China Politics

In a rare display of opposition that caused nervous murmurs Friday in the Great Hall of the People here, one-third of China's national Parliament failed to support a handpicked candidate of Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin for a senior post in the government. But the candidate for the post of vice premier in charge of agriculture, Jiang Chunyun, still carried the day, winning election with 63% of the vote.

In an extraordinary move, Chinese authorities Monday turned down a request by two congressional leaders, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David L. Boren (D-Okla.) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), to visit China later this month, State Department and congressional sources said. Boren and Pell both sought permission to visit China during the next congressional recess, which starts next Monday.

Senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping has triggered an aggressive effort by reformers within the Communist Party to oust hard-line ideologues from key party and government positions. Acting Minister of Culture He Jingzhi has already submitted his resignation, Chinese sources told foreign reporters in Beijing on Saturday. Others facing pressure from reformist forces include Wang Renzhi, head of the party propaganda department, and Gao Di, who heads the official newspaper People's Daily.

The dominant front-page headline of the official English-language China Daily on Wednesday was surely written with no sarcasm intended: "Delegates sing their praise for Party line." The headline simply captured the pep-rally atmosphere surrounding a weeklong Communist Party Congress that opened Monday.

Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader for the past 14 years, is believed to be dying, and some preparations are already under way in the Chinese political hierarchy and the People's Liberation Army for the transition that will take place after his death, according to U.S.-based China specialists. "The reports have been consistent that his health is on a steady downward trajectory," one U.S. intelligence official said last week.

The Communist Party's Central Committee is believed to have begun a key meeting to decide economic and personnel matters before the nation's Parliament convenes later this month, diplomats said Friday. The committee would be meeting for the first time since November, when the decision-making body approved a three-year economic austerity program and announced that senior leader Deng Xiaoping was resigning from his last party post.

China's guardians of Marxist ideology on Tuesday announced a new campaign against pornography and Western liberalism and said they will press on with an anti-crime drive in which hundreds have been executed. The announcements in the party newspaper People's Daily indicated that the hard-liners who have dominated Chinese politics since June, 1989, have no intention of relaxing their hold.

The middle-aged peasant woman, resting briefly from the backbreaking work of planting rice seedlings, needed only a moment's thought when a visitor asked what suggestions she had for her government. "Fertilizer costs too much," replied E Maoxin, who lives in a village near Wuhan in central China. "We can't buy enough at state-set prices, so we need to buy the rest on the market. But the market price is too steep."

The bloody uprising in Romania culminating in the execution of longtime leader Nicolae Ceausescu has alarmed China's hard-line leaders and dimmed hopes for an early relaxation of martial law in Beijing. American and other Western officials have repeatedly advised China that the removal of martial law would be a key step in restoring ties with the West. It would also help President Bush, who has been under fire from Congress for being too soft on China.

China's sudden plunge into turmoil, with the government retreating into impotence and a divided army arrayed as if to wage civil war, has left stunned observers grappling for an explanation: How could the order of a powerful nation turn so quickly to chaos? Paradoxically, experienced China analysts say, it was China's very rigidity of leadership--the virtually unlimited authority wielded by its leaders, and their willingness to use it--that led to today's slide toward anarchy. What gave the appearance of command and control at China's helm, they say, was in fact an inflexibility so brittle that, when the leadership was confronted with pent-up opposition, it apparently snapped.