Chinese billionaires ordered to pay lagging regions, dissenters kicked out
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Since October 1934, the Chinese Communist Party has been leading the remnants of the Red Army of the Chinese Soviet Republic from the prosperous coastal provinces to the backward regions of the Northwest. Under the blows of the troops of the Kuomintang party that ruled the country, the detachments of the communists made their way through mountain steeps and snowy deserts for a whole year, dying in continuous battles, from disease and hunger. At first, Mao Zedong became the informal and then the official leader of the unprecedented campaign. He also headed the “Special Region of China”, from where the armed forces of the Communist Party launched a fight against the Kuomintang, which ended 12 years later, on October 1, 1949, with the proclamation of the PRC.
Since October 2022, the Chinese Communist Party has been leading China on a “New March”. So they began to call the second stage of the long-term plan “Chinese Dream” developed in 2012 by Xi Jinping. After the success of the first stage, called “New Era”, which lasted ten years, the current “New March” is designed to “mainly achieve socialist modernization” by 2035 before completing the entire plan by 2049.
The choice of the motto for the next stage of the Chinese Dream is, of course, not accidental. The reference to the “Long March” symbolizes a turn to the values of justice and socialism, which led the Chinese revolutionaries to a sacrificial struggle against the superior forces of Chiang Kai-shek, Japanese interventionists and local collaborators. These ideals faded in the “time of troubles” undertaken by Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution”. The socialist principles of organizing the economy and society receded into the background with the beginning of “Reforms and Openness”. This course put forward by Deng Xiaoping not only released the energy of private enterprise for accelerated development, but also led to deepening social inequality and corruption. The outrage assumed dangerous proportions, erupted several times in mass demonstrations of students, led to a revival of the rebellious spirit of the “Cultural Revolution” and the popularity of its inventor. During the riots in Tiananmen Square, I saw with my own eyes many portraits of Mao Zedong in the hands of students and workers. For them, he already then became a symbol of the struggle for justice – the age-old goal of Chinese popular uprisings.
Rigid restoring order did not lead to the disappearance of protest moods, nor to the improvement of public relations. Underlying was growing indignation at poverty, inequality, and corruption. This was evidenced by the abundance of portraits of Mao Zedong in the homes of ordinary Chinese, in taxis and eateries. Even in the altar of a Taoist temple, I found a statuette of a “great helmsman” next to Lao Tzu. Xi Jinping, who came to the leadership of the Celestial Empire in 2012, stated: “Either the party will defeat corruption, or corruption will defeat the party.” The alignment of the socialist national economy and the market economy created in the era of Mao Zedong provided synergy for economic development. But at the same time there was a displacement of communist ideas proclaimed by Deng Xiaoping by the directive “Get rich!”.
The resulting “spiritual vacuum” had to be urgently filled. This task was solved by a new ideology: “The Chinese Dream of the Great Revival of the Chinese Nation.” Its main components were the official doctrines of Marxism Sinicized even under Mao Zedong, the traditional ethical principles of Confucius and Sun Yat Sen’s “three people’s principles” – nationalism, democracy and people’s welfare. The new patriotic ideology became the basis for a long-term plan to turn China into a powerful world power by 2049. The emphasis on “reviving the nation” and the first practical successes improved the state of society and allowed Xi Jinping to start moving towards the resuscitation of the values of socialism. After summing up the first results of the implementation of the Chinese Dream Plan, the 19th Congress of the CCP put forward the slogan “Stay true to our original goal, never forget our mission.” Then, in 2017, the congress canceled the procedure introduced by Deng Xiaoping for tenure as head of the Communist Party for two five-year terms. This order was clearly aimed at denying the results of Mao Zedong’s lifelong rule. “The negation of the negation” met with no resistance either in the party or in society. Soon, the advance of trust was fully justified by Xi Jinping.
By 2021, the parameters of the “Xiao Kang” bequeathed by Confucius, a society of average well-being, have been achieved. For the first time in the history of the Middle Kingdom, poverty was lifted: 100 million people began to live above the poverty line. The per capita income has doubled. China’s GDP has doubled. All this was achieved despite the trade war launched by America in 2018 and the covid pandemic that came soon after. The movement program until 2035, developed in 2022 at the XX Congress, began to be called the “New Campaign”. The goals are another doubling of GDP and per capita income, the creation of an economy based on the achievements of cybernetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
The main theoretical innovations of the congress were the attitudes towards “internal revolution” and “general welfare”. The first consolidated the de facto revision of Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” course, which, in turn, was a negation of the period of Mao Zedong’s rule. From the first months of moving towards the “Chinese Dream”, Xi Jinping began to sharply turn China onto a new course. The orientation of the economy to foreign markets was revised to the detriment of domestic consumption and the well-being of the people. The ruling party, which had been slack during the years of “general enrichment”, began to be turned into a modern administrative structure based on the principles of discipline and unity of command. Accelerated modernization began in the armed forces – the slogan of Mao Zedong “a rifle gives birth to power” sounded in a new way. A systemic fight against corruption was launched, which affected hundreds of thousands of officials. The brutal “one-child policy” was abolished. The recovery of the environment, which had suffered from the pursuit of profit at any cost, began. China stepped out of the “shadow” bequeathed by Deng Xiaoping, abandoned passive adherence to the policies of the West, and started with the Belt and Road Initiative. In the tradition of Mao Zedong, who created the theory of the “three worlds”, Beijing began to think and act globally, under the motto of creating a “community with a common destiny for mankind.” From Deng Xiaoping’s hostility toward Moscow, the new leader moved on to accelerate the development of a “strategic partnership” and defiantly paid his first foreign visit to Russia.
The second orientation – to achieve “general welfare” – takes the Communist Party and the country away from Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening up” policy that lasted almost four decades. At the same time, no one is going to throw mud at the “architect of reforms” and subject him to direct criticism. It is clear that today’s prosperous China would not exist either without Mao Zedong or without Deng Xiaoping. Most likely, in relation to Deng Xiaoping, the same formula will soon be used as in relation to Mao Zedong: “I was 70% right, 30% wrong.”
In the “New Era” of Xi Jinping, the focus was not on the unlimited enrichment of the minority to the detriment of the majority, not on the priority development of coastal provinces, but on the balanced development of the entire national economy. Over the decade of the “New Age” managed to finally solve the problem of the lower stratum of the population – 100 million people living below the poverty line. At the same time, the “middle class” reached 400 million. But another 600 million Chinese live on an income of 1,000 yuan a month, which is about 11,000 rubles. To reduce inequality, to turn the majority of the people into a “middle class” – this is the most important political and economic task of the “New Campaign”. Increasing the incomes of all 1,400 million Chinese will create an unprecedented domestic market and reduce dependence on export earnings.
The obvious strengthening of the socialist component in the Chinese Dream does not at all mean the curtailment of the market, capitalist component. Xi Jinping is not going to “cut the goose that lays the golden eggs.” The market sector by the beginning of the 2020s provided 60% of taxes, provided 80% of jobs and 60% of export earnings. We are talking about changes not in the methods of production, but in the distribution of the produced social wealth. This process has already begun. Multibillionaires and billionaires were “convinced” to contribute billions of dollars to the treasury of lagging regions, to educational and charitable foundations. The dissenting rich had to leave the Celestial Empire. The number of fee-paying educational institutions preparing for university admission has sharply decreased – they were a symbol of unequal opportunities for children of different strata of society. The defiant luxury of life and the unconventional manners of TV show stars and influencer bloggers have received an adequate assessment from the tax authorities and the police.
The near future will show how successful the achievement of “general welfare” will be. The justification for the thesis that a qualitatively new world economic model has been created in China: “socialism with Chinese characteristics” will also become clearer. The socialist foundation of this model was laid by Mao Zedong. The successful symbiosis of socialist and market economies was brought to life by Deng Xiaoping. Based on the previous stages, Xi Jinping took up the “Great Revival of the Chinese Nation”. The Chinese banner remains red. The proponents of the theory of “constructive engagement” hoped to change its color, starting with President Nixon and his adviser Kissinger. The current Cold War against China was launched by Trump in 2018 shortly after the conclusion of the 19th Congress of the CPC, which approved the socialist-based “China Dream” as the long-term strategy of the Communist Party and the entire PRC. Illusions collapsed completely: the incompatibility of liberal capitalism in the American edition and the creation of a socialist society begun by Mao Zedong became obvious.
The east turned red, the sun rose. These words from a song from the time of the “Long March” became prophetic.
Newspaper headline:
Mao’s ideas lead the way again
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