CONFIDENTTAL
16.
(a) This will not prevent growing intellectual enquiry and even ferment as modernisation proceeds and foreign contacts proliferate.
From the intellectuals, always a particularly important group in China, there is likely to be growing pressure for liberalisation. At the least, the new movement, which has taken its name from the first spontaneous outburst of
5 April 1976 in honour of Chou En-lai, could be a valuable and humanising element in the Chinese Communist tradition.
e) Mao will not be wholly discredited.
He still
represents Communist China's history. To deny him would leave a void much greater than that left in the Soviet Union by the denunciation of Stalin. A balance is likely to be found along the lines Teng himself propounds, namely Mao's great contribution to history will be stressed; his fallibility and his own acceptance of the need to right wrongs will be recalled; and a veil may be drawn over the later years, when in "metaphysical" dotage, he was duped by the Gang of Four.
In other words the pot is not going to boil over, nor is there going to be a burgeoning of democracy as we understand it. Some of these are There are of course dangers in the situation. political; some are risks inherent in the modernisation programme and may be better considered separately in a despatch on that subject. But they can be briefly indicated here.
There is risk in
a controlled thaw, in debunking only to a point and in encouraging freedom of expression and then having to check it sharply as has happened in the last few weeks. There is a risk of going too far
CONFIDENTIAL
/and too fast
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