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Op-ed: Chinese Communist Party at age 100 confronts growing contradictions
It must be said this bluntly: the Chinese Communist Party, which turns 100 this week, represents history’s most successful authoritarians.To get more news about CCP's 100th anniversary 2021, you can visit shine news official website.
So, why does President Xi seem so uneasy?
It is a time when no obvious challenges are emerging to his authority, and China has never enjoyed such international reach, economic strength or military might. Yet in a marked departure from his predecessors, Xi has been in a rush to tighten the screws on dissent, to expand technological surveillance of his people, to assert new controls over private business, and to vastly strengthen his party’s prerogatives and power.
It is this contradiction between China’s head-spinning authoritarian accomplishments and President Xi’s head-scratching nervousness about the future that is most worth watching as the systemic contest of our times unfolds.
Arrayed across from each other in these global sweepstakes for the future are the ruthless, technology-empowered efficiency of autocratic capitalism and the enduring (though dangerously challenged) attractions of democratic capitalism with its magnetic charms of individual rights and freedoms.
It is the question of our times whether these two systems, as represented by China and the United States, can agree to a set of terms that allows them to peacefully compete and sometimes even cooperate. Even if they do, one system or the other will emerge ascendant as the dominant rules-setter for an evolving global order. One or the other is also likely to emerge as the more successful provider for citizens’ needs.
While the fragility of democratic societies has been on full display in recent years, most dramatically on January 6 during the riot and violent attack on the U.S. Congress, it may be the less transparent challenges to President Xi’s ambitions that are more decisive.No other dictatorship,” it writes, “has been able to transform itself from a famine-racked disaster, as China was under Mao Zedong, into the world’s second-largest economy, whose cutting-edge technology and infrastructure put America’s creaking roads and railways to shame.”
At the same time under President Xi, adds the Economist: “The bureaucracy, army and police have undergone purges of deviant and corrupt officials. Big business is being brought into line. Mr. Xi has rebuilt the party at the grassroots, creating a network of neighbourhood spies and injecting cadres into private firms to watch over them. Not since Mao’s day has society been so tightly controlled.”As Jude Blanchette writes in Foreign Affairs: “His belief that the CCP must guide the economy and that Beijing should rein in the private sector will constrain the country’s future economic growth. His demand that party cadres adhere to ideological orthodoxy and demonstrate personal loyalty to him will undermine the governance system’s flexibility and competency. His emphasis on an expansive definition of national security will steer the country in a more inward and paranoid direction. His unleashing of ‘Wolf Warrior’ nationalism will produce a more aggressive and isolated China.”
Yet recent history also shows that the CCP has demonstrated a ruthless resilience, brutal efficiency and ideological dexterity that has confounded its critics time-and-again and has allowed it to navigate Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976 with its estimated death toll of up to 20 million, the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, the Covid-19 crisis of 2020 that China spawned and then slayed, and so much more.
Not long after he came to power, President Xi abandoned the studied patience of his immediate predecessors who had acted in the spirit of Deng Xiaoping in “biding their time and hiding their power” in their approach to world affairs. As they did so, the Communist party’s power over society also waned.
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сегодня 24 ноября 2024 г. 02:31
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