Is China’s political environment loosening up, or is the government cracking down? It’s hard to tell. President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao sometimes seems to be going both ways simultaneously.

For example, Hu has decided to honor the memory of his mentor, former General Secretary Hu Yaobang, in order to burnish his aura as a reformist. But, in many ways, Hu Jintao’s tenure as the head of the fourth generation of Communist leaders, which began when he became party secretary in 2002, differs sharply from that of his mentor.

Hu Yaobang was a founder of the China Youth League, regarded as a relatively liberal institution in the People’s Republic, who in the 1980’s promoted political reforms and rehabilitated virtually all the victims of the Mao Zedong’s purges. By contrast, the younger Hu has narrowed the public space for political discourse that had opened up during the latter years of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, when market pressure was forcing media outlets to be more daring and wide-ranging.

Since taking over, Hu Jintao has arrested a number of outspoken journalists in an effort to rein in the media. His government has also detained an array of public intellectuals who have been critical of its policies, including cyber-dissidents Liu Di and Shi Tao (who was arrested thanks to Yahoo’s collaboration with the police in identifying him) and freelance writers Yu Jie and Liu Xiaobo. Military doctor Jiang Yanyong was detained in 2003 after he publicly rebutted the Party’s assertion that the SARS epidemic had been brought under control. In 2004, he was placed under surveillance when he called on the Party to revise its judgment of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstration.

Hu’s tightening of controls over political discourse and the media intensified with the publication in September 2004 of a list of “Top Fifty Public Intellectuals” in Southern Weekly. The list, dominated by intellectuals who in the 1990’s had called for freedom of speech and political participation, appeared with the statement: “This is the time when China is facing the most problems in its unprecedented transformation, and when it most needs public intellectuals to be on the scene and to speak out.”

On November 23, 2004, an article in the Shanghai Party Committee’s orthodox Liberation Daily disagreed. It attacked the concept of “public intellectuals,” claiming that their “independence drives a wedge” between intellectuals and the Party and between intellectuals and the masses.

Hu’s leadership has tried to draw public attention to the growing gap between rich and poor. But its reaction to the book A Survey of Chinese Peasants, which is based on interviews over several years with farmers in the poor province of Anhui, was a telling reminder that public intellectuals are not welcome to contribute to that effort.

The authors, the husband-and-wife team of Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, who spent their early years in the countryside, described in detail the imposition of unfair taxes by local officials and the authorities’ rapacious seizure of land farmed by rural residents. The increasingly impoverished lives of peasants that the book vividly documented resulted from the very abuses of power that Hu Jintao had declared himself to be against. Yet, in February 2004, one month after its publication, A Survey of Chinese Peasants was banned.

Hu’s government has also tightened controls over the media. Reports on peasant and worker demonstrations against corrupt officials and illegal property confiscations have been banned. Those who dare to protest, such as Beijing University journalism professor Jiao Guobiao, are silenced.

Similarly, Wang Yi, a law lecturer at Chengdu University who called for freedom of speech and association, was barred from teaching. The liberal journal Strategy and Management was closed down. Even the editor-in-chief of China Youth Daily, the newspaper affiliated with Hu Jintao’s own China Youth League power base, which had been aggressive in exposing official corruption, was recently detained.

Hu Jintao’s rule is not a return to the Mao Zedong era. Despite the regime’s vast means of censorship, its embrace of new communications technologies like the Internet make it increasingly difficult for the party to maintain effective control over people’s views.

Moreover, persecution of political dissenters does not now reach far beyond the accused to involve their associates. While scores have lost their positions and others have been imprisoned, most are briefly detained and then allowed to find other jobs in China’s burgeoning civil society.

By comparison with the late 1990’s, however, the space for political discourse has undeniably narrowed, crushing expectations that the country would continue on a liberalizing course. Hu Jintao may have made a genuflection to his more liberal mentor, but in the two decades since the elder Hu’s fall from power, even as private space has expanded, China has become a politically far less open society.