Tag: Communist

China’s Communist Celebration Turns 100. Cue the (State-Authorized) Music.

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Post date July 2, 2021

Yan Shengmin, a Chinese tenor, is known for bouncy renditions of Broadway tunes and soulful performances in operas like “Carmen.”

But lately, Mr. Yan has been focusing on a different genre. He is a star of “Red Boat,” a patriotic opera written to celebrate the 100th anniversary this week of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Yan has embraced the role, immersing himself in party history and binge-watching television shows about revolutionary heroes to prepare.

“I feel a lot of pressure,” Mr. Yan said in an interview between rehearsals. “The 100th anniversary is a big occasion.”

A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China as the Communist Party works to ensure its centennial is met with pomp and fanfare.

Prominent choreographers are staging ballets about revolutionary martyrs. Theaters are reviving nationalistic plays about class struggle. Hip-hop artists are writing songs about the party’s achievements. Orchestras are performing works honoring communist milestones like the Long March, with chorus members dressed in light-blue military uniforms.

The celebrations are part of efforts by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, to make the party omnipresent in people’s lives and to strengthen political loyalty among artists.

Mr. Xi, who has presided over a broad crackdown on free expression in China since rising to power nearly a decade ago, has said artists should serve the cause of socialism rather than become “slaves” of the market.

In honor of the party’s centennial, Mr. Xi’s government has announced plans for performances of 300 operas, ballets, plays, musical compositions and other works. The list includes classics like “The White-Haired Girl,” a Mao-era opera about a young peasant woman whose family is persecuted by a cruel landlord. There are also new productions like “Red Boat,” which chronicles the party’s first congress in 1921 on a boat outside Shanghai.

The outpouring of artistic expression comes amid rising nationalism in China. Many artists have little choice but to comply with the government’s demands for more patriotic art, with officials in China’s top-down system wielding considerable influence over decisions about financing and programming.

“It has become very important for artists to follow the political line,” said Jindong Cai, director of the U.S.-China Music Institute at Bard College. “The government wants artists to focus on Chinese works that relate to people’s lives and positively reflect China’s image.”

Critics have denounced the so-called “red” works as propaganda. But Chinese artists say that is partly the point.

“China is very strong now and people should respect that,” said Warren Mok, a Chinese tenor who is embarking on a national tour to celebrate the centennial.

Mr. Mok said he hoped to use music to remind people about the party’s success in improving living standards in China. Still, he said it was important that patriotic works are balanced with Western music and other art forms.

“Anything you do should not be too extreme,” he said. “If you’re so insecure about your own culture, your own nationalism, you close your door. Isolation is not good for any country.”

Hundreds of performances related to the party’s centennial have already taken place, and scores more are expected by year’s end.

In Suzhou, a city west of Shanghai, the choreographer Wang Yabin recently staged “My Name is Ding Xiang,” a new ballet about a 22-year-old martyr who died during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In Nanjing, an eastern city, an orchestra recently performed “Liberation: 1949,” a symphony about the Communist revolution by the composer Zhao Jiping.

Some works deal with contemporary themes, including the party’s efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and its success in fighting the coronavirus, which Mr. Xi has held up as evidence of the superiority of China’s authoritarian model. A play called “People First” depicts the heroism of medical workers in Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019.

Propaganda art has a long history in China, and some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control, including the decade of bloody upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s known as the Cultural Revolution. During that time, classical music was attacked as decadent and bourgeois, and many Western composers and instruments were banned.

In modern China, music and dance from the Cultural Revolution still resonates with the public, including works such as the “Yellow River Piano Concerto” and “The Red Detachment of Women,” a revolutionary ballet.

“These cultural products have their own artistic value,” said Denise Ho, assistant professor of history at Yale University who studies 20th century history in China. “For many Chinese, there is a nostalgia for certain aspects of the Mao era.”

By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days. His government has redoubled efforts to fortify ideological loyalty among artists. This year, a government-backed industry association released a moral code for performing artists — dancers, musicians and acrobats included — calling on them to be faithful to the party and help advance the socialist cause.

China’s Tightening Grip

- Xi’s Warning: A century after the Communist Party’s founding, China’s leader says foreign powers would “crack their heads and spill blood” if they tried to stop its rise.
- Behind the Takeover of Hong Kong: One year ago, the city’s freedoms were curtailed with breathtaking speed. But the clampdown was years in the making, and many signals were missed.
- One Year Later in Hong Kong: Neighbors are urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. The Communist Party is remaking the city.
- Mapping Out China’s Post-Covid Path: Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is seeking to balance confidence and caution as his country strides ahead while other places continue to grapple with the pandemic.
- A Challenge to U.S. Global Leadership: As President Biden predicts a struggle between democracies and their opponents, Beijing is eager to champion the other side.
- ‘Red Tourism’ Flourishes: New and improved attractions dedicated to the Communist Party’s history, or a sanitized version of it, are drawing crowds ahead of the party’s centennial.

Mr. Xi, in a ceremony this week at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, handed out centennial medals to 29 party cadres, including Lan Tianye, an actor often described as a “red artist,” and Lu Qiming, a patriotic composer known for the piece “Ode to the Red Flag.”

“For Xi, as for Mao, art is first and foremost a political instrument,” Professor Ho said.

The Chinese government has tried to use music, dance, television and movies in recent years to improve its image, especially among young people, many of whom have no direct connection to the Communist revolution of 1949.

A rap song celebrating the centennial, titled “100 Percent,” has been widely shared on the Chinese internet in recent days. But the 15-minute track, featuring 100 artists, has been mocked for its wooden propaganda slogans.

“Our spaceships are flying in the sky,” says one lyric. “The new China must get lit.”

Performers say they hope the high caliber of the centennial productions, including elaborate costumes, sets and visual effects, will appeal to younger audiences.

Wang Jiajun, 36, a principal dancer at Shanghai Dance Theater who plays a martyr in a revival of the dance production “The Eternal Wave,” said young people could identify with the work.

“These heroes were only in their teens, 20s or 30s when they lost their lives,” Mr. Wang said. “The stories of young people will attract young people.”

For artists taking part in the centenary, the effort has at times been laborious.

Xie Menghao, a Chinese-born graduate student in music composition in Germany, spent six months repurposing a suite of Red Army songs into a piano concerto about the Long March, a 6,000-mile retreat of Communist forces that began in 1934 and established Mao’s pre-eminence. He said he was proud of the piece, which the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra premiered last month, but added that the experience was “more like a job.”

“I just did what they said,” he said in an interview. “Every composer just thinks about the music.”

Mr. Yan the tenor starring in “Red Boat,” said he has found it easy to connect with his character, Chen Duxiu, a founder of the party. But he said rehearsals have not always been easy. Younger performers, for instance, have needed help better understanding the emotional experience of being part of the early communist struggle, he said.

“They don’t have the ideas to fight or sacrifice for the nation’s destiny,” Mr. Yan, 56, said. “I can do it in one take.”

Mr. Yan said he was confident that the show would have success in China and perhaps beyond.

“We’re depicting history, not just lecturing how great the Communist Party is,” he said. “This isn’t a communist slogan-type performance. It’s plain storytelling.”

Javier C. Hernández reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Joy Dong from Hong Kong.

Tags Chinas, Communist, Cue, Music, Party, StateApproved, turns

World News

Dwell Updates: On Communist Celebration’s Centenary, Xi Jinping Warns In opposition to International Interference

Post author By
Post date July 1, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, struck a confident posture on Thursday as he hailed the Communist Party’s role in leading his country toward greater prosperity, while warning foreign aggressors against attempts to undermine Beijing’s rise.

“For one hundred years, the Communist Party of China has united and led the Chinese people, writing the most magnificent epic in the history of the Chinese nation for thousands of years,” Mr. Xi said.

The centenary comes as China faces mounting international criticism over the Communist Party’s crackdown in Hong Kong and on Muslim minorities in the far western region of Xinjiang. Mr. Xi struck a nationalistic note as he described the party’s resolve to protect its interests.

“The Chinese people have never bullied, oppressed, or enslaved the people of other countries. They have not in the past, not now, nor ever will in the future,” he said.

“At the same time, the Chinese people will never allow any foreign forces to bully, oppress, or enslave us,” he added. “Whoever deliberately wants to do this will surely face bloodshed at the Great Wall of steel built by the flesh and blood of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

The crowd of performers gathered on the square responded with loud cheers and thunderous applause.

Since becoming general secretary of the Communist Party in late 2012, Mr. Xi, 68, has made it increasingly clear that he sees himself as a transformative leader — in the footsteps of Mao and Deng — guiding China into a new era of global strength and rejuvenated one-party rule. And by many measures he is already the most powerful leader since Deng or even Mao, and presides over an economy and a military much stronger than in their times.

Few Chinese leaders from recent decades are more steeped in the Communist Party’s heritage than Mr. Xi.

He was born into a revolutionary family, endured the upheavals of Mao Zedong’s era, and began his career as a party official when Deng Xiaoping and other leaders opened up market reforms.

Before Mr. Xi came to power, many in China thought that he would be a milder figure, because his father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary veteran who in the early 1980s oversaw the beginnings of market reforms in Guangdong Province.

Xi Zhongxun had suffered decades of confinement and persecution after Mao turned against him, and his family was torn apart during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Like millions of other youths at that time, the younger Mr. Xi was sent to labor in the countryside, and he spent seven years in a dusty village in northwest China.

But after coming to power, he pursued scorching crackdowns against official corruption and domestic dissent, and applied harsh measures to bring areas like Xinjiang and Hong Kong firmly under Chinese control.

Mr. Xi appears driven by the conviction that for China to secure lasting stability and prosperity, the Communist Party must reassert its control, and he must remain in command of the party.

In 2018, he abolished the two-term limit on the Chinese presidency, opening the way to remain in office — as president, party leader and chairman of the Chinese military — for many years to come. His next big step in that journey will be next year, when a Communist Party congress appears likely to acclaim him for a third term as party leader.

Credit…Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

China’s Communist Party on Thursday is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding, an event at which it is expected to argue that the country can keep ascending only if the party remains firmly in power.

The centenary is symbolically important for Xi Jinping, China’s leader, who is almost certain to claim a third five-year term as party leader next year.

In a speech, he asserted that China would never have achieved its present-day prosperity and power without the party’s struggles against foreign oppression and domestic exploitation.

The celebrations made virtually no mention of China’s setbacks over the past decades of Communist Party rule — such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the deadly crackdown against protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Instead, the day’s stagecraft was focused on conveying an image of China as confident and secure while much of the world struggles to shake off the pandemic.

There was no military parade, unlike the enormous show of force that marked the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 2019. But it featured a military flyover at Tiananmen at the opening, together with a 100-gun salute.

Organizers assembled a carefully picked crowd at Tiananmen Square — of party members, workers, students and others — to listen to Mr. Xi’s speech.

Credit…Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock

BEIJING — China’s ruling Communist Party kicked off a tightly choreographed ceremony celebrating its 100th anniversary on Thursday with a 100-gun salute, as thousands of performers assembled on Tiananmen Square.

“For 100 years the Chinese Communist Party has led in the Chinese people in every struggle, every sacrifice, every innovation,” Mr. Xi said near the start of his speech from a deck on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “In sum, around one theme — achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

In a rousing opening, the performers chanted slogans celebrating the party’s leadership, as Mr. Xi Jinping and other leaders watched.

“Listen to the party, be grateful to the party, and follow the party,” they shouted. “Let the party rest assured, I’m with the strong country!”

The streams of Communist Party youth groups in color-coordinated uniforms had filed on to the square from all directions at the beginning of ceremony as dawn rose.

They mostly wore polo shirts in lime green, pale orange or bright red. Most wore black or white trousers, but some of the young women were in matching poodle skirts that would not have looked out of place in the 1950s. A military brass band in dress blues filed into the back of the Great Hall of the People.

Thursday’s festivities did not include a military parade like the one in 2019 that celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, but the military still provided a backdrop. Squadrons of helicopters flew over carrying red banners and forming the figure 100, followed by fighter jets, including the country’s most advanced fighter jet, the J-20.

A few police officers stood on sidewalks in the downtown area around the square, which was closed to traffic. But the security was mostly unobtrusive, with numerous surveillance cameras perched like overweight pigeons on almost every pole.

Coronavirus precautions were understated for an outdoor event drawing many thousands of people to Tiananmen Square. The folding yellow and orange chairs in the main area of the square were not quite socially distanced, but still separated: 15 inches in between each chair.

The seated crowd extended only about three-quarters of the distance from the Forbidden City’s entrance gate, with Mao’s portrait back to the monolith in the heart of the square. But for the Communist Party’s elite, red chairs were mounted on viewing stands at the front of the square..

A military brass band played and a youth choir sang as a military honor guard brandished the national flag. Youths and rows of attendees behind them waved small, red Communist Party flags in a careful choreography.

Rain was expected later in the day, but for now, the sun was shining and the temperature rising through the low 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Toni Li, a local professor who has been coming to July 1 anniversaries since she was a girl, said that the chair arrangement had reduced the density of the crowd from previous years. But since Beijing has not had any virus cases for months, she was unconcerned about any risk of infection at the gathering.

“I don’t worry about that; it’s safe here,” she said.

Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

As the Communist Party of China celebrates the country’s rise, its international reputation continues to plummet, according to a new survey.

Large majorities in countries in North America, Europe and Asia have unfavorable views of China, the survey, by the Pew Research Service, found. They included 88 percent in Japan, 80 percent in Sweden and 76 percent in the United States.

Of 17 major countries and territories surveyed, a majority of respondents held favorable views of China in only two: Greece, at 52 percent, and Singapore, at 64 percent. Even in those two countries, majorities overwhelmingly agreed that China does not respect the personal freedoms of its own people.

Negative views of China are now at or near historic highs, even though perceptions of how China has handled the coronavirus pandemic have improved since last year. That appears to reflect its successes in containing the crisis, even as some of the nations in the survey bungled their efforts, including the United States and Britain.

The findings suggest that China’s economic and diplomatic behavior in recent years has played a bigger role in hardening views. China’s crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang have, for example, drawn widespread condemnation.

Countries like Australia have also faced economic coercion after criticizing China’s actions. As a result, 78 percent of Australians now have an unfavorable view, compared with only 32 percent who did in 2017.

Only a few weeks ago, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, urged party leaders to “strive to create a credible, lovable and respectable image of China.”

The survey shows the scale of the challenge: In all the countries except Singapore, overwhelming majorities had little or no confidence in Mr. Xi’s handling of world affairs.

Credit…Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

BEIJING — To cover the Communist Party’s anniversary celebration on Thursday, I have had to take three coronavirus tests in four days. I’ve been confined to a government-approved hotel. Officials have repeatedly checked my vaccination record, as well as my cellphone, for signs of a problematic travel history.

In China, major political events routinely feature suffocating security measures. But the pandemic has added a new dimension to the party’s preparations. China’s approach to virus outbreaks has been largely successful, though often draconian. And in the weeks leading up to the party’s centennial celebrations, the authorities have taken no chances.

Reporters invited to cover the event at Tiananmen Square in Beijing were told that we must stay at a hotel in the city’s northeast starting on Wednesday morning.

I could enter the hotel only after I had scanned two QR codes with my cellphone, indicating that I had not been anywhere with a recent Covid outbreak. At check-in, in addition to my passport, the clerk took copies of my vaccination certificate — two jabs in Shanghai of the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine — and the negative result of my most recent coronavirus test, on Tuesday.

I was directed to a conference room, where another official handed me a knapsack made for the centenary in the same hue of light-blue canvas worn by Mao’s soldiers during World War II. It contained a seat cushion, a fan, a souvenir notebook, a folding umbrella and a light- blue raincoat.

A nurse in a white protective suit with a face shield swabbed the back of my throat for yet another coronavirus test. Then a hotel employee took me up the elevator and told me that I would not be allowed to leave my floor on my own until after the centenary. I had to call the hotel operator to ask to be escorted down in the elevator for my meals. Lunch on Wednesday included beef, green peppers and broccoli served buffet style in the cafeteria.

The event starts at 8 a.m. on Thursday at Tiananmen Square, only a 20-minute drive away. Reporters had to gather in the hotel lobby at 2:45 a.m. for a 3 a.m. departure, and were warned that nobody would be allowed to go to a bathroom at the site from 7:30 a.m. onward.

Credit…Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

Hong Kong was wrapped in an extensive security bubble on Thursday as the city marked three political anniversaries that have helped transform it from a freewheeling international center of trade and finance to an increasingly constrained Chinese city.

Police officers fanned across the city to clamp down on any unauthorized gatherings and prevent people from gathering in Victoria Park, where the annual July 1 march traditionally begins.

July 1 is both the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese control and the 100th anniversary of the founding of China’s ruling Communist Party. And just over one year ago, late on June 30, 2020, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong.

With Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, in Beijing to participate in the party anniversary celebration, her chief deputy, John Lee, led a morning flag-raising ceremony in the same spot along Victoria Harbor where the 1997 handover was conducted after more than 150 years of British colonial rule.

Opera singers performed the national anthem as helicopters flew overhead and a flotilla of boats performed a water salute. Officers marched in goose-step, a distinctive style used by the Chinese army that replaced British style marching in the city this year.

Mr. Lee, a former police officer who was promoted last week to chief secretary, the city’s second most powerful leader, hailed Beijing’s leadership. “The central government’s original aspirations for Hong Kong remains unmoved and solved problems for Hong Kong,” he added.

Outside the convention center where Mr. Lee spoke, police surrounded four protesters who tried to march with a banner that read, “Free all political prisoners.”

“We just want to speak up, encouraging people to not give up and keep speaking up for justice in Hong Kong,” said Raphael Wong Ho-ming, the head of the leftist group League of Social Democrats, which organized the protest.

“At the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, we urge the CCP to keep its promises to give its power to the people.”

In the year since the security law came into effect, many of the city’s most prominent opposition politicians have been arrested, with dozens still held in jail. The electoral system was transformed, with directly elected seats cut and security agencies given vast power to vet candidates. Apple Daily, the city’s largest pro-democracy newspaper, was forced to close last week, and RTHK, the once proudly independent public broadcaster, has been gutted.

The law also authorized Chinese security agencies to openly operate in Hong Kong. In a rare interview this week, Zheng Yanxiong, director of the national security office in Hong Kong, issued a stern warning to the city’s judges, whose reputation for independence has come under pressure since the security law took effect.

The power of the independent judiciary is authorized by China’s legislature, Mr. Zheng told East Week, a pro-Beijing magazine. “It must implement the nation’s will and the nation’s interest, otherwise it will lose the premise of that authorization,” he said.

The Communist Party’s grip has grown increasingly visible in Hong Kong, where it was once outlawed. Mrs. Lam’s trip to Beijing for the anniversary is the first by a Hong Kong chief executive for the event. And the anniversary has been publicized on buses, trams and a set of commemorative stamps in Hong Kong.

Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

In addition to the centenary of the party’s founding, July 1 also marks the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China in 1997.

The passage of a contentious national security law in 2020 ushered in one of the most transformative years in the city’s history since the end of British colonial rule.

With each day, the boundary between Hong Kong and the rest of China fades faster.

The Chinese Communist Party is remaking this city, permeating its once vibrant, irreverent character with ever more overt signs of its authoritarian will. The very texture of daily life is under assault as Beijing molds Hong Kong into something more familiar, more docile.

Now, neighbors are urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. Officials are pressed to pledge their loyalty.

Hong Kong had always been an improbability. It was a thriving metropolis on a spit of inhospitable land, an oasis of civil liberties under iron-fisted rule. After its return to China in 1997, the city was promised freedoms of speech, assembly and the press unimaginable in the mainland, in an arrangement Beijing called “one country, two systems.”

Hong Kong had always been an improbability. It was a thriving metropolis on a spit of inhospitable land, an oasis of civil liberties under iron-fisted rule. A former British colony that returned to China in 1997, the city was promised freedoms of speech, assembly and the press unimaginable in the mainland, in an arrangement Beijing called “one country, two systems.”

Freedoms once at the core of Hong Kong’s identity are disappearing. The government announced that it would censor films deemed a danger to national security. Some officials have demanded that artwork by dissidents such as Ai Weiwei be barred from museums.

China’s new might has also declared itself in Hong Kong’s business world. For decades the mainland’s economy had raced to catch up with that of Hong Kong, the financial hub so proud of its global identity that its government billed it as “Asia’s world city.”

Now, China’s economy is the booming one and officials are bending Hong Kong’s global identity increasingly toward that one country.

Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

The anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party has given the country’s leaders an opportune moment to encourage citizens to visit sites central to the party’s founding.

At these sites, schoolchildren are told how the Red Army, later renamed the People’s Liberation Army, was created. Tourists gaze at an ensemble of chairs used by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and other guests when they visited Mao’s home. Retirees take selfies with flower-adorned statues of Mao and Zhu De, the Red Army commander.

The centennial has also prompted China’s biggest property developers to cash in as they jazz up typically staid “red tourist” attractions, like dull exhibition halls and cave dwellings, and make them friendlier for the era of Instagram and TikTok.

This month, Dalian Wanda, a property developer, unveiled a Communist Party theme park in Yan’an. In it, mascots dressed in Red Army costumes parade down “Red Street,” a long shopping boulevard where visitors can take pictures and buy snacks and souvenirs.

The pilgrimages are in keeping with Mr. Xi’s call for Chinese citizens to learn from the party’s history. Even before he came to power in 2012, Mr. Xi said every “red tourist” attraction was equivalent to a “lively classroom that contains rich political wisdom and moral nourishment.”

With international borders still shut because of the coronavirus, Trip.com, a travel website that is popular in China, said this month that the number of bookings for “red tourism” attractions had more than doubled in the first half of the year from a year earlier. The company said it expected the numbers to climb ahead of the centennial celebration next week.

Beyond fueling party devotion and lore, “red tourism” has been good for business. In 2023, the industry’s revenues are expected to reach $153 billion, according to the Qianzhan Research Institute, a data consultancy. That represents an average annual compound growth rate of 14.1 percent from 2019 to 2023. Wanda said it was planning a second “red” attraction.

Tags Centenary, Communist, foreign, interference, Jinping, Live, Partys, Updates, warns

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Chinese language Communist Occasion at age 100 confronts rising contradictions

Post author By
Post date June 27, 2021

It must be said bluntly: The Chinese Communist Party, which turns 100 this week, represents the most successful authoritarians in history.

So why does President Xi seem so restless?

It is a time when there are no obvious challenges to its authority, and China has never enjoyed such international reach, economic strength, or military might. Yet in a marked departure from his predecessors, Xi was in a hurry to tighten the screws on dissenting opinions, expand technological surveillance of his people, enforce new controls over the private sector, and enormously strengthen his party’s prerogatives and power.

It is this contradiction between China’s overwhelming authoritarian achievements and President Xi’s head-scratching nervousness about the future that is most worth watching as the systemic competition of our time unfolds.

In these global sweepstakes for the future, the ruthless, technology-assisted efficiency of autocratic capitalism and the permanent (albeit dangerously questioned) attractions of democratic capitalism with its magnetic stimuli of individual rights and freedoms are juxtaposed.

The question of our time is whether these two systems, as represented by China and the United States, can agree on a number of terms that will enable them to compete peacefully, and sometimes even to work together. Even if they do, one system or another will emerge as the dominant rule-maker for an evolving global order. One or the other is likely to turn out to be a more successful provider for the needs of citizens.

While the fragility of democratic societies has come to its fullest in recent years, most dramatically on January 6th during the uprising and violent attack on the US Congress, the less transparent challenges may be more crucial to President Xi’s ambitions.

The Economist cover story this weekend sets out the contradictions.

“No other dictatorship,” it says, “has been able to transform itself from a famine-ridden catastrophe like China under Mao Zedong into the world’s second largest economy, whose state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure of America’s creaky roads and railways to shame. “

At the same time, the Economist under President Xi adds: “The bureaucracy, army and police have been cleared of dissenting and corrupt officials. Big business is being reconciled. Mr. Xi has rebuilt the party at grassroots level, creating a network of neighborhood spies and cadre smuggled into private companies to monitor them. Society has not been so strictly controlled since Mao’s days. “

History suggests that if Xi steps up his domestic repression and his assertiveness abroad, something will have to give way.

Jude Blanchette writes in Foreign Affairs: “His belief that the CCP should run the economy and Beijing should curb the private sector will limit the country’s future economic growth. His demand that party cadres adhere to ideological orthodoxy and demonstrate personal loyalty to him. ”The flexibility and competence of the system of government will be undermined. Its emphasis on an expansive definition of national security will steer the country in an internal and more paranoid direction. His unleashed ‘Wolf Warrior’ nationalism will create a more aggressive and isolated China. “

However, recent history also shows that the CCP has demonstrated ruthless resilience, brutal efficiency, and ideological dexterity that has repeatedly puzzled its critics and enabled it to end Mao’s 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, with an estimated death toll of up to . 20 million to deal with, the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the 2020 Covid-19 crisis that China spawned and then killed, and much more.

Not long after he came to power, President Xi gave up the studied patience of his immediate predecessors, who acted in the spirit of Deng Xiaoping by “biding their time and hiding their power” in dealing with world affairs. With that, the Communist Party’s power over society also waned.

President Xi’s dramatic decision to change internally and externally was the result of his own belief that the United States and Western democracies were in relative decline.

Xi’s worldview was shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist party in 1989 and 1990, a lesson that guides almost everything he does in relation to his own communist party, as well as his own struggle for power.

As early as 2018, he reflected on how it was possible that the Soviet party with its 20 million members collapsed after it had defeated Hitler and the Third Reich with 2 million members.

“Why,” he asked. “Because his ideals and convictions were gone.” He mocked Gorbachev’s “so-called glasnost” policy, which allowed criticism of the Soviet party line. The implication was clear: there would be no such openness under Xi.

Although he has said less about the experience of his own accession to power in 2012, when the party faced the biggest political scandal in a generation, the only way to get away from it is to learn how dangerous power struggles and corruption are for the leadership of the Communist Party can be together. His consolidation of power eventually included disciplining 1.5 million civil servants.

One can now only understand his rush to smash any possibility of internal disagreement and use all opportunities of international gain as a keen reading of his own political lifeline, measured against the emergence of the Biden government and its efforts, the Western democratic decline and Allied disorder to reverse.

Xi probably only has a window of about a decade before his country’s demographic decline, structural economic downturn, and inevitable internal upheaval are the historic opportunity now presented to him by his country’s technological advancement, geopolitical achievements, and his own current stance to diminish threatening threat performance.

This haste sees a turning point, but only if it acts with quick, determined determination and possibly recklessness.

And under Xi, China is not just sprinting to seize an opportunity. Xi, writes Blanchette, has at the same time put China “in a race to see whether its many strengths can surpass the pathologies that Xi himself has brought into the system.”

In short, the test is whether authoritarianism’s most compelling success story can overcome its fundamental flaws.

Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and President and CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked for the Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant editor-in-chief and senior editor for the European edition of the newspaper. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York Times bestseller and was published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his view every Saturday of the top stories and trends of the past week.

Tags age, Chinese, Communist, Confronts, contradictions, growing, Party

World News

Raúl Castro to Step Down as Head of Cuba’s Communist Social gathering

Post author By
Post date April 17, 2021

Raúl Castro to Step Down as Head of Cuba’s Communist Party

MEXICO CITY – Raúl Castro announced on Friday that he was handing over the leadership of the ruling Cuban Communist Party to a younger generation “full of passion and anti-imperialist spirit”, leaving the island nation for the first time without Castro in a leadership role for over 60 years.

Mr Castro, who will turn 90 in June, reiterated his long-awaited intention to resign in a speech opening the Communist Party Congress on Friday. He is expected to officially resign and announce his replacement before the conference ends on Monday.

After two terms as President of Cuba, Mr. Castro resigned from this office in 2018 and was replaced by his hand-picked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez.

The Cuban leadership is likely to announce further reforms during the party congress that will allow for more free market activity and further divert the country’s economy from the strict, state model introduced after the revolution that brought Mr Castro and his brother Fidel to power in 1959.

The Communist Party has no choice but to reform itself or to face growing discontent as Cuba faces its worst economic crisis since the 1990s following the fall of the Soviet Union. By introducing a new, younger political class, Mr Castro hopes to put the country on track to fully and fully embrace the economic reforms he has put in place in the years since the death of his brother Fidel – the leader of the revolution – five years ago to be fully accepted and implemented.

Mr Castro is seen as more pragmatic than Fidel, who is more willing to turn Cuba away from the communist model his brother advocated, which has brought the country great development achievements, including high literacy rates and quality health care for all Cubans, but it’s gone the economy in ruins.

“Of course, Raúl will continue to have influence, as Deng Xiaoping did when he resigned,” said Carlos Alzugaray, a party insider and former diplomat in the Cuban government, referring to the Chinese revolutionary leader who took over and implemented China after Mao Zedong a time of far-reaching market reforms.

Mr Alzugaray added that Mr Castro could deliberate on fundamental issues such as relations with the United States and major economic issues from his retirement. But he is unlikely to interfere in everyday life in Cuba.

“It won’t be a clean affair, it’s not how the system works in Cuba,” said Alzugaray. “It’s not like the US, where the former presidents have no influence if they step down.”

Mr Castro announced in 2016 that he would give up his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party during this year’s party congress in order to hand over power to a younger generation. The Secretary General is the most powerful position in Cuba, more powerful than the Presidency, and is considered the second highest position.

Mr Díaz-Canel will likely be elected as the new general secretary of the Communist Party over the weekend to consolidate his leadership over Cuba. The two roles are often filled by the same person, with Fidel holding both positions for about 30 years.

Younger members are expected to be elected to the 17-member Politburo before the end of the congress to further clarify what Cubans refer to as the “historical generation,” the veterans of the armed revolution.

Cuba has been ruled by an aging political class for decades, many of whom sparked the revolution in the 1950s and are seen as resistant to the reforms Mr Castro sought to impose.

Maria Abi-Habib reported from Mexico City. Ed Agustin contributed from Havana, Cuba.

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