A Curtain Parts on China Politics

Intrigue is not new to China’s claustrophobic Communist leadership, but it’s certainly worth notice when written evidence of the secretive maneuvering in Beijing appears in public. So it is with the release of a transcript of deliberations of the Communist Party Politburo that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989.

The information in the 15,000 pages of what are believed to be official minutes confirms much of what China scholars have known or suspected. The timing of its release, however, opens the possibility of a struggle for power within China’s leadership ahead of the Communist Party’s 2002 congress. Such a struggle would have significant implications for U.S. diplomacy.

The intraparty squabble seemingly signaled by disclosure of the “Tiananmen Papers� does not match the one that occurred in the early 1970s when there was a smear campaign to discredit Mao Tse-tung’s anointed successor, Lin Biao. Lin, the Red Army commander, lost out and he disappeared in 1971, officially in an airplane crash in Mongolia. But the “Tiananmen Papers,� said to have been compiled by Communists disaffected with lack of political reforms, are significant in that they discredit some of the party’s hard-line leaders, specifically Li Peng--the prime minister at the time of the massacre and presently No. 2 in the party--and the arbitrary procedure that led to the selection of President Jiang Zemin.

Beijing said the papers are fake, and, indeed, their authenticity won’t be 100% certain until original documents are examined. But several leading China experts found enough evidence of credibility to warrant publication. The papers, which remove some of the mystique from China’s political decision-making, are being published in Taiwan and will be available to many mainland Chinese on the Internet.

Whether the “Tiananmen Papers� are part of a struggle for political reform or signify jockeying for power before the next Communist Party meeting, they expose cracks in Beijing’s leadership that the incoming Bush administration cannot ignore.