China Party Still Ailing, New Leader Says

Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin conceded Sunday that serious problems remain in party ranks after last month’s crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy movement.

The admission came as the party launched an image-building campaign to show that it is trying to punish the internal corruption that helped fuel the movement.

In a speech released by the official New China News Agency, Jiang was quoted as telling 50 party veterans at an organizational meeting that the pro-democracy movement and its aftermath “revealed many problems in party organizations and among party members. And some of them are serious.”

Echoing China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, and all other official pronouncements since the party hard-liners ordered the violent crackdown, Jiang blamed most of the problems on former party chief Zhao Ziyang, whom Jiang replaced after last week’s purge of Zhao and his moderate supporters.

Zhao, who openly supported the students’ demands that the party initiate political reforms to match its new economic openness, had neglected “party building,” Jiang said, which “brought about very grave results, weakening the party’s strength.”

The party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, reported calls for an investigation into the behavior of each of the party’s 47 million members during the weeks of protest. “Those deserving sanctions should be punished,” it declared.

Consistent with the party’s strategy to heap all the blame for the initial protest and its bloody suppression on Zhao, the newspaper also quoted 20 Marxist scholars from within the party as condemning Zhao for the “degenerate, backward and cynical” popular culture that developed in China during his tenure as the party general secretary.

Three More Cases

At the same time, however, state television prominently reported the arrest, conviction and sentencing of three party members from a city near Beijing.

The three, all factory managers, were given prison terms of one to 10 years for accepting bribes.

Later, the New China News Agency reported that a Shanghai official also was sentenced to a prison term for taking bribes and that officials in Sichuan province had been fined for amassing huge sums in illegal profits.

The strategy to showcase a series of corruption-related arrests and trials within the party was outlined by Deng in a series of unpublished speeches he delivered during and after the protest movement. But most students and intellectuals interviewed in the capital said they do not believe the strategy will be successful in cleaning up the party’s image or winning back popular support.