[Columns of tanks and intercontinental ballistic missiles will rumble through the streets, and fighter jets and 70,000 doves will adorn the skies. Soldiers will cover exactly one meter with every two goose-steps. More than 300,000 civilians will accompany the floats in the parade.]
By Anna Fifield
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People
at a 70th anniversary exhibition take pictures in front of portraits of Chinese
leaders, including,
from left, Mao Zedong, the first head of the communist Chinese
state and longtime
party chairman, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and
President Xi
Jinping. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images)
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BEIJING
— The Soviet Union
disintegrated, Xi Jinping said when he became the leader of the Chinese
Communist Party seven years ago, because its leaders changed their ideals and
beliefs too quickly and too radically.
“It’s a profound lesson for us!” he said in a
speech to cadres in December 2012.
And one that Xi has assiduously put into
action as China moves toward a milestone on Tuesday — a huge military parade
and other events to mark seven decades since the Chinese Communist Party
established the People’s Republic of China.
He learned from the Soviets not to denounce
the party’s founding father, and not to try any kind of political opening.
The Chinese Communist Party will reach a
moment the U.S.S.R. did not: 70 years in power — one more than the Soviet Union
lasted.
“They have now surpassed the Soviet Union,
and that really matters to these guys,” said Randal Phillips, a former CIA station
chief in Beijing. “They have been paranoid ever since the Soviet Union fell, so
to endure for longer means a lot to them.”
The parade will be a manifestation of what Xi
sees as China’s proper status: a strong and proud country that is not beholden
to the capitalist West.
Columns of tanks and intercontinental
ballistic missiles will rumble through the streets, and fighter jets and 70,000
doves will adorn the skies. Soldiers will cover exactly one meter with every
two goose-steps. More than 300,000 civilians will accompany the floats in the
parade.
Xi has ushered the Communist Party to this
moment by becoming, as Richard McGregor, the author of a book on the party,
puts it: The “reddest leader of his generation.” Xi is a die-hard follower of
Mao Zedong, the Communist Party and the communist canon, and a “true believer”
in the party’s right to rule China, McGregor said.
When he became China’s top leader at the end
of 2012, many analysts and Western governments thought that Xi would be a
reformer like his father, Xi Zhongxun, who was a peer of Mao’s.
Instead, Xi has proved himself to be much
more a disciple of Mao — and therefore of Mao’s inspiration, Stalin — than a
follower of his father’s approach. And he has made the perpetuation of
Communist Party leadership his top priority.
He constantly espouses the importance of
“loyalty to the center” — the leaders in Beijing — and “staying true to the
original aspiration of the party.”
“Xi Jinping has reinvigorated ideology to an
extent we have not seen since the Cultural Revolution,” John Garnaut, an
Australian analyst of China, said in a speech to Australian officials. “In Xi’s
view . . .
the cost of straying too far from the Maoist and Stalinist path is dynastic
decay and eventually collapse.”
In recent weeks, Xi has been very obviously
trying to walk in Mao’s footsteps, carrying out guidance tours on farms and in
factories in interior provinces. At every turn, he has been talking of the need
to continue the “struggle.”
In a bombastic speech at a Communist Party
school recently, Xi impressed that message on the young officials. China’s
great rejuvenation could not be achieved without a “great struggle” to achieve
a “great dream,” Xi said, calling on the cadres to use their “combat spirit” to
tackle the many challenges facing the country.
[Paramount and paranoid: China’s Xi faces a crisis of confidence]
China is richer and stronger than ever
before. Its gross domestic product per capita has risen from about $200 at the
republic’s founding in 1949 to more than $10,000 per head now. The party likes
to say that it has lifted 750 million
people out of poverty. China now accounts for one-third of global sales of
luxury goods.
Xi has channeled resources into modernizing
the military, including building China’s first aircraft carrier, and the space
program. After landing a lunar rover on the dark side of the Moon this year,
China hopes to send a probe to Mars next year.
He has also launched an expansionist and
aggressive foreign policy centered on his $1 trillion “Belt and Road” infrastructure
initiative.
China is now the world’s second-largest
economy and could overtake the United States for top spot as soon as next year.
But its trajectory has been far from smooth —
massive famine, political chaos and the repression of the Cultural Revolution.
The Xi family experienced this firsthand.
Xi’s father was purged, and Xi was sent to the countryside, forced to dig
trenches and wear a metal dunce cap. But he has said that rather than turning
him against Mao, the experience was formative for him as a Communist Party
cadre.
Mao was “70 percent right, 30 percent wrong” in the way he led, Xi has
said.
A second period in the republic’s history
came with the “reform and opening” era led by Deng Xiaoping, which sparked
China’s astonishing economic transformation. But it also involved the crackdown
on pro-democracy demonstrators who massed in Tiananmen Square and around the
country in 1989, resulting in hundreds and perhaps thousands of deaths.
“This anniversary is the first chance that Xi
has had to really explicitly tie himself to the legacy of the Chinese Communist
Party’s foundation of the People’s Republic,” said Rana Mitter, professor of
Chinese history at the University of Oxford.
To achieve this vision of a strong and
confident China, Xi has elevated himself to the same political level as Mao and
Deng, adding his name into the constitution and removing presidential term
limits so he can theoretically serve indefinitely — undoing an initiative
designed by Deng to ensure that China did not return to the kind of personality
cult of the Mao era.
To stamp out dissent, the party has cracked
down on lawyers, human rights activists and other members of civil society. It
has overseen a sweeping campaign to forcibly assimilate ethnic minorities,
detaining about 1 million
Uighurs in re-education camps in Xinjiang. Xi has steered an anti-corruption
campaign so extensive that it has led to the arrest of more than 1.5 million
people.
“The history of the People’s Republic of
China is one of aspiration, destruction, ambition, confidence and anxiety,”
said Klaus Mühlhahn, professor of Chinese history at the Free University of
Berlin.
“I think a lot of Chinese policy is driven by
fear,” he said. “This fear of losing power, of a development similar to what
happened in the Soviet Union, shapes much of the policy and thinking.”
That anxiety and fear is only increasing as
the party faces new and significant challenges.
For starters, Xi is locked in a protracted
trade war with the United States that coincides with the most rapid cooling in
economic growth in a generation. Premier Li Keqiang recently said it would be
difficult for China, which enjoyed double-digit growth just over a decade ago,
to maintain 6 percent
growth.
But Tao Wenzhao, a political analyst at the
state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that the trade war
would not influence the celebration.
“If there was no trade war, we would still be
celebrating,” he said. “Competition has become the new normal. We see it in
every area.”
Another problem: Hong Kong. The protests
there against the mainland’s efforts to exert control over the former British
colony are set to come to a head on Tuesday, with a huge counter-rally planned
to coincide with the parade.
As the anniversary nears, the party is doing
its best to make sure the 1.4 billion
people of China feel proud and remain loyal.
“Over the past 70 years, China’s success
boils down to the Communist Party’s leadership,” it said in a 49-page white
paper published Friday hailing the achievements of the past seven decades, and
particularly of the past seven years, since Xi took the reins.
“The Chinese nation has risen and become
prosperous, and is becoming strong, closer to the goal of national rejuvenation
than ever before,” it said. “China’s development path will look on brighter and
brighter prospects as time moves on.”
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