Liberal Democrat or fanatical Maoist, the Communist Party now treats its defeated political opponents alike. This week the party released the last imprisoned member of the Gang of Four, Yao Wenyuan , but placed him under house detention while imprisoning democracy activist Liu Xiaobo , who had been under house arrest.
At the same time, it prepared to put former student leader Wang Dan on trial although he has already been in prison for over a year. All this takes place in tandem with further efforts to normalise China's legal system. This month China announced that the National People's Congress is preparing to abolish the catch-all law against 'counter-revolutionary crimes' under which most political prisoners have been condemned since 1949.
And on the front page of the People's Daily, President Jiang Zemin urged his officials to become more familiar with the country's laws. 'We must ensure that laws are abided by, laws are enforced strictly and those who break the law are punished, so that various undertakings will grow along the orbit of the socialist legal system,' President Jiang said.
Yet the past week's events show that no amount of changes to the laws will protect individuals from the wrath of the party. Even if it is no longer a crime to be against the revolution, few officials will entertain the illusion for an instant that anything has changed about the way Chinese politics are conducted over the past 50 years.
As a common Chinese saying puts it - 'Success is all that determines whether one is hailed as a bandit or a king.' The humiliation meted out to political losers, whatever their former rank, is evident from the list of those now in various forms of detention, legal or otherwise.
They include former Communist Party chief, Zhao Ziyang , seven years under house arrest; his secretary Bao Tong who was released from a five-year prison sentence this year but immediately placed under another form of arrest; and Wang Xizhe first jailed for co-authoring the famous 1974 wall poster 'On Socialist Democracy and the Legal System' and who was sentenced in 1982 to 13 years in jail for 'counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement'. This week he was again seized.