By Reuters

BEIJING, July 30, 1997, (Boston Globe) - Heirs to Deng Xiaoping are embroiled in a power struggle over his capitalist-style reforms several months before a crucial Communist Party meeting, a senior Chinese official said in an interview published yesterday.

The rare disclosure of factional fighting among China's top leaders was carried in a front-page interview by the China Economic Times with Xing Bensi, editor of the Communist Party magazine Seeking Truth.

The ruling Communist Party elite are gathered at the seaside resort of Beidhaihe for their annual round of political infighting that could be especially acrimonious because it precedes a crucial party congress to elect the 200 people who will rule China into the 21st century.

``The problem can be seen very clearly,'' Xing told the newspaper in answer to a question on whether China had succeeded in eliminating ``leftism'' - in line with an anti-leftist call by Deng in 1992 that triggered China's current economic boom.

``This is not only based on the fact that a few comrades have written some long articles that criticize our exercise of present policies,'' Xing said, referring to documents circulated internally over the last year at the behest of hard-line leftists opposed to Deng's reforms.

This shows ``especially that they take exception to the theories of Comrade Deng Xiaoping,'' said Xing, who is also vice principal of the Central Party School and a member of the law committee of the National People's Congress, or parliament.

Xing's remarks reveal for the first time since Deng's death in February that a strong bloc of opposition exists to the capitalist-style reforms he launched in 1978.

President Jiang Zemin has pushed those reforms in recent months in a campaign to enshrine Deng's theories as an unassailable part of China's Communist liturgy, thus bolstering his own position.

Xing made clear that opponents to Deng's reforms, and hence to Jiang as his heir, were a force to be reckoned with before the 15th Communist Party Congress in late September or early October.

``This is not a problem involving a small number of people, but confronts us with a profound problem ... that is that there is not yet a consensus within and without the party,'' Xing was quoted as saying.

Any sign of public disagreement among the ruling elite is anathema to China's party leaders, who have struggled for decades to try to present a united front despite the bitter behind-the-scenes feuding that has often paralyzed policy.