From: gaojeng@durras.anu.edu.au (J. Gao)
Subject: China News Digest (Global), Sun, 10/4/1992
Summary: CND
Keywords: CND
Organization: Computer Services Centre, Australian National University
Date:  4 Oct 92 10:45:30 GMT

              * * *  C h i n a   N e w s   D i g e s t  * * *

                              (News Global)

                        Sunday, October 4, 1992


Table of Contents                                                # of Lines
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1. China Marks National Day with Reform Calls ...........................58
2. China Newspaper Says Filmmakers Rights Must Be Protected .............58
3. Three Chinese Refugees Imprisoned by U.S. Government Freed ...........70
4. China's Imperial Survivor Awaits Japan's Emperor ....................123
5. Chairman Mao's Secret Cigar Factory ..................................46
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1. China Marks National Day with Reform Calls ...........................58
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From: A CND Reader
Source: UPI, 10/1/92

BEIJING -- China marked its founding as a communist nation Thursday by 
calling for more capitalist-style economic reforms, with state media saying
the Communist Party's upcoming national congress will enshrine reform and 
name a younger group of leaders.

Editorials in government and party newspapers on the Oct. 1 national day
gave wide support to senior leader Deng Xiaoping's revived drive for
market-oriented reforms, presaging the spirit of the party congress that
opens Oct. 12.

"The upcoming party congress ... will crystalize the experiences of the
past 13 years," the official China Daily said, referring to the reform era
since 1979. "The establishment of a socialist market economy is expected
to get a ringing endorsement."

The newspaper, noting the years since communist China was founded in 1949,
said it taken more than four decades to realize that "market forces are not
contradictory to the socialist system, but necessary and conducive to its
fast and coordinated development."

The editorial also hinted that some changes in the leadership, notably in
the party's policy-making Central Committee, would occur. The congress will
set key personnel and policies for the next five years and is likely to be
the last for the 88-year-old Deng.

"A younger team of leaders will be elected to the Central Committee, which
will work to further emancipate the thinking of the whole nation and seize
the opportune moment to accelerate the pace of reform, opening to the world
and modernization," it said.

The party's flagship newspaper People's Daily noted "the basic socialist
systems are for the people's interests, but the old economic system impedes
the development of the force of production."

But it cautioned that the country also needs to keep one hand "grasping
the attack on every kind of illegal activity" and "combine revolutionary 
spirit with a scientific attitude."

Another party newspaper, Guangming Daily, warned that reforms must be
accompanied by the strengthening of "thought and political work" and
adherence to the so-called Four Cardinal Principles, basic tenets that
ensure the communist monopoly on power.

A Shanghai state-run newspaper, the Liberation Daily, ran a glowing
editorial glorifying Deng himself, who has in the past eschewed any form
of personality cult. The newspaper has recently been used by Deng's
supporters as a voice for his views.

"Deng Xiaoping represents a great generation," the newspaper said.
"Deng Xiaoping thought and theory is nothing less than contemporary,
newly developed Marxist-Leninist, Mao Zedong thought.

"People are hoping that the 14th party congress will take another step 
in the appeal to the entire party, the entire army, and all the people to 
study Deng Xiaoping's major work."

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2. China Newspaper Says Filmmakers Rights Must Be Protected .............58
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From: Chongyu Hua, <cyuhua@ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Source: UPI, 10/1/92

BEIJING  -- In another sign of easing controls over art and culture in 
China, an official newspaper called Thursday for filmmakers' artistic 
freedom to be guaranteed in law.

An article in the Shanghai-based Wenhui Daily slammed "ossified and 
conservative" leaders for stifling creative freedom in China, saying that 
legal guarantees were needed to ensure filmmakers artistic freedom was not 
interfered with.

"Creative freedom is a natural rule of art, a natural rule of life -- it is 
not for a certain person to give if he feels like it or withhold if he 
doesn't," the writer, identified as "Xun Lei" or "bolt of lightning," 
said in the article.

The article called for "the urgent drawing up of a set of laws and 
regulations" guaranteeing the creative freedom of filmmakers, adding "we 
should concentrate on finding ways to protect creative freedom and not weigh 
out how much freedom should be granted."

The article focused on the works of Oscar-nominated Chinese film director 
Zhang Yimou who, the article said, was a principal target of a cultural 
freeze imposed in 1989 that made "cultural work lose its color, becoming 
bland and lifeless."

The government crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989 was followed 
by purges of reformist officials, including then Minister of Culture Wang 
Meng, and tightened government control of art and cultural fields.

The article said that after 1989, "bold and independent thinkers" were 
targeted for criticism, and said the return of "leftist" or hard-line 
communist thinking after the crackdown "created an atmosphere of tension 
where everyone felt under threat."

"The misfortune that befell Zhang Yimou's films was an outcome of this 
sort of attitude," the article said.

Two of Zhang's films, "Judou" and "Raise the Red Lantern," were 
nominated for Oscars in 1990 and 1991. But both were banned in China, 
accused of "heaping disgrace on the motherland" and "belittling the 
Chinese people," the article said.

Both films and Zhang's most recent movie, "Qiuju goes to court," were 
passed for public viewing in China for the first time this summer.

In stark contrast to traditional communist ideology that sees cinema as a 
propaganda tool, the article said films should be treated as artistic 
products, adding that to treat a film as a "propaganda tool" was "an 
invasion of the democratic and creative freedoms of artists."

It said the decision over whether a film should be made should be left to 
investors who could base their decision on the success the film would have 
on "the film market."

"As long as they don't break the law or the constitution then we shouldn't 
interfere," it said.

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3. Three Chinese Refugees Imprisoned by U.S. Government Freed ...........70
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From: <jhua@aol.com>
Source: UPI, 10/2/92

MIAMI - Three Chinese refugees, imprisoned in a hotel room for 14 months 
by the U.S. government, were finally granted political asylum and freed in 
the sponsorship of a university president who fought for their cause. 

The young women were freed late Thursday, leaving Room 606 at the Miami
Airport Hotel for the first time since they arrived aboard a Paraguayan
airliner without papers Aug. 13, 1991. 

"We go now!" cried Shu Zhen Qiu. "I'm very, very, very happy." 

Qiu, Jinfeng Chen and Aihu Situ, all in their 20s, were not students but 
had participated in the Chinese pro-democracy demonstrations that ended 
with the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

They fled China out of fear of political persecution, going first to 
Bolivia and then to Paraguay. They met each other for the first time on 
the Paraguayan airline flight to Miami. 

They were arrested as stowaways and the U.S. Immigration and 
Naturalization Service ordered the airline to feed and house them and 
provide security until hearings were held on their requests for political 
asylum. 

The requests were initially denied and their appeals dragged on for a 
year unresolved. All along, immigration officials said the women were free 
to go back to China by dropping their petition. 

"We aren't holding them against their will," said Wayne Joy, acting deputy
INS director for Miami. 

Although the circumstances of the detention were not unusual, the length of
their wait was, immigration officials conceded. 

"These women somehow fell through the cracks," said Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin 
the Barry University president who took up the women's cause after reading
about their plight. 

The despondent women spent their time watching television and looking out 
the window, where their only view of the outside world was a patch of sky 
over a parking garage. 

The female security guards hired by the airline and assigned to watch the
women befriended them and sometimes allowed them to go for a swim in the
hotel pool. 

O'Laughlin began teaching them English and offered to take the women home
with her while INS considered their asylum request, but the INS said no. 

For months, O'Laughlin pulled every string she could in Miami and 
Washington. She enlisted the help of Rep. E. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., who pressed 
U.S. Attorney General William Barr to intervene. 

INS finally dropped its opposition to asylum and Barr told the women late
Thursday that they were free to leave the hotel. 

"Oh I'm so happy. Get your stuff. Let's get out of Dodge," O'Laughlin told
them as she picked them up. "I think these are very good, very courageous
young women. I think they will be beautiful citizens someday." 

The women will stay with O'Laughlin for a few weeks and then move into 
dorms and begin English classes at Barry University. 

"They can't believe they are free. They are walking around like it is a 
dream " O'Laughlin said. 

"This is really somewhat outrageous," said Shaw, who vowed to sponsor
legislation to change the law that allowed the women to be held for so long. 

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4. China's Imperial Survivor Awaits Japan's Emperor ....................123
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From: A CND Reader 
Source: Reuter, 10/2/92
Reporter: Andrew Quinn

BEIJING -- Not far from the Forbidden City, where China's emperors once 
decided the fate of millions from the golden dragon throne, a small 
flower-filled courtyard is home to Beijing's last imperial survivor. Amid 
persimmon trees and leafy stands of Japanese mint, Aisin Giorro Pu Jie --
younger brother of China's last emperor and once heir-apparent to the 
throne of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo -- tends his garden and 
practices the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy.

His is a quiet life behind stone walls, marked by the slow change of the
seasons and the comfortable habits of a man of 86. Pu Jie -- by turn prince, 
prisoner of war, traitor and now scholar -- has played a minor but 
important role in the evolving relationship between China and Japan.

This month, he and millions of other Chinese are preparing to mark a turning
point in that relationship: the arrival of Emperor Akihito, the first 
Japanese monarch ever to visit China.

"If I have a chance to see him when he comes, the only thing I want to 
say to him is 'welcome'," Pu Jie said in an interview.

"I have had contact with Akihito. He invited me to lunch once when I visited
Tokyo. We talk about normal things."

Among all of China's 1.1 billion people, Pu Jie alone could presume to 
discuss "normal things" with the Emperor of Japan.

For centuries, the two countries vied as the imperial powers of Asia, 
their rulers similarly endowed with absolute power and an official 
"mandate of heaven" handed down by the gods.

For China's Qing dynasty, the end of the line came with Pu Jie's brother, 
the boy emperor Henry Pu Yi, who was toppled from the throne by the 
Republican revolution of 1911.

Japan's imperial tradition continues in the person of Akihito, who 
succeeded his father Hirohito to the Chrysanthemum throne in 1989.

Akihito's visit to China from October 23 is portrayed as capping a 
friendship which has grown since the end of World War Two, during which 
millions of Chinese died at the hands of a brutal Japanese occupation 
force.

Pu Jie, a small man wrapped in a grey cardigan despite the autumn sunshine,
thinks the time is right.

"China and Japan should stand together like trees in a forest," he said in 
the sitting room of his courtyard house.

"It is time to throw the past away."

The past that Pu Jie now dismisses with a wave of his delicate hand is 
entwined with his own life's story.

Born in 1906 into China's declining imperial household, he joined his 
brother and the besieged Manchu nobility in an attempt to preserve their 
power as China fell headlong into the chaos of the 1920s and 30s.

"Old officials wanted to use us. But they gradually died off. Then we had 
no choice but to join hands with foreigners, with the Japanese."

Japan's expansionist dreams in Asia were centred first on China. In the 
two brothers it found willing accomplices. Pu Yi was installed as "emperor" 
of a new state in northeast China, Manchukuo, in 1935.

Pu Jie was shipped off for schooling to Japan, where he had his first 
contacts with Japan's imperial family.

As Pu Yi was childless, Tokyo's political matchmakers soon married Pu Jie 
to a member of Japan's aristocracy -- envisioning a malleable new dynasty 
which would serve as a front for Japanese control.

"They looked down on us. We were the slaves, they were the masters," Pu 
Jie said.

The fragile state of Manchukuo crumbled when Japan was beaten at the end 
of World War Two. Pu Yi and Pu Jie were taken prisoner as traitors to the 
new communist government, and subjected to "re-education" before being 
released in 1959.

Pu Yi died of cancer in 1967, having lived his last days as a gardener in 
the Beijing Botanical Gardens.

Pu Jie's re-indoctrination, and his own political acumen, still serve him 
well. He is a loyal citizen of the People's Republic, a delegate to its 
rubber-stamp parliament, and a firm believer that his past is littered with 
mistakes.

"We sold out our country," he said. "This was wrong."

Pu Jie believes that Japan, too, should be given a second chance. He 
disagrees with those who feel Akihito should make a formal apology for the 
horrors of the war, and does not support efforts by unofficial citizens' 
groups to demand compensation.

"We cannot demand an apology. The Japanese resist this very strongly, and 
we should not make these demands," he said.

"Some people in China will never forget that Japan invaded us. And some in
Japan are very much against (Akihito's) visit. But they are in the 
minority."

Pu Jie said Akihito, whom he has met several times on visits to his daughter 
in Japan, is a different man from Hirohito, who remains a war criminal in 
the minds of many Asians.

"This emperor is different. He is closer to his people."

Pu Jie said he has not yet been told if he will be invited to meet Akihito 
and Empress Michiko when they come to Beijing.

"If I am invited, I would be happy to go," he said.

Meanwhile, he continues his early morning exercises in his courtyard,
researches his family history, and takes occasional strolls through the
Forbidden City -- along with thousands of other Chinese tourists.

"I lived there, so of course some memories come back," Pu Jie said. "But 
I am old, and I find my memory is failing."  

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5. Chairman Mao's Secret Cigar Factory ..................................46
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From: A CND Reader 
Source: South China Morning Post, 1/10/92
By: Geoffrey Crothall

BEIJING -- Chairman Mao Zedong, still revered by many in CHINA as the
saviour of the common people, had one very uncommon vice, an official
Chinese newspaper has revealed.

The chain smoking founder of the People's Republic was partial to luxury 
hand-made cigars which he had specially produced by a top secret tobacco 
workshop, originally located in the southwestern province of Sichuan, 
according to the Sichuan Daily.

The workshop, set up by senior provincial party officials in 1964, used only 
the finest of materials to produce the Chairman's cigars, the newspaper 
said. Every tobacco leaf was individually tested for fragrance and its slow 
burning properties, it said. Out of every 25 kilograms of tobacco supplied 
to the workshop, only about 100 leaves would be deemed suitable enough for 
the Chairman's cigars.

All cigars were made by hand with one worker producing less than 30 cigars 
a day. The whole operation was conducted in utmost secrecy with the 
workshop, located inside the Shifang Tobacco Factory, being surrounded by 
barbed wire and firmly padlocked when not in use.

According to the Sichuan Daily, the exclusive cigar manufacturing operation 
was the brain child of the late Marshall He Long, who commissioned the then 
party secretary of Sichuan Li Jingquan to find a suitable factory.

After an extensive search, the Shifang Tobacco Factory, just up the road 
from Mr Deng Xiaoping's home town of Guanghan, was chosen as the site of 
the operation.

In 1966, production was moved to the provincial capital Chengdu but the chaos 
of the Cultural Revolution that year forced the production team to move back 
to the relative tranquillity of Shifang.

In 1971, following the mysterious death of Mao's chosen successor Lin Biao, 
production at Shifang was stopped and the manufacturing operation moved to a 
workshop just across the road from Mao's residence in Zhongnanhai.
The chairman's cigars and cigarettes were collected from the workshop by 
Mao's bodyguard. No one else was allowed anywhere near the sacred weed.

The new workshop, continued its operation right up until Mao's death in 1976 
when it was disbanded and the workers transferred to the Beijing Tobacco 
Plant. 

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