China: The awakened giant

In about a week's time, on Oct 1 to be precise, the People's Republic of China (PRC) will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the birth of this new Chinese nation-state.

They have much to celebrate I suppose.The grand Sleeping Dragon of the Orient has indeed awakened with a vengeance, enjoying a kind of renaissance of the prestige once attributed to the Middle Kingdom in the midst of barbarians a millennia ago.

Many mainland Chinese and millions in the Chinese diaspora all over the world must be justly proud. They can finally hold their head high on the international stage.

With a continuous civilisation of 5,000 years, the Chinese people have their long collective memory carved into their history books.

The last couple of hundred years are but a recorded account of national shame, of constantly falling victims to gunboat diplomacy from the Western powers, of having to concede territories like Hong Kong, Macao, and enclaves of foreign-controlled districts in Shanghai and Tien Zin.

So many Chinese people were addicted to opium smoking that China was labelled the Sick Man of Asia.

inally, The Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1917, and the new public of China was declared born, amidst intense civil war among the warlords and the nationalist party the Kuomintang under Dr Sun Yet-sun and Chiang Kai Shek (right).

Then the Japanese invaded China in 1937. During the Japanese occupation, The Nationalist Party arrived at a truce with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong to fight their common enemy, the Japanese army.

Horrendous suffering under Japanese

The Chinese people suffered horrendously under Japanese occupation, with the massacre in Nanjing standing out as one of the most significant war crimes of WW2, a crime still denied in Japanese history text book to-day.

The war ended in China with the Japanese defeat and surrender to the Allied Forces in 1945. Almost immediately after that, civil war erupted again, this time between the CCP and the Kuomintang.

The CCP won that conflict and drove Chiang Kai Shek and his army to the island of Taiwan. On October 1st 1949, Mao Zedong proudly declared to millions of joyous Chinese in Tiananmen Square, "Comrades, a new China is born!"

Until to-day, it is still difficult to evaluate the historical status of Mao Zedong. Was he a hero or a villain?

His communist theoretical reconstruction to suit the ideology to the unique conditions of China determined his brilliant military strategy that was so successful in fighting the Japanese, and then overcoming all the warlords and the nationalists.

He realised that though the proletariat in Europe had to be the masses of industrial workers, in China, the proletariat class had to come from the rural peasants. His guerrilla tactic was to surround the cities from the countryside.

Indeed, his political power did come out of the barrel of his gun. He was also a great poet, probably among the top poets in China's long celebrated literary traditions. You could say that he more than any Chinese person truly understood the soul of China.

Revolutionary fervour blinds Mao

Indeed, what he achieved was truly historic and revolutionary. With a borrowed ideology, he was able to bring that kind of politics that would end thousands of years of dynastic rule by one emperor, though some would argue that Mao was no less imperial than those dead emperors of old.

Eventually, Mao's over-heated political fervour proved to be his undoing. His need to conduct a perpetual revolution blinded him to the cold hard reality in the socio-economic reconstruction of China.

In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward programme to create a universal egalitarian society with modern industrial production that could exceed that of the UK. It proved to be a catastrophe, and millions died in the ensuing famine.

Under pressure from some sections of the CCP, Mao yielded some of his absolute power to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiao Ping in 1962, and these two pragmatists managed to repair the badly damaged economy of China.

But Mao's revolutionary zeal was not to be denied. With the help of the Gang of Four, Mao launched the infamous campaign of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

Youths called the Red Guards were left alone to run riot in every corner of China, persecuting intellectuals and destroying numerous cultural relics in the name of preserving China's revolutionary purity.
Young people and members of China's intelligentsia were sent to the countryside to do menial work in the name of rehabilitation.

Children persecute own parents

The period of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to Mao's death in 1976 must have been one of the darkest times in China's long history.
Millions died in the massive purges conducted on the "reactionary elements". Socio-economic development ground to a halt. Schools remained closed, as young children roamed wild on the street, sometimes persecuting their own parents.

I have read quite a great deal of literature reflecting the experience of those Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. That sort of novels and poetry is now labelled in China as the Literature of the Wound. It is heart-breaking literature.

Until that time, China was a closed society barred from the outside world much like North Korea today.

On February 21, 1972, Richard Nixon made history when out of the blue he arrived in Beijing with advisor Henry Kissinger for a visit that paved the way for the establishment of friendly relations between the United States and China. It was a meeting that changed the world.

For us in Malaysia, the significant event was the visit of our former Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak (right) to Beijing in 1974, there to establish diplomatic relation between Malaysia and China.

It sort of took the wind out of the sail of the Malayan Communist Party which had been waging an armed insurgency against Malaya for decades.

Reborn revolution delivers modern China

The diplomatic success of China during those dark years was due to the skills and pragmatism of the statesman Chou En Lai, Mao's premier at that time. Chou became the most loved Chinese leader among Chinese people both inside and outside mainland China.

After Mao died, Deng was rehabilitated from obscurity and he assumed the premier position of the de facto leader of the CCP. The Gang of Four was arrested and tried, thus officially ending the Cultural Revolution.

Deng was indeed the architect of the truly modern China. He was every bit as revolutionary as Mao, though his contribution was the innovative adjustment of communist ideology to the realities of socio-economic development.

He laid the foundation for such new thinking and new policies such as Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Socialist Market Reform.
His brand of pragmatism is crystalised by his famous saying, "It does not matter whether a cat is a white cat or a black cat. It is a good cat as long as it can catch mice!"

Deng put emphasis on the economic modernisation of China. The whole financial and economic system was liberalised, to encourage foreign investment, and privatisation and even ownership of private property, a heresy according to communist orthodoxy.

Thirty years later, China is one of the world's largest economies. Even now, as Western nations are struggling to spend out of their recession, China is still growing at about 7.6% per annum!

Life has vastly improved in China, especially along the coastal areas, although many hundred of millions of rural Chinese still live on less than US$2 per day.

Looking at the ultra modern façade of the booming Chinese cities, and the blossoming of their cultural and intellectual life, you have to admire the Chinese people and their leaders. They have achieved the kind of national glory denied to them just a century ago.
China has come of age. At least now, famine and war are no longer a perennial feature of their life.

But China has come to a crossroad also. They have to wrestle with many of the political, economic and even environmental realities in an increasingly globalised world.

Then, there would be the hidden contradiction of an authoritarian regime overseeing a free market economy that begins to divide the country's vast population into the haves and the have nots.

SIM KWANG YANG can be reached at kenyalang578@hotmail.com.