IN DECEMBER, less than three weeks after taking over as China’s new Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping had some encouraging words for advocates of political reform. “No organisation or individual”, he said, has a “special right to overstep the constitution and law”. He was doing no more than quoting the Chinese constitution itself, but some Chinese liberals were encouraged by his praise of the “mighty force” of a document the party often chooses to ignore. Party officials are now trying to warn optimists not to get carried away. The constitution contains much that liberals admire. It makes no mention of the Party, except in its preamble. It promises “freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration” as well as “freedom of religious belief”. It says the “lawful private property of citizens is inviolable.” According to a 2004 insertion, the state “respects and guarantees human rights”. Apart from its prohibition of “disruption of the socialist system” and its talk of a “people’s democratic dictatorship”, much of the document would go down well in any Western country.

Liberals call for “constitutionalism”, meaning that the document should be above any other law or party edict. In what appeared to be a nod in their direction, Mr Xi admitted in his December speech that “supervising mechanisms” to ensure implementation of the constitution had “not been perfect”. Xinhua, the government’s news agency, even noted demands (made by many liberals) for a constitutional-review body to be established. But some in the party are clearly worried that advocates of far-reaching political reform in China are trying to promote their agenda using the constitution as a shield. In the past few days the idea of constitutionalism has come under a barrage of Party fire.

The assault began with an article by Yang Xiaoqing, a legal scholar at RenminUniversity. It appeared on May 21st in Hongqi Wengao (Red-Flag Manuscript), a leading Party journal (here, in Chinese). The main components of constitutionalism, it said, belonged to “capitalism and bourgeois dictatorship, not to socialist people’s democracy”. It said constitutionalism was “deceptive”: appearing to suggest that everyone would enjoy democracy. In fact only politicians supported by “big interest groups” could get elected.

On the following day the Global Times, a newspaper controlled by the party’s main mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, joined the fray (here, in Chinese). It said that debate about constitutionalism was not just a theoretical one. It was being used, it said, to negate China’s political system and try to turn it into a Western one. Calling for constitutionalism was actually unconstitutional. “Not even the entire Western world combined has the strength to make China follow a different path, let alone a small number of dissenters at home,” it said.

It is difficult to tell whether Mr Xi himself endorsed these attacks. In January journalists at a liberal-minded newspaper, Southern Weekend, staged an unusual strike over the censorship of an article in praise of constitutionalism (see our story here). This would have alerted him to the possibility that debate about the issue might trigger bolder calls for political reform and even cause unrest. But although Mr Xi himself has not used the word “constitutionalism”, he kept the debate alive by referring again in February to the document’s importance.

It is highly unlikely, however, that Mr Xi is on the side of the liberals. In January remarks widely believed to have been made by him in an internal speech circulated on the internet (see here, in Chinese). He criticised unnamed people for suggesting that reform meant adopting “Western universal values”. A major reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse, he said, was a “wavering of its ideals and beliefs”. In recent days the internet in China has been abuzz with rumours of a stepped-up attempt by the Party to stifle academic discussion of universal values, press freedom and other issues it regards as politically sensitive (see this account by Global Voices, an online-media monitoring group).

But if the Party hopes that a few editorials and the odd directive will keep liberals quiet it is likely to be mistaken. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, the tirades against constitutionalism helped to fuel discussion on the internet. The word became a top trending topic on Sina Weibo, China’s censored equivalent of Twitter (which is blocked). It is still being vigorously debated, with much criticism being directed at the party’s ideologues. Liberal media are still defending constitutionalism (such as here in the Economic Observer and here in Yanhuang Chunqiu; both in Chinese).

And it is not just a discussion limited to academics and dissidents. “Protecting the equal rights [conferred by] one person, one vote: that’s constitutionalism”, wrote Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate magnate, on his microblog (which has nearly 15m followers) on May 27th. His message has been forwarded more than 2,000 times. Mr Xi may be rueing the day he brought the subject up.

Correction: The number of Ren Zhiqiang's microblog followers is in fact 15m, or ten times what we originally stated. This was corrected on May 30th.