ruling Communist Party celebrates its auspicious anniversary, the controversy is intensifying over the way to pander to the renewed prominence of authoritarian values at the guts of the world’s second-largest economy. For the party, this can be meant to be an instant for basking within the warm adulation of the masses, not for mouth a replacement conflict. And Max Baucus, the previous US political party Senator who served as US ambassador to China from 2014 to 2017, finds himself in agreement. “The vast bulk of individuals in China… care little a couple of change within the party because they’re more concerned about their own lives,” he says. “Living standards in China have risen dramatically within the last 20 years and they are very happy about this.” What to do, if anything, about the Communist Party’s tightening grip on power, the growing personality cult of its leader Xi Jinping, and therefore the draconian direction of its domestic policies is one in all the defining international policy debates of our time. And while it divides opinion in Washington and Europe – between those expressing ideological confrontation and people, like Mr. Baucus, for continued strategic engagement – such differences may be much harder to glean inside China. But they’re there. Cai Xia may be a retired professor from Beijing’s elite Central Party School, who spent her life working with and training senior officials until her growing doubts and criticisms forced her into effective exile last year. She doesn’t buy the thought that the Chinese people don’t desire political change, nor the notion that engagement with the political party is best than the choice. “It’s not too late to vary China from an autocratic system to a democratic system,” she says. “The earlier the higher, for China and therefore the whole world. although Xi Jinping requires a ‘shared future for all mankind, he has already launched the conflict and it never stops.” Beijing’s party for its party – involving large quantities of pomp, pageantry, and pyrotechnics – brings into sharp relief the prospect of an ever-rising, ever more prosperous, capitalist China with a rigid Leninist system at its heart. The question is whether or not the celebrations are just another piece of theatre – a distraction from the important story of the undoubted personal enrichment and increasing lifestyle choices of uncountable ordinary Chinese people. Or whether they seem to be a troubling reminder that each one this prosperity and power is held, ever more firmly, within the hands of a one-party state, willing to use them, not just against its own people, but the remainder of the planet. Max Baucus belongs to a faculty of thought that has dominated US relations with China over the past few decades: the assumption that trade and engagement is an end in itself. Increased Chinese prosperity and an emerging class offer the promise, the idea goes, of gradual political reform and, whether or not that comes agonizingly slowly or not in the slightest degree, economic integration is a minimum of better than the choice – confrontation. He’s worried that that consensus now appears to be shifting which a replacement, conflict mentality is control in Washington. “I think there’s an excessive amount of groupthink in Washington,” he says. “It’s very easy for members of Congress, the president, to bash China politically. it is so bipartisan, it is a big problem. “We have to be compelled to work with China,” he adds. “The people of China and America are basically identical, they care about their families, about putting food on the table. and that I think policymakers should keep that in mind.” But Cai Xia disagrees. Expelled from the party while on sabbatical within the US and now unable to return to China out of fear for her own safety, she thinks it’s folly to concentrate on the positives of economic change while ignoring the politics of the party. “Western politicians and students lack a true understanding of China,” she says. “After China spread out to the globe, it hoped to use the worldwide system to strengthen its own power, that was an important intention. That’s why it shows a friendly and open manner to the world; but, in fact, the party’s conflict mentality has never changed.” The West, she believes, fails to work out that it’s already locked into an ideological confrontation, whether it wants one or not. Deng Yuwen is that the former editor of an influential Communist Party newspaper, the Study Times, another insider who is additionally now living in exile, unable to return to China for fear of arrest following his own published criticisms of the system. He has some sympathy for the view that China’s rapidly changing economy might once have held out the prospect of political reform. “Ten years ago, the party was gradually fading into the background,” he says. “That’s what Xi Jinping wasn’t satisfied with, he considered it dangerous; so now using his own words – ‘from North, South, East, West, and center’ – the Party is comprehensively controlling the country.” Mr. Deng believes that under this renewed dominance of the party, China has taken a good leap backward. It has become an increasingly oppressive reception – with its giant re-education camps in Xinjiang and also the mass arrests in metropolis – yet as increasingly able to assert its authoritarian values on the worldwide stage. “This will gradually exert an influence on those countries. By accepting China’s system and its logic, the West may gradually change, this might be a danger for the West.” So tight are the controls on information within China, especially around important occasions like this one, that none of them were available or willing to talk. The ministry of foreign affairs failed to reply to several requests to assist source an appropriate expert on party matters, despite having offered to help.
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