China’s President Hu Tightens Party’s Grip on Power

Leader takes hard-line stance on speech, other civil liberties

"He is the ultimate product of the system," said one party academic with
access to the leadership who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He never
studied overseas or had much contact with the outside world. He was educated
by the system, spent his entire career in the system, and his values are the
same as the system's."
....
....in his first major address to the 300-plus member Central Committee as
the nation's undisputed new leader, Hu warned that "hostile forces" were
trying to undermine the party by "using the banner of political reform to
promote Western bourgeois parliamentary democracy, human rights and freedom
of the press," according to a person given excerpts of the speech. Hu said
China's enemies had not abandoned their "strategic plot to Westernize and
split China." He blamed the fall of the Soviet Union on policies of
"openness and pluralism" and on the efforts of "international monopoly
capital with the United States as its leader." And in blunt language that
party veterans said recalled Mao Zedong's destructive Cultural Revolution,
he urged the leadership to be alert to the danger of subversive thinking.

"Don't provide a channel for incorrect ideological points of view," the
person who had read at least some of speech quoted Hu saying. "When one
appears, strike at it, and gain the initiative by subduing the enemy."

Hu said relaxation of such efforts to manage ideology could endanger the
party and argued that the Soviet Union collapsed because Mikhail Gorbachev
allowed the United States and others to spread subversive ideas there,
according to those with knowledge of the speech.

"History has already proven that when hostile forces want to create disorder
in a society and subvert a political power, they often first make a
breakthrough with ideology and start by confusing people's thinking," said a
Nov. 23 editorial in the People's Daily, the party's flagship newspaper,
that the sources said quoted directly from Hu's speech.
....
In a recent comment often cited as a clue to his thinking, Hu wrote in an
instruction to propaganda officials that though the economic policies of
communist allies Cuba and North Korea were flawed, their political policies
were correct, according to a person who saw the instruction and others
briefed on it. The remark, first reported by the Hong Kong magazine Open,
stunned many in the party who consider the two countries repressive and
isolated from the rest of the world.
....
"Looking back at the policies of Jiang Zemin now, it wasn't so bad," said
Mao Yushi, an economist who has had a book banned by the government and who
runs a private research institute that has not been able to renew its
permit. "We survived for 10 years under Jiang, but with Hu Jintao the
authorities are trying to shut us down."
....
"The party's authority is gradually declining, and as a result, Hu is less
confident and more insecure than the leaders before him," said a former
provincial party chief, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "When a leader
feels insecure, he tightens controls."

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