About a year ago, former Prime Minister of Australia and sinologist Kevin Rudd wrote that Red China is “back.” If only Beijing could come to its senses and return to the policy of “Reform and Opening Up” it pursued so successfully for 40 years, he argued. But Rudd, like many others, has based a pious hope on a faulty analysis, one which goes as follows: Deng Xiaoping and his followers abandoned Marxism the moment Mao Zedong died in 1976 to transform an insulated country reeling from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution into the world’s second-largest economy.
The key term is obviously “reform.” For decades, a motley crew of foreign politicians, entrepreneurs, and experts have told us that “Reform and Opening Up” meant a move from the planned economy to a capitalist one. And in the wake of economic reform, they have assured us that political reform would inevitably follow, turning China into a responsible stakeholder if not a thriving democracy. There were major economic reforms but the political shift never happened. None of these fortune-tellers had bothered to genuinely read the country’s constitution, listen to its leaders, or understand its past.
One common view is that since every one of China’s leaders after Mao was a victim of the Cultural Revolution (Deng was purged three times; Xi Jinping was sent into exile in the countryside at the age of 15), they understood all too well the danger of power wielded by a capricious hand. But the opposite is true. After Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966, he first allowed select students called Red Guards, then the population at large, to ferret out and denounce every party member who might have harbored misgivings about his leadership and the revolution at large. “Bombard the Headquarters,” he urged his followers. The result was a social explosion on an unprecedented scale. Party officials recoiled in horror, many of them hauled to denunciation meetings, paraded through the…
