Then Mühlhahn writes of the following decades: "The crucial question...was how to determine who is an enemy. In retrospect, the trajectory over the course of the 1950s was towards greater vagueness and increasing breadth of targeting." In his introduction to Kirby, Roderick MacFarquhar summarises these violent decades: the killing of hundreds of thousands of landlords, the campaigns against intellectuals and counter-revolutionaries, "the greatest man-made famine in world history", 1959-1961, when more than 40 million starved to death, and the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, in which he says the number of dead remains unknown. What seems to me to be the party's default position, the elimination of internal and external enemies, is a Maoist weapon inherited by his successors. It was Mao, not yet the party's supreme leader, who, beginning in 1930, included party members on his enemies' list, with the "anti-Bolshevik campaign" that murdered thousands of those Mao deemed "objectively counter-revolutionaries". In 1957 Deng Xiaoping, thought of in the West as the great reformer, oversaw the anti-Rightist campaign, in which hundreds of thousands were purged, and in 1989 ordered the slaughter in Tiananmen Square and the national terror that followed.

Perry and Heilmann contend that Mao, the master of "guerrilla policy-making", emphasised that "war and politics were to be played according to the same rules". Deng Xiaoping and his successors instituted economic reforms (which Mao would have condemned), an experiment with wide approval even from the now middle-aged urban Chinese who in 1989 crowded into Tiananmen Square and shouted "Down with Deng Xiaoping" and "Down with the Communist Party". Many of those demonstrators paid with their lives for that fatal experiment, but the survivors are better off economically than they were in 1989, and the chances of another Tiananmen soon are remote. "To get rich", the party has trumpeted, "is wonderful."

But to draft and sign Charter 08, which proclaimed, "The most fundamental principles of democracy are that the people are sovereign and the people select their government", was an experiment too far. For this, Liu Xiaobo, whom I saw exhorting students in Tiananmen in 1989 to call for democracy (for which he served three years in prison) attracted the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party. "The policy style that emerges from these [Maoist] stratagems", conclude Perry and Heilmann, "is fundamentally dictatorial, opportunistic, and merciless. Unchecked by institutions of accountability, guerrilla leaders pursue their objectives with little concern for the interests of those who stand in their way."