The Communist Party of China at 100

Transcript

Archive Recording: Our top story this hour, the Chinese Communist Party puts up a grand extravaganza as it celebrates its 100th founding anniversary.

Archive Recording: A 100th birthday marked with fanfare, military precision, and tens of thousands of adoring supporters.

Archive Recording: Seventy-thousand people gathering with precision-like performance, really sending this official message to not only the Chinese people, but to the world.

Archive Recording, President Xi Jinping: Today, 100 years on from its founding, the Communist Party of China is still in its prime and remains as determined as ever to achieve lasting richness for the Chinese nation.

Archive Recording, President Xi Jinping: At the same time, the Chinese people will never allow any foreign forces to bully, oppress, and enslave us. Anyone who tries to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by 1.4 billion people.

Rana Mitter: Hi, Elmira. Nice to speak to you.

RM: Combination thereof. It’s like a kind of leaning tower of documents. But basically that’s the raw material for my new book.

RM: I think that the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which underlies the Chinese Communist Party, has produced two qualities, one of which might be expected, one of which is less expected. So, the expected quality, you might say, is ruthlessness. And I think I can say that not as a value judgment, although it is a value judgment, but actually as an objective statement. The reason being that if you look at Lenin – the revolutionary figure from whom Leninist thought is taken – it’s very clear that he believes that the absolute use of coercion and force and tactics that give pretty much no quarter to your opponent are essential for political control. He was, of course, writing in the context of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War of the late teens, early twenties, and that as a framework has continued to be very, very central. Even as the Chinese Communist Party has moved from being this sort of small gathering of intellectuals in the 1920s to being this behemoth which controls a quarter of humanity in the 2020s, that Leninist strand has never been removed.

So, that really kind of ruthless quality is what you might expect if you know something about Lenin. But what you might not expect so much, depending on your reading of the Soviet past, is the other factor that I think has enabled the Communist Party of China, as you say, to last for 72 years and counting in government and 100 years as an organization. And that’s flexibility. Now, that’s not a term that you necessarily hear associated with an authoritarian party state – and China is very much and authoritarian party state – but actually if you look at the way in which its central policies have changed over that century, you’ll see how much it’s been willing to change.

Let’s just take economics, because one of the things that is brought up over and over again is that whatever you think of their tactics, the Chinese Communist Party has managed to lead China to becoming the second-biggest economy in the world. And to do that, it’s gone through a whole variety of phases. When Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao, first took power in 1949, essentially the economic model was pretty much taken off the shelf from the Soviet Union, and there were plenty of Soviet advisers. And then that changed over time. After the horrors of the Great Leap Forward famine – which the party brought upon itself in the 1950s through not looking at what was happening in reality on the ground, causing millions of people to starve – there was then, in the early 60s, a reintroduction of what you might even call kind of miniature sprouts of capitalism. Those are then stamped out during the Cultural Revolution, but then fast-forward to the 1980s, and then you get the beginning of the trajectory we see today, which is essentially a Communist Party which implements a capitalist revolution.

So nobody would look at one political party, particularly one calling itself communist, and associate it naturally with all of those different economic models. And yet that ability over time to change, sometimes just in the nick of time, is something that I think has sustained the Party over more than seven decades.

Archive Recording: For the first time in huge numbers, the ordinary men and women of Beijing, the old and the young, professors and taxi drivers, have joined the student protest, lending their support to what has now taken on all the appearances of a peaceful, popular uprising against the oppressiveness of communist rule.

Archive Recording: In China, the will of the people has been thwarted by the will of the people’s government.

Archive Recording: We all knew it couldn’t go on forever, but no one thought it would come to this: a brutal massacre of Chinese students and other protesters by the Chinese army.

Archive Recording: On the streets leading down to the main road to Tiananmen Square, furious people stared in disbelief at the glow in the sky, listening to the sound of shots.

Archive Recording: One official government report characterized the massacre as a glorious victory over counterrevolutionary turmoil. But hardly anyone in this city thinks there’s much glory in shooting down unarmed civilians.

RM: Again, it’s worth just doing a little bit of history on this. The decade that led up to 1989, the 1980s, was actually one of the freest, one of the most open decades within the period of the Communist Party’s rule.

Deng Xiaoping, of course, the paramount leader of China who essentially managed to wrest power after Mao had died, and his successor, then come into place. But Deng Xiaoping essentially becomes the paramount leader of China from 1978 onwards, and allows a real reversal of many of the assumptions of the Cultural Revolution, which had traumatized China for a decade previous to that.

So, in other words, instead of mouthing ideological slogans, Deng Xiaoping will say, “well, instead, you should go back to” – and he used a quite long-standing Chinese phrase, but he used it in a new way – the phrase is: “seek truth from facts.” Again, it sounds a bit gnomic, but really it’s a statement that, look, we’re back to the days of science. We’re back to the days of empirical research. If social science comes out with solutions that tell us things that we find uncomfortable – maybe that markets work better than command economies in creating wealth – well, okay, maybe we have to deal with that, rather than saying it’s an ideological deviation.

So, that sort of change of attitude was very important in the 1980s. And it opened up a whole, much wider range of reconsiderations, not just of economics, not just of science, but also actually of the whole way that China should be. And then of course, the confrontation came. So, the third and fourth of June 1989, Deng Xiaopoing and others in the leadership, from what we can gather, decided that enough was enough. The demonstrations were not going away. They were making China look bad. And the tanks rolled in.

It was not the most – it was not the highest number of people who had been killed in an action by the Communist Party. That would be, you know, many of the confrontations that happened during the Cultural Revolution, where tens of thousands were killed at times. But it did provide a really stark end to what had been a period of real openness, a real willingness to sort of think about how the outside world and the Western world might influence China. And although China has had more liberal periods even since then, it created a chill within the Chinese Communist Party that they would never again allow free thinking and speaking out to put the Party in a position where people would be gathering literally in front of the Forbidden City, and the Party could not do anything about it other than clear them off the streets. So, it was a deeply, deeply traumatizing episode for the families and friends of those many who were killed. But it also, in some ways, hardened the hearts of many of the leadership of the Communist Party at that time as well.

RM: I think it’s one of the puzzles, you might say, of geopolitics in the present moment that not only the West needs to work out, but also China itself spends a whole lot of time asking itself, which is: how does China do it? You know, what is the secret sauce, if that’s the right way to put it, that holds today’s China together? I would say, there has been no political entity, certainly in modern history, maybe the whole of history, that has brought together four factors in the way that China has to create a unique kind of political system, both at home and abroad. One element of it is the one that most of us from the outside think of first in terms of thinking about China and I’ll say it, and that’s authoritarianism. But if it was just repressing people – and it does a lot of that, let’s be clear – but if it was just repressing people, then actually that wouldn’t be enough.

And the other factors make the difference. And for me, they are consumerism and, bear in mind that this is a sociological term, really – in other words, the creation of higher living standards, what we might call a middle-class lifestyle. You have to remember the old Soviet Union back in the Cold War, they tried this as well, and it didn’t work out. You know, basically American holiday-makers were jetting off to the Caribbean for holidays. Well, you know, the Soviet holiday-makers were making do with little kind of huts on the beach in Bulgaria. People in West Germany were driving Mercedes; people in East Germany were driving Trabants. And while there are people who love their Trabbies, even now, you have to say it probably wasn’t a fair fight.

Now let’s think about the kind of lifestyle that China’s system is offering an awful lot of the emergent middle class today. They’ve got mobile phones. I know that your previous work, Elmira, you’ve talked to, I think, one of the founders of Xiaomi, one of the biggest mobile-phone manufacturers in the world. You may have heard of a little app called TikTok. Quite a lot of people seem to be rather keen on it, not least my teenage daughter, I have to say. You know, this is an example of how actually China has, to some extent, cracked the idea of how you make the products of the authoritarian system actually rather attractive to an awful lot of people. So, mentioning that it’s not just Chinese teenagers on TikTok reminds me that there’s then global ambition, globalization. China now has a blueprint about how it wants to influence the world, not just its own country. Vehicles, such as the well-known Belt and Road Initiative, infrastructure investment. Now turning a lot more actually in the direction of both health technology, vaccines against COVID and so forth, and digital footprints, in other words, putting the framework in for 5G. That’s where a lot of that globalization is going.

And then that leads us to the final, but I think a really important, factor: China’s ability to use technology to make its case. Now, there are arguments, I’ll put forward my view, but there are arguments about how much China really has been an innovator in technology. It seems to me, as an amateur on these questions, that the very kind of, you know, first-tier innovation – you find it in Silicon Valley; you don’t find it that many other places. But second-tier innovation – being able to take existing technology and do some really impressive things with it – that is something that China has actually been putting a lot of effort and time into, and producing some impressive results in selected areas of technology.

So, being able to use that technology with both military and civil applications, putting it into the consumerist side of its proposition to the wider population, using its global reach to actually talk to the world about how that works, and then being really hardline about – and this comes from the Chinese Communist Party – that it absolutely will accept no dissent to its legitimacy to rule. That is a very unusual combination, as I say, I think historically unprecedented, and that’s I think what has enabled China, for good or ill, to be in the highly dominant position it is, in terms of the overall top table of geopolitics today.

RM: Now, I have to say, I have spoken to well-educated American and British friends who, first of all, are not very clear that China was in WWII in the first place, and second, then ask which side was it on. Which I have to say, actually of course is a trick question because those who know the history of that period will know that there was a Chinese collaborationist government, as in France, that worked with the Japanese.

But I should say that the significant forces, the nationalist government of China at that time, under the then-leader Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong, did in fact basically lead the only major resistance in Asia to the Japanese empire in the first few years of the war, until the Americans and British came along at Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is a tendency of Westerners to think that the war in Asia only began at Pearl Harbor when they turned up. But the Chinese would point out that they’d been fighting the Japanese for four and a half years previously and holding half a million plus Japanese down.

So, this was a highly, highly traumatic experience. And in a way, it paved the way for the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party, which could take the sort of shattered China that was there in 1945, fight a civil war against their former nationalist allies, and eventually triumph in 1949.

But fast-forward to the present era, because something that’s a bit unusual in that story is that during most of the era of Chairman Mao – the 1940s up to the 1970s – oddly enough, the People’s Republic, Communist China, didn’t talk very much about this experience of WWII. Yes, they talked about the role of the Chinese Communist Party in opposing the Japanese fighting against them, guerrilla warfare out in the countryside – all important stuff. But they didn’t mention the most embarrassing fact from their point of view, which was that in fact, it was Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, the Kuomintang, who actually did the vast majority of the set-piece battle fighting.

And that began to change in the 1980s and 90s. It suddenly became in China more permissible to mention that the old enemy, the nationalists who had been defeated in the Civil War and had defeated Taiwan, actually had done a pretty good job in fighting the Japanese in many ways. And the reasons that the story changed were multiple. One was a sort of quite relevant one today, which was the desire to reunify with Taiwan and hoping that being a bit nicer to the nationalists who had fled there might encourage them to come back to the homeland.

But actually, more than that, I think it was to do with disillusionment after the Cultural Revolution – a horrific, you know, turbulent experience that may have killed as many as two million people. People after that wanted something unifying, a story that would bring them together, rather than tearing them apart on the altar of class warfare, and the story of WWII, just as in the United States, just as in Britain, turned out to be a powerful element, you know, saying the evil Japanese in this version of history invaded, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a Communist or a Kuomintang nationalist, we both fought back against the Japanese.

And that story, over the last few decades, has made itself more and more into a kind of unifying story in every aspect of Chinese society. So, that’s why WWII, you know, for generations who have no memory of it, and even their grandparents were kids at the time, still has tremendous power in China today, because it’s a really rare example of a foreign country invading China through no fault of China’s own, and China successfully fighting back. And you might understand why in today’s very turbulent geopolitics with the outside world, China wants to hear stories like that.

Archive Recording: A 70-gun salute to mark 70 years since the end of WWII, a decisive moment in Chinese history, commemorated on a suitably epic scale.

Archive Recording, President Xi Jinping: This great triumph re-established China as a major country in the world and won the Chinese people the respect of all peace-loving people around the world.

RM: I think it was February of last year, 2020. I think one of the last trips I managed to make overseas from the UK, where I lived before the pandemic hit and all travel shut down, was to Munich to the annual Munich Security Conference. And there was a speech made by the foreign minister of China, Wang Yi, in which he pointed out something that actually Chinese leaders have been saying for a long time, which is that 1945, the end of WWII, was also the moment at which China was not just any signatory, but the first ever signatory to the United Nations’ charter, which is factually correct.

Why on Earth would this be a significant thing to say? Because even a generation or two ago, the story that China told about its point of origin – today’s China, the PRC – is 1949. In other words, Chairman Mao’s victory over his nationalist Kuomintang opponents and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. And don’t get me wrong – that’s still a tremendously important story. We’re speaking in the week of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party – that 1949 “year zero” has not gone away.

But there’s an additional and very important alternative starting point being put forward, and that is 1945. And 1945, again, sounds very mainstream to most Westerners because, you know, Americans, Brits, Germans, French, whatever, Japanese, think of that as the end of WWII and the beginning of the global order that we still have with us today. China signing on for that is basically a signal saying, “yeah, you know what? China was there, too. We own this order as well. And therefore, we have rights when it comes to seeing how that order – the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, whatever it might be – is to be understood. You can’t cut us out of that order.”

However, to do that, there is a piece of historical sleight of hand, because of course the China that signed that United Nations Charter was of course the China of Chiang Kai-shek, not the China of Mao Zedong. Now, for absolute historical accuracy, just to show that we dot the Is and cross the Ts on this podcast, there was one communist delegate, a man named Dong Biwu, who eventually became the president of the PRC many decades later, who was present in that delegation. So, the Chinese communists did have their man in there. But overall, this was one of the last achievements of nationalist China, not the first achievement of communist China, and therefore it’s really indicative that the Chinese government today, the Chinese Communist Party, thinks this is such an important date to tell its story about itself that it incorporates that particular event while sliding over the fact that the guy holding the pen was not a member of the Communist Party, but a member of the nationalist party.

Archive Recording, US President Bill Clinton: By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people.

Archive Recording: Leaders of the wealthiest democracies have agreed on a plan to counter China’s global influence. The first face-to-face G7 summit since the pandemic began has showcased a newfound Western unity.

Archive Recording: In that final communiqué, there was specific wording and language targeting China, calling on the country to respect the human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. There were also renewed calls for reinvestigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

RM: So, China is, I think, doing what I would call a Schrödinger’s reshaping of the international order, by which it is both reshaping it and seeking to preserve it at the same time. In other words, China, I think, is not trying to overturn the international order from first principles. And that’s different from what it was trying to do let’s say 50 or 60 years ago under Chairman Mao. Because I think that Chairman Mao, who was not in any way embarrassed to call himself a revolutionary, wanted, just as he overturned order at home in the Cultural Revolution, would have ideally wanted a global order to be overturned as well. One statement that Chairman Mao made during the Cultural Revolution was I think along the following lines: the situation is chaos; everything is excellent. Let’s just say those are not words that I can imagine that his successor – whatever, four – Xi Jinping would ever say in his life.

In other words, thinking of the international situation today as being in chaos is not something that today’s Chinese Communist Party do want, because so many bits of it work to their advantage. Think about the World Health Organization. Think about the United Nations. These are places where China now pays for a lot of the dues, to be fair – I mean, they are doing that in many cases – but also of course gains great influence and advantage in doing so.

What they want, I think, is to reinhabit and redefine the existing order in ways that suit China’s interests. And to take one example that’s always brought up because it’s so on the money and it’s so contentious: human rights. So, China states that it’s very keen on promoting human rights with the United Nations. But it wants to emphasize its definition of human rights, which is much more about collective economic goods – everyone needing to eat; everyone having enough clothes on their back – and underplaying the individual civil liberties, which is what most people would, in the liberal world, want to stress. So, they would say same world order, but different definition.

But beyond that, there is also a further tendency, which is also to try and create an order that has much more to do with something new that China wants to put forward in the world. And so you can take examples such as the AIIB, the Asian International Infrastructure Bank, which is actually in some ways quite similar to Western development banks, but is run from Beijing. Or the ongoing attempts to try and create what some have called internet sovereignty – in other words, the idea that China and other nation-states should have much more rights than they do under the current international framework to define how the internet is used both within particular societies and how the internet is used globally, in terms of the interests of those societies. Those are, I think, real changes to the global regimes that we have at the moment. And China, as I say, in a slightly sort of Schrodinger’s cat way, is looking to push both the line that it’s the most fervent upholder of today’s order, along with, I think, sort of slowly but surely creating other structures that put forward agendas that are outside what we might call the post-1945 international order.

RM: Well, I think it’s entirely right that there is absolutely a conflict of values and a conflict of norms between the two sides, but it is worth remembering the past. We’ve become spoiled by the fact that those of us of a certain age see the Cold War – you know, the original one – way back in the rearview mirror. The post-1945 order at its start was always a bipolar system, in which two different systems basically fought over the same territory. I’ve called it in one article I’ve written, the civil war of the enlightenment.

In some ways, I don’t think the Chinese case is exactly parallel. I’ll just explain why. A question that people quite often ask about Chinese intentions is whether or not there is a Chinese ideology that is looking to basically displace liberal ideology around the world. Actually, I don’t think that’s what the Chinese are up to for two reasons. One is sort of ideological and one is practical.

The ideological one, the clue is in the way that they described their own system at home in China – and bearing in mind that, you know, that’s big enough in itself, because that’s a quarter of the human species, which is within that territory – which is the idea that they’re practicing “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which looks a lot like authoritarian capitalism to many of us, but, you know, fair enough. You call it what you want. But the point of something that is “with Chinese characteristics” is, by definition, special to that country. You know, you can’t reproduce it elsewhere. You can’t have socialism with Chinese characteristics, as such, in Ethiopia or Argentina or Vietnam. And so to that extent, I think there’s a sort of self-definition that is still saying, “look, we’re actually different, not the same from other places.” So, what does that mean then about global Chinese influence, which is undoubted? I think it’s much more oriented around a set of preferences than it is a type of ideology. In other words, having international military, economic, and cultural influence that basically means that the world is easier for China to do what China wants, which is to keep its own one-party rule stable at home.

Archive Recording: It’s the beginning of a new era in Chinese politics, the era of Xi Jinping thought.

Archive Recording: President Xi Jinping’s name and political ideology are now written into the Party’s constitution. That makes Xi Jinping the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic.

Archive Recording: It’s unclear, though, what this means for the country, but there is no doubt, it allows Xi Jinping to tighten his grip on power.

Archive Recording: Mr. Xi tells delegates that his political philosophy will help build a modern, prosperous China. And he reads out its unwieldy title: Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.

Archive Recording: Members of the Chinese legislature, the National People’s Congress, have overwhelmingly endorsed sweeping and controversial new security laws for Hong Kong. The bill, which now passes to China’s senior leadership, has caused deep concern among those who say it could end Hong Kong’s unique status.

Archive Recording: Researchers in Australia have identified and mapped more than 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang, that northwestern part of China where the government has interned hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, Muslim minorities, including the Uyghurs.

RM: I think that it’s absolutely unarguable that there has been strong centralization of power in both the person of Xi Jinping and the institutions and agencies of the Party over which he presides. Even ten or 15 years ago, there was a move within the Party-state system by his predecessors, Jiang Zemin, and to some extent, Hu Jintao, to move toward what you might call state and government bodies, the State Council being one example of that, that would basically take away aspects of governance from the Party as such. It was always a slightly odd division because, of course, the Party and the state have always been intertwined in communist China, but it was a gesture for a kind of separation. It’s been absolute reverse gear in the last decade or so under Xi Jinping. And he has explicitly said the Party controls everything, you know, south, north, east, west, wherever you go, the Party has to be in control. So, he makes no bones about that.

What does that do for the question of legitimacy? Well, I think that it means that an awful lot more of what happens in the next five years, ten years – I mean, we’re all assuming that next year in 2022, having abolished term limits, Xi Jinping is likely to seek a third term as Secretary-General of the Communist Party. And that means as long as the economy continues to grow, as long as the Five-Year Plan works out, he will be able to take the credit for what China has managed to do at that point, in terms of its international politics as well. But it also means that he has fewer places to step back and go if things go wrong. The benefit from the Communist Party’s point of view of the collective leadership, as you might say – I mean there’s always a president of course, and the general secretary, but there are always factions behind that who basically represented different positions. And that may be the case under Xi Jinping, but it’s less obvious from the outside. So, the alternatives on whom to place responsibility are, I think, smaller in number.

But the reason why putting a finger in the wind for where we are right now, that I think that he’s probably likely to, you know, maintain his position for a while, is that some of the major dangers that face China – and they do exist – are slightly more long term.

Archive Recording: China’s population is aging rapidly. More people are reaching retirement age and soon, there won’t be enough young people to replace them in the workforce.

Archive Recording: The authorities in China have announced that couples will be allowed to have up to three children, raising the limit from two.

Archive Recording: China’s birth rate has fallen for the fourth year in a row. Twelve million babies were born in 2020, short of government expectations.

Archive Recording: China says its economy is back on track. Chinese exporters are doing record business. Chinese pharma giants are selling vaccines. It’s a win-win story with lots of money flowing in. But scratch the surface, and you’ll find a glaring crisis.

RM: I think that the China we see today has a whole variety of economic, environmental, and governance issues, some of which I’ve mentioned. And I think it’s also making certain choices and, I’ll be explicit, the choice to really kind of clamp down on free expression, that I think actually are not going to do a great deal of good in the longer term.

But overall is the China of today, is the China of the Chinese Communist Party, on the way to any kind of sudden collapse? I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. We can always be wrong. We famously know that many, many people did not spot the Soviet Union’s collapse. And of course, amongst those people were the thinkers of the Chinese Communist Party who, to this day, go into seminars, saying what did the Soviets get wrong? We absolutely have to make sure we don’t do that. So, they didn’t spot it coming, either.

But that having been said, many of the fundamentals that were problematic with the Soviet Union and, I’ve mentioned them before, but just to mention again, the idea that you have to create some kind of lifestyle for the majority of your growing population that they choose to aspire to. When those sorts of measures, I think there’s enough going on in China, not to mean that it’s there without any problems, but rather that it will have problems that I suspect it will manage. But it will continue to manage them in ways that, I have to say, look very problematic to those of us in the liberal world. And you know what? I think the Chinese Communist Party is not going to spend a great deal of time worrying about what we think about that. We may say that’s bad. We may say that’s good. But the point is that China is going to take a great deal of time to plow its own thorough on these issues.

RM: Elmira, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be on the podcast and look forward to maybe talking again.