WP,p.1:Study Group Crushed in China's Grip (Beijing U.students)

A Study Group Is Crushed in China's Grip
Beliefs Are Tested in Saga Of Sacrifice and Betrayal
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 23, 2004; Page A01


....Nearly 15 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre and 13 since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in the largest and perhaps most successful experiment in authoritarianism in the world. What happened to the New Youth Study Group (a group of 8 current and former students at Beijing University, formed to debate the need for political reform in China) offers a glimpse into the methods the party uses to maintain its monopoly on power and the difficult moral choices faced by those caught in its grip.

The fate of the study group also illustrates the thoroughness with which the party applies one of its most basic rules of survival: Consider any independent organization a potential threat and crush it.

The eight members of the New Youth Study Group never agreed on a political platform and had no real source of funds. They never set up branches in other cities or recruited any other members. They never even managed to hold another meeting with full attendance; someone was always too busy.

(A member of the group reported a meeting to the Ministry of State Security. "Three and a half years later, four members of the study group are in prison, serving sentences of eight or 10 years on subversion charges. Two are free but living with the shame of implicating the others when interrogated by police." The informer has fled to Thailand, "where one recent afternoon he leafed through some of his reports and struggled to explain why he became an informer and betrayed his friends.")

And yet they attracted the attention of China's two main security ministries. Reports about their activities reached officials at the highest levels of the party, including Luo Gan, the Politburo member responsible for internal security. Even the president then, Jiang Zemin, referred to the investigation as one of the most important in the nation, according to people who have seen an internal memo summarizing the comments of senior officials about the case....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34768-2004Apr22.html