Jiang fights back as critics attack

Jiang tries to quell an upsurge among detractors

By Willy Wo-Lap Lam
CNN Senior China Analyst

(CNN) -- President Jiang Zemin is taking tough measures to prevent the biggest rift among China 's leaders since the Tiananmen crisis in 1989.

Outspoken party elders, leftist journals and other critics of Jiang's personal style are being told to fall in behind their leader or face the consequences.

Jiang is hitting back at those who accuse him of adulterating socialism by allowing private businessmen to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Some party elders and cadres, in a series of petitions to CCP authorities, have claimed Jiang has violated party discipline and built a personality cult around himself.

Jiang, in his July 1 speech marking the CCP's 80th birthday, indicated private entrepreneurs and members of other "new classes" should be recruited into the CCP.

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Since then, a party source said, Jiang has since told others that party unity would be shattered unless the leftists were reined in or gagged.

A few outspoken ideologues -- such as Lin Yanzhi, the vice-party secretary of Jilin Province -- have been told by Jiang's aides to stop diatribes against the president or face punishment.

In an article in early summer that was circulated widely, Lin indicated that allowing quasi-capitalist "exploiters" into the CCP would lead to the death of socialism and the ruin of the party.

Other cadres who have opposed Jiang's initiative, including Zhejiang party secretary Zhang Dejiang, have promised to rectify their mistakes.

Leftist mouthpieces

Jiang has also ordered the party's propaganda department to serve warnings on three journals that are leftist mouthpieces.

Since early July, The Search of Truth, Zhongliu, and Contemporary Ideological Currents, have been forced to mothball several articles they had originally commissioned to attack Jiang's new ideas.

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Jiang has also targeted party elders, including former propaganda chief Deng Liqun, who have spearheaded a series of attacks on Jiang's theories.

Last week, the party's organization department, headed by Jiang protégé Zeng Qinghong, held an indoctrination session for more than 2,000 retired cadres.

At the session, the veterans were told to "unify their thoughts" under Jiang's teachings and to "stay in the utmost unison" with Jiang.

In an article that began circulating in Beijing late last month, 17 ideologues headed by Deng said admitting businessmen to the party would "disintegrate the class, organizational and ideological bases of the CCP."

The article compared Jiang to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former Taaiwan leader Lee Teng-hui, who are often vilified as betraying their own parties.

Personality cult

The ideologues also said Jiang's decision to accept businessmen into the CCP had not been vetted by the leadership who make up the Politburo -- and that the president had encouraged a personality cult around himself.

Jiang has retaliated by instructing that the leftists' writings and petitions cannot appear in print or on the Internet.

To emphasize his control, cadres in all ministries, provinces, cities and army units have been told to organize special sessions where leading officials make public declarations of their support of the Jiang line.

But it is understood that senior leftists, including Deng, remain unrepentant -- and that the ideological battles will go on.

The shakeout from the 1989 crisis saw the party's democratic-leaning leaders cast aside amid a crackdown in which hundreds and possibly thousands of student demonstrators were killed, many of them in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.