China's obsession with enemies

"Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?" Mao Zedong (毛澤東) asked in 1926. It is a useful question to keep in mind in the wake of the friendship treaty just signed between Russian President Putin and China's President Jiang Zemin (江澤民).

Fear of enemies and the need to destroy them remains overpowering among Mao's heirs. It explains their imprisonment of members of the tiny Democratic Party; of Catholics loyal to Rome; of Protestants, Buddhists, and Muslims who resist supervision by the party's Patriotic Church; the oppression of Tibet and the hunting down of the millions of adherents of Falun Gong. Bei-jing's leaders justify persecution by linking supposed internal enemies to "outside forces" seeking to bring down Communist rule by "smokeless warfare." If they fail to crush their enemies, it is claimed, China's fragile stability will shatter and the country will be plunged into chaos.

This fear infects foreign China-watchers too. A bomb explosion in some city or peasant riot causes these specialists to heat up the Internet with queries about whether this bomb or that riot threatens the survival of the Communist Party.

No one interprets the regime's fear of instability and the hunt for enemies better than Liu Binyan (劉賓雁), China's best-known inves-tigative reporter, political prisoner for 22 years, ex-Party member and an exile in the US, where he teaches at Princeton. "Actually," says Liu, "what disrupts unity and stability is the leadership's own political performance ... they have made the Chinese people lose confidence in the socialist system and the future of the nation. ... Some people take the law into their own hands ... gunshots, bombings, arson and railway derailments are a form of revenge for the injured and the oppressed."

Many foreigners observe that China is no longer a place of constant Maoist persecution. They speak of how eagerly acquaintances and taxi drivers curse the regime, including the corruption of the leaders and their offspring. The outpouring of publications, including pornography, is cited as a sign of press freedom. Yet nothing is permitted which can be interpreted as organized resistance to the regime -- especially if connected to the US, condemned as the source of the "bourgeois liberalism" which the government most fears.

The roots of this "enemy hunt" lie in the time when the party was officially founded in 1921, with help from the Moscow-directed Comintern. This meant immediate infection by the core Leninist/Stalinist conviction that enemies must be eliminated, and if not killed, made to vanish from the record.

In Shanghai, visitors to the building where the founding of the party is said to have taken place are shown photographs doctored to eliminate founders who became traitors. Photographs of Mao's funeral in 1976 initially showed his widow in mourning but within a few weeks of her arrest as a member of the Gang of Four the photographs were republished with the widow and the rest of the gang airbrushed down the memory-hole. At various times Mao and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平)were treated as enemies by party comrades. Deng survived three such purges, two of Mao's making.

From the beginning of his assent to party leadership in the early 1930s, Mao showed a taste for the blood of his adversaries. Survivors, especially the widows of those executed as counter-revolutionaries, recall the pervasive fear at his guerrilla headquarters at Yanan. During the years before the 1949 victory, according to party historian Dai Qing (戴晴), Mao's alleged enemies were accused of Trotskyism -- a useful justification inherited from Stalin -- and were shot, beheaded, or buried alive by the hundreds.