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SCMP Reporter

APART from economics, history is mainly moved by symbols. And the signs and portents this past week seem to be conspiring against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its superstitious leadership.

  The death of North Korean president Kim Il-sung comes as the household of Deng Xiaoping is going about elaborate preparations for his 90th birthday next month.

  While Mr Deng is too frail to make a convincing TV appearance, the plans include a staged photo opportunity and other festivities.

  The patriarch's family and anointed successors such as President Jiang Zemin hope the intensification of the Deng cult - including his longevity and invincibility - will help consolidate their own positions.

  The demise of the 82-year-old North Korean dictator has brought more than intimations of mortality for his Chinese comrade-in-arms.

  Scenes of orchestrated mourning in Pyongyang, with six-year-old schoolgirls and middle-aged soldiers pounding their chests with desperation, were broadcast on Chinese television.

  These vignettes of near-dementedness from the Hermit Kingdom evoked unsavoury memories of the Cultural Revolution, which was feudalism gone mad.

  It is both unseemly symbolism and unwise politics for Mr Jiang and his allies to suggest that Chinese, who already have one foot in the post-Deng and post-feudalist order, should emulate the North Koreans.

  Incredible as it might seem, the messages sent by the CCP leadership seemed to indicate that Mr Jiang and company wanted to shore up their legitimacy by clutching at - and playing up - the trappings of Mr Kim's dynastic rule.

  It is no secret that Mr Deng, who made the decision to establish diplomatic ties with South Korea, had criticised the backward mentality of Mr Kim.

  Since the Great Leader's death, no Chinese media has so much as hinted at the illegitimacy of the Kim regime or the impropriety of his passing the leadership on to his son.

  Mr Jiang's telegram of condolence last Saturday emphasised that ''the Chinese people will forever remember him [Kim]'', and that ''we resolutely believe that the Korean people will fulfil comrade Kim Il-Sung's wishes''.

  A day later, the Chinese president and CCP secretary general appealled to the North Koreans to ''tightly rally around the party centre of the Korean Workers Party led by comrade Kim Jong-il''.

  The ''demonstration effect'' that Mr Jiang seeks is obvious. The president apparently hopes that mass oubreaks of sorrow will follow Mr Deng's departure, and that the party and citizens will rally around him, universally known as the ''core'' of the CCP party centre.

  The images from Pyongyang of irrationality fuelled by retrogressive ideology, however, might convince the Chinese that the ghost of dynastic politics must be laid to rest.

  Those outbursts of frenzy in the squares of North Korea might also have a tromp l'oeil effect: instead of being a reflection of feudalistic faith, mass outpourings of emotions could galvanise a nation towards progress.

  The Chinese are reminded of the April 5, 1976, incident in Tiananmen Square, when grief over the death of the late premier Zhou Enlai turned into a crusade against the Gang of Four, and, of course, the pangs for the demise of party chief Hu Yaobang in April, 1989, which metamorphosed into China's largest-ever democratic movement.

  Memories and symbols have coalesced and clashed no less frantically during the European tour of Premier Li Peng, who, like Mr Jiang, is an heir apparent to the revolution and a stained protagonist of Tiananmen.

  Last week, anti-Beijing protesters in what was East Germany said sarcastically that local pro-democracy activists had to thank Mr Li for the ''Chinese demonstration effect'': the ''Chinese butchers'' opened fire on their own people and inflicted an irrevocable trauma on the national psyche.

  Alarmed by Beijing's example, Erich Honecker and his soldiers blinked when confronted with mass rallies four months later.

  Honecker's softhandedness led to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the end of Nicolae Ceaucescu's dynasty in Romania, and the fall of the entire Eastern bloc.

  CCP critics saw a kind of poetic justice in the fact that Mr Li was forced by demonstrators to cancel a visit to the Brandenburg Gate, symbol of Berlin's liberty.

  The Soviet-trained engineer, however, had himself to blame for walking into another minefield of historical allusions.

  Anxious to shed his image as a dour, Stalinist technocrat, Mr Li insisted on visiting Mozart's home in Vienna and Goethe's house in Weimar.

  At the Goethe Museum, what the protesters outside called the ''mass murderer'' was lectured by curator Bernd Kauffmann on the fact that ''human rights and freedom were an integral part of Goethe's work''.

  Thereupon, the engineer-turned-aesthete cut Mr Kauffmann short and exclaimed: ''I know Goethe's work . . . I want to see how Goethe worked and lived.''   The hardline premier spent two hours in Goethe's digs, apparently consumed by an agonising debate with a Mephistopheles with Chinese characteristics.

  Afterwards, his handlers said Mr Li was so exhausted he had to cancel a planned walkabout and lunch at a nearby hotel.

  Mr Li got his recompense after leaving Faustian territory, when the red carpet was rolled out by Romanian President Ion Iliescu, an old classmate from the Moscow Communist cadre school.

  Even as Mr Li celebrated his 36th wedding anniversary with Zhu Lin, however, the couple was hit by a blast from the past. The Black Sea villa where they were staying was owned by Ceaucescu who had been Mr Deng's closest foreign comrade after Mr Kim.

  During talks, Mr Li and Mr Iliescu concentrated on trade, saying that ''it is not the ideological interests that prevail but economic ones''.

  However, the Chinese premier's message to his people could not be more political: even after the collapse of the Ceaucescu dynasty and the Romanian communist party, the country is still run by quasi-socialist functionaries of the old mode.

  Letting images and symbols play tricks with one another, however, is a dangerous thing. The Chinese mind last week was an amphitheatre, where a past that would not fade away did battle with a future that proved perennially illusive.

  Even as some Chinese gnashed their teeth over the replay of the Cultural Revolution in Pyongyang, others were pledging to themselves that the next show of people power would make Tiananmen Square look like Brandenburg Gate.



Party faithful seeking mileage from Deng cult