China's most wanted

Without academic freedom, China will never fully develop," predicted China's esteemed premier Zhou En Lai in 1954. He obviously did not know about the Internet. China's current leadership has taken a swat at the growing trade of information via computer technology, making the transmission of "secret" or "reactionary" material a capital crime last January. A crackdown on everyone from webmasters to Internet cafés coincided with publication in the United States of The Tiananmen Papers. The tome of once-classified documents reveals in blow-by-blow detail the decision of China's communist leadersÑ"the elders"Ñto use force in Tiananmen Square to bring student democrats to heel in 1989. Reputations of China's current leadership, including supreme leader Jiang Zemin, suffer most at the hands of the documentation. Behind the present crackdown on Internet users and academic researchers is that leadership's quest to uncover the true identity of Zhang Liang, the mysterious "compiler" of the papers. In the book's preface, he claims to be a Party leader, interested in reform from the inside. His prestige and documentation so impressed three eminent American SinologistsÑColumbia University's Andrew Nathan, Princeton's Perry Link, and Berkeley's Orville SchellÑthat they signed on as editors. A partial tally of the fallout is summarized below.