Tribune. China celebrates the 100 with great fanfaree anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, established in Shanghai on 1er July 1921. For the Chinese people, there is something to be proud of: a skillfully designed and successful ramp-up on 1er October 1949, then seamless continuity. At no time has China experienced alternation at the head of the Forbidden City, or even seen the emergence of an opposition party.
At the end of this century we see the future Chairman Mao Zedong, originally a simple librarian, establishing himself first as a political leader, then as a cold-hearted military strategist, and finally as an enlightened dictator. He led his country by alternating frenzied ideological campaigns and periods of respite essential to economic recovery.
At the other end of this long history, Mao’s direct heir, Xi Jinping, who takes up the well-established methods of the cult of personality, and puts in the spotlight the hated methods of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) such as the arrest of opponents, thinkers, too ambitious business owners, in the name of sacrosanct social stability. Between these two extremes, how many Chinese sacrificed on the altar of the single party? How many divergent options could have guaranteed China a peaceful and benevolent development towards its people?
Glorious tradition
Who remembers Chen Duxiu, the first secretary of the brand new Chinese Communist Party? A man who, from the 1910s, advocated the adaptation to China of certain new ideas from the West, such as communism, it is true, but also the rejection of Confucian conservatism which had fossilized China, and the gender equality. He died in solitude in 1942, marginalized and persecuted by his great rival Mao. All the others followed: Peng Dehuai, who would have liked to temper Mao’s ardor during the reform of the Great Leap Forward, a brutal initiative which caused the famine of 30 or 40 million Chinese, then the faithful right-hand man, Lin Biao, whose he plane crashed into the ground while trying to reach Russia.
Xi Jinping has returned to this glorious tradition by first eliminating the relatives of his predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, under the pretext of “corruption”, then the civil rights lawyers, whom he had locked up by the hundreds in 2015.
Let us not forget Liu Xiaobo, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died in detention in 2017, for refusing to forget the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Liu had reminded us in a series of articles of the great blindnesses of the West in the face of the rise of the dictatorships of the twentiethe century. He said in an article posted on the Internet in 2005, and entitled “The four big mistakes of the free countries in the XXe century ”that he did not understand how Western intellectuals could have fallen in love with a dictator like Stalin. Why had France and Britain so readily agreed to compromise with Germany and Italy? After World War II, why had the United States and Great Britain made such concessions to the USSR? In the 1960s and 1970s, why did the most brilliant European intellectuals become infatuated with “Mao Zedong thought”?
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