RULERS with foresight scrap outdated institutions in good time. Some dinosaurs collapse under their own weight or, as the Chinese say, because the ''overall climate'' has changed to the extent that oxygen and nutrients are hard to come by. Others suffer the painful fate of incremental atrophy by sheer force of irrelevance.
Last week, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) put up a valiant effort to prevent its Propaganda Department and related yamens from going the way of absolute monarchy and primogeniture.
In the largest gathering of specialists in propaganda, ideology, culture and the media since 1957, top cadres including President Jiang Zemin, Premier Li Peng and Propaganda Chief Ding Guan'gen spoke about ushering in a new era of propaganda through ''the further liberation of thought'' and ''upholding the construction of spiritual civilisation''.
As the custodians of Marxism, however, CCP chieftains should know that construction makes up only half of social engineering. The other equally crucial half consists of destruction - the planned obsolescence of institutions that seem, to use Hong Kong slang, to be obstructing the movement of the Earth.
The problem with an administration as intent on guarding its turf as the CCP is that its accent has always been on ''construction'', preservation, and aggrandisement.
On the economic side, this has resulted in up to two-thirds of state enterprises and conglomerates dripping in red ink.