a212  1133  24 Apr 79
AM-Focus-Poster Voices, Bjt,820
TODAY'S FOCUS: Voices from the Wall
Laserphoto NY26
By VICTORIA GRAHAM
Associated Press Writer
    PEKING (AP) - The fiery posters are fading and dawn seldom breaks on
fresh angry paint. But the people still come to Democracy Wall and
the posters still speak. The voices are softer now, but clear.
    Several weeks ago the Chinese government called a halt to the wall
poster demands for human rights and to criticisms of the Communist
Party. The most ferocious banners were torn down or pasted over.
    Here and there are small, scrawled remnants: ''Where there is
suppression, there is rebellion'' - from Chairman Mao. A yellowed
scrap of paper carries a pink blossom and the words, ''A flower for
human rights.''
    The wall posters that survived and the occasional new arrivals are
more mundane - a rambling collage of pinks, greens and whites, of
gripes and pleas, snatches of biography, traces of hopes.
    All are pasted on an unassuming gray wall between the Telegraph
Building and a sports stadium. It faces the vast Chang An Avenue and
looks back to storage sheds and a bus yard. Signs atop the wall warn:
''Lock your bicycle before looking at wall posters.''
    In a day, thousands of people amble by. They stand silently,
reading, then moving on with their clusters of coriander or bags of
fresh crabs. They say nothing about what they read.
    One young man near the wall said some people are afraid now to be
seen at the wall, for fear of losing jobs or places in school.
    The newest posters include windy political discussions that may
stretch for 20 posters and poems that stretch for 10 posters. The
messages may be ponderous, prosaic or poignant. There are even posters
about posters.
    Some writers vent their spleen on the Gang of Four or extoll Mao
Tse-tung and Party Chairman Hua Guofeng (Hua Kuo-feng). One writer
criticizes the forestry program of the old regime, one suggests an
elaborate reform of Chinese characters.
    Another advertises a new mathematical game that ''teaches you to
calculate, easy to grasp. Makes you think deeply.'' Just one yuan,
says the man who stands by the poster and sells them.
    Then, there are the people:
    A foot-high banner in shocking pink proclaims that ex-soldiers are
out of work and want to return to their homes in the city. About 10
posters from ex-armymen follow.
    ''I can no longer endure this misery of being a vagrant. I want to
work,'' says one demobilized soldier in an unsigned, undated poster.
''I have suffered in the cold. I have been stripped of my family.''
    Says another: ''I was proud to be a soldier. Now to get my job back
seems reasonable.''
    A third army veteran says he ad his comrades were workers and
served in the army for six years. ''When our time was up, we were sent
to work on farms,'' he says, ''but we had studied military law which
clearly stipulates that you are to return to where you came from.''
    Wang Yu Fen, a woman of the Dong Sheng Commune in Haidian District
on the outskirts of Peking writes that a factory has taken her home.
    In March 1976, she says, factory number 6971 unlawfully took over
her house and demolished it to make way for new construction. She
appeals to Hua Guofeng and the Communist Party Central Committee to
investigate and solve her problems.
    A more convoluted tale of woe occurs at a break in the wall where
bicycle carts clatter by with loads of broken rock.
    Yang Jung Hua of Shaanxi (Shensi) Province says that in 1974 he
wanted to marry and have a family but the woman he hoped to marry was
told she must undergo sterilization. She refused, he says, but the
operation was performed later when she was ill.
    He complains that ''the law provides for free choice in marriage and
no third party should intervene. The people who violate the law
continue to ruin my marriage.''
    He says he has come to Peking and appealed to various organizations
for help, but to no avail. Then, he says, he wanted to join a
Buddhist group but was told it was not permitted.
    ''As a citizen of the People's Republic of China, I really don't
know how I should go on existing,'' he said.
    At the beginning of democracy wall near the stadium, there is a
poster about a poster.
    The writer says that another man cursed him when he put up his first
poster, which was not described. ''He told me to get out and go back
to my native Hunan Province,'' he said. He insulted me by saying
''you don't know how high is the sky or how deep is the earth.
    ''He told me my poster was not in conformity with what Chairman Mao
says. But I say cursing and intimidation is not the correct Marxist
way to strugle.''
    One poster criticizes the recent poster campaign and says: ''Some
wildly wrote and painted on Democracy Wall low and vulgar things, such
as liberation of sex and setting up brothels . . . They shamelessly
applauded the enemy . . . some bent their knee to Soviet revisionism
. . . Some deem it an honor to stretch out their yellow hand to shake
the white hand of a foreigner.''
    
ap-ny-04-24 1433EST
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