-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! SECRET documents smuggled out of China have revealed the innermost conflicts of the Communist party at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They confirm that the Chinese leaders feared they would be overthrown by their own people in a mass movement for democracy. "Anarchy gets worse every day," said the late leader Deng Xiaoping, quoted in a memorandum of a top-level meeting on May 13 that year. "If this continues, we could even end up under house arrest." The appearance of such documents is bound to embarrass Beijing, not least because President Jiang Zemin emerges from the papers as a man whose ambition for power led him to endorse the killing of civilians. They show how Jiang was hustled into the post of general secretary by frightened old men who broke the party's own procedural rules in the rush to get their own candidate into office. Jiang's role is certain to be widely discussed as the contents of the papers leak into China this weekend through websites and e-mail messages. The former premier, Li Peng, reviled by pro-democracy activists for his dominant role in the crackdown, is depicted as a strong advocate of force who called the students' demand for free elections "nonsense". But the most significant historical aspect of the documents is the fact that they have come to light at all. The hoard includes politburo minutes, memorandums of meetings between Deng and his aides, intelligence reports, military files and records of telephone calls. For western observers and many ordinary Chinese, the material offers what one scholar called a glimpse of "the dark side of the moon". The material is said to have been brought out of China by an anonymous party official from a faction in Beijing trying to promote political reform. The official handed the Chinese-language texts to two American sinologists, Andrew Nathan, of Columbia University, and Perry Link, of Princeton. Their translation and assessment will appear as a book called The Tiananmen Papers. The two were intitially sceptical about the authenticity of the documents, but extensive conversations with the official and further research convinced them that they were genuine. James Lilley, the American ambassador to Beijing at the time of the killings, has also said he believes the documents are authentic. A picture emerges from the documents of two cliques ruling over a billion Chinese subjects in 1989. One was made up of bloodstained old revolutionaries who had captured power by civil war and were terrified of losing it. Their feelings were summed up by Wang Zhen, a party elder, who said of the young people in the square: "These people are really asking for it . . . Give them no mercy". The other clique comprised the party's junior leaders, rivals for an inheritance that might have taken China towards political reform. Their most powerful member was Li Peng, who played on the fears of the old men that the mob rule they had unleashed against their enemies so many times could now devour them. Deng: feared popular coup One memo records Li meeting Deng on May 17, 1989, and warning him: "The spear is now pointed at you and the others of the older generation of proletarian revolutionaries." The loser was Zhao Ziyang, the party secretary, who argued for dialogue with the students and opposed the military assault on them. Purged by Deng just before the massacre, Zhao is still alive and in Beijing. Said to be in poor health, he has been under house arrest for more than a decade. It is no coincidence that the papers have been smuggled out of China before major leadership changes due to take place after 2002, when Jiang steps down from his formal posts.They also raise the question that Jiang and his followers loathe more than any other: why did Chinese history reach a turning point in 1989, but then fail to turn? Since crushing the democracy movement, Jiang has presided over economic growth and political stagnation, an expansion of many individual freedoms alongside political repression. The party's grip on power remains absolute. The documents show Deng, who died in 1997, expressing the imperial attitude of China's modern rulers towards the masses they claim to represent - and the communists' limited understanding of "reform". "We can't be led around by the nose," he said. "We can't allow people to demonstrate whenever they want. 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