100 glorious years of Communist Party of China| By M Ziauddin
ON 01 July, this year, the Communist Party of China (CPC) attains the ripe age of 100. A matter of great pride for the Chinese people.
More so, because the CPC has lifted the country from the very bottom of the barrel to almost its very top causing sleepless nights to the US, the self-perceived leader of what it believes to be still a unipolar world.
According to Global Times (March 23, 2021) Chinese President Xi Jinping who earned the top most position in China’s executive hierarchy in 2012 and who is also the general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, will deliver a speech at the grand ceremony and award the “July 1 Medal” to outstanding Party members who made extraordinary contributions to the Party.
Other outstanding Party members, Party affairs workers, community-level Party organizations and senior Party members who have been members for 50 years will also be awarded.
Dialogue and exchanges with political parties around the world will be conducted to exchange experience in governance. It will also focus on grass-roots Party activities and promote “red” tourism.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army will also hold activities to mark the anniversary, which will focus on keeping the red line of the Party’s absolute leadership over the army, always be a heroic and trusted by the Party and the people.
By December 2019, there were 4.681 million community-level Party organizations nationwide, with 91.914 million Party members.
The so- called free world media led by its political leadership is, out of pique probably,projecting these achievements of the Chinese people as some kind of negative global developments, threatening the so-called rule based international order.
While, they call CPC as one party dictatorship without bringing out its grass root plurality and projecting it as a party of the people, for the people and, by the peoplewhich it actually is, they intentionally ignore the glaring fact that compared to it the political parties of the free-world are for the rich, of the rich and by the rich as they have already been taken over by the big business long ago.
One has only to recall the way the media of the so-called free-world was pathetically led by its nose to create the falsehood of the Iraq’s non-existence WMDs just to provide the US the justification to invade the hapless country.
The propaganda mounted by the media of the free-worldagainst the Soviet Union was too slanted to be judged as non-partisan and ethical.
They are now repeating itagainst today’s Russia and Iran. It is, therefore, never a good policy to try to look at China, its leadership and its role as a member of international community through the lens of the US and European media.
Here are some of the glimpses of distortions indulged in by this media (Quotes from ‘Xi’s Gamble’-The Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster, by Jude Blanchette, July/August 2021 edition of Foreign Affairs):
“Xi’s agenda was the need to assert China’s interests on the global stage. Xi quickly began land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea, established an air defense identification zone over disputed territory in the East China Sea, helped launch the New Development Bank (sometimes called the BRICS Bank), unveiled the massive international infrastructure project that came to be known as the Belt and Road Initiative, and proposed the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
“Xi continued to slash his way through the status quo for the remainder of his first term and shows no signs of abating as he approaches the end of his second.
His consolidation of power continues uninterrupted: he faces no genuine political rivals, has removed term limits on his tenure in office, and has installed allies and loyalists in key positions.
New research centers are dedicated to studying his writings and speeches, party officials publicly extol his wisdom and virtue, and party regulations and government planning documents increasingly claim to be based on “Xi Jinping Thought.”
He has asserted the CCP’s dominance over vast swaths of Chinese society and economic life, even forcing influential business and technology titans to beg forgiveness for their insufficient loyalty to the party.
Meanwhile, he continues to expand China’s international sphere of influence through the exercise of hard power, economic coercion, and deep integration into international and multilateral bodies.
“In Xinjiang, fears of separatism have been used to justify turning the entire region into a dystopian high-tech prison (It is a purely judgmental call without putting the actual issue in its proper context).
And in Hong Kong, Xi has established a “national security” bureaucracy that can ignore local laws and operate in total secrecy as it weeds out perceived threats to Beijing’s iron-fisted rule (Here too the provocations being caused by the agents of the free-world are being ignored).
In both places, Xi has demonstrated that he is willing to accept international opprobrium when he feels that the party’s core interests are at stake.”
Now this media is threatening the world with imminent war that China is expected to launch in 2027 to reclaim Taiwan.
In order to show Xi in a bad light as compared to China’s past leadership the relevant policies of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping are being recalled by the free-world media.
The two did “demonstrate strategic patience in asserting China’s interests on the global stage, therefore Mao told U.S.
President Richard Nixon that China could wait 100 years to reclaim Taiwan, and Deng negotiated the return of Hong Kong under the promise (since broken by the free-world) of a 50-year period of local autonomy”.
“Both leaders had a profound sense of China’s relative fragility and the importance of careful, nuanced statesmanship.
Xi does not share their equanimity, or their confidence in long-term solutions”, therefore, he should be seen (internationally) as a reckless leader.
Deliberately, the US media has pitted China in competition against the US, in a race to determine the leader of what is going to be a multipolar world, ultimately.
And the free-world media believes that if the United States and its allies invest in innovation and human capital, they can forestall Xi’s efforts to gain first-mover advantage in emerging and critical technologies.
Likewise, a more active and forward-looking US role in shaping the global order, the free-world media further believes, would limit Beijing’s ability to spread illiberal ideas beyond China’s borders.
— The writer is veteran journalist and a former editor based in Islamabad.
