A flag flies across the Beijing sky, adorned with a hammer and sickle. The symbol could not be clearer: the Communist Party, which is commemorating its first 100 years, wants to continue to lead China.
“The Chinese people have risen” and their rise, after more than a century of underdevelopment and invasions, is “irreversible.” With this patriotic tone, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech for the celebration of the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party.
Xi assured that China, which has become the second largest economy in the world, will not allow itself to be “oppressed” by other countries, as in the time of Western colonialism or the Japanese invasion, from 1931 to 1945.
This is what history tells us about the Communist Party of China (CPP).
The myth of the economic boom
The Chinese president, one of the most powerful leaders of his country since Mao Zedong, took the occasion to declare that the country has managed to become “a moderately prosperous society at all levels”, the main goal set in 2012 for the centenary of the match.
“This means that we have achieved a historic resolution to the problem of extreme poverty in China, and now we are making a determined step towards the goal of the second centenary: to make China a great modern socialist country at all levels,” Xi said.
The second centenary that Xi referred to is that of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which occurred in 1949.
“It is thanks to the party that we have a society like this and if (the country) has been able to develop rapidly. We have to thank it,” Li Luhao, a 19-year-old student, told AFP.
For 72 years, the PPCh has governed uninterruptedly, although that prosperity that the president now boasts was not the rule for most of the last century.
“The CCP has little to celebrate in terms of what it has done for China. Its main achievement is having been able to manage to survive and stay in power for so long,” according to Chongyi Feng,
The Chinese academic assured that the industrialization and urbanization of China had advanced long before the arrival of the PPCh to power, in 1949, because despite the wars and invasions, the cities already had infrastructure, transport, commerce, industries and modern finance.
In addition, Chinese citizens, including peasants, enjoyed full property rights under a modern legal system that had been created by the government of the ROC, founded in 1912.
“These achievements were destroyed by the CCP,” said Feng. “He squandered opportunities for economic growth for three lost decades before returning China to a semi-market economy in the 1980s.”
With exponential growth in the past 40 years, the CCP can be proud to have brought the country out of underdevelopment. Although the truth is that many communist policies, such as the Great Leap Forward (1958) and the Cultural Revolution (1966) —which are not included in the topics discussed on the party’s anniversary— condemned millions of people to poverty.
“According to different poverty measures now used by the World Bank, there are still potentially hundreds of millions of Chinese living below the poverty line,” said the Sydney University of Technology professor.
Chinese leaders now face several risks that may prevent them from reaching their next goal, such as the global economic slowdown, climate challenges and the
In this context, the one-party leaders seek to continue to establish themselves as the only possible future for China.
The CCP “seeks to link its survival to that of China and the Chinese people,” Wu Qiang, a former political science professor at Beijing Tsinghua University, who was fired in 2015 after supporting the protest in Hong Kong, said in an interview with AFP.
How did the Communist Party of China come about?
The Communist Party of China emerged in secret on July 13, 1921, when 12 delegates from a small study group of young people gathered in Shanghai – then under French control – for their first national congress.
The Russian Socialist Revolution had triumphed a little less than four years earlier, in 1917. That had given Marxism a great boost and infected the enthusiastic young Chinese.
Chinese study groups grew out of the anti-imperialist and nationalist protests of May 4, 1919 that had merged with a broader social and cultural movement, says Andrea Janku, an academic in the history department of the School of History, Religions and Philosophies of the University of London, SOAS, in an article for
“In an intensely international intellectual environment, young students sought radical change and found inspiration in a range of new ideologies, from liberalism, humanitarianism, and individualism to anarchism, feminism, and socialism,” Janku wrote.
Years later, the communist leader Mao Zedong would decide that the anniversary celebration would be set on July 1, the official date since 1941.
In 1934, to escape the communist purge carried out by the nationalists of the Kuomintang, Mao and the then called Red Army undertake the Long March, 12,500 kilometers, largely on foot, to Yan’an, which will be one of the historical communist bases.
Yan’an did not have enough housing for the still thousands of communists who came to its arid steppes, so they dug caves in the yellow earth, in the manner of the traditional “yaodongs” of the region.
From there, they plotted the guerrilla war against the Kuomintang and the Japanese invasion (1937-45), intensively trained cadres and soldiers, and gained increasing peasant support, which ended up turning the tide of more than 20 years. intermittent civil strife, after winning the one that both sides provisionally fought together against the Japanese.
“The CCP learned that for a political force to be successful it has to win the hearts of the people,” Xue Lin, a history professor at the Yan’an Executive Leadership Academy, told EFE news agency.
“We also learned that prolonging the conflict is key, defending ourselves well and trying to expand it. That was the CCP’s strategy, to buy time, build good defenses, we call it the ‘persistent war’,” he added.
Opacity: the main characteristic of the Chinese Communist Party
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains true to its Marxist-Leninist roots and its inner workings are shunned, even though it has a monopoly on power and public debate in China.
“The largest secret society in the world,” as China affairs expert Jean-Pierre Cabestan put it, lives in symbiosis in the Chinese state.
Under these conditions, it is difficult to assess their influence over the country separately from that of the administration, because many public buildings house state and party organs, and many officials are CCP leaders at the same time.
The party claims 92 million members, but the list of members is not known. Occasionally the veil of mystery is lifted, as in 2018 when the official press revealed that
The organization is “just” the second largest political party in the world, behind Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP, with 180 million members.
The PCC’s budget is not public. The party has its own resources, such as the fees of its members who contribute between 0.5% and 2% of its income.
In 2016, an official gazette cited the figure of 7.08 billion yuan (920 million euros or 1.104 million dollars at the current exchange rate) as the total income from installments the previous year.
Divided by the number of affiliates, it means a contribution of 80 yuan (10 euros, 12 dollars) per person each year.
Its heritage is also dark, but the party is at the head of a financial empire and runs companies, such as hotels and factories, Jean-Pierre Cabestan, of the Hong Kong Baptist University, told AFP.
Regarding the salary of its leaders, the opacity is total, even when the party leaders are in principle aligned with the public function payroll. Many of them have additional advantages such as housing, vehicle and domestic service, which do not appear in the base salaries.
The question of the fortunes of top Chinese officials is an even more sensitive topic, and the foreign media that took the risk of addressing it in 2012 were sanctioned by the regime.
The great public meetings of the party, such as the five-year Congress, are systematically closed with the adoption of almost unanimous decisions. But at the top, meetings of the 200-member Central Committee and the 25-member Political Bureau are held behind closed doors.
Public television is limited to broadcasting the monologues of the secretary general, Xi Jinping. The debates, if any, are not public, and neither are the results of any voting.
The moments that have marked the history of the Communist Party of China
“The CCP’s 100-year history is full of ambiguities and contradictions, hope and joy, suffering and despair,” Janku wrote.
After the long march, in 1937, the Chinese nationalists and communists put aside their differences and joined forces to confront the Japanese, who had invaded China since 1931.
The civil war was reignited in 1945, as soon as Japan was defeated in World War II. Victory came for the Communists in 1949. On October 1 of that year, from the Tiananmen Gate in central Beijing, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China.
Between 1958 and 1961, Mao began an industrialization campaign known as the Great Leap Forward, in which Chinese peasants were forced to neglect their occupations and to melt steel in a precarious manner. Little of the steel obtained had the necessary quality for its use.
The melting of the tools of the field and the exaggeration of the volume of the crops actually obtained to reach unrealistic quotas, resulted in a famine that killed about 30 million Chinese.
Questioned by his policies, Mao sought to consolidate his power and launched the Cultural Revolution (1966), in which millions of Red Guards who swore allegiance to the president destroyed any symbol that they considered bourgeois or old, in addition to ending the lives of many of the owners of those symbols. The Chinese leader then got rid of political rivals.
On September 9, 1976, Mao died and the responsibility for the Cultural Revolution was placed on his last wife, Jiang Qing, and three other associates, known as the Gang of Four.
After surviving several political purges, Deng Xiaoping seized power in China, albeit as a shadow leader, in 1977.
Deng initiated the Reform and Opening of China to the World, a series of policies that would lay the groundwork for exponential economic growth in the decades that followed that, however, also opened the door to corruption.
One of the darkest chapters in the history of communism in China came on June 4, 1989. The CCP’s hard wing prevailed in an internal struggle and turned to the Army to forcibly end several weeks of massive protests against it. corruption and greater political openness led by Beijing university students.
The repression in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, but also in other cities, left an undetermined number of deaths, mostly protesters.
In 1992, Deng traveled to the southern provinces of the country and proposed a series of policies that would revitalize the economy.
Deng died in February 1997, a few months before Hong Hong’s sovereignty from the United Kingdom was handed over to China. By then, Jiang Zemin had been at the helm of China’s general secretariat and presidency for several years, albeit in the shadow of the “little Helmsman.”
China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 served as an economic springboard. Just nine years later, it surpassed its old rival, Japan, as the world’s second-largest economy.
Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao – in power since 2002 – as the country’s president in 2013 and launched a powerful anti-corruption campaign that, according to his critics, focused on eliminating political rivals.
From Hu’s relative greater openness, China moved to greater authoritarianism.
The greatest example of this authoritarian rise is the controversy that came into force in June 2020. The legislation was a response to pro-democracy protests on the island, and has served to dismantle, in subsequent months, the pro-democracy movement in the semi-autonomous city .
The Xi government has also cracked down on the Uighur Muslim minority, which it has imprisoned in re-education centers and against whom it has committed various crimes. This has already cost him sanctions from the United States, Canada and Europe.
With information from AFP, EFE and Reuters
