After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, it was clear to pragmatists in the Chinese Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, that Maoism had not worked.
By the late 1970s, food production had failed to keep up with population growth and nine out of ten Chinese were living on less than $2 a day. But the Party didn’t want to admit the inviability of communism, its raison d’etre. Instead, it dubbed the ensuing decades of privatisation, foreign investments and lifting of price controls ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
So the country remained nominally communist, even though state-owned enterprises were liquidated en masse and the private sector made up the bulk of Chinese GDP by 2005. For hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese, like my family, reform and opening were keenly welcomed. My uncle was the first in the family to go to university; my mother found work in an international company in the city. When I came along, my childhood was not marred by hunger.
But the CCP has moved on from Deng. These days, instead of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the Party talks about ‘the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics with Xi Jinping as core’. With the abolition of term limits and an increasingly tight grip on China’s civil society, government, military and so on, Xi Jinping had already shown himself to be an ambitious Communist leader more akin to Mao and Deng than their relatively bland successors (Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao). But this year, as Xi reaches the end of his first decade in power, this is no longer enough. Xi wants to be second only to Mao, with Deng’s legacy a necessary casualty.
