Frank wrote on Feb 16
th, 2022 at 10:07am:
“A communist regime is built on a triple foundation: dialectics, the power of the party, and secret police—but as to its ideological equipment, Marxism is merely an optional feature.” According to this analysis, the Communist Party is best understood as essentially a secret society that rules through terror and deception. The Party’s path to power was obscure, arising out of economic and social chaos of the 1940s. It used propaganda and tight organization to turn a miniscule movement into the embodiment of the nation’s will.
But Mao did formulate one theoretical innovation, which Leys took extremely seriously. “Mao explicitly denounced the concept of a universal humanity; whereas the Soviet tyrant merely practiced inhumanity, Mao gave it a theoretical foundation, expounding the notion—without parallel in the other communist countries in the world—that the proletariat alone is fully endowed with human nature.”
The end result was a deeply scarred society: “For those who knew it in the past,” Leys wrote in 1977, “Peking now appears to be a murdered town. The body is still there, the soul has gone.” The revolution disfigured the psyche as well. The constant political campaigns, revenge, and struggle sessions, eroded any notion of shared humanity. As Leys observed, “twenty years of systemic incitation to ‘class hatred’ and denunciation of basic impulses such as a compassion for suffering whoever is the victim… has brought about the general and willed lowering of the traditional virtues that gave harmony to Chinese life.”
Replacing that harmony was a New Man, with new qualities: kindness had vanished. This absence of kindness was true in Soviet Russia as well and is in some ways the defining characteristic of a totalitarian society. In Chinese Shadows Leys quoted Nadezhda Mandelstam on the impact of Stalinism: “Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality, but it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand… Everything we have seen in our times—the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant ‘unmasking’ of people—all this has taught us to be anything you like, except kind.”
https://quillette.com/2020/09/28/analyst-of-totalitarianism-reading-simon-leys-t...I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/in-praise-of-quixotism
No matter what doubts people have about the CPC and China's political system, it is difficult to deny the success of the CPC.
In 1949, China was still a poor semi colonial country, with an average life expectancy of 35 years. Today, China has been regarded by the west as a competitor that can not be ignored.
This huge change was fully realized by the CPC in a huge country with a population of 1.4 billion. This achievement can be called great, but can the CPC maintain this achievement? How long can it last?
I think the CPC is currently implementing a major self-renewal project to combine the party with 100 years old history and Chinese young people in pursuit of advancement. The rest countries of the world may not have noticed this important development.
To be in power for a long time in the world's most populous country, the CPC relies on two characteristics - self realization and self innovation. Self realization is the goal, and self innovation is the means to achieve the goal.
The ultimate self realization of the CPC is centered on its original mission. In current words, it is around its "beginner's mind". At the beginning of its founding, the CPC established two main goals, socialism and national rejuvenation, so that China can get rid of the humiliating fate of repeated foreign aggression, poverty and weakness since modern times, build a prosperous and strong socialist society, and restore China's due status as a world power. Everything the CPC has done in the past and will do in the future is to achieve this goal.
The second characteristic of "self innovation" is the "killer application" of the CPC. After all, the CPC has accurately planned two times historic innovations, and is currently making the third times.
The first innovation of the CPC was from a revolutionary party to a ruling party after 1949; The second was a series of reforms by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, which transformed China's extremely closed planned economy into a huge market economy deeply integrated with the global economy. This helped the CPC avoid the fate of the CPSU. At the end of the cold war, many people predicted with confidence that China would embark on the same road as the Soviet Union.
In the past five to ten years, another innovation has quietly arrived, bringing opportunities and challenges to the Communist Party of China. How to carry it out will have a far-reaching impact.