It would be misleading to say that there is a hidden war going on at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, because there is always a secret war going on there. But the struggle in Beijing at the moment seems much fiercer than usual. It could even be the one that finally cracks the system open.

As usual, only fragments of evidence about what is really going on in the party’s upper ranks reach the outside world, but in the past few months there have been signs that fundamental issues are being debated. The most recent hint was an article by ex-premier Li Peng in the party magazine, Seeking Truth, in which he defended his decision to send in the army to clear Tiananmen Square in June, 1989, killing hundreds of student demonstrators.

Most Chinese old enough to recall those terrible events see Li, now 75, as the man chiefly responsible for the massacre, which permanently undermined the legitimacy of communist rule. However, his article gives the main responsibility to the late leader, Deng Xiaoping, who is virtually above criticism. But why is he mentioning it at all?

In February, Jiang Yanyong, the whistle-blower who revealed the Sars cover-up last year, released a letter he had written to the communist party in which he recalled treating dying students on the square and asked the party to acknowledge that they had been patriots who were just trying to improve their country.

Opening up

In the end his letter was not reported in the Chinese media — and Jiang was arrested and whisked out of Beijing for a few days on the fifteenth anniversary of the tragedy in June.

Another sign that the hidden war in the party is heating up was Beijing University journalism professor Jiao Guobiao’s tirade against the state propaganda department in May. “Where can you find propaganda departments? Not in the US, the UK or Europe. But you did find them in Nazi Germany...[The state propaganda department’s] censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilization, and as counter to scientific common-sense as witches and wizardry.”

It’s easy to guess what the struggle in the party is about, because it has been the same war for fifteen years now. Should the party lead in liberalizing China, before rising educational and living standards create a demand for freedom and democracy that will simply sweep it away? Or is gradual reform impossible, and must the party therefore struggle to hold the line forever, knowing that even one step backwards could be fatal?

Survival strategies

That was already the argument in 1989. The secretary-general of the communist party at the time, Zhao Ziyang, wanted to negotiate with the students on Tiananmen Square, but he was overruled and removed by the hard men around Jiang Zemin (later president) and Li Peng. Zhao remains under house arrest to this day.

It was widely hoped that Jiang Zemin’s retirement from presidency last year and the choice of Wen Jiabao as premier would lead to a gradual loosening of totalitarian controls, but it has not happened. The frustration must be intense among senior communists who believe that the party will only survive if it takes the lead in opening the system up, and so battle has been joined.

The champion of the hard-liners is still Jiang Zemin, and it is on the parts of the apparatus that his partisans still control that the advocates of change direct their attacks. The conservatives fight back (as Li did) with strong defences of their actions at the time of Tiananmen Square, but the public sees only a hundredth of what is really going on. This struggle may go on for years without a decisive victory, but it really is a battle for the future of China.