Suharto's fall boosts China's dissenters

On the lamppost outside my residential compound in Beijing someone had stuck up a poster. The glue was still wet when I looked at the signatures of workers from half a dozen provinces. They were calling for immediate mass protests.

'Everyone must act together to punish corruption and give back human rights! We plead with the new leadership of China to unsheath the sword of justice and kill all the dirty cadres.' In increasingly violent language, it first expressed support for Zhu Rongji's government but mostly called on people to 'unite together and chop off the heads of the corrupt and brutal cadres'.

It is the first such poster I have seen in Beijing since 1989, and is a hint the honeymoon for Mr Zhu may already be over and political unrest around the corner.

The city has been buzzing with talk of former Indonesian president Suharto's fall, and around dinner tables people who saw the news unfold on television drew the obvious parallels with Tiananmen: students demanding democracy, attacking corruption, occupying Parliament, troops opening fire and killing student demonstrators, opposition leaders calling for restraint amid fears of a military massacre.

In Jakarta, the tanks patrolling the streets were not, in the end, unleashed in support of an unpopular dictatorship. But Beijingers have been asking themselves: would the Chinese military act differently a second time round? The fall of Mr Suharto, the relatively peaceful transition to a new government and the end of Indonesia's economic miracle have given immense encouragement to those seeking political change in China.

Not surprisingly, China's leadership has looked on uncomfortably at the precedent set in Jakarta. At the crucial moment when CNN was broadcasting Mr Suharto's resignation speech live, the satellite link was cut and viewers were left looking at fuzzy pictures.