POLITICAL activism in China is at its lowest ebb since the 1970s, but over the past two weeks the Communist government has shown an undiminished zeal in silencing ideological opponents of every kind.
A prominent pro-democracy dissident was ordered to serve three, years in a labour camp. The last imprisoned member of the extreme-Maoist Gang of Four was placed under house arrest after completing a prison term. And Amnesty International said that a sick, 75-year-old imprisoned Catholic bishop was refused urgent medical treatment.
All this hardline activity has happened against a background of a Communist Party plenum at which a resolution was approved calling for China "to perfect a socialist legal system", and another stressed the need for fighting a bourgeois decadent
Most international attention has focused on the veteran dissident Mr Wang Xizhe (46), who fled to Hong Kong from southern China on Sunday to escape imminent arrest and is now believed to be in the United States.
He had issued a joint statement last month along with a fellow protester, Mr Liu Xiaobo, calling for the impeachment of the Communist Party leader. Mr Jiang Zemin, for placing the armed forces under Communist Party control.
Mr Wang Xizhe was first imprisoned in 1974 for jointly writing a wall poster calling for legal norms, and was sentenced in 1982 to 13 years for "counter- revolutionary propaganda and incitement".
He left home after Mr Liu Xiaobo was arrested last week and sentenced to three years' labour re-education, a decision which prompted the US State Department to protest against "the gross intolerance in China for the airing of divergent political views".
American criticism of the hard line against political opponents has had little effect. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr Shen Guofang, said the United States should not interfere in China's internal affairs. The US Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher, will visit China on November 21st-22nd and will raise human rights issues, as he has done before.
The United States has granted scores of visas to Beijing's political activists since the military crackdown on the student-led democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Like Mr Wang Xizhe, many were first smuggled into Hong Kong, an escape hatch which will be closed after China takes over on June 30th next year.
Another prominent Chinese dissident, Mr Wang Dan, a leader of the 1989 student demonstrations who has been detained for a year without trial, finds himself facing a sentence of seven years in a Chinese prison.
On Thursday, court officials told his family to hire a lawyer on his behalf and gave them a day in which to do so, his mother said. He will be tried, possibly this week, with plotting to overthrow the government. His mother Ms Wang Lingyun (61), protested that all he had done was take a correspondence course with the University of California.
Although the Cultural Revolution ended two decades ago, the authorities still do not wish one of its most fanatical leaders Mr Yao Wenyuan, to be heard in public. He was released last week at the end of a 20-year sentence but was promptly placed under house arrest. Mr Yao and the other three members of the so-called Gang of Four seized power in China in 1976 but were ousted in a palace coup.
He suffers the same fate as his ideological opposite the former Communist Party chief Mr Zhao Ziyang, who has spent seven years under house arrest after sympathising with student demonstrators in 1989. Earlier this year his secretary, Bao Tong, was released after five years in prison and rearrested.
Other inhabitants of China's prison system who have come to international attention include 75-year-old Bishop Zeng Jingmu of the underground Catholic Church. After serving 23 years for his religious activities, he was sent to a hard-labour camp for three years re-education in March on charges of holding illegal services in Fuzhou.
On Sunday Amnesty International made an urgent appeal for medical care after reports that he was suffering from severe pneumonia.
The hard line against nonconformity is also hitting the publishing world. China has banned the novels and two films of a controversial writer as part of its new crusade against "bourgeois decadent ideas".
The state-owned Hua Yi publishing house, decided to stop publishing his works, which recounted the underside of life in Chinese cities, after coming under criticism from the party's propaganda department.
The most strident voices from the left are also being silenced. A provincial academic review, Economic Work Monthly, was forced to shut down after publishing a widely-circulated but anonymous report severely criticising the economic reforms introduced by the ailing Chinese leader, Mr Deng Xiaoping.
One of the plenum resolutions called for the sacking of editors who step out of line, saying: "Those press and publications units which have constantly violated the rules. . . should be closed."
The document is believed to have originated at the top in the party leadership, signalling a struggle for pre-eminence among the leadership, where President Jiang Zemin has started a spiritual civilisation campaign to strengthen his position as ideological heir to Mr Deng Xiaoping.