Chinese See U.S. Plot Against Communism : Asia: Internal party document concludes that dictatorship and market reforms are not easily reconciled.
President Bush and the U.S. Congress, while seeming to disagree on China policy, are actually united in an attempt to bring about the collapse of Chinese communism, asserts an internal party analysis leaked to reporters here Tuesday.
To hold on to power in the face of such Western pressure, the document says, the Communist Party must enforce its dictatorship and fight internal supporters of democratic socialism. At the same time, it must keep China open to the world and press forward with economic reforms.
The document sheds light on the thinking of China’s top leaders just before the scheduled arrival here Friday of Secretary of State James A. Baker III. It reaffirms the twin policies of political repression and economic reform that China has followed since 1978. But it expresses these themes in unusually harsh and blunt terms and includes a rare official acknowledgement that dictatorship and market-oriented reforms are not easily reconciled.
Couched in ideological jargon, the document shows a Communist Party profoundly fearful of being overthrown.
The Oct. 25 document is titled “The Struggle Between Peaceful Evolution and Counter-Peaceful Evolution Is a Class Struggle in the World Arena.” Since 1989, Beijing has adopted the term “peaceful evolution” to describe what it calls a Western plot to undermine Communist regimes around the world.
In the debate over U.S. trade policy toward China, Bush and Congress are merely arguing over the best way to advance this agenda, the document asserts.
“On the surface, Bush’s opinion is very different from the opinion of the majority of congressmen, but in reality they are using different means to the same ends and different roads to the same destination,” it says. “Their goal is to make us collapse and bring about the peaceful evolution of socialist China (to democracy and capitalism).”
The document quotes Bush statements in which he argues that preserving normal trade ties with Beijing is the best way to export the ideals of freedom and democracy to China. “It is very clear that those U.S. politicians who support continuing most-favored-nation (trade) status all see this as the most effective way to influence China’s actions,” the document says.
The document, intended for study by party members, also declares that U.S. support for human rights in China is simply a ploy to create a political opposition. The paper repeats Beijing’s claim that the June 4, 1989, army assault on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing came in response to violent rioting.
“After we quelled the rebellion,” the document says, “the United States and other Western countries called the rioters ‘fighters for democracy and freedom’ and their violent actions ‘a human rights movement.’ Not only is this ridiculous and absurd but it reveals what rubbish their constantly repeated defense of ‘human rights’ really is.”
But the document stresses that a retreat into isolation is no answer to this perceived Western threat.
“Today, with the swift development of the new technological revolution and the growing linkage between the economies of all countries of the world, if we lock our doors to fight against peaceful evolution, and simply defend ourselves tenaciously in the ossified old pattern, then the more we oppose it the poorer and more backward we’ll become,” it says.
“In the long run, the inevitable result of backwardness is collapse. . . .”
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