jshen@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Jun Shen) (01/25/91)
* * * C H I N A N E W S D I G E S T * * *
January 23, 1991
Table of Contents # of Lines
0. Briefs..............................................................22
1. Chinese View Americans Differently through Gulf War.................31
2. Key Chinese student leader tried for "counter-revolution"...........98
3. Declassified German Documents Describe Nanjing Massacre............103
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0. Briefs................................................................22
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Five North African nations requested that the UN Security Council order a
cease fire in Iraq so that Hussein could be given time to move his troops
out of Kuwait and so that diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict can
resume. It is expected that these efforts will be refused by the permanent
Security Council members.
Six SCUD missiles were fired at targets in Saudi Arabia and Israel today.
All were downed by Patriot anti-missile defenses.
In a Pentagon briefing today, General Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense
Cheney appeared pessimistic about a quick ending to the Gulf war. However,
it appears that there is still hope in the Pentagon that air power will
suffice to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.
Despite yesterday's fatal SCUD attack on Tel Aviv, Israel's parliament has
decided to "retaliate at a time and place of Israel's choosing". This is
the stance they have held since the first attacks this past weekend.
The Federal Reserve and Congress are beginning to worry about the cost of
the war, which is estimated to be costing the US from $0.5 to $1 billion
per day, and which could go over $2 billion/day once ground operations
begin.
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1. Chinese View Americans Differently through Gulf War...................31
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From: Weihe Guan <INR@uga.cc.uga.edu>
Source: US News and World Report, week ending January 28, 1991
In Beijing, workers talk about the gulf war with an enthusiasm usually
reserved for crucial soccer matches against archrival South Korea.
Intellectuals say this is the first time they have been excited since the
1989 Tiananmen crackdown. For all of them, it is a time of reassessment.
Beijing's citizens probably have less at stake in the war than those of
any other major capital. Self-sufficient in oil, China has no soldiers in
the gulf. But the American Embassy reprots receiving letters from Chinese
eager to volunteer to fight, a sign of changing attitudes. What impresses
many Chinese most is the length to which the United States has gone for the
sake of a principle. They seem awed that Americans have put half a million
of their lives on the line for something so abstract as the sovereignty of
another state.
Drawing special criticism has been Foreign Minister Qian Qichen's
abstention on the United Nations vote authorizing force against Iraq. The
official fence straddling is easy enough to understand. By not blocking
efforts to remove Saddam Hussein, China has won a reprieve from sanctions
linked to Tiananmen. America may not have officially dropped human rights
concerns, but in recent weeks, China has been prosecuting prominent
pro-democracy activists with scarely a murmur of Western opposition.
Meanwhile, by not supporting the use of force, China has enhanced its bid
for Third World leadership.
Still, Beijing residents find it ironic that their own government, whose
idology so closely embraces the notion of national sovereignty, stands
idle, while the imperialist America of their history books fights to
preserve Kuwait's integrity. Says one intellectual, who has long insisted
that United States sanctions after the Tiananmen massacre were not
motivated by mere principle: "I have changed my mind."
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2. Key Chinese student leader tried for "counter-revolution".............98
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From: zuofeng@castor.wustl.edu (Zuofeng Li)
Source: UPI, Jan. 23, 1991
A Chinese court began the counterrevolution trial Wednesday of a key
student protest leader whose thoughtful and persuasive appeals in the 1989
pro-democracy movement landed him at the top of a government "most-wanted"
list.
The trial of Wang Dan, 22, indicated China's communist government is
committed to moving ahead with prosecutions of what it has deemed core
agitators of the crushed Tiananmen Square protests, now denounced as a
"counterrevolutionary rebellion."
Wang, a Beijing University student jailed since July 1989, was tried on
charges of "agitating counterrevolutionary propaganda," according to a
notice posted outside the Intermediate People's Court in downtown Beijing.
The government has cited Wang for sponsoring campus debates it says were
catalysts for the nationwide pro-democracy movement that was suppressed by
Chinese troops on June 3-4, 1989.
Wang topped a warrant naming 21 "most wanted" student activists issued
after the Beijing massacre.
The United States and other Western governments, along with human rights
organizations, have voiced deep concern over the political trials, asking
that defendants not charged with violence be freed.
Critics allege Beijing has chosen to move quickly ahead with the trials
while world attention is transfixed by the Gulf war.
At least 20 Tiananmen Spring activists now have been prosecuted since the
trials began in December.
Most have been prosecuted on charges of counterrevolution, a political
crime whose vaguely stated penalties range from several years in prison to
death in cases deemed egregious.
The only two dissidents known to be charged with the more serious capital
crime of sedition -- intellectuals Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming -- are
expected to be the last to be tried.
The Chinese government recently began a quiet campaign to ease Western
concern, telling several diplomats that "lenient" sentences would be more
common. But diplomats said this has in fact heightened fears over the
arbitrariness of China's judicial system.
"Several high court officials have told a number of Western embassies that
the sentences were going to be very light," said one Western diplomat who
has been following the trials.
"This suggests very strongly that these officials have reason to know that
the trials are pro-forma, and that the results are decided in advance,"
the diplomat said.
Chinese judicial sources have acknowledged that guilty verdicts lodged in
the first trials on Jan. 5 were preordained.
Under China's socialist legal system, defendants brought to trial are
virtually assured of being convicted and are expected to earn leniency by
admitting their guilt and expressing remorse.
Wang Dan, a bespectacled history major at prestigious Beijing University
who helped organize the quickly banned Autonomous Union of University
Students, was arrested in Beijing on July 2, 1989, after eluding a
nationwide dragnet for nearly a month.
The government said Wang had failed in attempts to flee through southern
China and accused him of having met with a Taiwan reporter to plot a new
escape plan. The reporter was detained for a week and then freed.
Wang was singled out from the beginning of the 1989 movement and
throughout the crackdown, accused of agitating the unrest by holding 17
open-air "democracy salons" on the Beijing University campus.
Officials also accused Wang of doing the bidding for dissident
astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and his wife, university professor Li Shuxian,
who were denounced as "ringleaders" of the protests and took refuge
for a year in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
But Wang, spindly, boyish and reserved in public appearances, clearly
wielded great influence over his student peers, persuading them with his
calm and well-reasoned appeals for democracy and an end to one-party
communist rule.
"We make no attempt to conceal the aim of the current student movement,
which is to exert pressure on the government to promote the progress of
democracy," Wang wrote in an article published in May 1989, at the height
of the protests.
"People's yearning for democracy, science, human rights, freedom, reason
and equality, which lack a fundamental basis in China, have once again
been aroused," he said.
Although the Intermediate Court notice said Wang's trial was being held in
the downtown courthouse, sources in China's secretive judicial system say
virtually all the trials are being held at Qincheng Prison outside Beijing.
Qincheng is China's leading political prison and has been home to Wang and
most other Tiananmen Spring dissidents since their arrests.
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3. Declassified German Documents Describe Nanjing Massacre..............103
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From: J Gao (gaojeng@fac5.anu.edu.au)
Source: Kyodo, December 18, 1990
Newly declassified documents held in Germany contain eye-witness accounts
by German diplomats of rape, looting and indiscriminate slaughter of
Chinese citizens by the Japanese Imperial Army at the time of the Nanjing
massacre.
Copies of the documents, kept by the former government of East Germany,
were obtained by Kyodo News Service.
The Japanese Army entered Nanjing on Dec. 13, 1937, after a few days of
fighting, and during the sacking of the city between then and January 1938
about 42,000 civilians were killed, according to estimates quoted at the
Tokyo war crimes trials.
The German documents, which describe the events as an "atrocity" and a
"mass killing," also say, however, that in the beginning the plundering of
the city was carried out by Chinese soldiers.
The say that the Kuomintang government and the Chinese military leadership
abandoned the defense of their own people, and must also be seen from a
critical stance.
The detailed reports sent by German diplomats in China to the Foreign
Office in Berlin shed new light on the massacre, according to historian
Akira Fujiwara, professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, who called
them "important new material."
Japan's Education Ministry has been criticized in recent years for playing
down accounts of the massacre and other wartime actions by Japanese forces
in high school history textbooks.
The documents, discovered among the files of the German Embassy in China,
had been sent to East Germany and kept at the Central State Archives in
Potsdam.
Copies were provided to Kyodo reporters who found them in the archives
after being allowed access following the unification of Germany.
The diplomats' reports are based on eyewitness and contemporary secondhand
accounts by Germans and other foreigners in Nanjing at the time. One
report, dated Jan.15, 1938, describes Japanese soldiers slaughtering
unresisting citizens in great numbers, raping women and looting.
Although Japan and Germany were on friendly terms and shared an anti-
Communist stance based on the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, the German
diplomats sharply criticize the events in Nanjing.
A report dated Dec. 24, 1937, describes the Japanese as "having created a
dangerous breeding ground for communism" and as "thwarting the German aim
of stopping the spread of communism."
A Diet member of Japan's ruling Liberal-Democratic Party, Shintaro
Ishihara, drew criticism from historians last month when he said in a
magazine interview that the massacre was a story made up by the Chinese
and was a "lie" which had tarnished the image of Japan.
Fujiwara, however, said, "Being systematic, official documents, moreover
collected by diplomats of a friendly nation, these reports show that the
Nanjing massacre happened, even if there are still denials."
The documents comprise 190 mostly typewritten pages. Titled "Japanese-
Chinese conflict," they cover the period from December 1937 to December
1938, and include diplomatic reports and circulars exchanged between the
Foreign Office in Berlin and the German Embassy in China. The embassy was
moved various times during the period.
They also include a report acknowledging the failure of Germany's attempt
to act as a mediator between Japan and the Kuomintang government, in which
Berlin sought to persuade the two sides to end their conflict.
One report gives a detailed description of an amateur documentary film
made by a missionary in China, the Rev. John Magee of the American
Episcopal Church Mission, a witness in the Tokyo war crimes trials.
At the end of World War II the embassy's official documents, comprising
hundred of thousands of pages in 4,400 volumes covering the years 1864 to
1945, were left in the German Embassy building in Beijing.
At the beginning of the 1950s they were sent from China to the former East
German government. Until recently access to the files was strictly limited
to East German researchers.
Most of the reports on the Nanjing massacre carry the signature of an
official named Rosen at the German Consulate in Nanjing.
Rosen fled to Shanghai by ship on the Yangtze River on Dec.24, 1937, 11
days after Japanese troops entered the city, but on his way to the harbor
describes seeing "mounds of corpses dressed in civilian clothes."
He returned to Nanjing on Jan. 9, 1938, and in a report dated March 4
wrote that while "walking around in the open country, corpses lying about
here and there in the fields and the watercourses can be seen, not to
speak of the coffins standing around everywhere for weeks, even at the
street corner close to the embassy's office building."
There are also accounts given by the chief of the Nazi Party's branch
office in Nanjing, who stayed in the city and reported indiscriminate
slaughter and outrages. A reporter of Reuters news agency also saw a mass
execution of Chinese soldiers on the banks of the Yangtze River.
Although the documents give no concrete figure for the total number of
victims of the massacre, and account dated March 4, 1938 refers to "about
30,000 corpses originating from the mass executions lying around in the
harbor suburb of Hsiakuan."
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4. Sino-US Trade War Looms
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From: Charles P. Mok <mok@fortsc.enet.dec.com>
Source: UPI, January 22, 1991
China fanned the flames of a growing Sino-U.S. trade dispute Wednesday,
blaming Western sanctions for a mounting trade deficit and criticizing the
United States for slashing import quotas on Chinese goods.
A government spokesman said Beijing regards the troubled state of U.S. -
China trade relations as the fault of the United States. "The U.S. side's
action is unfair ... (the United States) should
take the main responsibility," Liu Xiangdong, spokesman for the
Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, told reporters.
The United States in late December sharply cut Chinas export quotas of key
textiles and garments following U.S. customs claims that Chinese exporters
were evading quotas by illegally funneling goods through third-party
locations such as Hong Kong.
China's shipping procedures also have contributed to squabbles over a
growing U.S. trade deficit. Unofficial U.S. estimates place the deficit at
about $12 billion in China's favor in 1990, a jump of more than 40 percent
over 1989.
But according to Chinese calculations, Beijing is in the red by $1.4
billion in trade with the United States. However, Chinese figures do not
include goods shipped through third-party outlets, including the vast
amount sent to the U.S. market via Hong Kong.
Liu claimed U.S.-led Western sanctions imposed to punish China for its
June 1989 crackdown on the democracy movement had contributed to the
deficit by "seriously influencing" Chinese imports, despite the
government's often-stated policy to reduce imports as part of its
continuing economic austerity program.
The spokesman twice cited so-called Western "tightening of technology
exports" as affecting Chinese imports, a claim one Western diplomat
dismissed as ludicrous.
"Its a complete canard," said the diplomat, who monitors China's trade
relations. "There's no relation at all between sanctions and imports."
The diplomat pointed out that limited economic sanctions imposed after the
crackdown banned only sales of military technology, adding that technology
exports in other fields had in fact been made easier to expedite.
On the domestic policy front, Liu announced new foreign currency exchange
retention figures for Chinese trade corporations that are apparently aimed
at curbing burgeoning regionalism.
Under the new policy, which took effect Jan. 1, all foreign trade agencies
may now retain up to 60 percent of their foreign currency earnings,
although loopholes allow the central government to demand more. Previous
policies favored China's freewheeling southern economic zones at the
expense of northeast industrial cities and Shanghai.
Liu would not elaborate on the government's recent decision to cut budget-
draining export subsidies in a bid to hold foreign trade companies
responsibile for their own profits and losses.
He said only that the state planned to eliminate central government
subsidies now amounting to 4 percent of exports. China also provides
millions of dollars in local and enterprise subsidies, and government
fears over social unrest make it unlikely that unprofitable firms would
be left to their own devices.
China has incurred "big losses" due to the escalating war in the Persian
Gulf, Liu said, repeating an earlier Foreign Ministry statement that
estimated the loss at $2 billion.
"The Gulf region had been one of our major markets for contract
engineering and labor service," Liu said.
The spokesman added that rising fuel, insurance and transport costs
triggered by the Gulf crisis have combined with the U.S. recession to have
a "big impact" on Chinese exports, but he declined to give precise figures.
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