Party piece: China’s Communists at 100

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. Today we'll be taking a hard look at the Chinese Communist Party as it marks its hundredth anniversary. How it came to be and how it came to power. How Xi Jinping has made the party and the state indistinguishable and how the party's ubiquity in that even China's hip hop scene has been co opted for propaganda. It's no surprise that Beijing was the site of massive, well orchestrated celebrations today. Our Beijing bureau chief David Rennie was there herded by the Foreign Ministry hours before it all began.

Chinese Communist Party threw itself a hundredth birthday party and they did that in Tiananmen Square, which is the ceremonial heart of China. The the crowd was handpicked. They were almost all party members. I was sitting next to members of the People's Congress for the city of Beijing. There was a lot of singing of Communist Party songs and everyone around me knew all of the words to those, you know, greatest hits like, you know, without the Communist Party there would be no China. So it was this mix of the very grand and formal and the kind of national, but also this strange feeling of a kind of private family gathering of a party celebrating in the open. It's absolute control of this giant country.

And presumably this gathering was also Very carefully controlled.

Very interesting that this is a very confident party, but it's the Chinese Communist Party. And so there's always an element of paranoia and extreme control. The not only we were all security checked multiple times, but this is also a China that is determined to have zero cases of COVID So although there haven't been cases for months in Beijing, we were all made to quarantine for 24 hours before we set foot on the square. We all had to wear face masks. We were all Covid tested multiple times. And in fact, many Western ambassadors from places like Europe refused to come because they were told that they too would have to spend a night in a state guest house and be multiply Covid tested. And they simply thought that was undignified. So it was a kind of very, very controlled, very, very paranoid festivity.

And what did that festivity consist of?

So the main event was a speech by Xi Jinping, who we refer to as President Xi, but whose most important job is as General Secretary of the Communist Party. He spoke from the rostrum, from the terrace of the Tiananmen Gate, the front of the Forbidden City, where, where Mao declared the forming of the People's Republic in 1949, the setting for all great party and state events. And he wore a Mao suit where all the former leaders around him wore suits and ties to make that point that he is the kind of the heir to a long tradition going back to the founding of the People's Republic more than 70 years ago.

And so at that main event, during that speech, what message did Mr. Xi send?

It was a very carefully crafted, revealing speech. It lasted more than an hour. And in a way, it was a mixture of the old and the new. So there were things in the speech that many other Communist leaders have said in the past about how China used to be humiliated by Britain and France and other colonial powers, how they grabbed territory like Hong Kong, and that the Communist Party had helped China regain its pride and its sovereignty and its full control of its own territory.

That.

That you would have heard from any number of speakers in the past. But two big things have changed which were new about the Xi era. One is how the Party presents itself within China, much more willing to admit that senior officials are party members, that their most important jobs are often their party jobs. Xi is much more willing to talk about the party being in charge. Then the international context has changed. There is a much greater sense of confidence now that the Communist Party is not just the best form of government for a poor, not very well educated country. Like China, which is what you used to hear two decades ago. Now they're willing to say, look at how well we have handled Covid. Look at how well our economy has fared for the last 40 years. Look at the chaos and the partisan paralysis in the west, especially in America. And now the party is willing to say we are more benevolent than these so called democracies of countries like America because we actually deliver for our people in a way that these squabbling, corrupt, incompetent politicians who run Western countries cannot match.

And what did the crowd make of all those messages?

Interestingly and perhaps worryingly, the most enthusiastic applause, the loudest cheers were for the most nationalist line. It was a line where Xi Jinping talked about foreign countries had bullied China in the past. And he pledged that if they were to do so again, the they would gash their heads against a great wall of steel made of the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people. That got a huge roar from the people around me in Tiananmen Square and in the rest of China. It's been trending on Chinese social media. There's lots of images of people watching the speech on kind of jumbotron screens. The truth is, and it's not comfortable for many people in the west to hear, Xi Jinping is pretty popular.

And July 1st is also the anniversary of Hong Kong's handover from Britain to China. Was that acknowledged at all?

It was acknowledged in a rather brutal fashion by Xi Jinping talking about the importance of guaranteeing national security in Hong Kong. A very clear reference to the fact that China has imposed extremely strict laws, crushing Western style freedoms that allowed them to imprison democratic politicians, to jail the editors of independent newspapers in Hong Kong, that Hong Kong is much more like a mainland Chinese city now. And that speaks to a real problem with this Chinese Communist Party claim, that because they claim support from a majority of the Chinese people, that we should think of them as the moral equal to a Western democracy. And the problem with that claim is that it's not enough to be a tyranny of the majority. Hong Kong is a classic example of that. Whether you're a Uyghur, a Muslim in Xinjiang, or whether you are a law abiding democrat in Hong Kong. There is no place for you in this new world of absolute explicit loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. And, and it's that that makes you realize that for all the kind of pageantry and the claims of seeking the happiness of the greatest number, this claims to be a benevolent dictatorship. It's the second word that counts. This is still a dictatorship. And if you are on the wrong side of that majority minority divide, then you are not invited to this.

The site of President Xi, Party General Secretary Xi standing where Mao Zedong did when declaring the republic, the only one wearing a Mao suit. It's more than just symbolism. It reflects a deep historical link to the communism of a century ago. Then China was poor, fractured by internal conflicts, its northern population thinned by a famine, and some of the workers of this world sought to unite. The founding of the party, though, wasn't grandiose. About a dozen people met in secret in a Shanghai home, among them a tall, lanky man by the name of Mao.

Those attending the meeting probably didn't know that much about the basic theories of communism. It had only recently been spreading within China. But what had inspired those people taking part was a broad intellectual current that was moving through China after the First World War, after the settlement of agreed by the victorious powers. And that involved handing over German territory in China to the Japanese. And that really angered this fired up Chinese nationalism.

James Miles is the Economist's China editor.

And people began searching for reasons why China had become so weak. Some people turned to Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution had been successful in 1917. And in the factories of Shanghai, the cotton industries that were springing up there, Bolshevism had a certain appeal.

So then Mao and others formally formed the party. But how is it that it came to power to dominate China at the.

Time, in 1921, it would have been impossible to imagine that this was achievable. What in the end enabled it to come to power was not the that urban proletariat, not those workers in the textile factories in Shanghai, but rather a rural revolution, something that Marx himself had not believed was likely to be the main source of revolutionary activism. But Mao realized in the late 1920s that this was the way forward. The Communist Party was being squeezed out of the cities. The countryside was the only option. You he found many discontented people there, many people living in abject poverty who were prepared to support the Communists. The party was helped by the Soviets. It also was helped, perhaps by the Japanese invasion of China, which resulted in huge losses for the ruling Nationalist Party. And after that war, after 1945, a civil war broke out between the Nationalists and the Communists.

The Communist soldiers moved quickly into the heart of the city, which had been evacuated by the Nationalists after they had boasted that they would defend it with the last drop of their blood.

And the Communists attracted many people Disillusioned by the corruption, the weakness of the Nationalist Party, and were able to Conquer China in 1949, the Nationalist army was.

So weakened and cut up by the rapid advance of the Reds, they hardly had time to retreat and prepare for the next line of battle.

It was the Chinese Communist Party, it was eventually decades later that became the flag bearer of Communism, rather than the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991.

And now, a century since the Party's founding, what of Mao's Communism is left in Xi Jinping's China?

Well, those values were largely discarded after the death of mao Zedong in 1976. Deng Xiaoping set China on a new course, a much more pragmatic one. The idea of continuous revolution, of endless class struggle, were cast aside in favor of at least a partial embrace of a form of capitalism, one that still had state ownership of some enterprises hardwired into the system. But nonetheless, in much of the economy, private enterprise for the first time was given pretty much free rein. And this principle has been continued under Xi Jinping. But the party needed pulling together. As Xi Jinping sees it, Much of the emphasis of his rule since 2012 has been to rebuild the party at the grassroots. You have to bear in mind that it was all but hollowed out at that level. Where once well into the 1980s, the party had been everywhere, in businesses, almost everybody worked for the state in one way or another. Private enterprise hardly existed to a situation by the late 1990s that was almost completely the reverse. And that meant the party was not there at the grassroots.

But that no longer seems to be the case. The party seems to be ubiquitous today.

That indeed is what has come about. The Party has not only injected itself into private businesses, forming branches, but those branches members have a duty to report anything that might affect stability. The Party at the local level is, you know, not just there sort of watching and spying on people. That is part of their job, but also, crucially, being there when needed. And we saw this in a big way after the pandemic began early last year. A big part of Xi Jinping's strategy is to build up the Party's credibility as a kind of can do organization. And surveys do suggest that the party does enjoy a significant degree of support.

And what about membership, though? I mean, that kind of control must require quite a lot of manpower.

Well, There are now 92 million members of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi Jinping has been making it harder for people to join. So getting into the Party requires having two sponsors. It requires a Long period of writing thought reports, that's to say, your observations on major sensitive political incidents, and then eventually you get in. But the Party requires that its members swear an oath of loyalty as well as an oath that they will uphold Party secrets. The Party is an exclusive club. It is one that you remain committed to for life. And if you do something wrong, it is the Party that will deal with you, not the law.

It would appear then that Mr. Xi's plan has worked, that there is unity, that there is broad support for the Party. The Party is everywhere that it needs to be to exert the control he wants. He seems to have hit it here.

Yes, to a degree. What is striking is that Xi Jinping himself does not always sound very confident. And indeed, frequently he talks about threats to the Party. Economic risks, financial risks, but I think most crucially of all, political risks. And they come from two directions. One is from outside the Party, what he characterizes as Western attempts to stir up color revolutions in China. And from within the Communist Party itself. He has kept on waging purges against perceived enemies within the system itself. Purges waged most often in the name of corruption. And he keeps referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This is something that clearly haunts him. And in a way, that's his way of referring also to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He has pointed out that the difference is between the two countries, that in the case of the Soviet Union, there was, as he puts it, no one man enough to stand up to the protesters before the Soviet collapse, and that's what caused it. And by that he means there was no one in the Soviet Union who had the gumption to send in the army to crush the unrest. So Xi Jinping, for all his outward confidence, is also a nervous man. But there is no sign of any imminent threat to the Party's rule. Given the level of control in China at present, it's almost impossible to imagine any discontent welling up into an anti government movement that could really pose a serious challenge to the Communist Party's grip on power.

Whether it's born of nervousness or sheer force of will, or both, Xi Jinping has brought the Chinese Communist Party back to a position of pervasive control and ideological purity reminiscent of the Mao era. Part of that control, that guiding hand of the Party at every turn, is of course, propaganda. And in the 21st century, propaganda takes a myriad of forms like this.

So 100% is a 15 minute track featuring 100 different artists rapping about Their love for the motherland. It was released by a hip hop brand called Hip Hop Fusion a few weeks before the Communist Party's 100th birthday.

Caroline Carter is the Economist's Deputy Asian News editor.

It has lyrics like, our spaceships are flying in the sky, the new China must get lit, and no matter if it's Hong Kong or Taiwan, we are all descendants of the dragon.

These don't sound like sort of standard hip hop themes, though.

Well, no, exactly. So the themes you think of in American hip hop are usually things that make authorities nervous. Guns and sex and drugs and rap sort of comes from a place of people talking about the injustice in society. But Chinese hip hop has gone in a different direction. That, you know, there's no injustice in China to inspire the sort of angry rap that the Americans have. So, of course we're going to rap about our love for China.

So how did rap become popular in China?

It's been around for a while in China, but it really took off. A few years ago. There was a talent contest called Rap in China, which drew billions of viewers. And it was very popular and it created a few stars, but it also seemed to draw the attention of of authorities who started looking at the content a bit more seriously.

And by that you mean they started to have some influence in the nascent hip hop industry?

Yeah, exactly. So it seems that when the Communist Party realised how popular rap was, it decided that it could harness this cultural phenomenon. Rather than ban it, it decided to make use of it. And so one way that it did this was by filming musical propaganda videos. So in the past, there's been a rap about the Belt and Road Initiative, which is China's signature foreign investment. And there's another one about China's 14th Five Year Plan and its 13th Five Year Plan. And these are sometimes released in English and Chinese, so they clearly have different audiences, a domestic one and, you know, an English audience for the West. So at the same time, the official media in China has a habit of promoting tracks about topics that it likes. For example, during the anti government protests in 2019 in Hong Kong, mainland rappers were writing tracks about how the protesters were destroying the city.

Hey, democracy. Why you always sign somewhere so hard to see?

There's one called Hong Kong's Fall, which is by a group of rappers called CD Rev. And they rhyme democracy with hypocrisy, as in America's attempts to spread democracy by funding violent protest in Hong Kong. And this same band, Tendu Revolution, they also have a track about the South China Sea dispute. They look like quite an authentic group of rappers rapping about the South China Sea whilst posing in fighter jets.

And so the propaganda takeover of Chinese rap seems pretty complete.

And so the Communist Party worries about what its young people are listening to. In 2014, Xi Jinping said there was a place in China for imported art forms such as rap, as long as they conveyed a healthy and upbeat message. So the message was rap if you must, kids, but keep it positive.

And what's the response been to this latest 15 minute banger then?

So reviews online seem mixed. There's certainly a debate to be had about whether having 100 different artists on one track is a good idea musically. But there do seem to be reviewers online who are touched by the topic and impressed by the scale of the project. And of course, as would happen anywhere in the world, there's reviewers who are completely appalled by these artists who seem so cozy with the authorities.

Xi Jinping's authorities would have a harder time cozying up if the country weren't still enjoying admirable economic growth. On Money Talks, our sister show on business and finance, our departing China economics editor Simon Rabinovitch reflects on a decade reporting on an extraordinary economy.

So I asked the driver if he could take me to the new district. I knew that it was a district that seemed to epitomize the ghost cities that China's economy has been infamous for. The driver said to me, which new district? The new new district or the old new district? We went there and it was full of cars, full of life. So full of cars in fact, that you know, it got stuck in a God awful traffic jam. And in the meantime, the city has gone on to build an even bigger new district. The situation here can change so rapidly.

Listen to Money Talks from the Economist. Wherever your regime permits. That's all from us on the intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.