100 years of Chinese Communist Party, the pros & cons

This month marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most momentous events of our times: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 1921 was a turbulent year. World War I had ended three years earlier and the communists were in power in Russia, with the charismatic Vladimir Lenin as their leader. The influence of Marxism was spreading in many parts of the world, including China. The equally charismatic Mao Zedong, who would later control the destiny of his nation for decades, was just 28 years old. A bitter civil war followed in China, with the communists finally triumphing over the Kuomintang, which would retreat across the sea to Taiwan. In 1949, the People’s Republic of China was established. Its two main leaders were Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai (the main architect of China’s foreign policy). These two men dictated the direction the most populous nation would take for the next 30 years.

Their first major move was to forcibly take over Tibet, “the roof of the world”, a vast autonomous region that Britain had wisely kept as a buffer between India and China, with a token British force in the capital, Lhasa. Independent India, perhaps unwisely, withdrew that force, which Beijing must have taken as a signal that it could march into Tibet, without any Indian objection. After all, those were the days of ‘Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’. Jawaharlal Nehru has been blamed, mainly by the present dispensation, for being too naïve about Beijing’s intentions, and that Vallabhbhai Patel, Nehru’s number two, would have been more realistic. Be that as it may, a big chunk of territory in Ladakh had been surreptitiously taken over by China. When India found that out, Nehru dismissed it by saying that the area was worthless, as “not even a blade of grass grew there”.

Big mistake. Worse was to follow in 1962 when the border dispute escalated into a short war in the Himalayas. The battle-hardened and well-equipped Chinese troops humiliated the poorly-equipped Indian forces facing them who had little experience of mountain warfare. Bad leadership compounded the impossible situation. I had an uncle, a young Brigadier, whose soldiers were well entrenched at one of the passes. Inexplicably, he was ordered to leave his defensive position and attack the Chinese forces facing him. The Chinese were waiting for such an opportunity and simply outflanked the Indian brigade and annihilated it. The 1962 defeat was the low point in the career of India’s first Prime Minister, who had otherwise made Indians proud and given them a set of abiding values, rooted in democracy and secularism. Nevertheless, the 1962 humiliation has hung over the two nations like a dark cloud, preventing closer ties and a resolution of the border dispute.

I have been to China three times. The first trip in 1985 was the most instructive. It was a two-week study tour, and the main purpose was to learn about the family planning programme. The Chinese realised quite early on that the unsustainable and exploding population growth was a serious deterrent to economic and social progress. The government also concluded that to lower the population growth rate, two things were essential: higher literacy and better health care. But it added another controversial and coercive element — a one-child family. Since there was in Chinese society, as in India, a preference for a male child, there were many families in China with only a son, no daughter, which we witnessed on that tour. Clearly, sonographs (which determine the sex of the unborn child) and abortions were widespread, probably even female infanticide. But controversial or not, China’s population growth plummeted, and it is now at what is called “replacement level”, which means it is neither going up, nor down. India, on the other hand, even though it has had a degree of success in recent years, still adds 1.4 crore a year to its population. In a few years, we will overtake China as the most populous nation in the world, a dubious ranking.

In other words, China owes its spectacular economic success in the past four decades at least partly to its family planning programme. In 1980, China and India were roughly at par economically. Today, the Chinese economy is five times larger. And the gap is growing, not shrinking. China’s GDP has grown an astonishing 80 times since 1980 and 80 crore Chinese lifted out of poverty, probably the most remarkable achievement in history. To me, it is admirable as well. Yes, the Chinese do not enjoy the freedoms we do, like democratic elections and freedom of expression. Everything is rigidly controlled by the one-party state. However, if hypothetically, you were to ask anybody what he or she would prefer, a better standard of living or those freedoms, there is no doubt in my mind that the reply would be to have a better life, with roti, kapda and makaan. Deng Xiaoping, China’s great pragmatic reformer, put it well when he confessed that “to get rich was glorious”. And also when he said it did not matter if a cat was black or white, “as long as it caught mice”. Results, not ideology, mattered most.

There are those who say that what has held India back is too much freedom, verging on anarchy, and democracy. And that an authoritative regime, like China’s, would have served us better. Wrong! Look at North Korea and South Korea or, earlier, East and West Germany. The same people, but different systems, one dictatorial, the other democratic. Which did better for its people? Or take Portugal, under Salazar, and Spain, under General Franco. And compare the record, under dictatorship and then democracy. A well-run democratic system delivers better results economically and socially than any other system. The key is that it should be “well run”. As Winston Churchill put it, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

— The writer is a veteran journalist