EDITORIAL: The ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding. As part of these celebrations, Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan participated in a virtual Summit of the CPC and World Political Parties on July 6, 2021. In his address, Imran Khan praised the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership between Pakistan and China, which he said remained a strong anchor for peace, progress and prosperity in an era of complex and profound changes at the global and regional levels. He supported China's efforts to safeguard world peace, contribute to global development and preserve the international order. Pakistan, the PM went on, had recalibrated its priorities from geo-politics to geo-economics. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of the Belt and Road Initiative, complements this shift. The PM then attempted to equate China's Great Rejuvenation with his Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf's (PTI's) vision of a Naya (New) Pakistan and the CPC and PTI's spirit of struggle, commitment and fortitude. Recounting, on the one hand, his government's social, health and environmental policies, Imran Khan lauded, on the other, the CPC's achievements in all-round national development, poverty alleviation and anti-corruption, suggesting another equivalence. As on other occasions, Imran Khan hinted that Pakistan can learn from, and even emulate, the lessons from the CPC's successes.

With due respect to the PM's somewhat simplistic analysis of China and his well-intentioned desire to follow in its footsteps, certain undeniable facts can only be overlooked at the risk of distorting our understanding. China, led by the CPC through 100 years of struggle, achieved a revolutionary overthrow of the feudal-capitalist system that had the country in its thrall but had been unable to either defend China against western and Japanese imperialism and conquest or improve the lives of its people. The visionary Dr Sun Yat Sen, leader of the republican revolution of 1911 that overthrew China's ancient monarchy, forged an alliance between his nationalist Kuomintang party and the CPC after the latter's foundation in 1921. However, this alliance failed to live long after Sun Yat Sen's demise in 1925. His successor, Chiang Kai Shek, abandoned his mentor's struggle against feudalism in favour of quelling the rising Communist movement. The Shanghai massacre of 1927 set the seal on this rupture. Under Chairman Mao Tse Tung's guidance, the CPC was forced to accept his argument that China's revolution had to be peasant-based, albeit led by the proletariat and its party, the CPC. The retreat into guerrilla warfare in the countryside attracted the wrath of Chiang Kai Shek who mounted five Encirclement and Suppression Campaigns against Mao's guerrilla army, eventually forcing the latter to abandon its southern base and embark on the heroic Long March towards northwestern China. This forced retreat also had the objective of positioning the CPC to resist the Japanese creeping conquest of China that began in Manchuria in 1931. Chiang was forced by his own Generals to change course and re-establish the alliance with the CPC in order to resist Japanese imperialism. At great human and material cost, the Chinese resistance, in alliance with the worldwide anti-fascist front, defeated the Japanese in 1945 but immediately after WW II ended, Chiang once again turned on the CPC, only to be defeated by a now much bigger and stronger People's Army. Chiang's flight to Taiwan cleared the way for the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. After liberation, China under Chairman Mao's leadership embarked on the difficult, precarious road of building socialism by carrying out land reform, nationalising the commanding heights of industry and commerce, and setting up state-owned enterprises to set the country in a modernising socialist direction under the Soviet advice. Facing resistance from within the CPC on the basis of errors in this 'crusade', Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to prevent a restoration of capitalism in China a la Khrushchev's turn since 1956 in the Soviet Union. The ultra-left excesses of the Cultural Revolution paved the way for the ascent to power of once disgraced Deng Xiaoping in 1978 after Chairman Mao's demise in 1976. Since then, despite its undeniable and incredible achievements in modernisation, a feat achieved in 30 years instead of the West's equivalent 300 years, and notwithstanding the unprecedented lifting of 700 million people out of poverty, Deng's embrace of capitalism may have catapulted China's economy to the second largest after the US, but in the process has ushered in inequality that suggests a retreat from the ideals of socialism. It must be left to time and history to decide whether the logic of capitalist development will at some point become an obstacle to continued CPC rule or not.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021