Making the same moves as Mao
FOUR decades ago, Mao Zedong unleashed the 'Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let One Hundred Schools of Thought Contend' movement.
This policy of encouraging China's hitherto tightly controlled intellectuals to criticise the communist authorities has generally been seen as a wily trick to flush his liberal opponents out into the open - the better to destroy them later.
Did the Burmese junta perform a similar stunt when it released its principal opponent, Aung San Suu Kyi, from detention two years ago? At least part of the rationale behind releasing Ms Aung San Suu Kyi appeared to have been to attract some rare positive publicity, and with it more foreign investment. Mao had nothing like that in mind.
When the Great Helmsman freed the party's hitherto safely muzzled critics in 1956 he did so against the advice of many of his colleagues: the late Deng Xiaoping warned him that he was playing with fire.
In its own way the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) has achieved something similar: when Ms Aung San Suu Kyi was released, dozens of members and sympathisers of her National League for Democracy party were released too.
They were allowed limited freedom to debate among themselves, and above all to meet and plot against the regime at the lakeside house of their charismatic leader.
When the release of its awkward rival failed to open the floodgates of respectability, SLORC's intolerance of even the mildest dissent started to express itself again.
The reins had already been pulled in fiercely by the time that students, and later monks, engaged in the first public anti-authority protests of the decade late last year.
There was never the slightest sign that the generals in Rangoon seriously thought of letting any power slip into the hands of others.
Yet SLORC's equivalent of 'Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom . . .' did buy the generals some time to parlay for themselves a modest measure of international acceptance that later this month will result in entry into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
It also allowed them to maintain totalitarian rule over a terrified population that has shown little enthusiasm for the regime's crude attacks on its critics.
By providing a democratic oasis in Ms Aung San Suu Kyi's house, they succeeded in bringing some new critics out into the open.
Mao never repeated his experiment. It would appear that SLORC has every intention of following his example.
