COVER STORY

PEOPLE'S CHINA AT 50

As a celebration of state, the accent of the festivities that mark the half century of the People's Republic of China is on the achievements of the past 20 years - of the post-Mao Zedong era of reform which made China the fastest-growing economy of the world and a player of global consequence.

MIRA SINHA BHATTACHARJEA

A GRAND parade at Tiananmen Square, and functions all over the country, will mark the celebration of a half century of China's existence as the People's Republic of China (PRC). The festivities, to which no foreign guests have been invited, will undoubte dly convey strong messages to the people of China and to the watching world. Some of these messages will confirm that the Communist Party of China (CPC) still plays the central and leading role in Chinese politics, that the third-generation team led by P resident Jiang Zemin is in control, and that China has successfully avoided going the Soviet way. Other messages will highlight the achievements of these 50 years not only in the indices of economic and state power but also in terms of living standards. In short, this anniversary will celebrate the fact that China, having 'stood up', as Mao Zedong so proudly announced on the founding of the PRC on October 1, 1949, now stands upright, sturdy and tall in the world of states.

As a celebration of state, the accent of the festivities will fall heavily on the achievements of the past 20 years, that is, of the post-Mao Zedong era of reform which made China the fastest-growing economy of the world and a player of global consequenc e. But no survey of the five decades of the PRC can ignore Mao Zedong, for he was both China's revolutionary and China's nationalist, par excellence. When victory in the civil war was won, and the new state was founded, Mao as leader of China's mi llions promised to bring to a close the long century of China's 'humiliation' by imperialist powers, including Japan. He promised to unite the nation and the state and set it on the path to wealth and power and to a standing of equality among the nations . No single imperialism had dispossessed China of its sovereignty; it never was fully a colony as India was. Only Japan thought of making the whole of China its colony. Its invasion and aggression against China in the 1930s provided the conditions for Ma o to entwine anti-Japanese nationalism and anti-imperialism into the compelling dynamic of the Chinese National Revolution. China's Revolution, therefore, did not confront the 19th century imperialist powers, especially Britain, which had opened its cent ury of humiliation with the Opium War of 1840. It confronted, instead, the new imperialists of the 20th century - first Japan and, after its defeat in 1945, the other new imperialist, the United States.

CHUNG CHIEN-MIN / AP
Premier Zhu Rongji speaks at a banquet in Beijing on September 30 to mark the inauguration of ceremonies in connection with the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The anniversary will buttress the fact that 50 years af ter it was founded, the PRC stands upright, sturdy and tall in the world of states.

To stand up - united, strong and equal with the powers - was a promise that history would have demanded of any government that may have come to power in Beijing. The CPC, on this anniversary, can claim to have fulfilled these promises in the main. Of the three territories that remained outside the jurisdiction of Beijing after 1949, Hong Kong was returned to China in a remarkably smooth transition under the innovative one-country, two-systems formula, and so will be Macao by the end of this year. It was often said that the Chinese leadership had privately decided on 2005 as the outside year for the peaceful reunification of Taiwan - to which that formula was first offered - with the mainland. But developments since the missile crisis in the Taiwan Stra it in 1995 and, more recently, a few months ago have set up serious roadblocks. If President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan continues to describe cross-Strait relations as between two equal states, he risks making the one-plus-two formula, as well as the whole q uestion of reunification, dangerously redundant. The new situation will involve the U.S. more directly and could delay indefinitely a resolution of the Taiwan problem. This is one success that the CPC would have liked to have claimed at this anniversary. Instead, it represents a serious setback for the Chinese Government, and raises new tensions in the Asia-Pacific region.

THE other two promises made to the nation on the founding of the state have been more or less fulfilled. In its search for equality, as for wealth and power, China had set its sights on the richest and the most powerful country, namely the U.S. It was al so the U.S. that had denied the PRC's existence as an international entity, treating Taiwan as China, for 23 years. Appropriately, therefore, it was President Clinton who symbolically conferred, as it were, 'equality' on China during his first summit mee ting with President Jiang Zemin in 1997 in Washington. The Beijing summit the next year confirmed China's new status and considered establishing a 'strategic' partnership between the two countries. This suggests that China, already a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, may envisage a diplomatic reach beyond its Asian region. However, it still has a long way to go before it can - if it ever will - acquire sinews of power to match those of the U.S.

Nevertheless, China's economic statistics testify to the giant strides it has taken in these five decades towards acquiring wealth and power with an average annual growth rate of 9.8 per cent over these decades. China weathered the recent Asian financial crisis without devaluing its currency, and its economy grew at a respectable 7.8 per cent during the period. In 1997 its gross domestic product (GNP) reached $1,055 billion, making it in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) the third largest economy i n the world. Per capita income rose to $860, having doubled over the past decade; adult literacy rose to 87 per cent; and average life expectancy rose to 70 years. In the years from 1985 China attracted upwards of $140 billion in direct foreign investmen t and accumulated foreign exchange reserves of $120 billion and a trade surplus with the U.S. of about $40 billion. It also became the world's 11th largest trading state.

XINHUA / AP
At Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announces the founding of the Republic.

These are impressive figures. But the goal before China is modest - to reach the income levels of middle-ranking countries such as France and Italy by the middle of the coming century. Actually the goal is far from modest, for it aims to provide all its 1.2 billion people with the comforts and living standards of those countries. China still has a long way to go before it can achieve this goal.

Nevertheless, at the end of the 20th century, China is no longer the ripe melon ready to be carved up by the imperialist powers that it was at the end of the 19th century. Instead, the present leaders could borrow from Zhou Enlai a description of China t oday. China, he said in 1975, was like a piece of tough meat, difficult to chew on or to swallow.

EVEN if the 50th anniversary is, in essence, a celebration of state and not of 'socialism', much of the credit for what the state is today must still go to Mao the nationalist. As a nationalist Mao led the millions of China. As a Marxist, however, he led a party that comprised, at that time, only a mere 5 per cent of the population. With this limited tool he undertook the awesome task of building socialism in the country from a peasant and backward base. Constantly aware of being in the minority, Mao ma de 'serve the people' (not just the proletariat), the raison d'etre of the party and the state and made the test of such service an incremental increase in the basic necessities of life for all the Chinese people. Building a strong state and servi ng the people were two separate and often conflicting items on the agenda. At best they were linked by the choice of means employed by the party in managing the large society and increasing its productivity.

REUTERS
President Jiang Zemin addresses a gathering of the 1999 Global Forum in Shanghai on September 27.

In the mid-1960s, fearful that the party was beginning to serve itself rather than the people, Mao called for the overthrow of the party leadership and organisation. The famous big character poster that urged 'bombard the headquarters' launched the disas trous Cultural Revolution (C.R.). In the desperate hyperbole of those heady days, the C.R. was presented as an attempt to touch people's souls, to bring about a sudden transformation of outlook and values in society, more in keeping with socialism. But M ao was in the minority even within the party. It was almost a foregone conclusion that Mao would fail, as he did, in this desperate gamble. His failure also heralded the end of the socialist effort in China, despite its present use as a signboard, to pro claim identity - that is, a socialist China building a socialist market economy, and so on.

Mao's portrait still looks out over Tiananmen Square and the 50th anniversary festivities. But his contribution to the building of the state will in all probability not be acknowledged. Yet Mao's contribution was not negligible, and needs to be recalle d for it laid the base from which Deng Xiaoping's reforms could take off. To list a few of his contributions: At the end of the Mao era, China was debt-free; oil resources (not revealed by Soviet prospecting) were discovered and exploited; the nuclear pr ogramme proceeded apace; land reform had been thorough and recovery had been made in agriculture.

Externally also China had made significant and strategic gains. Its 23-year-long period of isolation in the world ended with its acquiring a seat in the U.N. and its diplomatic recognition by the developed countries - on its own terms. This meant the de- recognition of Taiwan and the promise by other countries that relations with that island would henceforth be conducted only at sub-diplomatic levels. The crowning act in this drama of undoing the past was the 'private' visit of President Richard Nixon to China in 1972. That journey by the most powerful leader of the world to what was an 'enemy' country for 23 years, to be received by the man and a system he had threatened to destroy, and to a country which Washington did not recognise, was an exercise i n the most extreme form of realpolitik. It could only be accomplished by denying a friend of as many years, during which time Taiwan, with a population of only 11 million, was for the U.S. the only China. The Nixon visit opened the door to the technologi es and markets of the developed world for Mao's successors.

DENG XIAOPING, as Mao's successor, must, however, be given the credit for knowing how to walk through that open door where he wanted to take China. Deng's coming to power was an accident of history - he was not one of Mao's chosen successors. Mao identif ied him as the second most important target of the C.R. Deng survived that turmoil and witch-hunt, to be recalled to power and position in 1974 as Mao aged and cancer took its toll of Zhou Enlai. As soon as he had consolidated his power, he decided to pr onounce a formal assessment of and verdict on the C.R.

CUI YIJUN / LIBERATION DAILY / AP
Deng Xiaoping brought order to the nation after the unsettled conditions during the Cultural Revolution. He also represented continuity with the Revolution, with the party organisation and with Mao.

No assessment of the C.R., however, was possible without a similar assessment of Mao and the party. Unable to throw out Mao with the C.R., as it were, his erstwhile targets found his merits to be primary and his errors to be secondary. Mao's undeniable c ontribution lay in waging a successful struggle and in bringing the CPC to power. His mistakes, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, had stemmed, it was found, from an inability to understand what building socialism meant. This had lost China 10 years and more of development. This verdict on the C.R. and Mao was to be the foil for Deng's genius in putting economics, not politics, in command of socialist development.

Physically Deng Xiaoping was a little man, small built and stocky, but he had the makings of a big leader, unlike Zhou Enlai who seemed destined to be the permanent No. 2 in the leadership hierarchy. The story of his return to power after the C.R. is u nsavoury, and understandably it is not often recounted in China. But China was fortunate to have him as leader. He brought order to the nation and to governance after the chaos of the C.R. Above all, in his person, he represented continuity - so importan t for a C.R. ravaged China - with the Revolution, with the party organisation, and with Mao, even though he switched the tracks on which the nation was going to travel. These were the sources of his right to power.

Yet, like Mao before him, he worried about leadership succession, on which would depend the future of China. He was unlucky with his chosen heirs until he brought Jiang Zemin from Shanghai to Beijing after Tiananmen (1989) and then devoted the next six y ears of his life to grooming Jiang to be the core of the third-generation leaders of party, state and army.

LIU JIANGUO/XINHUA/AP
President Jiang with Premier
Zhu Rongji.

Deng, like Mao, had the ability to think in the round. Having put economics in command, he undertook reform from above in all sectors of society, both to support the modernisation drive and to contain the inevitable fallout on the party and society as vested interests were disturbed. At the same time, he had to manage a complex relationship with the world, and in particular with the U.S. His biggest challenge was to introduce political democracy, taken to mean freedom of expression and association, th e rule of law and the separation of powers. Both internally and externally he was unable to fit political democracy into his reforms. Instead, as student demonstrations rocked China, the 'Democracy Wall', which had come up during the C.R., came down. His new Constitution also dispensed with the earlier Maoist inclusion of 'four big freedoms' to the people, including the right to strike work.

With Tiananmen and the collapse of the Soviet Union with its break-up on ethnic lines, and its adoption of a multi-party democratic system, China became the bad boy on the block. Isolated once again, as in 1950, by the developed world, it faced internati onal criticism and sanctions on many fronts - on human rights, on its one-child population policy, on prison labour, on censorship and so on, all of which added up to a condemnation of China's refusal to abandon socialism and change to a multi-party demo cracy.

XINHUA / AP
Vice-President Hu Jintao, considered the man of the future.

There was domestic criticism of his line too from both the Right and the Left, and not until 1992 was he able to assert his free-market, get-rich strategy and tempt the developed world with the prospect of a market of a billion consumers. That strategy, with some modifications and considerable skilful diplomacy, has resulted in the lifting of international sanctions and the muting of criticism by governments wanting to do business with China. Ten years after its international standing touched a low foll owing Tiananmen, and 20 years after the reforms began, China's economic development, supported by domestic stability and considerable military muscle, both conventional and nuclear, has enabled it to recover and improve its international standing, though not its pre-Tiananmen image.

This duality will continue to characterise the way the developed world will look at China in the years to come. On the one hand, the lure of the China market will strengthen those who advocate closer 'engagement' with China, who argue that this will in t ime bring about a greater democratisation of its system. On the other, in a strange reversal of roles, the ideologues of democracy - if one can call them that - are the new Cold War warriors who argue that China should be 'contained' by putting pressure on it to change its system through strong sanctions and diplomatic and trade isolation. As China becomes stronger, these voices will probably become louder. History has no precedent for the international community's adjustment to a new power without reso rting to war.

KIMIMASA MAYAMA / AP
The Chinese flag is raised as the Union Jack is lowered at the ceremony to mark the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, in July 1997.

EVEN as China reaches a critical take-off period in its domestic development, it is faced with a new and more complex external environment. The reform era began, by contrast, in the relatively simple and predictable bipolar world, which China charted wit h some skill until the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a unipolar world and with it, supposedly, the 'end of history'. Since then new complexities have been added - for instance, the nuclearisation of South Asia and the spread of international te rrorism.

Since that time China has been concerned not only with the problem of managing this complex world, but with the need for it and India, as ancient civilisations, to influence the shape, structure and norms of the coming world order. In the last half dec ade, China has indicated the kind of world order it would like to encourage, namely one in which a number of big powers can be identified. At present these comprise China, Russia, Japan, Germany, France and, potentially, India. In this multi-polar system of its preference, no one pole can aspire to equal the U.S., but collectively and in their own interests they would be able to act as curbs on it, both within and outside the United Nations.

WIN MCNAMEE/AP
U.S. President Bill Clinton with Jiang. China's objective is to use diplomacy to avert conflict with the U.S. and point out the advantages to both countries of a cooperative relationship.

It has also revived the old India-China case for introducing a new set of behavioural norms - the Panch Sheel - to replace what it calls 'power politics'. In short, these would accept the territorial limits and the sovereignty of states; respect the righ t of governments to manage domestic problems without outside interference; help move disputes from the ground to the negotiating table; and encourage a mutuality of approach to common problems. This is its theoretical framework.

In its practice, China's grand strategy takes the U.S. as the 'other' both in terms of the world order it advocates and perhaps as the biggest obstacle to the emergence of China as a global great power. At the same time, it needs U.S. markets and U.S. technology. Its latent suspicions of the U.S. have become more overt as it aggregates the sum meaning for China of U.S. policies in the Asia-Pacific region of the past few years. Briefly these include what it sees as a qualitative change in Washington's more official relations with Taipei; the revival and strengthening of U.S. security relations with Japan and Australia; and America's proposed theatre missile defence system in Asia. Its overall objective is not to risk a military conflict with the U.S. but to use diplomacy to deflect from such a possibility and to continue to point out the advantages to both countries of a cooperative relationship.

VIDYA RAM
Tourists at the Great Wall. China's 'new security concept' calls for a series of bilateral and multilateral arrangements with its near and distant neighbours.

Partly as a result of the present skewed balance of power, partly because of U.S. policies and presence in the region, and partly because of its own limited military capability, China has begun to concentrate on Asia. The clearest expression of this inte rest is to be found in the speeches made by President Jiang Zemin on his recent state visit to Thailand. China's 'new security concept' calls for a series of bilateral and multilateral arrangements with its near and distant neighbours, which would increa se the density of interaction to the degree of making conflict a more and more distant possibility. China presents these as the building blocks of a comprehensive security system for the region, and by extension an alternative such system for the world. These arrangements, as should be obvious, have the added worth of reducing opportunities for the U.S. to take advantage of China's bilateral problems with its neighbours.

The 50th anniversary thus also marks the beginning of a period fraught with grave problems for China, both domestic and external which, in addition, intersect at many points. Some external problems have been mentioned above. China's many domestic probl ems include those that flow from a loosening of party controls, from a lack of higher purpose which has permitted religion to extend its hold and fringe groups like the Falungong to emerge; from the growing inequalities between the hinterland and the coa stal areas, the rural and the urban, the rich and the poor, the ethnic minorities and the Han, and so on, and from the consequences of its one-child family on the population profile of the early 21st century. These will test the management skills of the leadership as it takes China forward to achieving its mid-21st century goal for the Chinese state.