Chinese Communist Party and its government led by Xi Jinping are at the height of glory – and shame too — as the nation celebrated 100 years of existence and growth of the ruling party. Growth continues to be the ‘mantra’ for China as the red leadership is taking the nation forward in a highly organised manner. Its ill effects are also situations like the Covid19 pandemic that devastated the world. Yet, at a time when Communists elsewhere and around the world are a laughing stock and seen as an anachronism, China scripts a different story. Through successive leaderships since the time of founder Mao Zedong, China has been reinventing itself and changing course even by making compromises with the ideology itself as in the adoption of a market economy as the main prop to economic growth. Elsewhere, dungeon heads who swore by ideology, failed to effect course corrections and ended up as failures. Even the erstwhile Soviet Union, to which Communists across the globe looked for inspiration, disintegrated like a pack of cards.
China emerged as the world’s second most-powerful economic and military super power by wedding salient points of Capitalism to its Communist ethos since the late 1980s – a lesson that Socialist India learned from it a decade later in a small way through steps like economic liberalization. Since 2012, President Xi Jinping is powering the growth of China – and in questionable ways too as was the case with his predecessors. His assertiveness is reflected also in the way he got the party to do away with the two-term limit for president.
Marking the present occasion, Xi’s address from the balcony of the Tiananmen Square was noted for its major affirmations – that China can no more be bullied by external forces; that it does not aim to do so to other nations in future too as part of a long-held state policy; and that it is “determined” to reunite breakaway Taiwan into its fold. Yet, in reality, China is bent on emerging as a hegemon as Xi’s actions showed along the Line of Actual Control and also Doklam and in the South China Sea. It is targeting the main shipping route in the Indian Ocean as well for control. China is suppressing human rights in Hong Kong, from the time it regained control of the former British colony from the UK in 1997. China is also suppressing religious freedom. Its brutality was most evident in actions like the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Yet, China holds its head high by virtue of its ‘mantra’ of growth.
