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The Chinese Communist Revolution: Who Was It For? By Thubten Samphel

Phayul[Wednesday, July 18, 2012 11:24]

By Thubten Samphel, Tibet Policy Institute

For much of the past three decades China was viewed by the world as the engine that drove global prosperity.

Communist China was credited with lifting the greatest number of people out of poverty in the shortest

possible time in all of human history. The world was mesmerised by Chinas stunning economic performance.

Meanwhile, in 2006 China laid a railway line to Lhasa, the highest in the world. The Olympic Games held in

Beijing in 2008 brought all these economic and technological achievements to a dazzling climax. Chinas place

in the world was firmly established and was well deserved.

However, the recent downfall of Bo Xilai, the party chief of Chongqing, the sprawling metropolis in Chinasmost populous province, Sichuan, from the pinnacle of power and the brave dash of the blind human rights

activist, Chen Guancheng, to the American embassy in Beijing exposed the dark side of Chinas economic

growth. Chinas economic growth comes at huge human cost and is based on pervasive corruption.

Even in the days when China dazzled the world, there were China scholars who wrote about the connection

between the countrys economic growth and the corruption it spawned. The connection between the two

became even stronger when in 1992 during his famous southern tour Deng Xiaoping, to prevent the Chinese

Communist Partys possible fall from grace and power, urged the Chinese people to go into the business even

more boldly and even faster. Thats a fine sentiment and no one can disagree. But what was left unsaid was

how the Chinese people could become rich and within what rules? To spell out these details would be to

dismantle the one-party state. In order to save the Chinese Communist Party, Chinas paramount leader threw

the Chinese people to the vultures of a predatory state.

Today the Chinese people are suffering from the decision Deng made of sacrificing China for the sake of the

Party. Since then, the Party treated the Chinese state as an economic pie to be divided among its different

interest groups. Two broad interest groups emerged. The Party and business elites, working in collusion,

started plundering the wealth of the state.

Heres how the Party does it, as told by Bao Tong, an aide to the late Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang, to Ian

Johnson in an interview published this month in the New York Review of Books. If I were in the current

system, said Bao Tong, Id be corrupt too If youre in that system, theyll say, oh, your son should be a CEO.

If you say, no, he shouldnt, then they say, how can he not? If your son cant be one then ours cant be one

either. Then theyd push you out of the boat.

One ofthe most detailed examination of the link between corruption and economic growth in the Peoples

Republic of China was done by He Qinglian in her book, Chinas Pitfall published as far back as 1998. It is a

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credit to the Chinese leaders that this book was allowed to be published in China at all. Within two weeks of

publication, the Chinese public snatched all 100,000 copies. Later, 330,000 pirated copies came out.

In her book, He Qinglian says that Chinas economic dynamism is based on a process in which power-holders

and their hangers-on plundered public wealth. The primary target of their plunder was state property that had

been accumulated from forty years of the peoples sweat, and their primary means of plunder was political

power.

In a lengthy review of He Qinglians book for the New York Review of Books, Chinese writer Liu Binyan, and

Perry Link wrote, The fiftieth year of the Peoples Republic, for example, will lead to comparison between the

Communists and the Nationalists whom they displaced. The corruption of the Nationalists was ugly in the late

1940s, but many say it is far worse now. Problems of inequality, vice, and crime, which the revolution swept

away in the 1950s, have returned. A popular saying goes:

For forty-some years, ever more perspiration,

And we just circle back to before Liberation;

And speaking again of that big revolution,

Who, after all, was it for?

This saying encapsulates Chinas entire history and the cyclic nature of that history. Droughts, floods and

corruption lead to massive peasant rebellions that in turn lead to the creation of a new dynasty, which ushers

in unification, peace and prosperity. Then inertia sets in and the ruling elite degenerates into so many corrupt

regimes of the past. The cycle of rebellion, renewal and disintegration starts afresh. Who is to say that the

Chinese Communist Party can escape this cycle without reforms of renewal and restoration of faith?

But to answer the question, who, after all, was the revolution for? This question was answered by the two

reviewers quoting another popular Chinese saying. This saying is called A Short History of Comradely

Sentiment. It runs:

In the 50s we helped people.

In the 60s we criticized people.

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In the 70s we deceived people.

In the 80s everybody hired everybody else.

In the 90s we slaughter whoever we see.

The two reviewers explain. The word slaughter (zai), which corresponds in both sense and tone to rip off in

American English, is now widely used. Few people in the outside world appreciate how pervasive the attitude

and practice of zai have become in China. Probably in no other society today has economic good faith been

compromised to the extent it has in China.

The writer is the Executive Director of Tibet Policy Institute of Central Tibetan Administration.

(The views expressed here are that of the author and shall not be regarded as views and policies of Central

Tibetan Administration.)

The views expressed in this piece are that of the author and the publication of the piece on this website does

not necessarily reflect their endorsement by the website.