the third stop on a tour of Western Europe aimed at buttressing the Peking bureaucracy's ties with imperialism.
While Hua toured Europe, however, one of the leaders of the "democratie movement' in China, Wei Jinsheng, was sentenced to 15 years in ai. He was unofficial journal, Exploration, which insisted that in China today the majority of people are "deprived of power'.
PIERRE ROUSSET explains below how the growth of the dissident movement reflects the crisis of the regime.
The present situation leadership is particularly delicate in that the crisis of the regime is expressed at all levels of authority and society.
extremely grave, and this feeds a permanent mass challenge and mobilisations. In the last few weeks there have been demonstrations by •railway workers, artists, unemployed .tormer soldiers, and young people who have secretly returned from the countryside.
The aval alus itself disoriented. Although Deng's faction rules the roost in the initiative, it is quite probably a minority in the immense provincial and which is marked by its conservatism.
More serious still, confidence in the bureaucracy, ine regime of the editors of Chinese and social situation is repeated sectoral peasants, students, divided and leading bodies and holds the bureaucracy, the masses have lost faces a generalised crisis of the dominant ideology, the ideology of the bureaucracy. It is in this context that the 'democratic movement' sh The Wester press does is best to identify the movement with the values democracy, and it certainly has illusions in the of bourgeois today. West. But equally the majority of the Chinese 'dissidents' identify much more strongly with the Marxist tradition, are much more drawn from popular layers, are able to develop more militant currents and operate in a much more dynamic social context than exists in the USSR of teachers and directly tundamental questions parties, structures transition to socialism. sometimes increasingly Lenin or Marx.
Link-up social protest movements.
in arresitt demonstrations.
'popular publications' dissidents.
tolerance and repression.
be eliminated through repression.
The movement: is primarily made up of members of the skilled professions, factory workers, and local party cadres. The influence intellectuals seems rather involves militant layers estimated at some thousands in the case of Peking and hundreds in Shanghai or Canton. Its critique is oriented in the first place towards the sole problem of 'democratising' the regime, but the debates within it increasingly take up These include the position and role of of socialist democracy, conception of the state, contradictions of the Yesterday Mao and Stalin were quoted; today it is A link-up seems to be developing between sections of the 'democratic movement" and the Yuehua, militant of the 'democratic movement'; was January after physically demonstrating his solidarity with the peasant Each Sunday now, several thousand people gather in front of the famous "democracy wall" to read the latest wall-posters and buy the produced the The regime treats them with a mixture of The situation as a whole is still under its control. But since 1976 it has had to take account of an anti-bureaucratic current which, though confused, cannot simply