Beijing firefighters fail to tackle the real blaze

CYNICS think it's politics by Band-Aid. Propagandists call it ''seeking evolutionary changes within the system''. And apologists with classical training would mutter something about ''mending the heavens''.

But for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, it means the same thing: maintaining stability while doing almost nothing to what Marx calls the power relations of the country.

For the past two months, Politburo members have become fire-fighters and fanned out across the provinces to cool the tempers of peasants and labourers.

It is a tribute to the skills of high-wire walkers like Vice-Premier Zhu Rongji - and the fatalism of the Chinese mentality - that the day has been saved. Stability, however, has been bought at the price of a much-needed boost to reform. And nobody can say for how long the stalemate can last.

The flame-dousing act of Mr Zhu and such of his allies as President Jiang Zemin consists largely of a return to traditional norms: ''taking grain as the key link''; shoring up the state enterprises, the nation's largest employers; playing up what Mr Jiang calls the ''leitmotif of the times'', meaning patriotism, socialism and collectivism.

Instead of talking hi-tech in his impeccable English to foreign corporate moguls, Mr Zhu donned a bamboo hat during an outing to the northeastern provinces last week. In Liaoning and Jilin, the Vice-Premier urged the peasants to grow more rice and wheat.