China Watchers See Omens in Rhetoric

The strong language used recently by Chinese leaders to denounce their political opponents exemplifies an intolerance of dissent not seen in that country since the days of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, U.S. analysts said Saturday.

Among the most striking examples they noted was a reported speech to the Communist Party’s Politburo by former President Li Xiannian, who used a hallmark phrase from that tumultuous era in describing the clash as a “struggle between two headquarters.”

Similarly anachronistic, they said, was the nationally televised speech Friday by veteran party conservative Chen Yun, who signaled that a major political purge is in the works by urging party cadres to “resolutely expose schemes and intrigues of the very, very few people who intend to create turmoil.”

“That’s rough stuff,” said historian Thomas Bernstein of Columbia University. “Others who have lost favor since the death of Mao Tse-tung have been dismissed without that kind of virulent verbiage.”

Worried Leadership

“Intolerance comes from desperation,” said another China watcher, Anthony Kane of the Asia Society, “and what I think you see is an increasingly isolated leadership that realizes it has some very serious opposition.

The rhetoric, with allusions to an epic battle between party leaders and an “anti-party clique,” reflects a view that sees Chinese politics as a battleground on which a wider class struggle is fought out, the U.S. analysts said.

That notion, which dominated political discourse in China for nearly three decades after the Communists took power in 1949, had been almost completely submerged in the political relaxation that followed the death of Mao.

Its sudden resurgence last week marked a turnaround that some experts equated with Mao’s crackdown on dissent after the abortive “hundred flowers” campaign of the late 1950s, when exhortations to “let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” gave way to repression of those who had offered criticisms.

Emotions Inflated Rhetoric

American scholars cautioned that it would be premature to conclude that China had taken a great leap backward to a more repressive past, noting that the extraordinary emotion of weeks of public rebellion had sent rhetoric on both sides soaring.

But they said the change in tone was nevertheless troubling precisely because it was reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution and its social and political turmoil.

“This suggests that the intensity of struggle at the top is quite great, and that the possibility of wide-ranging purges is considerable,” said Michel Oksenberg, a former National Security Council official who now teaches at the University of Michigan.

There has not yet been an official announcement of the fate of embattled Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang. But widespread reports suggest that he and others will be purged from the party because of their support for student demonstrations in Tian An Men Square and their opposition to martial law in Beijing.

Another indication of the effort to discredit Zhao came Saturday, when Wan Li, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, issued a statement from Shanghai accusing a “small number of people” of “plotting political conspiracy.” Wan had been a leading ally of Zhao, and observers said they believed he had been pressed by the Chinese leadership to make the statement.

Specialists noted that the ouster of then-party chief Hu Yaobang in January, 1987, was not accompanied by rhetoric so alarmist or threats of consequences so severe. While leaders accused Hu of mounting a campaign of “all-out Westernization,” they also permitted him to resign his post voluntarily and to maintain his seat on the party’s Politburo.

That the veiled denunciations of Zhao in recent days have become so severe was seen by some scholars as an indication that the painful lessons of the Cultural Revolution may have faded.

“One of the central lessons of the Cultural Revolution that people seemed to have learned was that you had to have a political process where people who disagreed could be seen to have disagreed honestly,” said Kane of the Asia Society.

“Now, rather than respond to the other side, it (the party leadership) has apparently decided to crush it,” he said.

Added Oksenberg: “This suggests that a level of personal animosity has crept back into Chinese politics that many of us had hoped belonged to a bygone era.”