The Politics Of China
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
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Power comes from the barrel of the gun, Chairman Mao once affirmed. In many way, this was true to the degree that had it not for the fact that Deng Xiao Ping was the chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army at one stage, and the only civilian to have served in the Military Affairs Commission together with Mao, neither Deng or anyone allied with Deng would have survived the traumatic years of the Cultural Revolution in 1966–1976. Fast forward to 2016, President Xi Jing Ping is a princeling who sits in the Military Affairs Commission too.
More importantly, ever since Hilary Clinton’s assertion that the United States considers the South China Sea as part of its “core interest” in 2010, China has been flexing its military muscle nonstop in the South and East China Sea. In fact, some scholars attribute the growth of China’s military assertiveness in the East and South China Sea to 2009, a year after President Obama has come into power.
China must have understood that a social community activist with a law degree from Harvard Law School would prefer to talk, rather than to go eyeball-to-eyeball to China. The results have been clear to see. China, indeed, Russia, too, have become more accustomed to flexing their muscles, in East Asia, and the Middle East too.
But with everything clustered at the center, as acclaimed Sinologist Roderick Macfarquhar affirmed, can the Chinese Communist Party defy the will of the people and history over the next 60 years? Together with other contributors, neither he nor his contributors in the book answered the question. But Roderick Macfarquhar himself noted that China’s huge population has become more vociferous, and demanding, than before. It is a tall order to govern a country that is both opinionated and headstrong, especially when power has also slipped into the blogosphere.
The beauty of “The Politics of China: Sixty Years of the People’s Republic of China,” lies with the excellent editorship of Roderick Macfarquhar. He has edited numerous books on China and China’s elite politics over the last thirty years. And, almost all have withstood the test of time. Roderick Macfarquhar, who was among the first BBC correspondents to report from China at the height of the Cultural Revolution, has the foresight of understanding the difference between the Soviet Union and China too.
Whereas the Soviet Union was led by a group of ostracized intellectuals at first, before the revolution took hold in 1917, the veterans of the Chinese Long March had had considerable years of governing China from 1927 on-wards, albeit in villages and townships.
By 1949, when China had defeated the Kuomintang party, whose capital was in Nanjing, the leaders and veterans led by Mao had formed and overcome various forms of upheavals. Even the Great Leap Forward, between 1950–1956, did not rock the internal cohesion of the Chinese communist leadership, despite the tens of millions who had perished in the famine.
The Cultural Revolution eliminated some “capitalist roaders” on the bench, including Liu Shaoqi, but Chen Yun and Deng Xiao Ping survived the onslaught. When Mao passed away in 1976, both of them staged an immediate comeback with the help of General Ye Jian Ying, to unseat the Gang of Four.
What this book lacks is a more contemporary treatment of Xi Jingping, and the people who are loyal to him; indeed, the severity of his anti-corruption crackdown. Had such topics been given more treatment in the book, this work of scholarship would have been a major research compendium on China that is impossible to dismiss.
