China's guardians of Marxist ideology announced a new campaign today against pornography and Western liberalism and said they would press on with an anti-crime drive in which hundreds have been executed. The announcements, made in headlines in the Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, contradicted widespread expectations that the party would relax its tight social controls after the Asian Games ended Oct. 7 in Beijing. Hong Kong newspapers, many of which have close ties to Chinese officials, had predicted that more participants in last year's failed democracy movement would be released from jail if the games went off smoothly. But Zhou Chengkui, spokesman for the National People's Congress, said on Monday he had no word of forthcoming releases. Today's announcements further indicated the hard-liners who have dominated Chinese politics since June 1989 have no intention of relaxing their hold. Their speeches said that China's current stability is fragile and called for vigilence against alleged anti-party forces. ``At present, our country is politically, economically and socially stable,'' Qiao Shi, the party official in charge of police matters, said in giving the order to continue China's 6-month-old crackdown on crime. ``But we must see clearly that the relatively smooth public order of these few months was achieved through the might of the (crackdown on crime),'' he said. ``In ideology and in work, we cannot relax one whit.'' The international human rights group Amnesty International said last month that more than 720 people were given death sentences in China from January through mid-August, including more than 350 in June and July alone. Official newspapers have reported thousands of arrests since the anti-crime campaign began in May, causing cities to expand their police forces and in some cases form civilian patrols. The party also held an anti-pornography campaign for about six months beginning in June 1989, when the army crushed a student-led movement for democratic reforms. Not only pornographic but pro-democratic publications were seized and burned. Liu Zhongde, who headed that drive, said a new campaign to last through next spring will clean up remaining ``spiritual pollution and cultural garbage.'' The People's Daily quoted him as saying that 12 percent of the country's newspapers, 13 percent of its social science periodicals and more than 7 percent of its publishing houses had been closed since June 1989. He said 32 million books and magazines were destroyed and nearly 80,000 people were convicted for involvement in illegal publising activity. ``This is still just a good beginning,'' he said. ``Some obscene publications that have been explicitly banned have reappeared in new form. Illegal publishing activities have reared their heads.'' He blamed this on ``the bourgeois liberal tide,'' the party's phrase for Western-style democratic ideas such as free speech and multiparty rule. ``People who support bourgeois liberalism ... advocate complete Westernization,'' he said. ``But complete Westernization necessarily opens the door to corrupt and degenerate capitalist things, and thus obscene things are spread.''
