overcome objections from the harder-line leaders and forced through the lifting of the martial law decree, clearly does not want to wipe out his legacy of the open door policy and free market economic reforms. The leadership clearly is just as eager to win back the reform program's benefits. Foreign investment and trade have flagged. Lost tourism last year cost China $1 billion. Also vital is a resumption of World Bank and other foreign lending, now frozen. But, with some sanctions on the verge of being lifted, China also cannot afford renewed civil unrest that would require another crackdown. While the martial law decision suggests a confident leadership, analysts say the opposite is true. Chinese leaders are reported to be deeply troubled by the recent upheavals in Eastern Europe and by simmering discontent among Chinese college students and workers, for whom an ongoing austerity program has meant lower wages and unemployment. The hard-line Premier Li Peng, who privately has attacked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in recent months, so opposed lifting martial law that he needed five takes to film his announcement of the decision for national television, Chinese sources said. Thousands of democracy movement activists remained jailed. The government has stalled most economic reforms while maintaining its revival of orthodox Marxist dogma, deifying communism. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. China seeks to draw on Japanese credit line ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [World Bank News Summary/cafgm@ibrdvm1.bitnet] China has sent a request to a syndicate of Japanese banks to activate a standby credit line set up in 1985, according to banking sources in Tokyo, Associated Press-Dow Jones reports. According to the 1985 agreement, the money is to be advanced three months after the 67 Japanese banks receive a request. Initially, the Bank of China is hoping to borrow between $200 and $300 million from the credit line, the account says, and the activation of the loan may coincide with the visit of a Japanese banking delegation to China in March. A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official will visit China next week, Reuters reports, to discuss resumption of an already promised official loan to China of $5.7 billion and the head of China's State Planning Commission is due in Tokyo next week as well. The account says Japanese bankers remain cautious about resuming lending to China, despite this week's end of martial law in Beijing. "We must continue to move cautiously and watch the World Bank," one banker is quoted as saying. "No Japanese bank wants to step in front of the others, for fear of an adverse reaction." Nihon Keizai Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun report that the World Bank and its G-7 shareholders held an informal meeting yesterday and agreed to provide two loans to China -- $30 million for earthquake relief and $60 million for a project in Jiangxi province -- formal approval of which may be scheduled for January 30 or early February. For foreign businesses in China, the dominant concerns are tight credit in China, reduced demand and shortages of raw materials and foreign exchange, the New York Times (p.A3) reports. American businessmen, the article says, are looking to the resumption of lending by the World Bank and particularly the Japanese government for a stimulus to their commercial activity. China's industrial output rose 6.8 percent in 1989, according to government statistics published today, AP-DJ reports, a sharp decline from the 17.7 percent growth recorded in 1988. Reuters reports that China's Central Bank is considering another devaluation of about 10 percent, after devaluing the currency by 21.2 percent last month. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. China, Soviet Union reach agreement on Cambodia ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [AP/yawei@aqua.bacs.indiana.edu] China and the Soviet Union agree that the United Nations should help settle the Cambodian conflict, a senior Soviet official said Friday. The comment was made by Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Rogachev at the end of a four-day visit to China. ''We in general are of the same opinion with our Chinese colleagues that the U.N. should play a very major role in the process of a settlement,'' Rogachev said. ''Actually I don't know who can deny the role of the United Nations,'' Rogachev told reporters when asked about an Australian proposal. The two Communist powers have been on opposing sides in Cambodia's 11-year- old civil war. Moscow has provided financial support for Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia that installed a government in Phnom Penh. China is the main backer of the anti-Vietnam resistance, in particular the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Gorbachev on his difficult mission to Lithuania ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [AP/yawei@aqua.bacs.indiana.edu] President Mikhail Gorbachev is in the Vilnius, capital of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania, to try to reverse the Lithuania Communist Party's decision to break with the national party. Upon arrival in Vilnius Thursday, Gorbachev assured the independence- seeking Lithuanians that they would have a say in their republic's future. ''Nothing will be decided without you,'' he said. ''We will decide everything together.'' But he added, ''Remember, if someone succeeds in pitting us against each other in a clash, there will be a tragedy. We should not allow this.'' An estimated 300,000 defied Gorbachev by jamming central Vilnius in an evening demonstration for freedom. ''I am for self-determination all the way to secession from the Soviet Union,'' Gorbachev told a meeting of Lithuanian intellectuals. He appeared to be saying that although he vigorously opposes such a move, he understands it could be a possibility. The right to seceed is guaranteed by the country's 1977 Constitution. ''We have an article in the Constitution. According to this article, every republic has the right to secession, to go away. The right is there,'' he said. The Kremlin leader is in the middle of what so far has been a futile campaign to stop the secession movement, probably the worst political crisis Gorbachev has faced in his nearly 5 years in office. Lithuania's Communist Party already has declared itself independent from the central Communist Party. Leaders of Lithuania's proindependence Sajudis movement have been referring to Gorbachev as ''a great leader of a neighboring state.'' Late Thursday Gorbachev ordered that a law be written and published establishing a mechanism for secession from the Soviet Union. But the republic's leaders Friday rejected it as a ''trap'' and said Gorbachev had underestimated their republic's desire for freedom. ''If we get entangled in the mechanism of seceding from the Soviet Union, we automatically act as if we were a legal part of the Soviet Union,'' a Sajudis leader said. His group maintains that Lithuania's incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940 was illegal. Gorbachev's voice was cracking with emotion at times. He predicted Thursday night that Lithuanians would opt to stay in the Soviet Union once they realized the difficulty of secession and the hardships it would place on ethnic groups in their republic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Executive Editor: yawei@rose.bacs.indiana.edu or yawei@iubacs.bitnet | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- News Transmission chi@vlsi.uwaterloo.ca (or) ----------------------- --------------------- NDCadada Editor: Bo Chi chi@vlsi.waterloo.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sat Jan 13 22:03:19 EST 1990