CCP at 90: power and longevity

The elixir of the Chinese Communist Party is permanency of power. It has completed 90 years on July first, but it seems young because it has led China for 68 years. It is a unique case of longevity and success in the world, an example that hundreds of other communist parties were not able to follow, corroded or crushed by an eternal opposition from the vices of power. The CCP is still able to achieve its 2 main purposes: to stay in power and build a powerful and prosperous China.

The two objectives are mutually supporting each other and the consent has been given to material well-being and national revival. When a handful of subversives sanctioned the birth act in a secret meeting in the French Concession in Shanghai, there were 2 members of the Comintern, and some young revolutionaries, including Mao Ze Dong. No one imagined that 90 years later the party would rule the largest country in the world, started quickly on the road to wellbeing, feared or respected by the international community. Today, party members are about 80 million, attracted not so much by revolutionary ardour – however eccentric after the conquest of power – but out of respect, personal ambition and ideals.

Propaganda has recovered his breath in public celebrations. The Secretary Hu Jin Tao covers history and divides it into three periods. The first ends with the conquest of power in 1949. These were the years of heroic red bases and the Long March, the anti-Japanese resistance and civil war against the Nationalists fled to Taiwan. It celebrates liberation even before Revolution. The second is thirty years of consolidation. It is the Maoist period in alignment with Stalin’s Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s break with openness with the United States. The iron fist was needed to build the country; political policy took precedence over economic growth. Only after Mao’s death the economic revolution, inspired by Deng Xiaoping, was born and grew. Today’s China has developed so much that is has never seen this throughout its economic history. This explanatory synthesis should not hide censorships, sometimes violent, that have accompanied it. The three periods were marked by division struggles, purges, and arrests. In the political fanaticism years, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the country has experienced tensions that have touched on social tragedies and civil war. The party has changed positions several times, but has never changed the name. They rehabilitated the purge victims because their talents were needed to build the country. Today, continuity is proclaimed because it offers security to the citizens and the legitimacy to govern as if it were perpetual. Having confidence in the party becomes a sign of fate, a natural evolution. For this reason it is considered unnecessary to establish other parties. The PCC collects all realities, represents all social categories and sums up all tensions. This approach has worked, but is now subject to open and insidious challenges. A modern society cannot be content with official stories, young people have other means of knowledge, the excluded from wellbeing are aware of their marginalization. Economic growth cannot be the medicine for every illness. Corruption and injustice are always insatiable. Once again, the CCP is facing the need to combine growth and stability. It is an ambitious goal because the margins for manoeuvre are more limited and China cannot afford mistakes. For a party that still defines itself as communist, it would be unforgivable to have set in motion a mechanism that cannot be controlled.