April 10, 2001

News Analysis: Many Voices for Beijing

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

BEIJING, April 9 — Zhang Yin, an elderly newsstand owner, recalled a song from the Korean War to explain his feelings about the current crisis with the United States: "When friends come, we have good wine to entertain them; but if jackals and wolves come, we'll use hunting rifles to shoot them," he sang, adding, "I have good feeling for the American people, but China should have shot the plane down!"

The streets of Beijing are filled with Mr. Zhangs, which helps explain why the negotiations with the Chinese to free the 24 crew members of the grounded American spy plane are going so slowly.

Although China remains a Communist Party dictatorship, it is no longer headed by a charismatic figure like Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping, someone who has the authority to arbitrate disputes in the leadership or personally set the country's course. Now, its leaders must cater to a range of constituencies, from government ministries to citizens like Mr. Zhang. And, increasingly, public opinion matters.

What is obviously smart for the pursuit of smooth relations with Washington is often not fit for domestic consumption in a country where some high officials are still ambivalent about China's dance with the West, and where anti-Americanism is now running high.

"Jiang Zemin has very diverse constituencies, and they all have to be brought on board, both in the bureaucracy and in the public," said Anthony Saich, a China specialist at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Unlike the American president — who has broad leeway to act unilaterally in such cases — President Jiang heads an unwieldy bureaucracy and must build a mandate anew on every important decision.

"I don't think anyone in China — including Jiang Zemin — could have made a prompt decision that Bush asked for to let the crew go," a Chinese political scientist said.

In this case, building a consensus would have been particularly delicate, he said, since it would involve the military, which remains strongly suspicious of American motives and was recently stung by the defection of a senior Chinese Army officer to the United States.

The Chinese military is deeply conservative, and some officers probably would not mind undermining some of Mr. Jiang's goals — like joining the World Trade Organization, which they worry will court social unrest and enhance Western influence. Sunday's Liberation Army Daily said China had the right to "investigate thoroughly" the commanders of the American aircraft.

And right now Mr. Jiang is likely to care — a lot — about what the military thinks. Next year he is scheduled to step down as Communist Party chief, and the year after that his term as president ends. But he is likely to try to retain his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission, which oversees the People's Liberation Army and would allow him to retain a large measure of power.

"A lot of P.L.A. commanders will be thinking, `If we're not tough on this issue, when will we be?' " said a researcher at a government think tank. "A Chinese plane crashed, the pilot is missing, and the people expect the government to do something."

Among ordinary Chinese, there has not been a raw emotional outpouring as there was during the period that led to stone-throwing protests after NATO planes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. But most people were nonetheless angry about the American spying, grieved by the death of a pilot, and frustrated by President Bush's unwillingness to apologize.

At the root of their complaints was a sense of wounded national pride — that China has suffered at the hands of foreigners before and is not prepared to suffer again. In one opinion poll on the Chinese Internet — always a hotbed of nationalist sentiment, 13,000 of 15,000 net surfers said the collision was the result of a "deliberate provocation."

During the Maoist era, from the 1950's into the 70's, China's people — then mostly isolated farmers — yielded to Mao's disastrous social and economic policies, even though those led to millions of deaths.

But today, the average Chinese is plugged in, quickly receiving and passing on information by phone if not on the Internet. Protests against government policy are frequent and widespread. And while voting is only possible in local elections, the increasingly loud voices of the people weigh heavily on national leaders.

"China has changed, and politicians are far more accountable," Professor Saich said. "There is definitely public opinion now. It forms, and it becomes part of the political debate."

Last week, for instance, the more xenophobic branches of the government were probably strengthened by the public anger over the air collision, he said.

"I think the government got tougher with the United States as the week went on partly because of popular feedback that it wasn't being tough enough," said Jian Yi, a student. "People's first reaction was that the plane was brought down by the United States on our doorstep — that's pretty hard for people to take."

Mr. Jian said the downing of the plane tapped unquenched anger over the Chinese Embassy bombing two years ago, which he said the United States, while insisting it was an accident, had never adequately explained.

"I know that in the United States there is a feeling that the Chinese government is taking a hard line on the plane," he said, "but we as students sometimes feel that in the last few years China's been making too many concessions — that the government's primary foreign policy goal has been good relations with the United States."