The display of military power during the 70th anniversary celebrations, on Oct. 1, of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was meant both for internal and external consumption.
Internally, China’s emergence as a superpower is a mobilization tool for national pride.
Nationalism is the glue that holds China together, buttressed by the humiliation and shame heaped on China during the period of Western ascendancy and Japanese aggression.
At the same time, China’s economic development has lifted millions of people out of poverty, cementing national pride.
Interestingly though, the political machine in China is working overtime to impress on its people that all of this is the work of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In a sense, the party and the nation are indistinguishable, and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who is also CCP general secretary, constituting the “core” of the system for an indefinite period, epitomizes all of these achievements.
In the process of working up nationalism and patriotism, the CCP has sought to erase much of communist China’s history after 1949.
The only part that is played up is China’s humiliation during the 19th century and parts of the 20th century until China “stood up” as the PRC, with Mao Zedong (毛澤東) as its “helmsman.”
It is as if it has been all smooth sailing to this day of China’s new military power and economic development.
Mao was a flawed leader seeking to personalize China’ new destiny.
In the 1950s, he plunged the country into all sorts of disasters; first, with the launch of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, followed by the Great Leap Forward.
The first led to a bloody political purge of elements that sought to point out problems with the new political order, honestly believing that the CCP was genuine about inviting alternative views to improve the system.
As it turned out, it was a clever ploy to weed out the dissenters.
Later, in the 1950s, Mao sought to skip the intermediate stages of economic development by turning farms into backyard steel furnaces. This did not work.
Indeed, the comprehensive neglect of the farming sector led to probably the worst famine in China’s history, when an estimated 30 to 50 million people dying from starvation. There are no reliable figures, as the CCP sought to fudge the numbers.
However, it was a great tragedy and, for the first time, the party hierarchy sought to challenge Mao’s political supremacy by seeking to sideline him.
This led to the Cultural Revolution, when Mao mobilized storm troopers of sorts, called Red Guards, who went after party stalwarts suspected of sidelining Mao. Many of them were sent to the countryside, where they were vilified, attacked and humiliated in their forced exile.
The most notable casualty of Mao’s revenge was the country’s president, Liu Shaoqi (劉少奇), who died a miserable death in some obscure cell.
The country was held ransom and turned upside down, because Mao felt sidelined after the disastrous famine from the ill-conceived Great Leap Forward.
Indeed, China went hopelessly backward in the midst of a decade-long violent convulsion, on top of the purges and the famine.
The PRC plunged headlong into a series of disasters brought about by Mao’s idea of “permanent revolution,” with the helmsman leading the country into an abyss.
Therefore, Mao’s death in 1976 could not have come too soon to retrieve the country’s lost decades.
After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), who had been consigned to serve his time in the countryside, was able to take charge of the situation with the cooperation of the CCP and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to restore normalcy and build up the country’s economy.
He did so by setting aside port cities and inviting foreign capital to set up shop with cheap Chinese labor and other incentives. In due course, China became the factory of the world.
However, it was not smooth sailing under Deng.
The transition from Mao had led many people in China, particularly students, to demand democracy with a pluralist and transparent political system.
Even at some high levels in the CCP — for instance, then-CCP general secretary Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) — there was a sense that they should, at least, listen to the students and, hopefully, come to some understanding rather than crush them.
For this, Zhao was put under house arrest until his death.
Deng, as supreme leader, even without having any formal political position, set the army on the young protesters, leading to a bloodbath in which thousands of peaceful protesters were killed; and killing with them the prospects of democracy any time soon, if ever.
Much of the world reacted with horror, but China is a big country and as its economy and military power grew, much of the world started to come to terms with this reality, as is the case today.
Yet, there are pressure points, which might create their own momentum to create instability.
One close at hand is the mass movement for a free society in Hong Kong. Hopefully, it will be resolved peacefully and China will refrain from repeating the Tiananmen kind of massacre in Hong Kong.
Second, China’s implicit contract with its people is that they would continue to grow economically prosperous under the regime.
However, the rate of growth is slowing, and the stimulatory path that China has been pursuing is creating a mountain of debt — mostly internal — likely to create severe economic distortions. The government, therefore, has been keen to get a handle on it.
Third, the situation in Xinjiang, where 1 million or more Uighurs are confined in so-called re-education camps, is a terrible moral indictment of a political system that the CCP is so keen to advertise and promote as an alternative to the Western democratic system.
There is no suggestion here that China’s communist political system is under threat any time soon.
The suggestion, though, is that any political system, without the freely expressed participation of the people, would continue to need strong-arm tactics under an authoritarian regime; and would likely develop cracks with minor and major explosions as time goes on.
At such time, the ghosts of erased history could create a haunting presence.
Sushil Seth is a commentator based in Australia.
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