Despite a brutal crackdown and the presence of martial-law troops in Beijing, snipers and saboteurs reportedly continue to operate, forcing the troops to escalate nighttime patrols and tighten checkpoints.
Diplomatic and dissident sources said Monday that rebels armed with weapons captured from the army last month have killed soldiers in the capital and carried out acts of sabotage elsewhere.
The sporadic bursts of violence are seen as an indication that at least some of the capital`s 11 million residents are resisting the presence of the troops and the return to the dark days when people were forced to mouth clumsy party slogans and pay public obeisance to the regime.
Witnesses said they saw the bodies of two soldiers floating in a canal near the Tai Yuan office complex in central Beijing about a week ago. The soldiers, who had been on late-night guard duty outside the office complex, apparently were garroted, possibly with cords of plastic-coated metal confiscated from troops sent in to clear Tiananmen Square.
”Every night now there is an incident somewhere in the city,” a student leader on the run said Monday. ”Many soldiers have been killed by snipers, but the government keeps this quiet.”
He added: ”They`ll have to keep the army here for three years, because the minute the army goes all hell will break loose.”
According to student sources, the people of Beijing captured more than 200 AK-47 assault rifles, 20,000 rounds of ammunition and 1,000 hand grenades from the army on June 3 and 4. Only a small part of that arsenal has been recovered.
Premier Li Peng said Sunday that authorities would take a ”lenient line” toward students who merely participated in demonstrations and were not leaders of the movement for democratic change-a movement the government now calls a ”counterrevolutionary rebellion.” But even as he spoke, martial-law units were raiding tenements and suburban blocks in house-to-house searches.
Reliable sources said thousands of intellectuals, academics and dissidents sympathetic to the student movement have been detained all over the country in the last week as part of a crackdown that has become all the more ominous since most arrests are no longer reported in the official media.
With the regime eager to lure tourists and foreign investors back to China, the hunt for ”counterrevolutionaries” has concentrated on rural areas, and there have been reports of some armed resistance to the crackdown. A railway employee said he worked over the weekend on a passenger train between Beijing and Chengde, where the Manchu emperors used to spend their summers.
”Every 300 meters someone had piled stones on the tracks and we had to stop to clear them,” he said.
Diplomactic sources also said there had been a second explosion aboard a train near Langzhou, west of Beijing. No casualty figures were known.
A week ago 24 passengers died when a bomb exploded in a toilet on a train near Shanghai. Local authorities called the explosion ”an act of sabotage.” There has been no official confirmation of the blast near Langzhou.
At night Beijing becomes a ghost town as soldiers set up roadblocks at strategic intersections. But even during daylight the city has not regained its normal bustle.
About 1 million people from the provinces are usually in the capital on short visits. But one traveler from the south said: ”Few people are coming into the city nowadays. If you want to get to Beijing, you have to obtain a letter from your work unit that says you are going there on official business.” Premier Li Peng has said there will be leniency for students who merely took part in protests.
