The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is all set to celebrate its 100th anniversary on 1 July. Chinese President and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping is leaving no stone unturned to make it an “epochal event”, with the twin objectives of putting China at the top of the global order, besides cementing his own position among the CCP pantheon as the most powerful leader after Mao Zedong.
Interestingly, as the country gears up for celebrations, it is also locked up in a series of confrontations with other countries, especially in its immediate neighbourhood—whether at the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh or the South China Sea and Taiwan. Those in the know of Chinese affairs would say this is nothing new. It’s just that the Dragon has decided to take on its true self, deceptively kept under wraps of its “peaceful rise”. Sensing the socio-economic chaos and distress worldwide post-Covid-19, about which the world is slowly coming to a consensus that it was a bio-weapon released from a Wuhan lab, accidentally or otherwise, China thinks it is the time to assert itself globally. Also, what’s encouraging the Dragon is the fact that two of its supposed rivals—the United States and India—are badly hit by the virus.
There’s also an internal factor that is pushing China for an aggressive posturing. President Xi is busy these days rewriting the history of China and the CCP, intending to disseminate the “correct” narrative and mass educate Chinese people through a national propaganda campaign. In the process, the history of Mao has been completely sanitised and glorified, just like Russian President Vladimir Putin has made an all-out effort for the redemption of Joseph Stalin. Behind all this, the endeavour is also to push Xi up in the CCP order, next only to Mao.
If Xi is trying to imitate and outdo Mao, one needs to look at the Great Helmsman to realise where China is headed today. Frank Dikötter, in his book The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-57, calls Mao a “monster”, a “madman”. And his madness didn’t appear towards the end of his life; it was an integral part of his persona from the very beginning. “Some have called the years of liberation a ‘Golden Age’ or a ‘Honeymoon Period’, in contrast to the cataclysmic of the Cultural Revolution that started in 1966. But the first decade of Maoism was one of the worst tyrannies in the history of the 20th century, sending to an early grave at least five million civilians and bringing misery to countless more,” writes Dikötter.
By the end of his regime, Mao and his policies had killed about 70 million people, surpassing both Hitler and Stalin in terms of death and destruction. Theoretically, the victims were landlords and reactionaries, but in reality, they were mostly farmers and labourers whose cause Mao would champion time and again. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in their book, Mao: The Unknown Story, expose him as a man who actually detested peasants.
Dikötter tells us how the Americans had unwittingly saved Mao and his army when George Marshall, President Harry Truman’s envoy, imposed a truce between the communists and the nationalists in 1946 just when Chiang Kai-shek was about to crush the communists. Marshall couldn’t escape the charm of Zhou En-lai, Mao’s envoy for the peace talks, who presented the communists as “agrarian reformers keen to learn from democracy”, leaving Chiang to fend for himself! (Marshall wasn’t the only one; remember Nehru and his Panchsheel folly.) Ironically, for all his personal loyalty and his role in legitimising Mao’s regime worldwide, when Zhou was suffering from cancer in the early 1970s, Mao didn’t allow him to get treatment. Zhao died in extreme pain, without any access to treatment.
Xi, in fact, has gone a step further than Mao, who would keep Zhou as a sobering face for international diplomacy. Xi has none. He is an emperor without any adviser. As Jude Blanchette and Evan S. Medeiros write in The Washington Quarterly, former Presidents “Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao had strong partnerships with their respective premiers (Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao), thus giving the State Council significant authority over setting economic policy. Xi, on the other hand, has sidelined premier Li Keqiang and positioned himself at the center of nearly all key policy discussions.”
With Mao as his role model, it’s hardly a surprise to see a Wuhan or a Galwan happening today. In fact, as China celebrates the 100th anniversary of the CCP, and with Mao back in the reckoning after being sidelined in the Deng Xiaoping political order, one suspects more such incidents, standoffs and face-offs in the future. But where things may not fit in well for China and its emperor, Xi Jinping, is that he is face to face not with a Nehru, but a Modi. Not with a Truman but a Trump and a Biden!