China's leaders, says Smith College political scientist Steven Goldstein, learned two key lessons from the Tiananmen debacle. The second lesson, he says, was that the leadership must stand together. The government appears to hope that the sentences will protect against a recurrence of the political unrest which ended with the Tiananmen killings. Its selected targets are largely long-time dissidents for whom the inside of a labour camp is depressingly familiar. Political debate within Communist Party-delineated limits is continuing, most Chinese and Western analysts say, as is economic reform.
Discussion is still the same.
In the meeting room, everything goes. He points to bookstores brimming with provocative new titles, many with January 1999 publication dates. He cites, too, the leadership's embrace of village-level experiments in democracy. In that context, the government's avowed commitment to continuing painful economic reform has been striking. The Chinese government's efforts to impose internal stability have produced mainly destabilizing effects on China's relations with the U.S., in part because President Bill Clinton's visit to Beijing last summer appeared to herald a political loosening.