Although much is made of the great strides in upliftment and prosperity that have characterised China since 1980 (The Mercury, September 30), the recurrent theme in commemorating 75 years of Communist Party rule is that of repression.
Certainly, the Communist Party has nothing to commemorate for its first 30 years. The unmitigated tyranny of Mao Zedong’s policies of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution cost tens of millions of lives. As Harrison Salisbury stated in his book The New Emperors, when President Nixon arrived on February 21, 1972, China was a wasteland, its surviving population traumatised, its factories shrouded in cobwebs, and its schools in shambles (p. 306).
Credit for China becoming a prosperous dictatorship belongs to Deng Xiaoping. He decollectivized agriculture by dividing people’s communes into private plots, thereby facilitating partial privatisation of agriculture. He designated special economic zones, which were run on capitalist lines and which became engines of economic growth.
But the vast material improvement the masses experienced was not matched by discernment for human rights. On Deng’s watch, the democracy movement was brutally suppressed in June 1989, with a death toll estimated between several hundred to several thousand at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Despite the technical, industrial and scientific advances China has made, brutal and pervasive oppression prevails under President Xi Jinping, who has become the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. Dissent and deviation from official narratives is prohibited and punished. Persecution of ethnic and religious minorities is draconian.
Labour camps house religious sects and dissenters in conditions that contrast glaringly with the modern, high tech image the Communist Party projects of China.
What should not be overlooked is the goal of the Communist Party. By cultivating a network of cheerleader states that become increasingly dependent on China’s aid and trade, the Communist Party hopes to mark its centenary in 2049 by having established socialism globally.
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