BEIJING — When Wang Changhong and 12 other Chinese were ``exposed`` last week as Taiwanese spies who stoked the antigovernment rallies of the smashed democracy movement, the most damning evidence against them came from the electronic eyes of Big Brother.
Wang, a roly-poly type with a ready smile, was seen giving the V-for-victory sign on Tiananmen Square in the euphoric days of the student movement, when everyone was flashing that two-fingered salute. The television eyes saw him haranguing small groups and engaging in whispered conversations, and followed him as he cycled off to unknown destinations.
Big Brother`s eyes also were in Shanghai and Guangdong province, where other members of the Gang of 13 spy ring were ``unmasked`` by the candid cameras that watch hundreds of millions of Chinese from lampposts and metal poles, from rooftops, from tree branches and even inside hotel banquet halls.
For millions of pro-democracy demonstrators and the tens of thousands who rioted against the military in the bloody days beginning June 4, the video sequences shown on Chinese television in recent weeks have become a chilling reminder that they, too, could face arrest and death sentences for throwing a rock at an armored personnel carrier or a tank, or for torching an army truck or a barricade.
All of that is now on videotape.
Some of the 27 young men who have been executed for hooliganism were plucked from the crowds by the remote-controlled cameras with zoom lenses that can zero in on any face. If television showed their misdeeds, the courts had no qualms about punishing the rioters based on videotaped evidence.
At times this evidence is as ridiculous as the commentary that accompanies it. A growing number of Chinese students who studied abroad, especially in the United States, are now accused of being foreign spies and agitators.
``The Chinese government did not send this man abroad nor pay for his studies. So how did he finance himself?`` asked one breathless TV commentator as the black-and-white video clips of the suspect`s activities rolled on the screen.
It showed the ``spy`` bicycling down an empty road. ``He is going to a demonstration,`` said the commentator. Then the man was shown talking amiably to a group of youths. ``He is inciting them to riot,`` the commentator interpreted. The final sequence showed the man mailing a letter at a post office, as the commentator triumphantly intoned: ``He is sending his report abroad.``
Another detainee exposed by the eye is literature professor Liu Xiaobo, who has been labeled the ``black hand`` behind the student demonstrations. The cameras caught him talking to Wu`er Kaixi, one of the professor`s students at Beijing`s Normal University and the most wanted of the 21 people on the government`s blacklist. A hidden camera also caught Liu sitting on the curb near a rally in Tiananmen Square. ``He is watching his handiwork,`` went the commentary.
Liu studied in the United States, and the TV commentator pointed out that ``this bad element`` had returned hurriedly from a lecture tour in Norway
``to mastermind the turmoil.``
In their rush to discredit student leaders as frauds who duped the public, the TV judges blundered with one sequence. The tape showed a banquet of student leaders, among them the flamboyant Wu`er, 22, chairman of the outlawed independent student union.
The shrill commentary informed viewers that while this group, supposedly on a hunger strike, ate their noodles and paid for the dinner with money collected for their cause, their fellow students suffered hunger only a quarter of a mile away on Tiananmen Square. But observers pointed out that beneath the running tape was the printed date and hour of the banquet-several days after the student hunger strike had been called off.
More frightening was the fact that the video sequence was shot inside the banquet hall of the Beijing Hotel, apparently by a camera hidden in the chandelier and, judging by the quality of the images, installed years ago. Today the somewhat run-down hotel, once the capital`s most luxurious, is a popular rendezvous for many official and commercial banquets during which the Chinese, encouraged by rice wine, let down their hair and make comments they would never make under more sober circumstances.
A second hidden camera picked up the students in the hotel lobby, and a third followed them to the hotel entrance.
China`s electronic eyes are controlled by a team of security agents from inside an oval control room at Beijing`s public security headquarters. Operators seated at monitors can activate the zoom lenses or swivel the cameras by remote control. Their harvest in recent months, millions of feet of taped footage, can provide China`s ubiquitous security apparatus for years to come with evidence against ``counterrevolutionaries.``