China Hits the Clutch

...Typical of these was an essay in the People's Daily by two postgraduate law students at prestigious Beijing University...

...Conventional wisdom has it that all Chinese political groups favor reform, yet that is merely to say they all look to an industrially and militarily powerful China...

...Conservatives sided with Deng, pressing him not to retire, and that set the stage for Hu's downfall and the anti-reformist offensive...

...The campaign to re-establish ideological orthodoxy—in this case meaning Party primacy and opposition to capitalism and "total Westernization"—· functions as a large tent beneath which the pace and content of reformist moves can be challenged and neutralized...

...From a tactical point of view, therefore, this is not the time for reformist attempts to regain momentum through relatively drastic measures like price reorganization, cited by Zhao as a prerequisite to further progress...

...The cause of his troubles, however, lay deeper...

...And as Hu went, so have and will those who enjoyed his political protection: Whether members of the Party's propaganda department, the universities, the writers' association, the media, or simply rankand-file Party members and factory workers, they are already being danced off to the anti-bourgeois liberalism drumbeat...

...A Party Central committee session must be held relatively shortly to confirm Zhao as Hu's successor in the general secretary's post, assuming he is to remain on the job...

...In addition, last year's "Hundred Flowers" revival, encouraging intellectuals to speak their minds without fear of retribution, has wilted under fierce attacks on academician Fang Lizhi, writer Wang Ruowang, and popular People's Daily investigative reporter Liu Binyan—all of whom have been expelled from the Party...

...for either to suggest otherwise would be a grave admission of failure and a confirmation of their political enemies' charges...

...It is a common phenomenon in Communist countries," they wrote, "that political power is highly centralized, and not effectively supervised and restricted...

...Last year, the most liberal among China's intellectuals, buoyed by the Deng-endorsed "Hundred Flowers" ambience, published highly critical articles on the political system that went far beyond the simplistic demands for freedom blazoned on the demonstration banners...

...Codewords in the assault on reform are "central planning" and "self-reliance...

...Nor is it the time to plunge ahead with new market mechanisms that would free factory managers from state quotas and upset local Party power cliques...

...Lately in official statements and in newspaper articles, there has been increasing stress as well on the need for more production, less spending, less consumerism...

...A month or two before the major Communist Party Congress in October they will have to reach agreement on documents setting China's course for the next five years, or until the next Congress convenes...

...Conservatives, true to the definition of the label, are meanwhile hailing the virtues of hard work, thrift, self-reliance, strict ideological education, and—above all —unquestioned Communist Party control...

...If conservatives and reformers can reach a consensus early enough, the choice might be announced at the National People's Congress in late March...

...It knows such cleansings can get dangerously out of hand, and unlike the "spiritual pollution" crusade of 1983 that was limited to ideological purity, the drive against liberalism bears on economic and social policy...

...In practical terms, though, they could come up with nothing better than "consolidation" to help achieve their objectives —hardly inspiring to the new generation of Party and government officials whose appetite for innovation and influence had been whetted...

...But that is exactly what one would expect them to insist after the most jolting political shakeup in China since 1979...

...Conservatives and reformers have the first half of the year to feud...

...These economic steps, and the political reordering Deng deems necessary to sustain them, will have to await the post-Congress period when, presumably, the leadership question will be settled...

...Deng and Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, who is now also the acting Party leader, keep reassuring everybody that the economic reforms and the open-door policy instituted to attract foreign capital will not be affected by the "recent personnel change...

...Thus the political lines that had previously seemed quite clear have become somewhat blurred...

...Though Deng remains this country's paramount figure, it can no longer be presumed that he is a puppetmaster standing above the stage and manipulating the array of political characters below...

...Enough information has been leaked to the foreign press, especially the Japanese, to establish that Hu posed a premature challenge to his mentor, probably no later than last fall...

...Even the most modest of the political revisions, aimed at divorcing the Party apparatus from low-level enterprise management, seem to be going nowhere...

...After the unwelcome by-products began to appear in 1985, reformers became increasingly defensive...

...They labored to explain, with some logic, that changes of the magnitude being undertaken would inevitably falter at times and would cause discontent among large numbers of people—notably workers hit by higher retail prices, Party officials divested of a measure of power, aged veterans of the Revolution pushed into retirement to make way for younger, better educated functionaries...

...Given Deng's present situation, it is at the least uncertain he will have a decisive say in the revised succession scheme...

...The means Deng chose seemed flawed to many when put into practice...

...Mark Hopkins, a specialist in Soviet and Eastern European affairs, has spent the last two years in China...

...The surviving leadership is struggling to contain the crackdown...

...It is too soon to date the end of the Deng Xiaoping era, despite the feeling of some observers in Beijing that he will be unable to revive the impetus toward reform in his political lifetime...

...Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist, who finally was sacked fromhis job as vice president of the University of Science and Technology in Hefei and publicly denounced by Deng himself, made vehement appeals for authentic democracy in his speeches on college campuses—all duly recorded by internal security police...

...The December demonstrations by tens of thousands of students—which began in Hefei and quickly spread to Shanghai, Beijing and more than a dozen other cities—furnished dramatic evidence that the 82-year-old leader was losing control over the nation...

...Since it is unusual for the same person to hold high positions in both the Party and the government, a replacement for Zhao as prime minister will probably be selected at the same time...

...Admittedly, his basket of reforms produced high industrial growth rates and fairly plentiful food...

...Some prominent figures were more explicit in their strictures...

...What is at issue is the best way to reach that goal...

...The boosting of both by, for example, the bureaucracy under conservative Peng Zhen, head of the unicameral National People's Congress, reflects a retreat from market principles and a deemphasis of foreign investment...

...Deng's own neat plan for an orderly succession was thrown off track with the ouster of Hu...

...The forced resignation January 16 of his onetime protégé, 71-year-old Hu Yaobang, from the job of general secretary of the Communist Party has opened the fields of policy and politics to the machinations of China's conservative faction...

...The vaunted economic reforms designed to create a Socialist market economy are slowing...

...Never much liked by the conservatives, especially those in the military, he was an easy target once he lost Deng's confidence...

...And pioneering factory managers who just a month or so ago spoke of adopting capitalist management methods are now vulnerable to Party functionaries monitoring them for symptoms of "bourgeois liberalism...

...As the General Secretary, Hu Yaobang was the obvious culprit for permitting the airing of such affronts to the party...

...Deng tried to do too much, too fast, they are saying, and now China must go back to the basics...

...But is has also yielded inflation, unchecked spending, widescale corruption and, of course, the spread of Western political and economic concepts...

...That called for Hu and Zhao to hold transitional power after his retirement, and to ultimately pass the torch to a "third echelon" of politicians currently in their 50s and early 60s...

...Shanghai author Wang Ruowang, it is now known from public attacks on him, excoriated Party officials as petty tyrants who "know nothing but persecuting others...