FOUR decades ago, Mao Zedong unleashed the 'Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let One Hundred Schools of Thought Contend' movement.
This policy of encouraging China's hitherto tightly controlled intellectuals to criticise the communist authorities has generally been seen as a wily trick to flush his liberal opponents out into the open - the better to destroy them later.
Did the Burmese junta perform a similar stunt when it released its principal opponent, Aung San Suu Kyi, from detention two years ago? At least part of the rationale behind releasing Ms Aung San Suu Kyi appeared to have been to attract some rare positive publicity, and with it more foreign investment. Mao had nothing like that in mind.
When the Great Helmsman freed the party's hitherto safely muzzled critics in 1956 he did so against the advice of many of his colleagues: the late Deng Xiaoping warned him that he was playing with fire.
In its own way the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) has achieved something similar: when Ms Aung San Suu Kyi was released, dozens of members and sympathisers of her National League for Democracy party were released too.
They were allowed limited freedom to debate among themselves, and above all to meet and plot against the regime at the lakeside house of their charismatic leader.
When the release of its awkward rival failed to open the floodgates of respectability, SLORC's intolerance of even the mildest dissent started to express itself again.