(CNA is Taiwan based China News Agency)

Ottawa, Feb. 24 (CNA) Deng Xiaoping's successors must now make a "last, modest leap forward to a developed industrial society with laws and more representative government," a Canadian analyst said Monday.

Eric Margolis, foreign affairs analyst for the Ottawa Sun, also predicted that a power struggle will now break into the open among Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Zhu Rongji, and Qiao Shi and other mainland Chinese leaders.

Mainland China is entering a new, lengthy transitional era of political rivalry, galloping corruption and internal tensions that could see the nation weaken, go backwards, even splinter, he wrote in a column titled "Riding a dragon into the future."

However, Margolis added that mainland China could also become the leading world power by the mid-21st century.

Out of the current interregnum will emerge a new, younger generation of mainland Chinese leaders who "probably will be more democratic, relaxed and free-market oriented than their elders," he forecast.

Marxism is dead; political communism is dying, and mainland China has awakened, he observed, with Deng Xiaoping the man who made it all possible.

"This tiny man with a will of iron delivered a fifth of the world's population from dire poverty and Maoist madness. He took China from the 19th century and positioned it to dominate the 21st century. Few leaders in our era have done so much good for their people," he judged.

"History, I believe, will eventually rank him above Mao Zedong as a maker of modern China," Margolis wrote.

He noted that Deng was able to transform mainland China from a desperately backward nation run by tyrannical Maoist fanatics in effect a giant prison camp into a semi-modern nation with a dynamic economy and world power status.

Western media and leaders, with inevitable ethno-centric bias, gave faint praise to Deng, calling him a "transitional figure," Margolis pointed out, noting that Deng is being judged on the basis of crushing the 1989 Tiananmen student uprising, and China's on-going repression of Tibet.

The West condemned Deng as a world-class villain even though Israeli forces shot down far more Palestinian students on the West Bank than the People's Liberation Army killed at Tiananmen Square, he said. India's repression of Kashmir was much more brutal and bloody than mainland China's actions in Tibet, he added.

Defending Deng, Margolis said the late leader realized what Western critics did not. "China was not and still is not ready for Marquess of Queensbury democracy. Economic development had to precede political liberalization, otherwise China would end up like bag lady Russia.

"If China was not ruled with an iron hand from Beijing, it would begin to fragment as so often in its history when the center grew weak. The regime, riding the dragon of explosive economic growth, had to keep control which it did ruthlessly."

He pointed out that Deng "unleashed broad political liberalization in the countryside," a fact "barely noticed by the Western press." He emphasized what he himself had witnessed: Mainland China's economic development produced a dramatic political liberalization compared to two decades ago, one that "promises to eventually transform China into a modern nation."

Impatient Westerners do not understand how much mainland China has changed, he commented. (By S.C. Chang)