Glory to the party

This year marked the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the truth is that those in charge there have reason to celebrate in style because thanks to it communism is maintained in China where the Party controls everything, sees everything, hears everything, knows everything and, as Xi Jinping himself has said, the Party is everything, "it is the east, the west, the north and the south". It is the glue that holds the invention together, a gigantic system of meritocracy by virtue of which ninety million comrades control with an iron fist the government, the armed forces, the security apparatus, the economy, science, culture... and also 1.4 billion compatriots. It controls everything, it is omnipresent and supervises everything. Its power is immense because it is both the engine and the brake on everything China does. It is a driving force in that it is a force for economic development and social progress, which are the main source of legitimacy for a system that has lifted 600 million people out of poverty in recent decades and turned China into a major global power, and also a brake because its own rigid, pyramidal structure and the absence of freedom within it, the lack of discussion and the crushing of disagreement hamper the possibilities of innovation because they hinder the debate that is at the root of progress.

Communism is China's great myth. And it works for them. Yuval Noah Harari says that humanity's success is due to its ability to believe in fictions such as religions, ideologies, nations, paper money or even corporations that are not tangible realities or whose symbolic value exceeds their material value. The important thing is that many of us share this belief because then we give it corporeality, we make it real and we act accordingly. Régis Debray goes further when he says that myth makes the people and not the people the myths and he must know what he is talking about because he contributed directly to inventing the myth of Che Guevara's revolutionary epic. Now the CCP has used this celebration to create the myth of its own infallibility by rewriting China's history over the last hundred years in a way that highlights its successes and hides its mistakes, which is what all dictatorships do. Stalin had those he ordered executed erased from the pictures because if they were counter-revolutionary traitors they could never have been his friends, the very doubt had to be nipped in the bud. George Orwell imagined a Ministry of Truth with the aim of continually rewriting the past to suit the convenience of the present because he knew very well that he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past... because he can modify it to suit himself.

Said and done. The CCP has revised Chinese history in the light of Xi Jinping's Thought, which is embedded in the Constitution itself, and has elevated to its secular altars a Communist Trinity without any stain of sin, which is saying something. In it Mao Zedong is the hero who ended the century of humiliation that began with the shameful opium wars and founded communist China, Deng Xiaoping is presented as the pragmatic man (it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, the important thing is that it catches mice) and the strategist of the country's economic and social development, and Xi Jinping, the third Trinidadian, is the one called upon to achieve a "developed socialist" welfare society, to gain the international respect China deserves as a hegemonic power, and to achieve territorial integrity by welcoming Taiwan into the bosom of the motherland. In this custom-made history, inconveniences are forgotten, such as the fact that Deng himself once said that Mao had been right 70% of the time and wrong 30% of the time. Also forgotten are the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, the Great Leap Forward that cost 30 million dead, the Cultural Revolution itself, a Communist Inquisition that was the greatest attempt to control thought ever made on planet Earth, or the current repression of nationalists and dissidents because what Xi really wants is not so much to be Mao as not to be Gorbachev, who this Christmas was precisely thirty years ago that he ended the USSR. And for that Xi Jinping counts on the Party and pampers it like the apple of his eye in a perfect symbiosis in which leader and party serve each other in the service of his goal of domination.
 
Jorge Dezcallar Ambassador of Spain