Tuesday 14 September 2010

Having a Party


July of next year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party. Having last year celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic, yet another jamboree is being planned. I understand that John Woo, the Hong Kong film director, whose Hollywood credits include Broken Arrow and Mission Impossible II, has agreed to make a new blockbuster to mark the occasion. The title is already in place: it’s to be called – wait for it- The Great Exploit of Building the Party. Yes, a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

True to the national character, the Communist Party continues to behave in the usual inscrutable fashion. Even so here seems to be a new willingness to face some of the ‘errors’ of the past, though I not sure how this could be done without destroying the remaining credibility that still attaches to Mao, whose moon-like face still stares impassively over Tiananmen Square.

Apparently at a recent top-level forum on party history Vice President Xi Jinping, while stressing that officials must “propagate and propagandise” the valuable experience it has accumulated, also made reference to the “horrifying price” that had been paid for its mistakes. It’s unlikely that these ‘mistakes’ will be outlined in any detailed way.

I don’t suppose it really matters all that much. China is now effectively a capitalist economy ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. The ideological struggles are over and Maoism is like some grand church, visited on high days and holidays then ignored for the rest of the year.

The worrying thing for the oligarchs, though, is that the workers in the ‘workers state’ are starting to get restive, demanding trade union rights and kicking against corrupt officialdom and unscrupulous capitalist entrepreneurs. Even Mao receives the occasional brick-bat, thrown at his mooning face! Never mind; I expect they will all cheer up when The Great Exploit of Building the Party finally makes it to their local multiplex.

20 comments:

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  3. The surprising thing about the Great Leap Forward, as I'm discovering from reading the recently published Mao's Famine, is that it was an attempt to overtake Britain, still considered a great powerhouse at the time, as one of the leading industrial economies. How things change!

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  4. Not only overtaking UK, Ana, but also US. At least the slogans said so (you guys' names were always together). China is an "ambitious" country, so ambitious that she wouldn't mind "sacrifice" millions millions of lives. And these millions of lives were/are so easily/willingly fooled by such "patriotic ambitions".
    Party will be huge next year. I am sure. Thanks for the reminder:-)

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  5. Mr.Garrie's One Nation, that link is so cute:-)

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  6. What a hard road it was, Yun yi. The details in Dikotter's book really are terrible. The peasants were treated worse than slaves, and I don't say that lightly. Even slaves have a 'value'. For many of Mao's cadres the peasants had no value at all.

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  7. i know ana. peasants have been absolutely at the bottom of chinese social hierarchy for thousands years. even now when many chinese people mention the word "chinese", it still doesn't include those peasants which is still majority of chinese population. the "glory" of modern china has nothing to do with them.
    i have not read the book but i believe those horrified happenings were all true. many chinese people still don't know much about it. Lu Xun said chinese people were the most oblivious people in the world. he was right. the reason chinese people still remember what japanese did during ww2 is only because communist government need them to remember. anything government don't want to people remember, they could easily succeed. like 6.4 of 1989.

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  8. You know, Yun yi, some of the information in Mao's Great Famine almost defies credibility: homes being destroyed for fertiliser, the forced labour that meant the farmers could not attend to their fields, the export of cotton that meant that some people had to go naked. It's as if history had stood still in China, that there had been no progress at all in the treatment of people between the time of the construction of the Great Wall and the so-called Great Leap Forward, which in practice was a massive leap backwards.

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  10. To be honest, Adam, the present Chinese leadership may pay lip-service to Marxism while running an economy that would have been envied by the high priests of capitalism. As I said before, Smiles is the man, not Marx.

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  12. I imagine he would be amazed that the Sleeping Giant has at last awakened. :-)

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  14. You are right Ana. The modern China's rising is all about materialism: a result of combining capitalism with a virtually functionalist Chinese cultural tradition. a perfect marriage!

    About Chinese history, what I have learned is, each dynasty, the first thing that almost every first emperor did was to "correct" history books (the most famous history book of Qing Dynasty "Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government" is a perfect example). And today I suddenly compared this the process of this "correction" with modern psychology "positive thinking style" - only remember what's good, forget about what's bad" and "look forward"...
    Communist party of course knows how to handle this as well. And people feel good/"positive" about it too.
    I found this review of the book today you may be interested:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/05/maos-great-famine-dikotter-review

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  15. Thanks, yun yi; I'll check that. It's a tremendously impressive piece of work, a shocking tale soberly told.

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  16. Thanks Ana, I am still in awe of how productive you are and how centered your opinion is, considering your right wing stand. Go into politics Ana, the world does need people like yourself.
    On China, the great communist state that is one of the worlds biggest crony capitalist country on earth, I wish all the commentators praising its rise as the worlds biggest super power would hold their breath; full of corruption, nepotism, controlled by a few neglecting the masses, I wonder how long this "miracle" can survive. Put in the mix the Asian philosophy of "saving face", which means pushing problems under the carpet until they blow up, I give China a fifty/fifty chance of making it.
    Also, any society that has done away with faith and adopted money as their main religion must fail somewhere along the line.

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  17. Rainer, you are very kind. It's really nice to see you after such a gap. :-)

    There is a lot of truth in what you say and I really do wonder if the Chinese model - economic freedom coupled with political repression - is sustainable in the long term. But your description of the triumph of money over faith is probably true of most societies in the throws of great economic change. It's certainly true of Britain during the Industrial Revolution.

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