China's hard-line Communist leadership is on its last legs and a single, dramatic event could spark
its downfall at any moment, a leading Chinese dissident says.
Wang Ruowang, 74, a writer and former longtime member of the Chinese
Communist Party expelled twice from the party for his liberal views, said many
key segments of modern Chinese society deeply oppose the rigid social control
imposed by the
One single, major incident --perhaps the death of Deng Xiaoping, 88,
"Any incident in China could ignite the fire just like a spark can ignite a fire in the prairie," he said
in a Montreal interview Friday.
"It could come at any moment."
The day Deng "goes to see Marx will probably be the day of the explosion,'' Wang added, speaking
through a translator.
Wang, who was imprisoned in 1989 for 14 months for his role in the pro-democracy movement, was allowed to leave China for the first time in August.
He said four key forces in Chinese society oppose the regime:
■Owners of businesses that have sprung up in southern and coastal China as a result of market-oriented economic reforms.
■ An additional one million entrepreneurs who now run small businesses in rural China.
■Open-minded party members and leaders who are unsatisfied with communism and who sympathize with the people.
■The vast majority of Chinese intellectuals.
Many of these groups are growing, he said, because of Deng's attempts to
build a socialist
with a Communist dictatorship and a capitalist economy. Such attempts are bound to fail because of
their irrevocable contradictions, Wang said.
In the meantime, he added, over-seas pro-democracy activists and the Taiwanese government, which he said has begun democratic reforms, provide support for the internal opposition.
He described changes in party leadership at last month's party congress as superficial.
All the same, he said, "there has been some loosening up" in censorship by authorities since they
crushed the pro-reform demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 even though at least 300 participants remain in jail.
He cited the permission granted by authorities to students who circulated a petition demanding reparations for World War II abuses during a recent visit by the Japanese emperor, and the publication of a book this year by a Beijing university in which leading dissidents harshly criticized party hard-liners.
Wang, now a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, said he was visiting pro-democracy activists in Montreal "so I can compensate for what I lost while I was isolated in China."