Xi Jinping’s efforts to remake the party may end up dooming it.
Is China a Communist nation? This is what the Beijing
government would have its people and the world believe by celebrating
the centennial of the formation of the Communist Party in Shanghai this
July 23. Originally, the Party was nothing but a group of 13
intellectuals informed by a quick reading of the gospels of Marx,
Engels, and Lenin and fascinated by what seemed promising in the new
Soviet Union. Though official accounts now deny it, we should not
underestimate the importance of Russian assistance in the creation of
the Chinese Communist Party, up to the time of its military victory
against Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in 1949.
After military
assistance came help with industrialization, until the expulsion of
Soviet advisors by Mao Zedong, who was determined to impose his personal
conception of Communism on China and on the rest of the world—Maoism
rather than Leninism. This Sino-Russian alliance was bound to end in
disagreement: for the Chinese Communists, the essential purposes of the
ideology were to restore unity to China, which had been ravaged by
colonialism and civil wars; to impose on the Chinese nation a new
collective ideology, Marxism, in the place of Confucianism; and to make
China the center of the world once again. The Chinese Communist Party
had accepted Russian aid for tactical reasons, without for a moment
considering becoming Moscow’s satellite.
Besides this mistrust, there was a conflict of civilizations. The
Russians relied on the working class or proletariat, with
industrialization as their goal. China was rural, and Mao Zedong, a son
of peasants, wanted it to stay that way. The initial popularity of the
Chinese Communist Party arose from its promise to confiscate the
property of rich landowners in order to distribute it to poor peasants.
The supposed virtue of agrarian labor explains why, after each period of
domestic instability, the Maoist solution was to send bureaucrats and
intellectuals to the countryside so that they could rediscover the
revolutionary spirit by listening to peasants.
Mao’s Communist Party succeeded in its primary objective of
destroying every vestige of the past: no more landowners, intellectuals,
or artists (except those devoted to the kitsch style favored by Mao),
and no more urban civilization, traditional religion, or respect for
elders and ancestors. When I visited Chinese villages in the 1970s, I
heard every peasant recite the words, “Thanks to President Mao, I have a
bicycle and a watch, and this is sufficient to my happiness.” Who were
the party members at that time? There were no women and few workers, a
few slavish intellectuals, and, for the most part, apparatchiks and
military officers. The recruiting criterion was not competence but
adherence to the ideology—the ideology of the moment, that is, which Mao
defined according to his fantasies.
Speaking of these early days, Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao, would
say that “Mao was right 70 percent of the time, and wrong 30 percent.”
The 70 percent consisted completely in the restoration of China’s unity,
excepting Taiwan and Hong Kong. And the 30 percent error? That would be
the absence of economic development, the mass famines and some 80
million deaths, resulting from the Party’s conquests—and these followed
by purges, known under the names of the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution. In order to preserve unity—that is, the Party’s
monopoly—Deng would add a few thousand victims at Tiananmen Square in
June 1989, among students favorable to democracy.
It was left to Deng to create a second Communist Party, beginning in
1979; it had nothing in common with Mao’s party but the name. Deng, who
governed for 20 years and founded the Chinese system as we know it
today, inherited from Mao only the passion for national unity and the
hatred of democracy (democracy being just the thing, he thought, for
decadent Westerners). His absolute priorities were industrialization,
education, economic development, a rising standard of living, and
national power. He went about it by restoring private property,
large-scale capitalism, universities, and trade with the rest of the
world.
The Communist Party would therefore have to transform itself from
a party of militants to a party of technicians and entrepreneurs. Party
members’ living standards rose alongside China’s economy, since the
party controlled everything and took its share of all profits. The
corruption of officials is an essential part of the system; it is
encouraged when it increases the country’s wealth, and it is condemned
when leaders wish to get rid of an entrepreneur or a bureaucrat who has
become a burden.
In what sense is this “pragmatic” party—a term that Deng was fond
of—still Communist? The Marxist litanies and the Maoist liturgy stay the
same: a Latin Mass that everyone recites and in which no one believes.
As an obligatory national ideology, it justifies the government’s
elimination of heretics, intellectuals, democrats, Tibetan Buddhists who
follow the Dalai Lama, Catholics loyal to the Pope, and adepts of
religious “sects.”
Leaders endlessly repeat, to the Chinese as well as to foreigners, that China is
the Communist Party, and vice versa. What do we know of party
membership in China? Very little, given the absence of elections and of
credible polls. The standard line in the West is that the party’s
popularity depends on the economic progress for which it is responsible.
That is true enough. But my own hypothesis, based on my research, is
that the Chinese are just as grateful to the party for bringing civil
peace; they appreciate this new tranquility.
What might replace the Communist Party? Almost all Chinese remain
speechless before this question, since no political alternative is
available, apart from a few intellectual and religious circles, often in
exile. But most Chinese—and this again is a personal hypothesis—dislike
the Party, ridicule its leaders, and grumble against the corruption
that rules the nomenklatura from top to bottom.
Can Communism in Chinese colors endure? Of all possible futures, the
status quo strikes me as the most probable. The main factor of
instability is the current president: Xi has broken the rule, imposed by
Deng, of stepping down after ruling ten years. Xi is not leaving but
organizing a personality cult and inventing from scratch a bellicose
nationalism foreign to Chinese civilization. This kind of talk could
lead to factional struggles inside the party, or even to international
conflicts. In this case Xi, instead of fulfilling his ambition of
creating a third Communist Party, could be sounding the death knell of
Chinese Communism. As we have seen in the USSR and in Cuba, Communism
always dies from the inside.
Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor and French public intellectual, is the author of many books, including Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century and The Genius of India.
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