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roadblocks being removed overnight to let essential food supplies reach the markets. The huge memorial rally on 9 June was closely policed, but passed off peacefully.
8.
Beiping
-
("Northern
There was every reason for Shanghai to be sensibly cowed by the carnage in Peking. Quite a few people told me that students and ordinary Shanghainese alike were too cowardly and too materialistic to take the risks which had produced the martyrdom and butchery in the capital. Peace"
when the KMT moved their capital to Nanjing!). Nevertheless immense credit is due to Shanghai's non-Shanghainese Mayor, Zhu Rongji, for providing at just the right moment, the leadership, intelligence and judgment even evidence of such solid qualities as sincerity and humanity - which had been so conspicuously and tragically lacking in the titular leaders in Peking and the old
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men directing them. The Mayor's televised appeal on 8 June for a return to order had enough sternness to carry conviction (and to show compliance with Peking) but also enough moderation (by not talking of "counter-revolutionaries") to earn the respect of the students.
9.
Zhu is no closet liberal. He has, however, some Confucian virtues to temper the Leninist disciplines of the Communist Party. One, clearly, has been his disdain for calling on the military to solve a political conflict. Several sources whom I trust have said that Zhu's televised speech was a re-run or edited version of a considerably longer address to an audience of Party and Government officials (with Jiang Zemin in Peking for most of the time Zhu was also acting Party Secretary). On television he said that declaring martial law in Shanghai or asking "those military types" to enter the city had never been considered an option. (I do not believe him: nor, of course, does the Mayor of Shanghai command the troops in and around the city). To the meeting he apparently said: "As long as I remain Mayor of Shanghai, the army will only come in over my dead body.
10. Zhu's stock in Shanghai is as high as I have known any provincial Government leader's to be in China: not loved
(Chinese people, apart from some of their leaders, are not stupid) but respected. By contrast Jiang Zemin is regarded as shallow, vain, lacking fixed principles and a poor advertisement for Shanghai. There were guffaws of incredulity from my local staff when his appointment as General Secretary was announced on television. Vanity may have overcome sanity in his acceptance of the post; in reality, he was too weak to refuse. By contrast, of the younger leaders Qiao Shi looks more and more to have the political agility which kept Zhou Enlai safe for so long. He is said to have been Jiang's mentor in the East China underground communist network in the latter days of the nationalist Government.
11. The past two months have added new dimensions to the relationship between Shanghai and Peking. Some may have
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/considerable