Today, 01 July, the Communist Party of China celebrates its centenary. On this date, on July 1, 1921 the CCP was created by the revolutionary leader and founder of the People's Republic, Mao Zedong. In fact the day of celebration should be 23/07, effective date of the meeting of 13 people in a French concession house in Shanghai, Where, inspired by the Soviet Bolshevik revolution and with the help of the Far East Office of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Far East Secretariat of the Communist International, Chinese revolutionaries found shelter to underground the project of a regime that would radically change the history of China.
currently, with about 91,914 millions of members, according to the sense of 2020, relatively modest number considering the population of 1,4 billion people in the country, the PCC is the second largest party in the world, second only to âBharatiya Janata Partyâ/BJP, from India. How to explain, So, its power in a population universe so much wider? What justifies the massive support of the population? what is the principle (dogma?…) political/economic/civilizational that gives it legitimacy?
To seek to understand the present, we need to visit the past., above all the so-called âcentury of humiliationsâ – the 19th â when in the decline of the Qing Empire the western powers imposed, with Great Britain at the forefront, the opening of China to the West and the consumption of opium, only way that the court of Saint James found to balance the bilateral trade balance exponentially in favor of the Chinese, revealing the scenario that was the stage of the two so-called âOpium Warâ (1839/1842 e 1856/1860).
The trauma caused by this chapter of history, still present in the memory of the Chinese whose ancestors were vile drugged to balance a chain of trade, not only intensified the struggle for the defeat of the nationalist regime that followed the fall of the Empire, but also failed to pacify the country., torn apart by power struggles between the caudillos (âwarlordsâ) regional, but also propelled the spread of the Marxist-Communist ideology that fed, by the way, the decolonization process of several Asian countries in the second half of the last century.
The road since then has been arduous and China has gone through enormous vicissitudes, mainly caused by the experimentalism that has since opened under the leadership of Mao Zedong, that since 1949 until your death, in 1976, imposed policies and practices that today must seem far-fetched to many Chinese. Such is the case of the âGreat Leap Forwardâ, campaign he launched between 1958 e 1960 with the ambition to turn the People's Republic into a developed and socially egalitarian nation in record time through the collectivization of the countryside through botched agrarian reform and urban industrialization, with the so-called âbackyard steel millsâ. frustrated, these experiments resulted in tens of millions of deaths; a conservative calculation estimates the victims in 18 millions, However, other studies suggest that the number was closer to 55,6 millions.
Defeated in these purposes and removed from power and the party, Mao called on the youth, and with the support of the People's Liberation Army (ELP), radicalized the confrontation with its opponents through the âCultural Revolutionâ, of 1966 up until 1976, which had as its declared objective âto purge the capitalist and traditional elements of Chinese society and to reimpose Mao Zedong Thought as the ruling ideology of the CCPâ. Tens of millions of people were persecuted and notable figures imprisoned., or dead. Even President Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongxun, that would later play a key role in the process of opening the country to the outside by inspiring Deng Xiaoping to create the âspecial economic zonesâ, went to prison.
However, from the death of the âGreat Helmsmanâ, Deng Xiaoping's return to the political scene, Mao's companion in the "Great March" that had a modernizing proposal for the country, confronting the official thinking of the Party, and that for this he was banished and even imprisoned, would once again change the course of the People's Republic. Deng is the true patriarch of contemporary China. The economic opening and modernization plan launched by him catapulted the country, hitherto mostly rural, to today's China. He is, by the way, author of famous economic neologisms, such as âsocialist market economyâ and âsocialism with Chinese characteristicsâ. It is his famous phrase "it doesn't matter if the cat is black, or white, since I hunted while". The economy grew rapidly after a series of pro-market measures that opened the country to foreign investment and private capital.. It means, ultimately, that from then on the Peopleâs Republic â and the Communist Party â inaugurated a period of economic experimentalism that deconstructed âhardâ Maoism while maintaining the myth of the âGreat Helmsmanâ to preserve the mythological unity of the Communist Nation..
This process continued in later generations of leaders., basically technocrats, whose mission was to implement and advance the ârevolutionaryâ policies and practices launched by Deng. Until the 18th. CPC Congress meeting, in november 2012, Xi Jinping was elected Secretary General of the Party and concurrently President of the People's Republic and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, that is, absolute leader of all PRC powers.
Who is Xi Jinping?
Son of the promoter of China's opening to the outside, as i mentioned, Xi is a modern man by the standards of Chinese bureaucracy.. As a teenager, he suffered the harmful consequences of being a âprincelingâ â a son of authority â during the Cultural Revolution., and was exiled to a rural county after his father's purge. He is married to a famous singer of patriotic folk music., Peng Liyuan, and has a daughter studying at Harvard under a disguised name. His biography places him, therefore, miles away from its predecessors.
But he is also a strong believer in the Party's ideological orthodoxy., whose bases he rebuilt after the series of news of misdeeds that plagued the PCC in recent times. Xi has consolidated his power with great impetus, expanding the constitutional limits of office. The fight against corruption became the motto of his administration.. However, the bad tongues say that the choice of the accused includes personalities who oppose him. According to its antagonists, since the time of Mao, Chinese society was not so controlled.
In contrast, millions of people were rescued from poverty in its management. Xi announced in February this year that under the current criteria for defining âabsolute povertyâ, all the 98,99 million of the country's rural poor were removed from this index, as 832 municipalities and 128.000 villages, although some experts conclude that China has set a low threshold for its definition of poverty and that continued investment in its poorest areas remains necessary..
However, Xi Jinping's China faces challenges the size of the country. Between others, the massive urbanization that tends to escape the control of the authorities, swelling cities with a population unaccustomed to urban life, with the acute problems that result from this process, as accommodation, schooling, deterioration of the environment, etc.. The growing disparity between social classes is another factor, to see that China - theoretically communist – now houses hundreds of millionaires and is the second country with the highest number of billionaires in the world, according to Forbes Agency, as well as some of the largest private companies – Huawei, Ali Baba, Tencent, etc. – of the planet. Another complex dilemma is the generation gap., the result of the âone child per familyâ system implemented in the 1990s. 70 to prevent the population explosion (now there are two children and it is being considered increasing to three) which became a huge challenge as it created a generational vacuum of incalculable long-term consequences, especially to take into account that the population curve is already decreasing. E âlast but not leastâ, the deterioration of the environment caused by exponential and accelerated growth in the country, biggest polluter on the planet. And let's not forget the theorem – larger – of globalization / Western. And these are just some of the dilemmas…
It is all these issues that the President and the Party will have to manage if the CCP and PRC are to pursue and achieve the plan outlined in the book âThe China Dreamâ, do professor Liu Mingfu, segundo o qual âas China rises to the status of a great power in the 21st century, its aim is nothing less than the top â to be the leader of the modern global economyâ; Xi repeats this mantra in all his speeches. This roadmap includes very ambitious projects such as the âBelt and Road Initiativeâ, which aims to unite Asia with Europe and Africa, financed by the trillions of dollars that the country holds in foreign reserves and intends to invest in the project, as well as in the âMade in China 2025â plan, that intends to catapult it to the pinnacle of the technological age.
President Xi Jinping's speech during the opening of the centenary celebrations demonstrates some of the central role that the Party occupies in Chinese society.: “dedicate everything, even their precious lives, to the party and the people”, said the president, while urging CCP members to maintain their love for the Party firmly and loyally”, in a speech broadcast on national television.
To confirm..
I recommend to friends who wish to learn about the Chinese Communist Party to read the article in Folha de SĂŁo Paulo: Understand how the century-old Communist Party controls the state and power in China
