Hard-Liners in China Vow to Carry On Fight

China’s guardians of Marxist ideology announced a new campaign today against pornography and Western liberalism and said they would press on with an anti-crime drive in which hundreds have been executed.

The announcements, made in the Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, contradicted widespread expectations that the party would relax its tight social controls after the Asian Games ended Oct. 7 in Beijing.

Hong Kong newspapers, many of which have close ties to Chinese officials, had predicted that more participants in last year’s failed democracy movement would be released from jail if the games went off smoothly.

But today’s announcements further indicated the hard-liners who have dominated Chinese politics since June, 1989, have no intention of relaxing their hold.

Their speeches said that China’s current stability is fragile and called for vigilence against alleged anti-party forces.

“At present, our country is politically, economically and socially stable,” Qiao Shi, the party official in charge of police matters, said in giving the order to continue China’s 6-month-old crackdown on crime. “But we must see clearly that the relatively smooth public order of these few months was achieved through the might of the (crackdown on crime),” he said.

The party also held an anti-pornography campaign for about six months beginning in June, 1989, when the army crushed a student-led movement for democratic reforms. Not only pornographic but pro-democracy publications were seized and burned.