China’s CCP needs a new Deng Xiaoping

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is marking the hundredth anniversary of its founding. At its birth or during the chaotic decades that followed, few would have predicted that the CCP would one day preside over a global economic, and increasingly military and technological, powerhouse.

It can claim credit to having made China such a power and for having pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty. The reason for this success was the CCP’s willingness, post-Mao, to fundamentally change its economic ideology. From a State-run communist economy, it morphed into a State-directed capitalist machine. This shift has enabled rapid economic growth at home even as State-owned enterprises have made major inroads into economies in distant countries. Under the CCP, China has not hesitated to dream or achieve big, whether it is with regard to its Belt and Road Initiative or its ambitious forays into space.

All of this has, however, come at great cost to the Chinese people. For politically, the CCP has been a dinosaur, unwilling to evolve with the times. The CCP has over the decades maintained its grip over power through a vast and intimidating organisation and at the cost of the individual liberties and rights of the people. It has arrogated to itself the position of China’s sole ruling party, and its leadership controls the government and all organs and instruments of State.

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It is the sole dispenser of power and privilege, and of justice, too. No ideas or thoughts other than those of the party are allowed to exist or be expressed. In this lie its failure and the seeds of its perennial insecurity. No wonder that in the run up to the centenary, China’s cyber chief removed two million Chinese social media posts that challenged the official version of the party’s history.

The CCP today aspires to project China as the next global Superpower and role model for political systems around the world. That was indeed the thrust of the party’s publicity in the run up to Xi Jinping’s centenary speech. But China cannot be a role model, precisely because of the CCP.

Its model can appeal to a few authoritarian regimes and leaders in other countries, it cannot appeal to the peoples of the world. The idea that one man who controls the party, the government and the military, and a small clique of men surrounding him, none of whom have been elected by the people, should be able to determine the daily lives and destinies of 1.4 billion people is so out of place in the 21st Century. The CCP needs a new Deng Xiaoping who believes that being rich is glorious for the nation, but even more glorious is the freedom and fulfilment of individuals.