Communist China at 70: Life of the party state

Would Chinese people have become more prosperous if the communists had not won?

A paramilitary policeman stands in front of a portrait of late communist leader Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. Picture: AFP

Next Tuesday, the People’s Republic of China will celebrate its achievements and its potential on its 70th birthday, with an enormous show of military force parading along Chang’an (Perpetual Peace) Avenue into Tiananmen Square, where Mao Zedong had led the celebrations of victory against the Nationalists in 1949.

About 300,000 people will be involved in the parade of floats and the ensuing firework display, as well as in the centrepiece — a display of People’s Liberation Army might, including “advanced weapons” such as a new supersonic wedge-shaped spy drone.

This key role underlines that it was the PLA that originally delivered the Communist Party of China to power and that rescued its rule in 1989. It remains the party’s army and not China’s.

The parade will receive acclamatory applause as it approaches the imperial Forbidden City and Great Hall of the People, from paramount leader Xi Jinping fronting a huge crowd of loyal cadres and invited foreign guests including those designated as a “lao pengyou” — old friend of the regime. Specially honoured attendees will include the Hong Kong police sergeant, surnamed Lau, who was filmed pointing a Remington shotgun at protesters in Kwai Chung during recent demonstrations. He has told fellow officers: “Our country is cheering up the Hong Kong police with the National Day celebration. I will just represent you guys by attending,” along with nine others.

China Central TV and the country’s social media will provide saturation coverage saluting the events. But the public will be missing. On such occasions, the party demonstrates how nervous it remains about trusting the Chinese people even to join its celebrations, barring direct access even to watching the parade by anyone not officially vetted.

Those living in nearby apartments have long been instructed to close their curtains and watch it on television, while some have even been told to move out for a few days while police occupy their homes.

There have been three full rehearsals of the parade, with maximum security each time. Nothing is left to chance.

The lockdown of central Beijing includes preventing access for several hours daily to major hotels and the closure of some stores, restaurants and subway stations. The flying of kites, lanterns, balloons and racing pigeons is banned. Polluting factories, power stations and building sites are closed to help ensure an auspiciously sunny parade. Xi will address the nation as Mao — whose embalmed remains can be viewed nearby, within the square — did from the same place in 1949.

Most people in China are looking forward to next week as one of the country’s two Golden Week holidays, with the Spring Festival that follows Lunar New Year.

But Xi, the party’s general secretary — his core role — will be seeking to set a more serious tone and to counter, with his long-term socialist vision, growing concerns about the slowing of the economy, the pervasive surveillance and censorship, and the increasingly existential contest with the US.

Anticipating this keynote address, authorities have underlined the importance of paying close attention to Xi’s speeches, with the reissue, on the front page of major newspapers, of a 2013 talk underlining that the leader had long anticipated the current hard yards: “Our system will become more mature, the superiority of socialism will further manifest itself, our path will grow wider.” He told the cadres they “must not be depressed or swayed by difficulties and adversity, must endure all the risks and challenges, and resist the erosion of decadent ideologies.”

On Monday, Xi led other party chiefs — all men; no woman has made it to the politburo standing committee in the party’s 98 years — in a tour of an exhibition celebrating the PRC’s 70th birthday, when he said “the historic achievements China has made in the past seven decades … fully demonstrate that only the CPC can lead China, and only with the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics can we lead China toward prosperity and strength.”

When Xi’s family was “sent into the countryside” during the Cultural Revolution to punish his reform-minded father, Xi Zhong­xun, instead of blaming the party or Mao for capricious cruelty the son was determined to respond by becoming “redder than red”. A true believer, Xi Jinping vowed always to place the party’s interests first so that he might never be deemed remiss.

Recently, he stressed at the Central Party School the importance of struggle — using the word 50 times in that speech. And posters plastered across the capital quote Xi: “Don’t forget the original intention. Stick to the mission.” The heart of the party’s mission was, and remains, to stay in power. Mission accomplished, gloriously.

One-party states emerged across the world in the 20th century but the PRC — a nation that has come to be defined almost entirely by the Communist Party that created it and rules it — has proven the most durable and successful, outlasting even the regime established by its former Big Brother Russian party. For 70 years China has been a people’s republic, though one in whose governance only party members, now numbering 89 million, may participate fully.

China’s national constitution, replete with liberal democratic rights, is effectively redundant, its first paragraph defining the PRC as a “people’s democratic dictatorship” ruled through a socialist system whose disruption is prohib­ited. It is not merely impossible but dangerous for a lawyer to appeal a case based on the national constitution. It is the party’s constitution, with its central committee and general secretary, that sets China’s rules.

The party — which celebrates its centenary in 2021 — was created by a small group of intellectuals led by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, also from the start involving Mao, who were caught up in the excitement stimulated by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

China was then emerging from its own far less bloody revolution of 1911 during which the 267-year-old Qing dynasty — a foreign line of emperors from Manchu, northeast of China — fell, due substantially to the persistence and charisma of Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China and of the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party. The KMT struggled during the ensuing decades to impose itself politically while succeeding in opening doors for modernity for China, establishing it as a republic.

Meanwhile the CPC was steadily gathering strength in the shadow of the KMT, with Mao taking over the leadership as he gained the backing of core party chiefs for his keynote strategy — focusing on rallying support in rural China rather than on the industrial proletariat as the Russians had done.

The KMT’s army, led capriciously by Chiang Kai-shek and exhausted from its long struggle with the formidable Japanese force, eventually was defeated by a Red Army rested and infused with new military equipment provided by Russian leader Joseph Stalin.

Many — possibly most — in China ended up cheering the founding of the PRC, believing it would end the years of debilitating turmoil. They did not know then of Mao’s intent to visit constant class conflict on China, through the liberation liquidation of rural “landowners”, then the Great Leap Forward that killed twice as many people as World War I did, and finally a decade later the anarchic Cultural Revolution. Mao told visiting Australian barrister and communist activist Edward Fowler Hill in 1968: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”

Xi differs most markedly from Mao in according order his top priority. Otherwise, the continuities through the PRC’s full 70 years have become accentuated under Xi, diminishing the fracture between the years before and after Mao. Deng Xiaoping’s recently vaunted reform-and-opening decades have themselves become an “old era”. The PRC has become the world’s most successful communist state, continuing to espouse Marxism, at least theoretically, and Soviet era rituals, language and symbols such as the hammer and sickle remain highly visible at party events.

Would Chinese people have become more prosperous if the communists had not won the civil war? In recent decades, vast numbers of Chinese people have tasted prosperity, although it is impossible accurately to apportion the credit between the ruling party and the individuals and families of China, seizing their opportunity with zeal.

China still has a way to go to catch up with its neighbours, which developed accountable governments with independent courts as they emerged from rural poverty post World War II.

South Korea’s average gross domestic product per person remains three times that of China, Japan’s four times, Taiwan’s 2.5 times, Singapore’s 6.5 times and Hong Kong — though still manifestly struggling on that accountability front — five times.

Constant research by the CPC since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 after 69 years has drawn the conclusion that Beijing must continue to venerate Mao, compared with the public pulling apart of Stalin in Russia after his death. It must maintain the unitary structure of the state instead of devolving significant authority to “minority” ethnic groups; it must control the country’s understanding of its own history, especially about the uniqueness of its “century of foreign humiliation” preceding 1949; it must control social discourse through mass and social media; and it must retain a significant core of state-owned enterprises in the economy’s upstream.

Xi has reinfused the PRC with traditional communist values, enforced by new technological controls in which the state has invested an unknowably vast fortune. He has succeeded by weap­onising the economy — chiefly by issuing Belt and Road Initiative loans to developing countries — in building coalitions of support for even the unlikeliest PRC causes, such as signing up dozens of Islamic countries to back its incarceration of more than a million Muslim Uighurs in “re-education” camps, with hundreds of thousands of children separated from their parents. The PRC’s authoritarian structures, its infrastructure capacities, its stores of cash, are highly seductive for the leaders of developing states.

Donald Trump’s trade war has provided Xi with perfect cover for the inevitable slowing of the economy as it requires ever greater injections of state capital to increase production. The party believes, crucially, that it remains best placed to price risk. The briefly exercised animal spirits of private entrepreneurs have met their match in Xi, who allows them space to operate — but within a cage of sorts, with party branches emplaced in every organisation and company.

Only the elderly have known any world but a communist one. And none is permitted to anticipate anything else. In the past 30 years this has provided a stability whose flip side is control.

The PRC is more purposeful and far-reaching than the Soviet Union ever was. It is thanks to decades of “tireless struggle”, Xi has said, that China still stands “tall and firm in the east”. But signs have emerged that some in China are becoming exhausted by the constant demands of struggle that such systems require.

John Fitzgerald, one of Australia’s leading China experts, tells The Weekend Australian: “Some decades ago people said China had survived as a country because the party stepped in and saved it, and the party survived because it had become essentially Chinese. The country and the party each helped the other, you might say: the party restored a sense of unity and pride in being Chinese, and people were encouraged to believe China was heading toward democratic government of a distinctly Chinese kind under party leadership.”

Another China expert attributes the PRC’s longevity to “adopting different strategies at different times, suppression of enemies, mobilisation of enthusiasm, recognition of errors, flexibility, ability to co-opt newly rising social forces, repression, vision …”

Now, however, Fitzgerald says, Xi “is risking cannibalising the achievements of the reform era” by dissolving or absorbing all the independent religious, cultural, media and social institutions that grew out of it, “and gorging itself on the private sector of the economy that was nourished under reform”.

The way things are going, he says, “there will be no institution left standing in a few years — no firm, club, media, school, court of law, whatever — that is not under the party and led by Xi. The risk now is that instead of the party becoming Chinese, China will soon become the party,” making engagement considerably more challenging.

So far the PRC hasn’t run out of puff like many 70-year-olds. But taking the credit for everything that has gone right for China in 70 years and beyond means also being blamed for what goes wrong. In the past week, for instance, the price of pork — the core protein for most Chinese — soared 10 per cent as swine fever continues to savage the industry. Little will be said in public or even on social media, but there will be irritable mutterings over many a holiday dinner this week.

A historic anniversary such as next Tuesday’s is viewed in China as both a tonic and a time of peril. The parade will look great on TV and will help Xi cement his open-ended rule of China, deterring malcontents and showing off the PRC’s glorious New Era.

But nothing must be allowed to go wrong. All risk must be expunged. Glory, yes. Power, yes, in spades. But trust, which is essential for the social contract, for individuals, innovation, creativity or private business to flourish, no.

Rowan Callick, twice a China correspondent for The Australian, is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.