Exactly 60 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power after a bloody civil war and established the “People’s Republic” of China.

The CCP was able to win the civil war because most Chinese people were disappointed with the legitimate Guomindang government, a corrupt and undemocratic regime, and the CCP made wonderful promises.

Two of them were especially appealing: The first is the promise of land reform, made to the peasantry who made up more than 80% of the population. The second is the promise of democracy, made particularly to the better educated urban people.

What happened to both of these promises?

Land Reform and Famine

Immediately after the CCP gained control of the mainland, it introduced a nation-wide land reform. This was a violent campaign which killed millions of country gentry and annihilated the entire landowning class. Anyway, peasants got their land, right? Wrong. Hardly had the land reform been concluded, when the CCP launched its Soviet-styled agricultural collectivization drive.

Peasants were forced to give up their newly-acquired land to agricultural co-operatives and people’s communes, and thus began their 30-year socialist ordeal; during 1959-1962 at least 36 million peasants died of starvation in a nation-wide famine. This worst famine in human history was caused entirely by Mao Zedong’s lunatic economic adventurism called the Great Leap Forward. It is therefore quite legitimate to contend that the promise of “Land to the tiller” was a big lie and the CCP had betrayed Chinese peasantry.

Then, what of the promise of democracy?

Promise of Democracy a Lie

A study of China’s history after 1949 shows it was another big lie, with the CCP betraying the Chinese people, who had believed and backed the Party in its drawn-out bid for power. It was interesting to note that when the Government of the People’s Republic of China was first formed in 1949, it did include some nominal figureheads who were not CCP members.

Three out of the country’s six vice premiers were non-CCP members. All were middle-of-roaders and fellow travelers. But each of them vanished without fanfare, until 1956 when every vice premier was CCP members; even nominal figureheads were no longer tolerated.

Today a superficial scan of China’s governance arrangements would show that China has what we call the super structure of a modern state – it has a legislature, an executive branch and even a judiciary system, similar to the United States.
Let us, however, look a little more closely at each of these.

The Real Holders of Power

The legislature is called the People’s Congress, which Western journalists obligingly call “China’s parliament”. The members of this so-called “parliament”, or delegate to the People’s Congress, however, are not elected by the people. In fact they are not elected at all. Next time you meet a visiting Chinese person, ask him or her who is their delegate in the People’s Congress.

Ask them to name that person. I can assure you you’ll see a blank look on their face, as if you had asked them to name their banker on the moon, or on mars. All the delegates are carefully selected by the CCP on behalf of the people, without bothering to consult the people, and most people are sensible enough to know it is none of their business who the delegates are.

The majority of the delegates are Party and government officials, anyway. The rest are celebrities such as film stars, Olympic medalists, prominent academics or successful businessmen, who have proven their loyalty to the Party. To be a delegate to the Chinese People’s Congress is more or less the same as being on the royal honor lists in New Zealand. It’s largely a ceremonial role.

The Chinese parliament meets only two weeks a year. How could it be possible that the legislative programmes of such a huge and complex country as China be dealt with in only two weeks? This fact alone reveals the true nature of the People’s Congress, namely, a rubber stamp, and a Potemkin-village façade of democracy.

The Politboro

The executive branch of the Chinese Government is called the State Council, and its head is the premier. The current Chinese premier is only number three in the CCP hierarchy, and important policy decisions on matters of the state are all made in the nine-member Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP (politburo), the nation’s real power center. The State Council’s task is to implement the politboro’s decisions and directives.

All the government departments receive instructions from a corresponding office in the CCP politburo. For example the Minister of Foreign Affairs (MoF) is under the direct leadership of the “Foreign Affairs Leading Group” within the CCP politburo. The MoF is only the front and executive branch while the CCP politburo “Foreign Affairs Leading Group” makes Chinese foreign policies and decisions on major foreign relations issues.

The Chinese Ministry of National Defence is purely a front of the CCP Military Commission which is really and truly the Chinese counterpart of the Pentagon in Washington D.C., not the Chinese Ministry of National Defence. By the way, the person who heads both the CCP “Foreign Affairs Leading Group” and CCP Military Commission is the General Secretary of the CCP, Hu Jintao, who doubles as the President of the country.

At every level of governance there is the dual track of the Party and the government, and the government is subordinate to the Party. The Number One, or the real boss of any Chinese province, for example, is not the governor of the province, but the first secretary of the CCP provincial committee, who has been appointed by the 9-member Standing Committee of the Political Bureau in Beijing.

Judicial Members Appointed for Their Party Loyalty

China seems to have a fully-fledged judicial system with prosecutors and judges, but all of them are CCP members, appointed on condition of their loyalty to the Party.

In each local CCP committee there is a secretary who is the overlord of law and order of the locality, summoning the police chief, chief prosecutor, and chief judge for conferences to give orders and pass CCP committee decisions on important cases. Put it in colloquial sporting terms, everyone involved in the judicial structure hails from the same team and is beholden the same coach. An independent judiciary system is absolutely non-existent and totally impossible to have under the one-Party dictatorship.

Important as the control of the state apparatus is, it is not crucial for CCP rule. What is crucial is the control of the armed forces and the propaganda machine, or, in the CCP parlance, the gun and the pen. Mao Zedong instructs in a famous quotation, “The gun and the pen—we relied on these two for winning the nation-wide power, and we rely on them for the maintenance of the power.”

Absolute Control Through Armed Forces

The source of the CCP power ultimately lies in its absolute control of China’s huge armed forces. In accordance with Mao’s famous adage “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and the CCP principle of “the Party commands the gun,” the CCP does everything possible to ensure that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is truly a “Party army.”

It is written in the Chinese Constitution that the PLA must at all times be under the direct command of the CCP. As we know, the Party boss, called the General Secretary, Hu Jintao, is Chairman of the CCP Military Commission and is automatically Commander-in-Chief of all the Chinese armed forces. As such, he personally appoints every general or admiral of the PLA. It is also ominously declared time and again that the PLA has the dual function of national defense and keeping domestic order. Any talk of nationalizing the armed forces is heresy, and punishable by imprisonment.

Since the CCP won power through a violent civil war, the PLA always enjoys a special and privileged position in the CCP organization. It is the real power base of the CCP, and as such the citadel of political conservatism. Personnel-wise, high-ranking military positions are the reserve of adult children of CCP leaders and top officials, who are either deceased or living. They are ready at all times to spring to action to “maintain law and order.” The army is the ultimate deterrent to challenge the CCP monopoly of power, and an extremely effective one.

While the PLA is a deterrent force, the well-equipped People’s Armed Police (PAP) and regular police force are there to maintain everyday order.

Maintaining Order Through Mind Control

If we say the PLA, PAP and the regular police force maintain a physical control over the population, the CCP propaganda departments try to control the people’s minds. China now has more than 2,000 newspapers, 9,000 magazines 2,000 television channels, as well as 450 radio stations, but they are all, without a single exception, under the watchful eye of the propaganda department in Beijing or provincial propaganda departments.

The CCP propaganda bosses issue daily instructions on what may and may not be reported and how to report on sensitive matters. Here is an example: On June the 4th every year there is a massive public rally in Hong Kong to commemorate the Tian’anmen Massacre in 1989 and to demand democracy in China. It is the biggest political rally in the territory, attended by several tens of thousands of citizens, but just across the border, there was not a word uttered about it in the Chinese press, radio or on TV.

On July 1, 2003, half a million Hong Kong people staged a massive demonstration demanding democracy, but there was stony silence across the border in the mainland Chinese media. Ordinary Chinese simply do not know these events occur because the Party decides it is not convenient for the people to know of them. Instead the people in mainland China are constantly fed with such rubbish as how “patriotic” Hong Kong billionaire tycoons love their “socialist” motherland.

Journalists who digress from CCP instructions will be suspended from work or even imprisoned. According to the Amnesty International 2008 Report: State of World’s Human Rights: “Around 30 journalists were known to be in prison and at least 50 individuals were in prison for posting their views on the internet. People were often punished simply for accessing banned websites.”

Tailoring School Textbooks

CCP propaganda departments also control what is taught and what is not taught in Chinese schools. Political education singing praises of the CCP leadership is compulsory for every youngster, and a “must pass” subject for school leavers. After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, paramount leader and long-time colleague of Mao, Deng Xiaoping concluded that the cause of the pro-democracy movement was that political education had been neglected.

In the months and years that followed, new textbooks were compiled that emphasize the glories of the CCP, omit inconvenient truths and whitewash the many so-called “errors” that the CCP had made. This so-called patriotic education extends beyond schools to include television, film, and the news media.

All this has serious consequences. Modern Chinese history is being re-written while participants and witnesses of events are still well alive. Many middle-aged people do not know just 50 years ago the worst famine in human history took place in China and claimed at least 36 million lives, still less do they know the Anti-Rightist campaign which inflicted over 20 years’ untold sufferings on half a million of the cream of the Chinese society.

Many young or not so young people in China today do not know what the Cultural Revolution was, and many young people do not know Tian’anmen massacre that took place in Beijing merely 20 years ago. Instead, thanks to the permeating propaganda, many people in China believe in the infallibility of the CCP and its exclusive and almost divine-given right to rule.

Brainwashing Generations, Controlling Religions

“Perception management” may be a term coined by the US Department of Defense, but it is a skill of which the CCP is a past master. The result is that entire generations of Chinese have been brainwashed. This, I think, is the great loss for the Chinese nation.

Nothing in the CCP’s control of the Chinese minds is more bizarre than religion. China is the only country in the world whose government includes a Religious Affairs Bureau. This Bureau supervises the activities of all faiths. Believers are allowed to worship only in state-sanctioned-and-supervised churches and temples. Any religious organization that the CCP finds difficult to control will be subjected to ruthless persecution. The bloody crackdown of Falun Gong is a case in point.

Paternal authoritarianism is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. The Chinese word for “country” or “state” is composed of the two ideograms of guo and jia, meaning “state” and “family.” The country is ruled like a family, where the rulers are parents and the people are kids. As “Dad knows best,” the rulers make decisions for the people, from what they may know to how many children a couple may have. The people have no civil rights, no freedom of speech or assembly, and their participation in public affairs is tightly controlled.

On the other hand, just like responsible parents, good rulers should see to it that the people are fed, clothed and sheltered. And it is the large-scale relief efforts and huge social projects that justify such authoritarianism.

The problem with paternalistic authoritarianism is that the rulers are not genuine parents of the people. Consequently the rulers will not be genuinely concerned with the welfare of the people as genuine parents usually are with the welfare of their children. Instead, with unaccountable and unrestrained power in hands, almost all Chinese rulers have been corrupt, bleeding the people dry to accumulate fortunes for their own families.

Officials Accumulating Wealth, People in Poverty

And CCP officials have set a new record of personal wealth accumulation at the expense of the people. A study undertaken by Chinese researchers two years ago reveals that the income of Party and government officials is 8 to 25 times that of urban dwellers, and 25 to 85 times that of rural people. Of the 3,200 super-rich in mainland China whose personal wealth exceeds 100 million Chinese Yuan (US$14.6 million), 2,932, or over 90 percent, are adult children of top Chinese leaders. At the same time, 400 to 500 million rural Chinese, almost 35 percent of the population still live under US$2 a day, or at subsistence level.

The CCP today has abandoned its communist ideals of public ownership and egalitarian distribution of wealth, and it keeps scoffing at the universal values of democracy, human rights and rule of law. It is singularly devoid of values. Its actions are guided by a crude form of social Darwinism.

Social Darwinism began to enjoy enormous influence among the Chinese intelligentsia in early 20th century. It was used to explain why Western powers were able to subjugate other lands (like China), and at the same time it was a wake-up call for the Chinese people to do whatever they could to make their country strong so as to survive and thrive.

‘Kill or Be Killed’

China’s experiences in the 20th century reinforced the national consensus of the importance of ruthless competition for economic and military power. Every Chinese child is taught Mao Zedong’s admonition “If you’re backward, you’ll be beaten up.” and it follows that if you’re beaten up that’s probably because you’re weak and useless (and therefore have only got yourself to blame).

Conversely if you are strong and powerful you can legitimately beat up others. Mao also taught his followers that, confronted with an adversary, it was a matter of killing or being killed. It is only zero-sum games that the CCP plays. It is in this social Darwinist spirit that Deng Xiaoping instructed “[Economic] development overrides everything else.” That means economic growth at any cost, even if it has brought about a yawning and worsening gap between rich and poor and irreversible environmental degradation.

Today social Darwinian sentiment is mixed with a popular nationalism—a nationalist sentiment based on the belief in survival of the fittest and resulting from the ambition to replace the United States as the dominant power—first in Asia and subsequently in the world. Nationalism is increasingly used to fill the vacuum created by the CCP’s abandonment of communist ideology.

Ross Terrill, a leading Australian-born China expert in the world, says, “In tacit acknowledgment of the weakness of its belief system, the Party-state, to stave off its death, added the gaudy mask of nationalism.” (The New Chinese Empire, page 154). Now patriotism is rated as the No. 1 virtue in the CCP book. Over 200 hundred years ago Dr Samuel Johnson said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” How true!

Thank you for your attention.

Professor Li Dong is a retired Chinese academic, having taught at universities in China, the UK, USA and New Zealand.