China's birthday party
September 29th 2009 23:13
The art of propaganda. Translation: 'Make art and propaganda one integrated part of the revolutionary mechanism. Use it as a powerful weapon to organise people, educate people, strike the enemy and eliminate the enemy!'
It is 60 years tomorrow since the party was formed, and if it has been in power ever since, it is largely because it has tended to delete rather than debate opposing ideas.
There are, of course, many positives. When Mao Tse Tung proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, he began a transformation from a poor, strife-torn country, control of which was being raffled by international powers, to an economic juggernaut. Along the way, the population grew from 368 million to 1.4 billion.
Along the way, also, Mao and his party rewrote the style guide to totalitarianism. Say one thing, do another, and don't let anyone else have a say unless they agree with you, in which case they should sing your praises loudly.
Along the way, also, we had seemingly endless five-year plans; we had a Great Leap Forward which was a great leap backwards; we had a Cultural Revolution which was a brutal leap backwards; we saw in 1971 little, inoffensive Taiwan evicted from the UN in favour of big, offensive China, a nasty act of political pragmatism which was cemented a year later by a meeting of non-minds when Richard Nixon stepped into Beijing; and we saw time called on the world's most vibrant harbour city, which Britain had quietly borrowed for 156 years.
The celebrations this week in China will be long and vigorous and stage-managed. No-one will quite believe the speeches and their long lists of Chinese Communist Party achievements. But they will smile and nod, and hope they are being seen doing so.
Happy birthday China, they'll say, and look like they mean it. Except in Tibet and Mongolia and Xinjiang and ...
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