China’s global opening-up after Mao’s death and a partial adoption of capitalism have only apparently softened the communist regime in Beijing. Mao’s successors have regularly shown that they will not cede their tight grip on society and, if the system requires defending- or consolidating- they can be as ruthless as the “founding father”.
The second economic powerhouse of the world
Who could have predicted, back in July 1921, China’s ascent into the first 5 largest economies of the world a hundred years later, under the Chinese Communist Party’s rule? Not even Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the “one country, two systems” concept, could have imagined, six decades later, that “made in China” would become globally omnipresent.
And I’m not referring only to the goods produced in this country, but also to its many international businesses supported by important Chinese communities. Among the countries with the most billionaires, China is ranked second.
How many of these billionaires own their businesses? It’s hard to tell! Seen through the propagandistic lens of Beijing alone, China is the perfect country. I remember being invited there by the Beijing government, in the early 2000’s, for a fact-finding visit aimed to highlight before the foreign journalists the great accomplishments of the communist state. Those were two full weeks in which we started from Beijing and ended up in Shanghai. China was in full economic expansion and was really becoming a case study for economists around the world who could not understand the economic boom of almost 8% within just one year.
I saw the Great Wall of China, the traditional silk embroidering school of Sichuan, pearl fairs, the day-to-day life of the usual Chinese family (one chosen and financed by the party), the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square, where you weren’t allowed to linger for more than 5 minutes. In other words, the propaganda machine made sure to cover the most important tourist attractions in that fact-finding visit. But it was also then that I saw the Chinese villages dominated by the blocks of flats that would serve as an inspiration for Ceaușescu during the ‘80s, when he wiped out a good many of the localities near Bucharest and moved villagers to blocks with no sewerage.
And yes, I saw in China peasants with deep sadness engraved on their faces. I also sow how todays’ ghost-towns were being built and I saw deep China in the too bright Shanghai, with curfew starting at 10 p.m. And I had some crazily long conversations with Chinese officials whom I would obsessively ask about how a state-owned economy could possibly function by capitalist principles.
I’ve made this trip down memory lane just to remind myself that, even though today China is at the top of the world’s economies, old habits die hard, if ever.
From Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Jiang Zeming’s Red capitalists
Communist China was built on the crimes committed by Mao Zedong in the name of the Cultural Revolution. It is estimated that Mao's political actions, from 1949 to 1976, killed about 70 million Chinese. The model of the supreme leader, imposed by Maoism, the sum of the military and political strategies of the first leader of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the People's Republic, remained in the collective consciousness. The cult of personality was the key to bringing a nation to its knees.
The first phase of Chinese communism, Maoism, cannot therefore be minimized. Mao Zedong had three goals: to end the civil war that destroyed China in the run-up to the establishment of communist power, to end foreign intrusions into Chinese territory, and to create a new, egalitarian society. All these three goals were achieved at the costs mentioned above.
After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping, one of the communist leaders ousted by the former leader, took over a poor and suffering country. And Deng knew that Mao's brutal dictatorship could not continue because it would lead to the collapse of the People's Republic. American analyst George Friedman summarizes Deng's ‘one country – two systems’ concept with a simple slogan: get rich!
In other words, Deng allowed the introduction of capitalist principles into a state-owned economy. For example, it allowed farmers to keep some of their harvest and craftsmen to open their own businesses.
As China was too poor to consume what it produced, Deng decided to open the borders for trade, which grew rapidly for more than a generation.
The semi-liberalism promoted by Deng Xiaoping eventually produced the expected boomerang effect. The great political changes of 1989 also affected China. The students and intellectuals protesting in Tiananmen Square questioned the legitimacy of the communist leadership in Beijing. The movement was bloodily suppressed by the communist power on June 4, 1989. The Tiananmen Massacre was condemned by everyone, and the Western countries imposed a harsh embargo on China, which, in the meanwhile, had been arresting Chinese protesters and journalists, while at the same time expelling the foreign ones. I’m recalling this episode because it seems essential to 21st century China. It was then that the repressive apparatus was strengthened, and the boundaries of political expression established.
Economic expansion continued during the time of Jiang Zemin, who was described by the then propaganda as the man who had changed China, which, in a way, makes sense if we think that under Zemin, China joined the World Trade Organization.
Zemin saw the importance of entrepreneurs whose businesses flourished in the 1980s and opened the door to party and state structures. This is how the so-called “red capitalists” emerged.
Xi Jinping and aggressive totalitarianism
At the age of 58, Xi Jinping, the son of a communist veteran, takes over the leadership of an economically settled China, but with challenging issues such as Tibet, Taiwan, or Hong Kong on the agenda. 2012 is the year in which the era of the Jinping-type authoritarianism begins. He quickly consolidated his position as a powerful leader by building the image of a strong politician. His ideas came to be mentioned in the Constitution, an honor reserved until then only to Mao Zedong. Such an idea refers to the fact that any challenge to the president is a challenge to the Communist Party. In fact, 5 years ago, the National People's Congress removed the limit of two terms at the helm of the state, practically allowing Xi Jinping to be president for life.
With Xi Jinping in power, the freedoms of the Chinese citizens have been vanishing by the day. Censorship, especially online, is getting tougher, dissidents and human rights lawyers are being arrested one after another. Opponents who have taken refuge in the West cannot feel safe for a second.
In the Xinjiang province, an autonomous region in the northwest of the country, human rights activists say that at least one million Uyghurs, a Muslim minority, have been arrested in recent years and sent to what the state calls re-education camps. They say they have evidence that Uyghurs are used for forced labor and that women are sterilized. Countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom have accused China of committing genocide by systematically repressing this minority.
Two years ago, thousands of people in Hong Kong protested a law allowing extradition to mainland China. All democratic actions in the former British colony were stopped last year, when Xi Jinping enacted the National Security Law. This allows Beijing to rebuild Chinese society on the island according to its own vision, in which any secessionist idea is a crime, punishable with imprisonment for life. Last month, we all witnessed the closure of Hong Kong's strongest pro-democracy voice, the Apple Daily, not before police searched the publication's headquarters and arrested several journalists.
Xi Jinping's China has become increasingly threatening to any of Taiwan’s attempts at independence. Legally speaking, Taiwan was not separated from China after re-becoming part of it in 1945. Starting 1949, when the nationalists withdrew to the island, Taiwan is practically an independent state, without having proclaimed its break with China though.
What China looks like after the cold shower of the pandemic
Against this complicated background, there comes the Covid 19 pandemic, with its epicenter in Wuhan, the most populous city in central China. In the face of a calamity of such magnitude, the state apparatus first hides the information, then tries to beautify it, and while the whole world looks helplessly at the hundreds of thousands of dead, China collects… from all over the world… not sanctions, but even euros or dollars in exchange for equipment that everybody is desperate to get.
After the shock of the first waves of Covid 19, the western countries woke up like after a cold shower and a black coffee. China is a dictatorship that could one day conquer the world which it has already infiltrated by means of the so-called debt diplomacy, through investments of billions made on all continents.
What have the great powers of the world done besides declaring an economic war on China?
Earlier this year, the US, the EU, the UK, and Canada introduced a series of coordinated sanctions targeting travel bans for Chinese nomenclaturists accused of violating human rights through actions against the Uyghur minority. At the G7 meeting in Great Britain, the richest countries in the world approved a plan to counteract the Chinese expansion by promising funds to the countries along the Silk Road, in which China has already invested billions. At the NATO summit in mid-June, the Allies took a hard line on China. President Joe Biden called on the NATO leaders to oppose Chinese authoritarianism and military threats.
The new White House administration has a clear goal; if not to stop, at least to slow down China's rise in the world. But let’s not dream of romantic motivations! The reasons are purely mercantile, if we look, for example, at the extremely tense situation in the South China Sea. The long-awaited Biden Putin meeting was not really about Russia. I think Joe Biden, who has known Vladimir Putin for about as long as the Kremlin leader has been in power in Russia, was rather looking for an ally in Russia for his plans regarding China. Most likely, a Biden-Jinping meeting will follow, this year at the earliest. And to watch that, I would get a front-row ticket!
