CCP accountability and survivability

ya never know

I mention frequently Xi Jinping’s dedicated efforts to recenter the CCP in the lives of 1.4 billion Chinese. It’s pretty well accepted by many in the west as caused by seeing himself as another Mao Zedong, a domineering leader of a Party determined to hold on forever.

A Party determined to remain in power most definitely describes the CCP. We assume the communism in the Party’s title is the operational phrase which corrodes anything that its roughly hundred million members touch. We where the term ‘freedom’ (a rather selective one a vast number demand it for their own actions while increasingly limiting the activities of others—{another column}), appears frequently in our own vocabulary so we assume the 1.4 million Chinese are chaffing for their freedom against this aggressive, godless communist leadership. I am not sure too many contemporary Americans know what communism means (state ownership of the means of production) but they definitely do not like it, using its negative, if unclear, connotation to ridicule and reject Beijing’s leaders. I suspect most Americans just don’t like them as godless.

The Communist Party won power after a bitter civil war with the Nationalist, Guomindang, Party in 1949. The largely rural population largely sought peace after decades of internal upheaval instigated by a collapsing Qing (Manchurian, rather than Han Chinese) government which then allowed the parceling of many portions of the country into the hands of various warlords into the 1920s. The next quarter century witnessed the Guomindang attempting both winning over the warlords to Chiang Kai-Shek’s government while simultaneously eradicating the newly-created Chinese Communist Party. After 1931, Imperial Japanese forces creeping across mainland territory lead to a fifteen years of Sino-Japanese war while thwarting Chiang’s aspirations to lead all of China. People in China experienced half a century of national trauma between the fall of the Qing in 1911 and the end of the civil war in 1949. Most were relieved to see turbulence end.

Mao’s proclamation that ‘China had stood up’ hardly represented a resounding celebration when the People’s Republic came into being in 1949. The Revolutionary leader instigated several conflicting policies under which the Party tried to consolidate power throughout his quarter century of rule. Some of those policies, such as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, deepened deprivation for the population as famine resulted from the Party’s obsession with illusory industrialisation. Party archives indicate at least twenty million died in areas where insufficient food production occurred as this isolated nation of roughly five hundred sixty million.

Less than a decade later, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began in 1966 as Mao unleashed the youth against many of the same revolutionaries who marched with him and helped create the ‘new China’. He sought to penalise anyone with western knowledge or language. The decade-long movement was chaos, precisely the type of luan so repulsive to Chinese but it occurred as Mao enabled one faction after another to assure unpredictability of a movement that would turn to him as a saviour. While the Cultural Revolution slowed roughly coincident with the U.S. opening in 1972, the violence, the turbulence, the hunger, the fall from grace by senior leaders, and so much more frenzy only ended with the Great Helmsman’s death in September 1976.

The GPRC therefore was within the memory of those leading China today to include Xi Jinping. A ‘princeling’, meaning his father was a revolutionary long associated with the Party, Xi can recall being exiled to rural China where food was scarce and fear abundant because of the uncertainty wracking the nation. Mao was dying but those he had appointed as his ‘successors’ over the years invariably found themselves out threatened by various Party factions.

The Party-driven GPCR left China further behind the remainder of the ‘developed’ world rather than improving the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese. In the late 1970s, the Party rejected its chaotic Maoist path to embrace Four Modernisations enunciated for specific fields of agriculture, science and technology, education, and military. With the reentry into the global community which Mao had eschewed as the world rejected his communism, the CCP finally led a nation beginning to prosper.

But the CCP suffered from the same corruption plaguing so many regimes. Chinese citizens knew this from the lifestyle senior Party officials and their families lived. This engendered incredible cynicism across the country, manifested in anti-corruption protests.

The Party seniors feared anti-corruption turmoil was evolving into anti-Party protests, which led making an example to its own youth, the educated pride of a modernising China, by mowing them down with tanks in Tian’anmen Square on 4 June 1989. The incident remains vorboten for public discussion in the PRC some thirty-five years later yet many Chinese do remember the events. And they recall it was the Party fearful for accountability that resulted in this national trauma. They rarely speak of it publically, however, for fear of reprisals.

When Xi Jinping began reasserting the importance of the Party upon taking power, citing the CCP’s authoritative nature, its Chinese sensibilities, and its position as a guiding force, Americans immediately disregard any possibility these actions were to protect that same Party from accountability within a changing China. Xi took power fully sixty-three years after the CCP began its peculiar governing history. We assume it is because the Party feels so strong and aggressive. Yet, it is possible there is something else going on.

Additionally, the Fifth Generation General Secretary assumed the apex of Party leadership precisely forty years following Richard Nixon’s visit and the associated opening with the United States.

What if Xi acted because he feared the incredible changes wrought by that forty year relationship? Why are we so sure we weren’t succeeding in pushing the CCP to change? What if our assumptions are wrong about the CCP? Is it possible our assumptions about ourselves are wrong as well?

I don’t know the answer but I do see this regime as rickety. If you have to worry about your leader compared with Winnie the Pooh, that just doesn’t sound too convincing to me that your power is absolute and unassailable.

This is most definitely a leadership that wants to use the past selectively, erasing its many damaging acts in favour of selecting humiliating historic instances to replay repeatedly. At what point does the social contract come up for renegotiation so the people of China demand decision-making outside of the Party’s poor performance so often over the past seventy-five year? When will the citizens tire of this selective governing?

Will differences all resolve after some post-CCP government gets to power? I am skeptical.

In the end, however, I most fear we don’t want to accept China and the United States will always have issues over which they agree and others over which they disagree. I think that is much more a Chinese and American relationship than it has ever been a CCP and American problem. But democracies and communist regimes definitely do not align most of the time.

Xi continues hoping the people of China will respect his determination to prevent genuine Party accountability. At some point, that reckoning will occur. What we can’t know is how likely massive public retribution will be against the heinous behaviours of the past, or will a successor regime just ‘to get on with life’? China has much going on beyond merely the nature of the distasteful regime. Americans assume it will be the former, which seems likely. But, we should not discount entirely the Chinese ability to look past the painful to achieve a better future more readily.

You never know.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? I welcome any and all of them as I don’t pretend I have all of the answers.

It was a superb sunrise. Thank goodness.

Be well and be safe. FIN

‘China Population, 1950-2024’, at microtrends.net, retrieved at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/population

Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: A History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).