In his address to the nation last month, Xi Jinping, after praising his country’s pandemic efforts, drew attention to the upcoming centenary in July of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. But his purpose wasn’t to look back into the past. It was to signal his plans for the future, namely for the Party to still be in charge for the next big centenary in its diary — the founding of the People’s Republic of China itself in 2049.
Still, at 100 years old, the Communist Party will have much to celebrate: after 30 disastrous years under Mao, Deng Xiaoping’s opening to foreign investment and global markets laid the ground for decades of growth and made possible Xi’s vision of China’s “great rejuvenation”.
Yet it is interesting to speculate what the twelve delegates, among them the young Mao Zedong, who met a century ago in Shanghai to found the CCP would make of today’s China. With the country’s New Year celebrations starting today, Mao, we can be fairly certain, would not be amused: he spent the last two decades of his life trying to prevent Deng Xiaoping from coming to power, accusing him, not unreasonably as it turned out, of wanting to “take the capitalist road”. But what of the other revolutionaries, men for whom Confucius was the despised symbol of everything that was wrong with traditional, imperial China, who dreamed of a society in which class divisions had ceased to exist and who proposed “liberation” and independence for Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia?
They would be pleased, no doubt, that China was stronger and wealthier, and that the era of western colonialism was over. But what would they make of the country’s wealth distribution, which a century later is among the most unequal in the world? Or that the current Communist Party leadership, while proclaiming “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, also promotes Confucius and invokes the glories of its imperial history as a source of its own legitimacy?
In another speech last December, this one to celebrate 40 years since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, Xi repeated the most common, and questionable, claim about that history. “To promote reform and development in China — a large country with a more than 5,000-year history of civilisation and more than 1.3bn people — there is no textbook that can be regarded as a golden rule, and there is no great master who can dictate to the Chinese people,” he said.
His appeal to China’s uniquely ancient calling card is one frequently repeated by visiting foreign dignitaries and business leaders — some, perhaps, because they know no better, others because they understand that making money in China is easier with a smile from above. It is also at the core of Chinese exceptionalism promoted by Xi and all who seek to please him: we are the world’s oldest continuing civilisation and that will never change.
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