China's obsession with enemies

After 1949, the enemy-hunt persisted, with successive campaigns against landlords, "right-ists," "stinking intellectuals," and "capitalist-roaders," and finally the millions of "opponents of Mao" in the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution. Researching that decade one can hardly discover a school in which teachers were not tortured and killed by their pupils.

In 1989 came Tiananmen, or rather the almost 100 Tiananmens throughout China, where citizens called for moderate reforms. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people across the country were arrested. The government still treats as semi-criminals the parents of students shot dead in Tiananmen.

The party fears its own past. Its begetters, a tiny group of

conspirators, harassed by their enemies, and often at odds among themselves, scrambled through civil war and Japanese invasion to seize power. If mistakes were made, the victims, even if dead, could be "rehabilitated" later -- and with official absolution: "The party makes mistakes, but only the party can correct them."

During the Cultural Revolu-tion, Mao established a committee to deal with those who "opposed the chairman." Hundreds of polit-buro, central committee, and senior party members and perhaps 2 million others were "examined." In prison, their every act was recorded. According to official documents these included "raising their legs, lifting their arms ... eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, gnashing their teeth ... burping, laughing, sighing ... talking in their sleep."

The committee's meetings were chaired by Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來), once regarded as the party's only saint. Thirty-five years later, no one outside its circle of corruption respects the Communist Party. But after the party's decades of violent and often bloody treatment of "counter-revolutionaries" and "class enemies," the Chinese people retain every reason to fear it. Mao's economic system may be finished, but his search for enemies -- at home and abroad -- continues unabated.

Jonathan Mirsky is the author of numerous books on China and a former East Asia editor of The Times of London.

Copyright: Project Syndicate