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Editorial: Birthday no cause for celebration

"China's sorrow" is the nickname of the Yellow River, renowned for its terrible flooding and devastating changes of course. But it seems a fitting soubriquet for that other devastating force, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which celebrates its 80th birthday today. The statistics numb. More people died in the land reform movement in 1949 than died in Pol Pot's genocidal Cambodia. Nearly as many people died in the famine resulting from the stupidities of the Great Leap Forward as in the whole of World War II. The death toll in the Cultural Revolution matched, murder for murder, Hitler's industrialized killing machine, while China's gulag system rivaled its Soviet mentor for cruelty. All told, perhaps 70 million Chinese have died as a direct result of the Chinese Communist Party's rule. That is roughly three times the current population of Taiwan.

And it is not only the death toll. The CCP managed to turn one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated civilizations into one of its most brutalized, ignorant and barbaric. The scale of destruction of any artifact of cultural value or importance is simply devastating, as any observant visitor to China can attest.

And now this party, which has brought about more human suffering than any other organization, anywhere, ever, is 80 years old. Celebration can only be in the worst of taste, congratulation likewise. Perhaps an international day of mourning for what has been lost to humanity by the Chinese Communist's rape of their own country is the only appropriate response.

Of course the CCP has its apologists, not just among its own members but in the West as well. We are often told that, while the party might have a lot of blood on its hands, it is not as brutal as it once was (the Falun Gong might beg to differ) and its raising of perhaps 200 million people out of poverty in the last 20 years is simply a phenomenal achievement. To which we have to say that the reason they were mired in poverty in the first place was almost entirely a result of the party's own stupidity. Wising up enough to let peasants decide what to plant and allowing people to develop businesses hardly required epoch-making insight.

Given the overblown claims concerning China's emerging "great power" status, it is interesting to speculate at what level China's development might have reached if a reasonably uncorrupt market-minded regime had ruled for the past 50 years. The tragedy is that of course no such alternative was available, only the politically, economically and morally bankrupt Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) regime.

Enough of the past, what of the future? For the changes that have brought China from impoverished Maoist autarky and international insignificance to being a regional -- not yet international, note -- power, have resulted in a worrying loss of authority for the party. Relaxation of restrictions on where and how people live and how they work might have created a more wealthy society, but the CCP is not comfortable navigating the ship of state sharing the tiller with Adam Smith's invisible hand. Entry to the World Trade Organization, perhaps later this year, is going to open the doors even wider to forces beyond the party's control. How it will adapt to this will be the dominant question in China for the next decade.

There is little chance that popular discontent will force the CCP from power, but the society it governs is growing in complexity at a furious pace. It will need imagination and skill to govern successfully, qualities that do not seem to be in great supply among the gray apparatchiks set to inherit the leadership and key positions in the wake of next year's party congress. There will not be another great leap forward, rather a hesitant shuffling into hopefully a better future for the Chinese but a threatening one for the party itself.
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