From Mao to Xi Jinping: the most unexpected political turning point | The centenary of the Chinese Communist Party

Xi Zhongxun y su hijo Xi Jinping –President of China-– cover the almost complete story of the first centenary of the CCP established on July 1, 1921 in a clandestine house in the French concession of Shanghai with twelve delegates, including Mao Zedong and two Russians from the Third International. Xi Sr. joined in 1926 and would play a key role in the Civil War. He was later jailed by his party, which paraded him with a “traitor” poster, rehabilitated him and appointed him secretary general, a cycle completed by most of these leaders.

The first 50 years

In its first 50 years, the CCP was on the verge of being exterminated, it allied and divorced Kuomintang nationalists, retreated to the mountains of Jinggang betrayed by Chiang Kai Shek – who was supported by Hitler – from which they made the Long March epic in 1934 with the Red Army covering 12,500 kilometers. They founded vast Soviets, again allies to their adversaries to drive out the Japanese, and resumed the Revolutionary War until they entered Beijing victorious on October 1, 1949. They have been successful in literacy, health, women’s rights and life expectancy. And failures like the Great Leap Forward – 1958/62 – which ended in famine. During its first 50 years, the CCP was plunged into paranoid Cultural Revolution: Xi’s father was four days away from being shot until Mao interceded. These two historic episodes have generated millions of deaths.

Mao having died – the country no longer hungry, becoming a nuclear power with a seat on the UN Security Council, and having made peace with the United States – his comrade Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978. (claimed after imprisonment). He devoted himself to softening failed Maoist dogmatism. And it was Deng – with Xi senior – who broke the structures: he experienced the special zone in Shenzhen. The grafting of a capitalist knot in the midst of communism worked and they began to reproduce it throughout the country under a new postulate: “to get rich is glorious” (10 years before listening to Beethoven making someone a bourgeois ). But When students asked him for more freedom in 1989, Deng looked towards the decaying USSR and did not shake his hand: he slaughtered them in Tiananmen.

The second fiftieth anniversary

Today, the second fiftieth anniversary finds post-Maoism in the most unexpected place: in the vanguard of the new industrial revolution 4.0 and at the forefront of 5G technology from the hand of Xi fils, whose daughter graduated from Harvard. Information gives the diagram of the metamorphosis: in 1978 100% of economic production was public (today it is 20%). According to Serbian Branko Milanovic, China fulfills the basic characteristics of a capitalist economy: most of the production in private hands on which the state does not impose decisions on production and prices. Chinese growth refutes the Western thesis that economic success requires a link between capitalism and liberal democracy (the origin of the Tigreasiático model would suggest otherwise).

The Chinese political equation would be – according to Milanovic – that the state is forced to generate growth in order to legitimize itself, limits the access of the capitalist class to quotas of its own power and deals with high levels of corruption. His hypothesis is that the communist regimes of China and Vietnam solidified the conditions for a capitalist transformation: “they functionally played the same role as the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe in the 19th century”. The CCP transformed the semi-feudal society into a capitalist society with arbitrary use of the law for the benefit of the new elites, maintaining the autonomy of the government from them.. Thus, they can guide and order the economy according to central strategic plans, which is very difficult in Western capitalism. The CCP seems to follow the Marxist theory that it saw a progressive role in the bourgeoisie: it gave itself the bourgeoisie it lacked.

Confucianism

In the Confucian political model that has prevailed in China for 5,000 years, it has never been accepted that economic power is independent of central power. The rich rise as individuals and not as a social class: they do not have their own political program. Jack Ma – the digital mega-entrepreneur who owns Alibabá – had his wings chopped off for suggesting he was self-sufficient: he hardly appeared in public anymore.

China having missed the train of the Industrial Revolution and dismembered by foreign powers until 1945, she entered with Mao a complicated labyrinth from which she seems to have succeeded in barely 40 years of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Although “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” seems more precise). Your take-off platform will be the new Silk Road with which it will connect the world by land and sea.

This whole cycle unfolded in just 100 years in the context of the only ancient civilization with continuity to this day, since it was unified 2,242 years ago by Qin Shi Huang, buried with 8,500 soldiers in the ground. cooked who still keep his tomb secret in Xian. Looking at it, Xi Jinping considers himself a new emperor who has come to “rejuvenate” China and revive it as a world power.

Ying and yang

From our binary point of view, it is difficult to understand these changes. The reasoning of the West comes from the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction: something cannot be a thing and its opposite at the same time. But Chinese thought – apart from ideology – has Taoist roots. In the symbol of ying and yang, black enters white and vice versa in complementary harmony: it is a unity. The Greek duality is A or B. The Chinese: A and B. This is why the Far East better assimilates change and adapts to circumstances. Marxism had already had to exchange the proletariat for the peasantry there – by changing its base – and now they have supplanted “the planned economy” for another “Chinese market”: state capitalism. The one who started this phase was a hero of the Long March – Deng Xiaoping – and is followed by the son of another great revolutionary: Xi Jinping. And no one sees a contradiction. They are communists who execute capitalism with efficiency and speed never seen before (like their Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese neighbors). Western Reason considers that the being of things is a rigid and durable substance, a purity to be maintained so as not to lose its essence. But East Asia is not essentialist: Lao Tzu theorized: “the only permanent thing is change”. If something fails to become, the reverse path is taken naturally. When “the great helmsman” Mao became dogmatic, he ran aground: people wanted to overshadow him and to defend himself he engendered the tragic Cultural Revolution. In the absence of the heroic leader who had strayed from the “fluidity of the tao”, China got back on track. A popular saying goes: “Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. “

The CCP’s economic success with political stability is indisputable – GDP has grown 412% since 1978 – beyond lack of freedoms. The West complains about the formality of human rights, but quickly puts them aside: commercial logic prevails. This year, the eradication of extreme poverty, a relative concept, was announced. But no one disputes that some 770 million Chinese have moved into the middle or upper class since 1949 (99 million since 2012). If the data is correct, it is a record in human history. It is a pillar of a party that in 1922 had 300 members and in 2021 reaches 92 million, although the exams to enter it are demanding and take years. When Xi Jinping wanted to join him, his father was sentenced to 7 years in prison and was rejected nine times. Of course, today everything is different: originally, being a Communist could cost your life. Now, in order for an entrepreneur to benefit from great labor flexibility and friendly unions, he must be affiliated with the CCP.

What is impressive is that it was all done by the same party with a political waist so flexible that he could rotate 180º on his torso without breaking his spine, following the postulates of the Art of Laughing. Sunzi’s war: a constant weighing of open potential, adapting to a situation diagram and not to a Western-style plan: an immobile objective becomes an obstacle.

The CCP is still Chinese today: ductile and adaptable, conforming to the facilitating slope like water: it does not have much in common with that of Mao. Consensus levels appear to be high for economic success in a kind of mutually agreed marriage of convenience. The Xi father-Xi son patrilineal line is a divergent continuity which converges, and not a contradiction (the first executed a plan A and the second an “opposite” plan B). This family story illustrates the past 100 years in China, that brief moment of a civilization that measures time on a millennial scale, as the patient red dragon takes a stand for his great leap to the global scepter, from a situation diagram never frozen.