Like all dictatorships, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership presents itself as strong, secure, popular, in total control — and entitled to rule. Yet beneath this image (one that all too many foreigners often fall for), there’s a paranoia that the protective façade might collapse and leave the CCP exposed.
As a result, the CCP is obsessed with control and power.
Let me explain:
Raising millions out of poverty
The Chinese communists (and many Western “China Hands,” as some of those experts like to be called) crow about the party having raised hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. And thus the Chinese Communist Party is to thank for the PRC going from the impoverished hell-hole of Mao’s era to something better these days.
Post-Mao, China of course had nowhere to go but up.
This didn’t require any brilliance by China’s communist leaders. All the CCP had to do was stop starving and killing the Chinese citizenry. Once that happened, Chinese people’s traditional industriousness kicked in.
However, at least 600 million Chinese are still living on about $5 a day — and that’s what the CCP admits to, so the number is probably higher. Regardless, this number would be much smaller if China hadn’t had the misfortune to fall to the Chinese Communists in 1949.
Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea were also flat on their backs after World War Two, but created far more prosperous societies than the Chinese communists did.
Indeed, there would also be many more Chinese alive today if it were not for the CCP. The “Great Leap Forward” killed 45 million people — in peacetime and good weather. Add in another million or two during the Cultural Revolution. And don’t forget the one-child policy and its forced sterilizations and millions of forced abortions.
Read the rest at The Messenger.
Grant Newsham is a Senior Fellow at Yorktown Institute.