Like all dictatorships, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership presents itself as strong, secure, popular, in total control — and entitled to rule. Yet beneath this image (one that all too many foreigners often fall for), there’s a paranoia that the protective façade might collapse and leave the CCP exposed.
As a result, the CCP is obsessed with control and power.
Let me explain:
Raising millions out poverty
The Chinese communists (and many Western “China Hands,” as some of those experts like to be called) crow about the party having raised hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. And thus the Chinese Communist Party is to thank for the PRC going from the impoverished hell-hole of Mao’s era to something better these days.
Post-Mao, China of course had nowhere to go but up.
This didn’t require any brilliance by China’s communist leaders. All the CCP had to do was stop starving and killing the Chinese citizenry. Once that happened, Chinese people’s traditional industriousness kicked in.
However, at least 600 million Chinese are still living on about $5 a day — and that’s what the CCP admits to, so the number is probably higher. Regardless, this number would be much smaller if China hadn’t had the misfortune to fall to the Chinese Communists in 1949.
Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea were also flat on their backs after World War Two, but created far more prosperous societies than the Chinese communists did.
Indeed, there would also be many more Chinese alive today if it were not for the CCP. The “Great Leap Forward” killed 45 million people — in peacetime and good weather. Add in another million or two during the Cultural Revolution. And don’t forget the one-child policy and its forced sterilizations and millions of forced abortions.
A lot of help from outside
The CCP’s performance is even less impressive considering how much outside help it had. A lot of that help came from the country it despises most: The United States.
President Nixon’s outreach, followed by Jimmy Carter’s recognition of Beijing, while throwing Taiwan under the bus and China assuming Taiwan’s seat in the United Nations, eventually led to China joining the World Trade Organization and securing most-favored-nation trading privileges.
This created tremendous opportunity for growth in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And Wall Street and U.S. business went all-in on China, pouring in money, technology, and know-how — and they still are.
America let its guard down.
The idea was that as China got wealthier and a middle class appeared, it would liberalize.
That didn’t happen, which was no surprise to anyone who understood communist dictatorships.
Also worth considering is that at least some of those investors may have been attracted to the PRC precisely because it is a dictatorship, with little consideration for human/worker rights and with ‘flexible’ environmental regulations. A population that exercised its rights wasn’t really in anyone’s interest — neither the communists nor the investors.
But more to the point: The Chinese Communist Party had little to do with China becoming wealthier. Rather, the Chinese people’s traditional tendencies for studious hard work, entrepreneurship and thrift really were the foundation for a rising middle class during the last few decades.
The Chinese people who rose out of poverty did so because of their own hard work. The new wealthy and middle class thrived because of capitalism — NOT due to being card-carrying members of the CCP loyally attending party meetings and reciting Mao’s little red book by heart.
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