Marking 100th Anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party

 

The Chinese Communist party  has been celebrating  its 100th anniversary of its 1921 founding today with nationwide festivities and fanfare.At 100 years old this year, the CCP is one of the few communist parties to have maintained power into the 21st century.

There will be operas, films and nearly 100 tie in television dramas. Few official speeches will fail to mention the anniversary. Across China, newspapers and buildings alike have been blanketed in red party propaganda. Three Chinese astronauts in space beamed back congratulations to the party. And online censors and police have been working overtime for the past month to ensure no disturbances mar the heavily scripted ceremonies held in Beijing today.

Beijing's celebrations began with a patriotic show in Tiananmen Square. As helicopters and fighter jets flew overhead, hundreds of school children, party members, and front-line health care workers sang songs like, "Socialism Is Good" and "Without the Chinese Communist Party, There Would Be No New China." 

 

 

But the centerpiece of the celebrations was a fiery speech given by Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping.

"The Chinese people will never allow any foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us. Anyone who dares will have their heads cracked and their blood will flow before the steel Great Wall built with the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people," said Xi, as he stood in front of Beijing's imperial palace on Thursday morning.

Wearing a grey Mao suit and flanked by party leaders past and present, Xi spent more than an hour laying out the Communist Party's achievements over the past century while making the case that it remains the only political force capable of governing China.

"The Communist Party of China and the Chinese people, with their bravery and tenacity, solemnly proclaim to the world that the Chinese people are not only good at taking down the old world, but also good at building a new one," Xi proclaimed. "Only socialism can save China, and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China."

The CCP is the second-largest political party in the world — it is half the size of India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party had 91.9 million members in 2019, many of them grassroots cadres  and ordinary civil servants and has ruled China since seizing power after a civil war in 1949. Internally, its policies color every sector of a nation with the world’s largest population, or 1.4 billion people. Externally, its model is having an impact and influence on distant economies and leaders worldwide not to mention the everyday shopper looking for a new pair of shoes.

The CCP was founded as both a political party and a revolutionary movement in 1921 by revolutionaries such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Those two men and others had come out of the May Fourth Movement (1919) and had turned to Marxism after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the turmoil of 1920s China, CCP members such as Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan began organizing labour unions in the cities.

It is a monolithic, monopolistic party that dominates the political life of China. It is the major policy-making body in China and oversees the central, provincial, and local organs of government to carry out those policies. 

The party's journey started in 1921 when CCP was formed. China at that time was driven by feuding warlords, deeply mired in poverty, and powerless on the international stage. The Republic of China was established in 1912, but its government was weak and largely unable to solve China's problems.

In what is now called the May Fourth Movement,  on 4 May, 1919, more than 3,000 students from 13 colleges in Beijing held a mass demonstration against the decision of the Versailles Peace Conference, which drew up the treaty officially ending World War I, to transfer the former German concessions in Shandong province to Japan.

The Chinese government’s acquiescence to the decision so enraged the students that they burned the house of the minister of communications and assaulted China’s minister to Japan, both pro-Japanese officials. Over the following weeks, demonstrations occurred throughout the country; several students died or were wounded in these incidents.

It wasn’t until October 1949, after years of political turmoil and civil war, that Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China, setting in motion more than 70 years of change.

Getting to that moment in Beijing took the party decades of battles. In its early days, the party allied with the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, in an effort to reunify and modernize China so it could ward off further encroachment by Japan.

The two parties also collaborated to “rid the nation of warlords that prevented the formation of a strong central government,”

In 1925, Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist’s leader and a revered CCP figure, died of cancer on March 12. On May 30, a series of strikes and protests throughout China left 11 demonstrators dead as British police responded to the anti-foreign eruption on May 30. Anti-imperialist outrage benefited the CCP which grew from a few hundred members to more than 20,000.

Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, instigated a slaughter of communists in 1927, and despite Moscow’s efforts to engineer cooperation, the two parties fell into a civil war.

By 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, the CCP had established itself in rural central China in part by expropriating land from wealthy owners and redistributing it to peasants.

Chiang pursued the CCP and its army, pushing them onto the Long March and off to dusty the caves of Yan’an in China’s central province of Shaanxi giving the party its foundational myth.

In Yan’an from 1935-47, Mao Zedong rose to power, building rural support for the party and expanding it from an initial force of less than 10,000 to nearly 2.8 million members as the CCP adopted a constitution that enshrined Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The party’s rapid expansion led to more political and ideological education for newcomers, an indoctrination process that came to include even Long March veterans. Known as the Yan’an Rectification, the effort allowed the party, and Mao, to purge thousands of people suspected of disloyalty.

That was only the beginning of decades of political turmoil and internal strife. After World War II, what had been the two parties’ united front against Japan dissolved as the full-scale civil war returned. “Eventual Communist victory seemed more and more likely,”

On Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announced “The Chinese people have stood up” in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, ending the civil war and dispatching the Nationalists “backed by U.S. imperialism” to Taiwan.

For some, the moment seemed like a new hopeful beginning. Chinese then living in the West, many of them intellectuals, professionals and scholars, returned to China to participate in its rebirth.

A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, one of the largest manmade disasters in history struck an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – were wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years.

The ironically titled "Great Leap Forward", a five-year economic plan, was supposed to be the culmination of Mao Zedong’s program for transforming China into a Communist paradise.

The campaign was undertaken by the Chinese communists between 1958 and early 1960 to organize its vast population, especially in large-scale rural communes, to meet China’s industrial and agricultural problems.

As per the BBC, the drive produced an economic breakdown and was abandoned after two years. Disruption to agriculture is blamed for the deaths by starvation of millions of people following poor harvests.

Tibet’s incorporation into the People’s Republic of China began in 1950 and has remained a highly charged and controversial issue, both within Tibet and worldwide. Many Tibetans (especially those outside China) consider China’s action to be an invasion of a sovereign country, and the continued Chinese presence in Tibet is deemed an occupation by a foreign power.

In 1950, Chinese troops entered Tibet, and a year later, the Chinese government formally gained control over the region and its devoutly Buddhist Tibetans. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, to India, following a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

The Dalai Lama and the exiled government, also known as the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), has proposed what they call a "middle way" approach that would allow the exiled Tibetans to return to China on the condition of "genuine autonomy" for Tibet, though not full independence.

In 2008, anti-China protests escalated into the worst violence Tibet had seen, just five months before Beijing was to host the Olympic Games. Pro-Tibet activists in several countries focussed world attention on the region by disrupting the progress of the Olympic torch relay.

However, since 2010, the CCP has rebuffed attempts by the CTA to reopen dialogue and maintains that the Dalai Lama is a separatist. 

The Great Proletarian  Cultural Revolution was a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedong’s bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his control over the Communist party.

Fearing that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet model and concerned about his own place in history, Mao threw China’s cities into turmoil in a monumental effort to reverse the historic processes underway.

In response to Mao’s admonishments, the Red Guard Movement was formed. The Red Guards was a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized. While they sought to reinforce the Maoist standards of Communism, they were largely undisciplined and caused violence among those they saw as capitalists.

They formed under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1966 in order to help party chairman Mao Zedong combat “revisionist” authorities—i.e., those party leaders Mao considered as being insufficiently revolutionary.

The Revolution marked Mao's return to the central position of power in China after a period of less radical leadership to recover from the failures of the Great Leap Forward, which contributed to the Great Chinese Famine only five years prior.

The Cultural Revolution lasted for at least 10 years until Mao’s death on Sept. 9, 1976, which was followed by the transformative reforms crafted by then-CCP Chairman Deng Xiaoping.By orchestrating China’s transition to a market economy, Deng Xiaoping left a lasting legacy on China and the world. After becoming the leader of the Communist Party of China in 1978, following Mao Zedong’s death two years earlier, Deng launched a program of reform that ultimately saw China become the world’s largest economy in terms of its purchasing power in 2014.

Xiaoping was one of the most powerful figures in the People’s Republic of China from the late 1970s until his death in 1997. He abandoned many orthodox communist doctrines and attempted to incorporate elements of the free-enterprise system and other reforms into the Chinese economy.

Under him, China undertook far-reaching economic reforms. The government imposed a one-child policy in an effort to curb population growth. With the "open-door policy", the party also opens the country to foreign investment and encourages development of a market economy and private sector.

The Chinese Communist Party's international influence, appeal and attraction have continually increased, placing it at the forefront of world politics," Guo Yezhou, deputy head of the party's external liaison department told reporters at a press event this week.

The CCP has steered China through a century of wars, famine and social upheaval. In the last 20 years, millions of impoverished, starving Chinese who lived in the countryside have been lifted from extreme poverty. This social mobilization has helped  create the second largest economy in the world.

However, the party's concentration of power and expansive foreign policy under President Xi Jinping has raised concerns that China is turning more towards authoritarianism. 

                        

                                     
                                              President Xi Jinping

Criticism of the party  and its policies is quickly censored, there is no room for dissent, the country is ruled by law, but it is the party that decides what the law is and interprets it as needed. As Xi Jinping declares, the main feature of the New Era is the unquestionable leadership of the party in all aspects of life. He is fond of quoting Chairman Mao’s adage: “The Party, the government, the army, the people, the education; East West South North and the centre—the Party leads it all." 

At the same time Chinese military expansion in the South China Sea has drawn international condemnation, as has a crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong and the treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority in the western Xinjiang region. where a million Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region are now being detained solely because of their ethnic identity, while many of their children are forcibly housed in state-run boarding schools. It is the China where millions of women have suffered the trauma of forced sterilizations and abortions, and where children cannot go to school because they were born outside of the One-Child or Two-Child policies.This other China  is the one whose existence the Communist Party denies and forbids anyone to speak about.

These points of criticism will, of course, not be mentioned during the celebrations.

 In February, Xi issued a revised version of "A brief History of the Communist Party of China" — the official party history — to coincide with the centenary. The printed version contains over 500 pages.

The latest edition of the CCP's official history condenses the decade-long turmoil of the Cultural Revolution into three pages and downplays Mao's atrocities, softening the party's 1981 condemnation of the revolution. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao unleashed the Red Guards to torment anyone suspected of disloyalty or bourgeois tendencies. Millions were banished to the countryside, and over the Mao years unknown millions of Chinese died

The section on The Great Leap Forward is also shortened and only mentions "economic difficulties." In comparison, the textbook from the CCP's 90th anniversary still used the words "famine" and "famine deaths."

The Great Famine — during which tens of millions of people died under Mao's economic policies —  is mentioned only once in the new textbook as a "natural disaster."

The 1989 Tiananmen Square protest is "dealt with very briefly," and is described as a counterrevolutionary uprising seeking to abolish the socialist system and had to be put down by the government. The protests grew, with demands for greater political freedom. In May 1989, nearly a million Chinese, mostly young students, gathered in Tiananmen Square, initially to demand the posthumous rehabilitation of former CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang, who was forced to resign in 1987.

But soon the protest spiraled to demanding greater democracy and call for the resignations of Chinese Communist Party leaders, who were deemed too repressive. For nearly three weeks, the protesters kept up daily vigils.

On June 3 to 4, 1989, however, Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. At the end of June 1989, the Chinese government said 200 civilians and several dozen security personnel had died

The purpose of the text is to convey the message that "even though there have been crises … the party has always been able to rebuild itself and lead China on the road to prosperity," 

The "crowning finale" of the book is Xi's "ideas for the new era,"  which will be defined by surpassing the US as the world's largest economy, and China establishing itself as a first-rank military and technological power.

It is striking that the section on Xi Jinping takes up about a quarter of the entire book, although he has only been in power for eight years, given 100 years of party history,.

The revised textbook will also become part of university examinations. Millions of Chinese will be expected to memorize standardized questions and answers based on the book.

In March 2012, Chongqing Communist Party chief and potential leadership hopeful Bo Xilai  was dismissed on the eve of the party's 10-yearly leadership change, in the country's biggest political scandal for years. Bo was considered a likely candidate for promotion to the elite CCP Politburo Standing Committee in 18th Party Congress in 2012.

His political fortunes came to an abrupt end following the Wang Lijun incident, in which his top lieutenant and police chief sought asylum at the American consulate in Chengdu.  Wang claimed to have information about the involvement of Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, who allegedly had close financial ties to the two.

In the fallout, Bo was removed as the CCP Committee secretary of Chongqing and lost his seat on the Politburo. He was later stripped of all his positions and lost his seat at the National People's Congress and eventually expelled from the party. In 2013, Bo was found guilty of corruption, stripped of all his assets, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He is incarcerated at Qincheng Prison.

In June, 2019, China unveiled details of its new national security law for Hong Kong, paving the way for the most profound change to the city's way of life since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Hong Kong was always meant to have a security law, but could never pass one because it always hotly debated.

The law came into effect at 23:00 local time on 30 June, 2019, an hour before the 23rd anniversary of the city's handover to China from British rule. It gives Beijing the power to shape life in Hong Kong it has never had before.

China's move to impose the law directly on Hong Kong, bypassing the city's legislature, came after a year of sometimes violent anti-government and anti-Beijing protests that mainland and local authorities blame "foreign forces" for fomenting.

At the time of the handover, China promised to allow Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy for 50 years under what is known as the "one country two systems" formula of governance.

Soon after, Hong Kong started seeing months of anti-government and pro-democracy protests, involving violent clashes with police, against the proposed law, allowing extradition to mainland China.

The last year, 2020,  will be forever linked with China. In December 2019, the first cases of a mysterious new pneumonia were detected, prompting Chinese officials to play down the danger and stifle news of the outbreak.

Even after they acknowledged the scale of the crisis in January 2020, some analysts in the West wondered, briefly, whether the novel coronavirus would threaten the Communist Party itself, as per The Economist.

In February, the death from COVID-19 of a whistleblowing doctor caused an outpouring of rage in China over the ruling party's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the virus spread worldwide, global leaders came together, condemning China over its mismanagement of the pandemic and its attempts to divert attention from early cover-ups of the coronavirus outbreak seem to be backfiring.

 As celebrations herald  the hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, China's leadership will highlight the elimination of extreme poverty, rising living standards, and economic growth, among the nation’s other successes. A quinquennial party congress—the country’s top political gathering—will be held in the fall of 2022, setting key policies that will define China’s future path and deciding the top leaders for the next decade. The Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing later that year.

At the center of all this is Xi Jinping, who has established himself as China’s most powerful and ambitious leader in decades and is expected to break political norms and stay on for at least a third five-year term at next year’s twentieth Party Congress. Xi’s decision to abandon former leader Deng Xiaoping’s mantra of tao guang yang hui, or “keep a low profile and bide one’s time,” and push much more rapidly for national glory is the driving force behind China’s actions—from its bellicose diplomats to the angry pushback against international criticism of the horrendous human-rights tragedy in Xinjiang. In Xi’s vision, China must replace the West as a global model by “blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization” and by offering “Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind,” as he put it in 2017.

 Party cadres and intellectuals are unhappy with Xi’s unprecedented power grab,  but for now, Xi’s unrivaled power has cowed any serious opposition and his push to raise China’s global influence is widely supported.

With the major caveat that limits on free expression affect the Chinese people’s willingness to openly criticize their leaders, polls show growing support for the party in China . And that is understandable. People’s lives have gotten much better over the last few decades, and it is natural for the Chinese to take pride in the growing strength of their country after years of feeling like a little brother to an often hectoring United States. Progress on combating the pandemic has also lifted support for the Chinese regime, and a barrage of propaganda from China’s press constantly reinforces the idea that life in China is now better than it is in the rest of the world.

Many analysts say CCP is at the peak of its power on its centenary, but the party faces a new host of challenges, both at home and abroad.

They include economic inequality, environmental degradation, and tensions with the United States and other developed nations over trade, politics and human rights.

For Xi and other leaders at the helm of the party, this year's birthday is an important chance to recast an organization originally designed to foment revolution among rural peasants into one that can be seen as a powerful government overseeing an increasingly sophisticated global economy.

Party leaders must do so in a world that is now largely hostile to its global ambitions. The latest Pew Research polling shows negative views on China remain at historic highs around the world. After over seventy years of  Chinese Communist Party’s rule, millions of people now live in the China that promises material comfort and convenience, and projects political unity. But they all live in fear of “the other China”— a reality the party’s top brass relies on to maintain control.For many Chinese people especially ethnic and religious minorities a succession of ideological crackdowns carried out by Xi  and his hardline supporters despite the celebrations cast a dark shadow over their futures whatever the propoganda and. jingoism on display today, getting rid of oppression  would certainly restores peoples faith.