China has broadly celebrated the 90th anniversary of its Communist Party. The party has been in power for over 60 years and it has achieved a lot over this period. The country has put an end to its position of a semi-colony, brought at least 400 million of its people out of desperate poverty and has become the world’s second biggest economy and a leading player in international politics.
Beijing has offered the world a model of efficient development that is an alternative to the Western one. Western critics are actively lashing China out for lack of democracy, apparently, understanding that the Communist Party’s monopoly for power has been about the most important factor in the country’s recovery and fast development.
Once, in a private conversation about China’s current problems, an influential journalist from Beijing told me that over the course of the last 5,000 years almost all ruling dynasties in China had been overthrown by peasant rebellions, hinting that if the party wanted to stay in power, it had to ensure social stability.
For China, devastated after the civil war and Japanese occupation, harassed with economic experiments of the Great Leap and the ten-year rampage of the “cultural revolution”, the most important goal was to simply feed its people: almost one third of the population was starving. The Chinese economic reforms began in the agricultural sector. Going over from the agricultural commune to the family contract and long-term land lease has resolved the problem. At the moment, the country’s population totals 1.3 billion people, and 97% of them have “full stomachs,” Newsweek writes.
Another problem was employment. The Chinese began with the so-called local industries: the light industry, production of mass consumption goods, i.e. everything that uses local resources. It did not only saturate the empty consumer market. It also created jobs that absorbed the country’s excessive workforce. And it generated income. This way, the Chinese ended poverty. At present, the IMF estimates China’s average per capital income at $6,000 a year. Actually, all of the world’s achievements in fighting poverty in the post-war period have been made possible by China.
Finally, confidence and stability require a feeling that everything moves in the right direction, that life is getting better, the future is bright and there are prospects in it. The prospect is provided by the 10% annual economic growth China has been witnessing for the last 30 years. It would have been impossible to achieve this result without technology and capital. The country didn’t have it, so it borrowed it abroad. At first, it engaged Chinese immigrants, whom the country has never pushed off and never declared cast-offs. Then followed bigger players from the United States, Japan and Europe.
The most famous quote of Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping goes, “It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” It can be interpreted as an explanation of the departure from orthodox dogmas in the economy that was addressed to the domestic audience and sought to calm the minds after decades of leftist experiments. I, however, suspect that the the slogan targeted foreign investors, who were told: the red cat would catch mice as well as any other. Investment attractiveness is measured by profit. Long-term profit can be guaranteed either by occupation or by social and political stability. The latter was offered to investors by the Communist Party of China, which has no alternative.
According to some estimates, total foreign investment in China has exceeded $500 billion. Besides, there has been an influx of technology and experience of managing modern production facilities. As a result, China became the world’s No.2 country for the size of its GDP, leaving Japan behind in 2010, and No.1 in world trade, pushing aside Germany. For ordinary Chinese, a bicycle as the sign of its owner being a good catch has been replaced with a car.
The economic reform required adjusting the ideology, and not only in order to explain how the socialist planned economy could be combined with competition and the market. Scientific socialism admits turnover of goods, i.e. the market, and competition is a usual thing in an overpopulated country. However, it was necessary to reconcile the country with its complicated past and to get rid of the inequality implied by the key dogma about the proletarian dictatorship.
So about the first thing the Communist Party did was to quickly give a clear assessment to the Mao Zedong period: 70% was right and 30% was mistakes. This way, China managed to avoid tarnishing its own history, which could demoralize society, and at the same time give up the dogmatism and extremities of the previous period.
Another point is that the socialism is being built with Chinese specifics. This in advance rebuffed all accusations of departure from the classics of Marxism and simultaneously mobilized feelings of patriotism, which in China have always been fairly strong.
An important innovation was the thesis of three representations offered by Chinese president Jiang Zemin. He said, “Our party should constantly represent the requirements for developing China’s advanced productive forces, represent the progressive movement of China’s culture and represent the intrinsic interests of the broadest strata of Chinese people.” In other words, the ruling party does not distinguish between party members and non-partisan citizens, representatives of all economic orders – state-owned and private – and all classes of the Chinese society. Businessmen are now joining the Communist Party in great numbers, but business ventures among party officials is not encouraged, to put it mildly. It’s seen as corruption.
The next move was to declare the goal of harmonization, which was done by China’s incumbent leader Hu Jintao. Over the years of reform, China has accumulated a lot of disproportions. They are obvious in the economic development of littoral and western regions of the country; the gap between the newly rich and long-time poor is increasing dangerously, environmental problems are multiplying and threaten to overpower the joys of prosperity.
In order to prevent these distortions from increasing the conflict potential as the economic development progresses fast, China is getting harmonized: energy- and resource-saving technology receives special support from the government, the economic policy is focused on leveling the living standards in different regions. Finally, at its latest congress, the Communist Party set the goal of creating a “medium prosperity society” by 2020, boosting GDP fourfold compared to 2000. This tangible prospect is supposed to correct Deng Xiaoping’s other statement made at the initial stage of the reform: “Someone has to get rich first.” In fact, China is building a society dominated by the middle class, which has always served as a stabilizing factor.
All this doesn’t mean that the Communist Party has only excellent grades in the recent history’s report card. One thing is clear, though: the party has learned the lessons of the Soviet Union and other former socialist countries. It is not afraid of new challenges and is positive that it is pursing the correct policy. There is some food for thought in this.
The economic crisis of 2008-2010 put a lot into perspective. Analyzing the consequences of the crisis, Francis Fukuyama, a guru of global political analysis, wrote, “The American version of capitalism, if not completely lost its reputation, is at least no longer dominating.” And, he continues, “governments of both the developing and developed worlds admired China’s remarkable ability to recover from the crisis, which was based on the rigidly controlled mechanism of decision-making built from top downwards. It allows avoiding delays typical for the complicated democratic process. As a result, political leaders of the developing world now tie the efficiency and possibilities to autocratic political systems.” This is the result the Communist Party of China has achieved by its anniversary. This is why there is no alternative to it.