“Socialist or not …
the rise of Communist China is a challenge
to the existing world order”
– Prof Alka Acharya, China Studies Division, SIS (JNU)
The year 2014 marks the 93rd anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As China is planning a grandiose celebration of the establishment of its Red regime, perhaps the only “successful Communist regime” amongst the few still existent citadels of the same regimen in the 21st century’s globalized world; with a queer mix of both authoritarianism and a dose of modern capitalism. A great story of its existence and resilience in the face of the implosion of the Communist regimes in the erstwhile Soviet Russia and East Europe in the aftermath of Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, that saw the annihilation of the Second World (as the Communist/Socialist bloc was known by then) with the ushering of a New World Order (George Bush Sr). A great triumph and survival story, indeed!!
But as the CCP is celebrating its “successes” at its 93rd anniversary, questions are being raised about the fragility of its “achievements” with the rising gulf between the urban riches and the rural poor, growing labour unrest, an aging population, poor human rights record, oppression of the non-Han minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, above all, the palpable sight of its cities that represent the best in the Western Capitalist world and its countryside that represents the worst of the Africa’s rural areas.
Amidst cheers and skepticism that bedeviled the CCP regime in China, it has been pointed out by many noted thinkers that if China is not taking some urgent bold revolutionary steps to at least mitigate these glaring gulfs/deficits, these “contradictions” can soon get the better of its triumphalist chest beating “successes” over the past nine decades. It could, as they pointed out, led to the very demise of the well anchored Red regime there, sooner than later, that looks quite realistic, most especially in the aftermath of the Jasmine Revolution (the Arab Spring) that swept across the dictatorial old Arab world off its feet with the thunder of a pro-democratic new Arab world order. Beijing can be the next in the line of fire, post the triumph of the great Arab Spring. Isn’t it better for it to take prior precautions to avert an anti-Red revolution there?
When the CCP was established in 1921 in some non descript place inside China with just a handful of its fellow-travelers, no one could have thought even it their wildest dream that it will establish its own rule in 1949 and that it will last over 90 years inspite the decimation of the same regimes across the world that marked the end of the cold war. From Mao to Deng, the CCP has been adopting quite a flexible approach in building its own regime suitable to that of China rather than blindly following the Soviet’s “one for all” model of communism. The idea was to establish a regime tailor made to suite Chinese politico-cultural nationalistic pattern, rather than building on the Soviet’s dictated unsuitable internationalist pattern, that would have made it the “running dog” of the old defunct regime that lasts no more.
The idea was simple: from day one the CCP strives to become the leader and making China the numero uno Great Power rather than being the puppet that must grovel at the feet of its Moscow paymasters. The end result of this foresighful strategizing is for all to see: Communist China survives while the
Communist Russia and its puppet regimes across Eastern Europe fell like pack of cards.
But, as they say “mere survival is no proof of existence”, China too can not hide its seemingly unbridgeable “contradictions” that have resurfaced after its over 90 years of “blood and iron” caged rule of politburo over the world’s largest proletariat.
For instance, inflation is now over 5.5% (the highest since 1994), fruits of Govt backed developments benefiting only the urban middle class excluding the rural poor, rising public debt (now 17% higher than its official GDP), the burgeoning aging population due to its “one child policy”, growing labour unrest slowing down its speeding industrialization, unchecked urbanization, a crippling health policy neither accessible nor affordable to the rural poor, substandard quality of its products that are the look-alike counterfeit of world’s best brands hammering down China’s model of export led growth, poor human right record, fallacies of its “One Nation Two System” model in Hong Kong/Macau and above all the growing discontentment amongst the non-Han minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang restive provinces by the Tibetans and Uighur Muslims, respectively that have let loose a war for freedom from Beijing’s rapacious strangulating dragnet.
Prof Alka Acharya of JNU is more forthright writing on growing regional imbalances within Communist China which she herself viewed critically questioning the oft repeated ‘rise’ or ‘peaceful rise’ of it. The income gap is now a chasm. Of China’s over 1.3 billion people, the most affluent fifth earns half of total income, according to one official study, while the bottom fifth takes home a piddling 4.7 percent. Incidents of protests are also on the rise – about 8,700 reported protests in 1993 to over 87,000 in 2005 – that’s an average of more than 200 protests a day on such issues as burgeoning official corruption, health problems, environmental degradation, mistreatment by employees, home evictions, an unraveling social security net, the privatization of higher education, the impact of market reforms in the healthcare sector etc which has virtually collapsed in China’s rural hinterland areas with the ‘real rise’ of communicable diseases.
All these, as Nouriel Roubini of the New York University has rightly predicted, can make the “China Bubble” burst. He said that unlike the “Washington Consensus”, the “Beijing Consensus” is seemingly unsustainable due to its lack of political freedom. And we all know by now that no system, no regime howsoever strong it is; can survive without political freedom; no matter how much economic freedom it doles out for its survival. That happened in the erstwhile Soviet Russia and it can easily manifest the “repeat of the same history” in Communist China too, sooner thn later – the ultimate hard reality to which the CCP can only afford to ignore to its own decimation (the ‘withering away’, in colloquial Marxist term has only just begun) with the lurking disintegration of China itself.
Post-Tiananmen Square pro-democracy uprising in the summer of 1989, the CCP, like a quick learner tried its best to revamp and repaint the old authoritarian model with the dose of a bit of capitalist economic freedom sans political freedom marking a new hybrid model of what came to be known as the Authoritarianism 2.0. But soon the world and the very Chinese population realized that it was just a cosmetic hogwash over the dilapidated “bamboo curtain” to provide it with a make believe coat of agility over the believable all clear flippancy of fragility.
The moral of the story is that the CCP needs to make a deep introspection and brainstorming to decipher its “real sustainable success stories” from the “fake unbearable shock stories” in light of its over 90 years of relentless rule. Otherwise, very soon the reality will get the better of the well published myth of Communist China’s ‘great leap forward’ to the next Superpowerdom story because we must know that Xinhua coloured pictures of bullet trains, longest sea bridges, super fast rail links, sky towering TV towers, huge skyscrapers of Beijing or Shanghai, manned space missions, super-show of its military might, distorted figures of its own development et al, can never give us a right and balanced view of what is going inside the heavily guarded and guided “bamboo curtain” of the Red regime there.
If the CCP and Communist China are so sure of their self drafted ‘success stories’ of a prosperous, harmonious great Chinese society, then why it has put such a strong dragnet on accessing free information about them on web now controlled via ‘internet policing’, banning Google, You Tube and social media tools like Facebook, Twitter etc. Instead, Chinese citizenry, excluding the those close to the ‘high and mighty’ of CCP, are ‘instructed’ to access the CCP ‘approved websites’ for the best or correct information/views about CCP controlled China. The utter irony is that while the common non-elite Chinese citizenry can’t access either Google or social media, the top brass of CCP can have hassle free access to it clicking and posting their ‘selfies’ on them.
No doubt, China under the CCP regime has made rapid strides in various fields ushering development in some of its remotest dark patches of hinterland, transforming an agrarian society into an industrialized one, but now the seemingly immitigable bridge of urban-rural, rich-poor divide following an environmentally disastrous industrialization policy force-fed on cheap labour; the sheer exuberance of its over 90 years of triumphalism has turned out to be what Alan Greenspan, former Chief of the US Federal Reserve Bank, chose to call as “irrational exuberance”.
Communist China and its CCP can no longer just shrug off the serious charges made by various thinkers, some of whom being the Chinese origin thinkers at Harvard, Oxbridge, RAND et al with their well researched works in the form of books, booklets, reviews and peer-reviews.
It is indeed very difficult to rightly gauge the right mood inside China because it simply refused to show us its true colour, cleverly camouflaged in a pro-poor, anti-imperialist façade of a “benign, pro-people regime”. This can no longer go uncontested in a globalized era and the reign of free voice across the globe. China, if it wants to survive its regime, must mend and must make some amends to weed out its unbridled corrupt follies that crept in over its nine decades of unchecked and uncontested rule. Freedom, political and economic, is the panacea to all its follies if China really wants to learn to unlearn its old outdated antediluvian and suffocatingly authoritarian practices because omnipresence is an euphemism for incompetence. That’s why “Brand China” has failed to make waves across the world, unlike “Brand India” or “Brand Korea”. That is again why the rise of a democratic India inspires but the very rise of the Communist China scares.
The bottom-line: to sustain and to excel without scaring the rest of the world, China and the CCP must reform with much more openness creating a vibrant civil society led democratic space and restructuring its own unsustainable old order of forced regimentation giving more space for dissent to have consensual consent to quell the growing disorder of discontent which is now engulfing China.
It is now an imperative of which China must execute or to face its doomsday prophecies in reality. And here lies the “Catch 22” situation resembling the Hobson’s choice, as Alex de Tocqueville rightly prophesized long ago that “the most perilous moment for a bad government comes, when it tries to mend its ways”.
But in case of Communist China, whether it ends with perilous disaster or booming bloom of prosperity or shenghsi, China must bend itself to make some immediate amends. It has no other way and perhaps for itself and the world that’s the right and not the red way!!
Only, with that the palpable anxiety behind the “peaceful rise (shengshsi)” of Communist China can end to the great relief of the freedom loving humanity of the world zealously vouching for a real democratic liberal world for ushering in an environmentally benign and sustainable politico-economic world order at last.
Three cheers to that hope of triumph of world’s six billion humanity that fervently appeals for a “let’s swim or sink together” call. It will be sagacious for China and its ruling CCP to take the call without wasting ticking time in pondering all over again. This time, hope of humanity must be allowed to find its way, without any authoritarian bottleneck in its way, right??
the rise of Communist China is a challenge
to the existing world order”
– Prof Alka Acharya, China Studies Division, SIS (JNU)
The year 2014 marks the 93rd anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As China is planning a grandiose celebration of the establishment of its Red regime, perhaps the only “successful Communist regime” amongst the few still existent citadels of the same regimen in the 21st century’s globalized world; with a queer mix of both authoritarianism and a dose of modern capitalism. A great story of its existence and resilience in the face of the implosion of the Communist regimes in the erstwhile Soviet Russia and East Europe in the aftermath of Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, that saw the annihilation of the Second World (as the Communist/Socialist bloc was known by then) with the ushering of a New World Order (George Bush Sr). A great triumph and survival story, indeed!!
But as the CCP is celebrating its “successes” at its 93rd anniversary, questions are being raised about the fragility of its “achievements” with the rising gulf between the urban riches and the rural poor, growing labour unrest, an aging population, poor human rights record, oppression of the non-Han minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, above all, the palpable sight of its cities that represent the best in the Western Capitalist world and its countryside that represents the worst of the Africa’s rural areas.
Amidst cheers and skepticism that bedeviled the CCP regime in China, it has been pointed out by many noted thinkers that if China is not taking some urgent bold revolutionary steps to at least mitigate these glaring gulfs/deficits, these “contradictions” can soon get the better of its triumphalist chest beating “successes” over the past nine decades. It could, as they pointed out, led to the very demise of the well anchored Red regime there, sooner than later, that looks quite realistic, most especially in the aftermath of the Jasmine Revolution (the Arab Spring) that swept across the dictatorial old Arab world off its feet with the thunder of a pro-democratic new Arab world order. Beijing can be the next in the line of fire, post the triumph of the great Arab Spring. Isn’t it better for it to take prior precautions to avert an anti-Red revolution there?
When the CCP was established in 1921 in some non descript place inside China with just a handful of its fellow-travelers, no one could have thought even it their wildest dream that it will establish its own rule in 1949 and that it will last over 90 years inspite the decimation of the same regimes across the world that marked the end of the cold war. From Mao to Deng, the CCP has been adopting quite a flexible approach in building its own regime suitable to that of China rather than blindly following the Soviet’s “one for all” model of communism. The idea was to establish a regime tailor made to suite Chinese politico-cultural nationalistic pattern, rather than building on the Soviet’s dictated unsuitable internationalist pattern, that would have made it the “running dog” of the old defunct regime that lasts no more.
The idea was simple: from day one the CCP strives to become the leader and making China the numero uno Great Power rather than being the puppet that must grovel at the feet of its Moscow paymasters. The end result of this foresighful strategizing is for all to see: Communist China survives while the
Communist Russia and its puppet regimes across Eastern Europe fell like pack of cards.
But, as they say “mere survival is no proof of existence”, China too can not hide its seemingly unbridgeable “contradictions” that have resurfaced after its over 90 years of “blood and iron” caged rule of politburo over the world’s largest proletariat.
For instance, inflation is now over 5.5% (the highest since 1994), fruits of Govt backed developments benefiting only the urban middle class excluding the rural poor, rising public debt (now 17% higher than its official GDP), the burgeoning aging population due to its “one child policy”, growing labour unrest slowing down its speeding industrialization, unchecked urbanization, a crippling health policy neither accessible nor affordable to the rural poor, substandard quality of its products that are the look-alike counterfeit of world’s best brands hammering down China’s model of export led growth, poor human right record, fallacies of its “One Nation Two System” model in Hong Kong/Macau and above all the growing discontentment amongst the non-Han minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang restive provinces by the Tibetans and Uighur Muslims, respectively that have let loose a war for freedom from Beijing’s rapacious strangulating dragnet.
Prof Alka Acharya of JNU is more forthright writing on growing regional imbalances within Communist China which she herself viewed critically questioning the oft repeated ‘rise’ or ‘peaceful rise’ of it. The income gap is now a chasm. Of China’s over 1.3 billion people, the most affluent fifth earns half of total income, according to one official study, while the bottom fifth takes home a piddling 4.7 percent. Incidents of protests are also on the rise – about 8,700 reported protests in 1993 to over 87,000 in 2005 – that’s an average of more than 200 protests a day on such issues as burgeoning official corruption, health problems, environmental degradation, mistreatment by employees, home evictions, an unraveling social security net, the privatization of higher education, the impact of market reforms in the healthcare sector etc which has virtually collapsed in China’s rural hinterland areas with the ‘real rise’ of communicable diseases.
All these, as Nouriel Roubini of the New York University has rightly predicted, can make the “China Bubble” burst. He said that unlike the “Washington Consensus”, the “Beijing Consensus” is seemingly unsustainable due to its lack of political freedom. And we all know by now that no system, no regime howsoever strong it is; can survive without political freedom; no matter how much economic freedom it doles out for its survival. That happened in the erstwhile Soviet Russia and it can easily manifest the “repeat of the same history” in Communist China too, sooner thn later – the ultimate hard reality to which the CCP can only afford to ignore to its own decimation (the ‘withering away’, in colloquial Marxist term has only just begun) with the lurking disintegration of China itself.
Post-Tiananmen Square pro-democracy uprising in the summer of 1989, the CCP, like a quick learner tried its best to revamp and repaint the old authoritarian model with the dose of a bit of capitalist economic freedom sans political freedom marking a new hybrid model of what came to be known as the Authoritarianism 2.0. But soon the world and the very Chinese population realized that it was just a cosmetic hogwash over the dilapidated “bamboo curtain” to provide it with a make believe coat of agility over the believable all clear flippancy of fragility.
The moral of the story is that the CCP needs to make a deep introspection and brainstorming to decipher its “real sustainable success stories” from the “fake unbearable shock stories” in light of its over 90 years of relentless rule. Otherwise, very soon the reality will get the better of the well published myth of Communist China’s ‘great leap forward’ to the next Superpowerdom story because we must know that Xinhua coloured pictures of bullet trains, longest sea bridges, super fast rail links, sky towering TV towers, huge skyscrapers of Beijing or Shanghai, manned space missions, super-show of its military might, distorted figures of its own development et al, can never give us a right and balanced view of what is going inside the heavily guarded and guided “bamboo curtain” of the Red regime there.
If the CCP and Communist China are so sure of their self drafted ‘success stories’ of a prosperous, harmonious great Chinese society, then why it has put such a strong dragnet on accessing free information about them on web now controlled via ‘internet policing’, banning Google, You Tube and social media tools like Facebook, Twitter etc. Instead, Chinese citizenry, excluding the those close to the ‘high and mighty’ of CCP, are ‘instructed’ to access the CCP ‘approved websites’ for the best or correct information/views about CCP controlled China. The utter irony is that while the common non-elite Chinese citizenry can’t access either Google or social media, the top brass of CCP can have hassle free access to it clicking and posting their ‘selfies’ on them.
No doubt, China under the CCP regime has made rapid strides in various fields ushering development in some of its remotest dark patches of hinterland, transforming an agrarian society into an industrialized one, but now the seemingly immitigable bridge of urban-rural, rich-poor divide following an environmentally disastrous industrialization policy force-fed on cheap labour; the sheer exuberance of its over 90 years of triumphalism has turned out to be what Alan Greenspan, former Chief of the US Federal Reserve Bank, chose to call as “irrational exuberance”.
Communist China and its CCP can no longer just shrug off the serious charges made by various thinkers, some of whom being the Chinese origin thinkers at Harvard, Oxbridge, RAND et al with their well researched works in the form of books, booklets, reviews and peer-reviews.
It is indeed very difficult to rightly gauge the right mood inside China because it simply refused to show us its true colour, cleverly camouflaged in a pro-poor, anti-imperialist façade of a “benign, pro-people regime”. This can no longer go uncontested in a globalized era and the reign of free voice across the globe. China, if it wants to survive its regime, must mend and must make some amends to weed out its unbridled corrupt follies that crept in over its nine decades of unchecked and uncontested rule. Freedom, political and economic, is the panacea to all its follies if China really wants to learn to unlearn its old outdated antediluvian and suffocatingly authoritarian practices because omnipresence is an euphemism for incompetence. That’s why “Brand China” has failed to make waves across the world, unlike “Brand India” or “Brand Korea”. That is again why the rise of a democratic India inspires but the very rise of the Communist China scares.
The bottom-line: to sustain and to excel without scaring the rest of the world, China and the CCP must reform with much more openness creating a vibrant civil society led democratic space and restructuring its own unsustainable old order of forced regimentation giving more space for dissent to have consensual consent to quell the growing disorder of discontent which is now engulfing China.
Reform or Perish: Areas Calling for Attention of the new CCP Regime
- Economic reform for balanced and inclusive development avoiding a lop-sided one.
- Political reform within the CCP and other areas giving more rights backed by legal entitlements for its people espousing more freedom, political and economic.
- Labour reform giving more rights to labour, more wage and improvement of their living condition to tame the growing menace of labour unrest hindering its export led growth.
- Health reform making health more inclusive and affordable for all alike and an urgent need to review its “one child policy” to tide over the burgeoning aging population leading to a demographic disaster instead of a demographic dividend by which countries like India will be making huge profit in near future.
- More rights to the non-Han minorities living in areas, most especially in restive Tibet and the troubled Uighur Muslim dominated Xinjiang province to usher in a multiculturalist / pluralist policy of national integration to avert a Soviet Russia like implosion in foreseeable future. Remedy lies in greater minority freedoms.
- Reforms within the various structures of the CCP via adopting a new-Left approach in making both communism or Maoism and its credo democratic centralism looking more realistic and practicable.
It is now an imperative of which China must execute or to face its doomsday prophecies in reality. And here lies the “Catch 22” situation resembling the Hobson’s choice, as Alex de Tocqueville rightly prophesized long ago that “the most perilous moment for a bad government comes, when it tries to mend its ways”.
But in case of Communist China, whether it ends with perilous disaster or booming bloom of prosperity or shenghsi, China must bend itself to make some immediate amends. It has no other way and perhaps for itself and the world that’s the right and not the red way!!
Only, with that the palpable anxiety behind the “peaceful rise (shengshsi)” of Communist China can end to the great relief of the freedom loving humanity of the world zealously vouching for a real democratic liberal world for ushering in an environmentally benign and sustainable politico-economic world order at last.
Three cheers to that hope of triumph of world’s six billion humanity that fervently appeals for a “let’s swim or sink together” call. It will be sagacious for China and its ruling CCP to take the call without wasting ticking time in pondering all over again. This time, hope of humanity must be allowed to find its way, without any authoritarian bottleneck in its way, right??
Written by Sourabh Jyoti Sharma >>
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