BEIJING'S hottest book of the season deals with an apparently pedestrian subject: the peasantry. The message of Looking at China with a Third Eye, however, is shocking: China is about to be plunged into chaos; the usurpers of the dragon throne are not bourgeois-liberal dissidents but half-literate farmers.
The apocalyptic vision has been rendered more intriguing by the identity of the author, a 41-year-old, ''world-famous German sinologist'' whose name is Luoyi Ningge'er in transliteration.
Such a personage, of course, does not exist. Chinese sources said the real author was probably the neo-conservative futurologist He Xin, a bete noire of the intelligentsia.
A one-time ''strategic adviser'' to Premier Li Peng, Mr He has since last year been diplomatic consultant to President Jiang Zemin.
In a recent internal talk, Mr Jiang heaped praise on Third Eye, which also tackles issues like state enterprises, the cadre system and foreign policy. He asked officials to pay special attention to the chapter on agriculture, saying that ''it offers many new insights''.
The thesis of Third Eye (Shansi People's Press, 268 pages, HK$6) is simple. The 800 million-odd peasants are ''China's active volcano'': ''Without an exception, China's dynasties were wrecked by uprooted, migrant farmers.'' Chairman Mao's solution was to chain the peasants to the soil through institutions such as the people's commune and round-the-clock indoctrination by ideological workers of village-level Communist Party cells. The system worked for 30 years.