It is unfortunate for the People’s Republic of China and for Hong Kong no less that Tuesday’s grandstanding on the 70th anniversary of the PRC was marred by the clash of ideologies over Beijing’s protectorate. More by design than by accident, the fresh bout of violence in Hong Kong coincided with a moment in history in the mainland. The President for life, Xi Jinping, understands the importance of history better than any leader since Mao Zedong, in trimming the sails of the Communist Party of China to the winds of change.
It is the history of the people, much closer to the bone than what social historians of the subcontinent have attempted to reconstruct. Many in China are grateful for the party’s rule; it enjoys a level of support that many democratically elected governments would envy. The past 70 years bear witness to extraordinary progress in lifespan, literacy and incomes: hundreds of millions are no longer living in poverty. There is little doubt that many people have worked their way out of poverty in Communist China. Closely intertwined is the history of the party and the country.
The party banned the family tyranny of forced marriages, but brought the official tyranny of the one-child policy, which had provoked the occasional barb that the party “polices the womb”. The advances have come at a terrible cost. The famine sparked by Mao’s Great Leap Forward took tens of millions of lives. Many more were hounded in the Cultural Revolution. Ideologically as much as structurally, the forward movement was unmistakable during the mass military parade in Beijing. Whereas in 1949, the republic’s 17 aircraft were ordered to fly over twice to make the display look more impressive, perhaps even modest, this time the world, most particularly the West, watched the People’s Liberation Army unveiling new missiles, stealth and unmanned vehicle capabilities.
It is a commentary of the development paradigm that China has outlived its big brother, the Soviet Union, and outgrown western economies. Yet it now faces new challenges. Seven decades of Communist rule have seen notable advances but at horrific cost. Ergo, there is cause for celebration, even among those acutely affected. Yet many in China are angry and cynical not the least because of the repression perpetrated in concert by the party and State, as an entity of governance.
In Xinjiang, for instance, an estimated 1.5 million Uighur Muslims are locked up in camps which the party has labelled as “vocational training centres”. Reports suggest that attendance at the military parade was by invitation only; nearby residents were under orders to keep their curtains down. The bitter irony chimed tragically with the spirit of the grand parade. Police guarded the homes of elderly “Tiananmen mothers”, so called, who lost their children in the brutal crackdown on pro-reform demonstrations in June 1989. Three decades later, the memories must still rankle amidst the pomp and grandeur of the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.