BILL Jenner looks an unlikely prophet of doom. But this small, grey-haired English academic is sounding a warning: the continued existence of the People's Republic of China is in doubt.
Professor Jenner, a sinologist and Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, sounds his warning in his new book, The Tyranny of History, The Roots of China's Crisis - a book he knows may be seen as anti-Chinese, but which he says deals with issues too important to be left for the wisdom of hindsight.
''I don't think that China can go on for much longer as an authoritarian, unitary empire,'' he said.
''It is hard to predict how, with the centre giving up a lot of its economic controls, it is going to be able to enforce its will in the future, short of the sort of things that happened in Beijing in 1989 being repeated.'' Such repression is not inevitable. Nor will it necessarily take the form of the tanks and guns of June 4. It could, Professor Jenner says, be in response to the centre's need for more money as Guangdong grows richer, yet pays fewer taxes.
In the paperback set for publication by Penguin in September, Professor Jenner devotes chapters to history, law, the family structure, Confucian thought, even the Chinese script. The script, for instance, is innately conservative, inhibits analytical andlogical thought, resists innovation, ''encourages copying and repeating what has been written before''.
History, in particular the way it has been written, has a homogenising effect. It ''makes it very hard even to consider the possibility that significant numbers of the subjects of Chinese regimes have refused to think of themselves as Chinese or accept the legitimacy of any Chinese rule over them or their territory'', he says.
''The defenders of today's imperial dream - a rich, prosperous, socialist and unified China under the effective control of a party centre that can keep at bay all the influences of the outside world as other communist dictatorships crumble and fall, nationalist passions rage and the economically viable parts of China have discovered the temptations of capitalism - need to hold the peoples of China in the grip of their state vision of history.'' The crux of Professor Jenner's argument is that China has not made a clean enough break with the past to be able to cope with the 20th century.
