The heads of many of the world's leading companies have already booked hotel rooms in Shanghai and Beijing for this autumn, to join the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on 1st October 1949. The availability of a large number of world-class hotel rooms in the two cities, with all attendant amenities, are symbols of what is to be celebrated: a China which, while still nominally under the control of the Communist party, has become deeply dependent on foreign business to reward its own massive bureaucracy.
As they applaud each other's speeches and toast their interconnections, party leaders, foreign financiers and those home-grown Chinese entrepreneurs favoured with invitations to the key events, will doubtless be somewhat aware of the oddness of the situation. What they will be celebrating, under the guise of a boisterous "socialist market economy," will in fact be the denial of pretty much everything the Communist party stood for at the moment of its triumph over Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist forces back in 1949: the ending of the assertive foreign capitalist presence in China; the adoption of a system of centrally controlled ownership of the means of industrial production on the Soviet model; the implementation of a land reform programme that would gradually make it impossible for farmers to make a profit from the sale of their produce in an open market; and the absolute control by the Party of China's cultural and intellectual life. At the various 50th birthday parties there will doubtless be dutiful references to Mao Zedong's celebrated 1949 phrase that China had at last "stood up," but there is unlikely to be much attention given to Mao's belief that an austere Party organisation, steeled by the hardships of guerrilla life, gave the best (indeed only) hope for the entrance of the Chinese to the promised land.
This is not the only big Chinese anniversary to fall in 1999. The 80th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 has already come and gone. It is now sometimes acknowledged that the Communist party's leading role in those events is a myth, but there has been little official discussion of the democratic demands that lay at the heart of May Fourth. The 10th anniversary of Tiananmen on 4th June was, of course, officially ignored. The square was closed for "repairs."
But there are four more notable anniversaries this year-1979, 1959, 1899 and 1799-which, in different ways, shed light on China's current dilemmas. The most distant in time, the bicentennial anniversary of 1799, was the year the longest reigning emperor in China's history, Qianlong, died aged 88, after holding power for 63 years. It was Qianlong who made modern China a central Asian power, by invading and conquering the desert region stretching to Kashgar, and incorporating that immense region into the empire of China under the name of Xinjiang. This doubled the size of China and brought large Muslim populations under Peking's control, changing the significance of China's western frontiers and the strategic role of Nepal, Afghanistan and Tibet in the politics of the Chinese border regions.
It was also Qianlong who supervised the most comprehensive effort ever undertaken in China to purge the written record of any works considered damaging to the ruling dynasty. He achieved this by an encyclopaedic, state-sponsored publishing programme, which collated all known written materials, destroyed those found wanting, and preserved the others in state-approved editions. People found in possession of works judged improper were punished with penalties ranging from fines to exile or execution.
More instructive to audiences in 1999 would be the events that followed Qianlong's death. His reign had been moralistic on the surface, but was known to be corrupt at its heart. Qianlong himself gave immense authority to a clique of court favourites, most spectacularly to a former member of the imperial bodyguard named Heshen. By 1799 Heshen had acquired a huge fortune in cash, jewellery and property, mostly in the form of gifts from those in office seeking to buy his protection as they used their positions to amass their own fortunes. The cycle of influence-peddling was heightened by the spread of domestic dissent and local rebellions, which enabled Heshen to deflect large sums from the central treasury to his favoured generals, to wage campaigns that were often never fought.
Although after Qianlong's death the new emperor ordered the arrest of Heshen and the confiscation of his fortune-Heshen himself being "permitted" to commit suicide-the damage to China had been huge, and it can be argued that many of the roots of China's 19th-century malaise in domestic and foreign policy sprang from the shattering of bureaucratic morale and integrity that had occurred in the last years of the 18th century. There is an obvious contemporary parallel in the government's attempt to curb the corruption of its own members, while simultaneously trying to maintain their morale in a time of desperately difficult transition.
Moving forward 100 years, we come to the anti-foreigner Boxer uprising of 1899. Although the most dramatic of the Boxers' actions-the siege of the foreign legation quarters in Beijing-occurred in the summer of 1900, the underpinnings of the uprising took place in 1899. What parallels are there here? One could consider how economic expansion and the proselytising zeal of foreign powers destabilised the social and economic order of the Chinese communities in which they were operating. There are also parallels in the range of expressions of local dissatisfaction in today's China, from witchcraft to factory burnings.
There are two other significant anniversaries which will not attract attention. One, the 40th anniversary of the Great Leap Forward in 1959; the other, the 20th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's 1979 trip to the US.
It was in 1959 that the Communist party decided to persevere in the collectivist revolution known as the Great Leap Forward even though they knew full well that the Leap was already causing catastrophic hardship in many areas of China. Central to the decision to persevere was a debate that took place between Mao and his most respected senior military officer, Marshal Peng-Dehuai, commander of north China's guerrilla forces against the Japanese in the early 1940s, and against the UN forces in Korea in the early 1950s.
In the summer of 1959, Peng wrote a personal letter to Mao, warning him that many areas, including Mao's own home village in the central Hunan province, were unable to produce food on the scale now being demanded by the central planners; that the plans for increasing industrial production through such means as "backyard furnaces" were failing; and that in many areas of the country famine was looming. What China's current leaders would do well to remember is that not only did Mao treat Peng's well-intentioned and confidential comments as tantamount to treason, but that when Mao circulated copies of the letter to the other senior members of the Communist party, none of them came to Peng's support, even though most of them knew that the marshal's analysis was correct. Historians now see this period as a turning point in the collapse of moral courage at the heart of the Party apparatus. The allegorical use of the case of Marshal Peng by historians inside China was also central to the build-up of criticism against the Party that exploded in the cultural revolution of 1966. In the time between the two events, more than 20m Chinese died in the famines that were the result of Great Leap Forward policies.
Finally, 1979 was the year in which Deng Xiaoping travelled to the US to agree full diplomatic representation and sign deals for increased foreign investment that seemed to augur well for the new era of flexibility after the death of Mao. Deng was photographed grinning in his new Stetson hat in Texas, and making visits to the Coca-Cola plant in Atlanta and Boeing's headquarters in Seattle. It was also the year when Chinese troops invaded Vietnam in a botched attempt to assert their influence there; when the flourishing forum for debate and argument known as the Democracy Wall was closed by the government; and when Wei Jingsheng was arrested.
Giving an airing to the case of Wei Jingsheng would be particularly helpful now, because he represented the attempt by the Red Guard generation of young Chinese to recreate in their own heads the unknown forms of government that they had never been allowed to study or to practice. Like many of his contemporaries, Wei was deprived of his schooling because of the imperative to serve Mao "by learning from the workers and peasants." But in his Democracy Wall posters and in his essays for unofficial magazines, Wei made a formidable attempt to assess how the underpinnings of democracy might be established in China; he also sought to give a reasoned analysis of the nature of the Party's dictatorship, and of how things had reached their current impasse. For good measure, he added in early 1979 a description of life inside China's maximum-security political prisons. Wei was arrested and given a 15-year jail sentence on trumped up charges that he had passed secret information on China's war in Vietnam to foreign reporters. After long years in prison, a brief release, and a rearrest on equally trumped-up charges, in 1997 Wei was allowed to leave China for the US, where he now lives.
Considering the 20th anniversary of these varied events could be combined with a more general reflection on the cultural scene that prevailed in China at the time of the Democracy Wall. The poetry and the fiction of the time, along with explorations in the visual arts and in music, marked a decisive shift away from Maoist social realism; although formally suppressed along with the writings of Wei, they have continued to circulate. Especially germane nowadays would be a 20th-anniversary reprise of what the Chinese authorities used to call the "misty" poetry of writers such as Bei Dao. Like Wei, Bei Dao was a child of the cultural revolution, and like Wei, he now lives in forced exile in the US. If Wei was trenchant and sometimes crude in his thought, Bei Dao was evasive and subtle. But just as Wei's message was hard to drive into oblivion, so Bei Dao's images were hard to erase from the minds of the young students who learned to chant them in 1979:
Debasement is the password of the base.
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.
Let me tell you, world,
I-do-not-believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number one thousand and one.
I don't believe the sky is blue:
I don't believe in thunder's echoes:
I don't believe that dreams are false:
I don't believe that death has no revenge.
Despite their "mistiness," even these few lines could form an admirable talking point for the Party leaders as they launch their anniversary celebrations in October. That would truly be a debate worth attending.
