CHINA:Leading retired cadres in the Communist Party and some doctrinaire Marxist scholars have written an open letter to the Beijing leadership, saying the process of reform in China had gone too far.
With a key party congress due in the autumn, the letter is another sign of an ideological rift growing between the conservative old guard and the government of president Hu Jintao, which is pursuing a policy of economic reform and trying to fight corruption.
The letter also shows just how divergent views are within the apparatus of the Communist Party and the challenges facing President Hu to cement his grip on power at the forthcoming 17th party congress, which takes place every five years.
"Party secretaries have become capitalists and capitalists join the party, while workers and farmers have lost their status of state masters . . . foreign corporations are plundering domestic markets and crushing our national economy," ran the letter.
It was addressed to President Hu and the central committee of the party, and was published on the conservative website Mao Zedong's Flag.
The letter was signed by a high-profile group of former ministers, diplomats, army officials and academics, the South China Morning Postnewspaper reported, and was published just one day after the liberal-leaning journal Yanhuang Chunqiu ran a cover story calling for greater political liberalisation.
The retired cadres are said to be furious at the introduction of laws protecting private property at the National People's Congress in March. They also signed a petition against that legislation at the time.
Their letter blamed the introduction of capitalism for corruption and a widening wealth gap - two of the chief ills in society that President Hu's government has made very public efforts to address.
"Frankly speaking, the current reform model is trying to replace public ownership with private ownership and to transform China from a socialist country into a capitalist country," the letter said. "We're going down an evil road. The whole country is at a most precarious moment."
Ironically, the article came at the same time as a report in the China Dailynewspaper, which showed that nearly three million members of the Communist Party were working in private business last year and 810,000 were self-employed. The ruling party, which boasted about 72.4 million members at the end of 2006, had 178,000 branches operating in private firms, a rise of 80 per cent from the year before.
The article suggested the central leadership launch an ideological campaign before the party congress to restore orthodox Marxism and purge other revisionist socialist ideologies such as social democracy.
It said that unless old values were restored, China would soon have "its own Boris Yeltsin" and that "the demise of party and country would loom".