Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

China: dissent at the top

By GWYNNE DYER


Saturday, August 21st 2004


It would be misleading to say that there is a hidden war going on at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, because there is ALWAYS a secret war going on there. But the struggle in Beijing at the moment seems much fiercer than usual. It could even be the one that finally cracks the system open.

As usual, only fragments of evidence about what is really going on in the party's upper ranks reach the outside world, but in the past few months there have been signs that fundamental issues are being debated.

The most recent hint was an article by ex-premier Li Peng in the Party magazine Seeking Truth in which he defended his decision to send in the army to clear Tienanmen Square in June, 1989, killing hundreds of student demonstrators.

Most Chinese old enough to recall those terrible events see Li, now 75, as the man chiefly responsible for the massacre, which permanently undermined the legitimacy of Communist rule. However, his article gives the main responsibility to the late leader Deng Xiaoping, who is virtually above criticism: "With the boldness of vision of a great revolutionary and politician, comrade Deng Xiaoping, along with other party elders, gave the leadership their firm and full support to put down the political disturbance using forceful measures." But why is he mentioning it at all?

You can see why Li, probably the most hated man in China, might want to shift the blame, but normal Party policy is to suppress all public discussion of the slaughter on Tienanmen Square. It is still highly controversial even within the Party: a video has been made, for viewing by cadres only, pushing the official line that the pro-democracy demonstrations were a "counter-revolutionary riot" that had to be crushed to preserve China's stability, but it is never shown in public. In fact, it is most unusual for these events to be raised in public-but it's not the first time recently.

In February Dr Jiang Yanyong, famous throughout China as the whistle-blower who revealed the Sars cover-up last year, released a letter he had written to the Communist party in which he recalled treating dying students on the square and asked the Party to acknwledge that they had been patriots who were just trying to improve their country. The Beijing rumour-mill claimed that he had the support of some party leaders, but in the end his letter was not reported in the Chinese media -and Jiang was arrested and whisked out of Beijing for a few days on the fifteenth anniversary of the tragedy in June.

Another sign that the hidden war in the Party is heating up was Beijing University journalism professor Jiao Guobiao's tirade against the state propaganda department in May. "Where can you find propaganda departments? Not in the US, the UK or Europe. But you did find them in Nazi Germany, where Goebbels said 'a lie that is repeated a thousand times becomes the truth'...(The state propaganda department's) censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilisation, and as counter to scientific common-sense as witches and wizardry."

This was not the normal nuanced criticism that loyal Communists allow themselves in public. "I cannot stand seeing the Communist party develop in this way ," Jiao explained. "We must take responsibility for China." And although his protest was kept out of the mainstream media, he said that he had been "encouraged by (party) elders" to write the essay-and it could readily be seen on the internet.

It's easy to guess what the struggle in the party is about, because it has been the same war for 15 years now. Should the party take the lead in liberalising China, before rising educational and living standards create a demand for freedom and democracy that will simply sweep it away?

Or is gradual reform impossible, and must the party therefore struggle to hold the line forever, knowing that even one step backwards could be fatal?

That was already the argument in 1989. The secretary-general of the Communist party at the time, Zhao Ziyang, was a moderate who wanted to negotiate with the students on Tienanmen Square, but he was overruled and removed by the hard men around Jiang Zemin (later president) and Li Peng.

Zhao remains under house arrest to this day, and even senior party members cannot visit or communicate with him without permission from the central committee of the party.

It was widely hoped that Jiang Zemin's retirement from the presidency last year and the choice of Wen Jiabao as premier would lead to a gradual loosening of totalitarian controls-Wen was one of the few senior leaders to visit the students on Tienanmen Square -but it has not happened. The frustration must be intense among senior Communists who believe that the party will only survive if it takes the lead in opening the system up, and so battle has been joined.

The champion of the hard-liners is still Jiang Zemin, semi-retired but still in charge of the military, and it is on the parts of the apparatus that his partisans still control (like the state propaganda department) that the advocates of change direct their attacks. The conservatives fight back (as Li did) with strong defences of their actions at the time of Tienanmen Square, but the public sees only a hundredth of what is really going on. This struggle may go on for years without a decisive victory, but it really is a battle for the future of China.

Gwynne Dyer is a

London-based independent journalist whose articles are

published in 45 countries.


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