Deepak Vohra

In 20 years, past my expiry date, TV channels will be expending a lot of time analyzing the rise and collapse of an ideologically, politically and economically flawed entity called the People’s Republic of China and its metastasis into a Federation of Independent East Asian States

The time spent will be more than that expended on discussing the collapse of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The distance between the past and the future is the blink of an eye, we call it the present.

The Communist Party of China, modelled on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was established on 23 July 1921. However, Mao decreed that its founding day be observed on 1 July. For the Chinese Communists, historical accuracy is irrelevant; narrative control is all that matters. The ‘great, glorious and correct” Party has ruled China for 72 years without a mandate from the people who have no say in how they are governed. 

According to traditional Chinese belief, tianming (mandate of heaven) entitles a person to rule, as long as he is capable. In theory, it can be revoked if he becomes a despot.

Xi PingPong fancies himself a “yellow emperor” and demands public adulation.

The outsized self-orchestrated pat on the back to celebrate the Party’s centenary is a sign of insecurity.

Even two years ago, foreign “friends” would have been falling over each other to get an invitation to the celebration. None of the “friends” was invited to the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party on 1 July 2021 as none would have come!

As per China’s official media, congratulatory messages came from such great democratic powers as Russia, Egypt, Angola and Congo!

As the King James’ version of the Bible laments: how are the mighty fallen!

What has kept the Party in power is ruthlessness (brutally stamping out any form of dissent, incarcerating millions, stifling speech, outlawing deviant thoughts), ideological acrobatics (from productivity-destroying people’s communes to market forces) and economic growth (despite being a kleptocracy in which wealth is sucked up by the well-connected, it has abolished rural taxes and created a welfare system for almost everybody).

PingPong believes that the Soviet Union collapsed because its rulers, at the critical moment, were not man enough to do a Tiananmen on unarmed protestors and machinegun them.

He is convinced that Nikita Khrushchev irretrievable damaged the CPSU by de-Stalinizing it, for zombies should never be allowed to question their leaders (Mao must be deified forever, despite having killed over 50 million with his Great Leap Backward in the 1950s).

Intrinsically insecure, Xi is on an endless purge of a Party riven with factionalism, disloyalty and ideological exhaustion.

Technology in China is used to crush dissent through ubiquitous street cameras, facial recognition software, censored social media.

Today’s China displays both great confidence and a sense of victimhood at the same time, pretending to be deeply misunderstood by the world, but powerful enough to thumb its nose at them.

PingPong’s keynote address at the Chinese Communist Party centenary was mishmash of old stuff.

There was nothing new, no vision, no motivation.

He talked of China’s past humiliation, its willingness to confront its detractors, its present greatness through economic progress, its military prowess, and its brilliant future. 

The peaceful rise of China shibboleth was ignored

Speaking to several thousand party zombies at Tiananmen Square (where Mao formally proclaimed the Peoples’ Republic of China on 1 October 1949 and where the Party slaughtered thousands of unarmed young protestors in 1989), Xi promised broken heads and bloodshed for anyone who tried to bully China, praised the ruling party for lifting China out of poverty and humiliation, rejected sanctimonious preaching from the free world, and promised that the era of China being bullied was “gone forever”

The phantom pain of losing imperial greatness is kept alive in the collective memory. History books, television series and newspaper articles repeatedly evoke the humiliation of the Chinese nation by foreign powers, the decline and misery.

This culture of remembrance sustains the mass appeal of Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream and keeps the people in perpetual motion mania.

He repeated a theme that Party leaders have parroted incessantly in recent months (what are they afraid of?) that the Party must maintain “absolute leadership” over the military (else the Party is history), which has to be grown and elevated “to world-class standards” (implying that it is not yet there).

Is he afraid that the Peoples’ Liberation Army might liberate the people from the Party?

The Chinese military is not invincible. If it were, they would have taken Taiwan and parts of Vietnam long ago.

He pledged to “root out any elements who would harm the party’s purity... or viruses which would erode its health”. I don’t think he was referring to his own virus.

He asked Party members to be ready to die for the Party (meaning PingPong).

The refrain of a famous Nazi martial song during the Second World War went: “Germany must live even if we must die.”

It is a combination of Chinese hubris, awareness of a deteriorating external situation, and internal leadership and economic stresses, all at the same time, which explains China’s belligerence.

Chinese history was supposed to be 3,000 years old, till a visiting Chinese Prime Minister was told that the Egyptian pyramids were at least 5,000 years of age. On his return, he summoned a bunch of academics, issued his orders, and, hey presto, China’s antiquity was increased by 2,000 years!

The recent G 7 and NATO Summit documents naming China, its virus, and the BRI explicitly as targets have not been reported in China, as the already low credibility of officialdom might plummet to unsalvageable depths and make the Chinese people realize the total isolation China faces. 

Finding his nation with its pants down, in June 2021 Xi asks his dumb officials to course-correct, abandon wolf warrior activity and create a more respectable, trustworthy and lovable image of China.

China blames everyone else except itself because the Communist God (presently Shri PingPong) can do no wrong, least of all the original sin of creating the deadly virus.

China has been chastised by various countries for suppressing information that could have helped in controlling the disease in the earlier stages.

According to a study conducted last year by the University of Southampton, if China had acted three weeks earlier, infectious cases could have been reduced by 95 per cent.

Shameful Xi continues to lead China’s unending long march of lies beginning with untruths about Communist China’s casualties during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the terrible Cultural Revolution, the wars with Korea, India, USSR, Vietnam, Tiananmen Square etc.

The US President famously said in February 2021 that his Chinese counterpart did not have a democratic bone in his body. Nor, may I add, a truthful vein?

The truth does not disappear by being denied.

When a person or institution or nation has something to hide, he or it tends to be very touchy and aggressive if demands are made to come clean.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks," says Queen Gertrude in response to the insincere overacting of a character in Hamlet.

During the Cold War, the Soviet information blockade was the Iron Curtain, the Chinese version is the Bamboo Curtain.

Glasnost and Perestroika came, and the Soviet Union went.

In June 2020, the EU took the unprecedented step of directly and publicly rebuking China as it tried to alter the narrative of how it handled the virus, unleashing a series of disinformation attacks on several European states, spreading laughable claims about the origin of the virus and the ineffectiveness of democracies’ response.

In 2008, the international community had hoped that the Beijing Olympics would usher in a democratic era in China. 13 years after the games, the Chinese state has become even more repressive and authoritarian.

There was a precedent for this hopefulness; the 1964 and 1988 Olympics had brought about a number of political and social changes in Japan and South Korea, respectively.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to shun the 2008 Olympics inaugural event following a Chinese crackdown on unrest in Tibet but meekly caved in following a wave of protests targeting French commercial interests in China, groveling in a media interview about his country’s "historic, unfailing and immovable friendship" with Beijing. Sarkozy learned the lesson that China could kick France on its stomach, where it hurts most. China too learnt that capitalists are masochists for profit.

After the spectacular Beijing Olympics, Chinese authorities changed their tone completely. They said they did not need to learn from the West anymore, and that the Chinese political system was better than other systems in the world.

The military parade in 2009 and the World Expo in 2010 enhanced this self-perception.

China tried to shed its inferiority complex and gained self-confidence, which has now developed into over-confidence.

In 2008, former President Hu Jintao pledged that the government would loosen control on media. 13 years on, the Communist Party of China regulates and controls everything.

At the annual gathering of Chinese lawmakers in 2018 President Xi Jinping said that China was now in a position to offer "a new type of political system" to the world.

The lying stakes are very high for China, afraid that the virus (that it claims to have vanquished) may draw attention to its awful domestic conditions, environmental degradation, intrusive and malfunctioning government, and poor public healthcare system.

President Xi’s legitimacy is built on narrative control.

China has grave concerns about regime stability and survival. 

Chinese officials are not savvy. They are stupid, unaware that the Middle Kingdom concept has expired.

In 2021, a US company complained to the Delhi High Court of technology theft by Xiaomi. The latter went bawling to the Wuhan People’s Court that ordered the US company to withdraw its case in India. The Delhi High Court asked the Wuhan chaps to get lost, saying that “the right of the citizen in India to legal redressal…is hallowed, sacred and fundamental.”

Some months ago, an Indian news portal published an unflattering report on PingPong. An apoplectic Chinese Embassy ordered them to retract. We believe in press freedom, riposted the portal. What is that asked the Chinese Embassy?

PingPong is a made-in-China fake.

Xi Jinping reminds me of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, egotistic, megalomaniac, narcissistic, with a deep need for excessive adulation, making his ideas the core philosophy of the nation as divine knowledge, and giving frequent commands of “off with his head”. I do not know what you mean by your way, the Queen rebukes someone, all the ways about here belong to me.

While it is perfectly acceptable for China’s confidence to grow, becoming a true global power requires deeper empathy with foreign nations and value system values that other nations can accept and appreciate.

Ping Pong has succumbed to the Caligula Trap of trying to rule through fear and terror. Rampaging through Rome in the 1st century, Gaius Caligula (the name means “little boot”) famously said of his enemies: “Let them hate me as long as they fear me.”

In 2019, China tore up the Hong Kong agreement and asserted its control.

It creates historical fiction to grab real estate from all its neighbours and scoffs at international arbitral awards.

Unfortunately for the CPC, the negative projection of China has replaced the wide-eyed admiration of just a decade ago. China is now presented as an aggressive monster, intent on taking over the world.

In 1996, a group of Chinese Communist Party academics produced a collection of polemical essays entitled “China Can Say No”, arguing that China was sufficiently economically developed to start imposing itself on the rest of the world. In reality, popular nationalistic sentiment in China is a source of deep concern for the ruling Communist Party since most Chinese want to move freely in their country and let their children study in the city where they wish to study, they want to hear the truth, they want dignity.

Chinese Whispers was once a party game. A message would be relayed in hushed tones through a long line of people and emerge at the other end amusingly garbled.

China is like a dying person sinking fast, trying to hold back the wheel of history.

Rather than regret the deaths of over 4 million people and hundreds of millions infected by its virus, the CPC makes Wuhan, ground zero, whose11 million residents endured a 76-day lockdown, have a massive, faked pool party to celebrate the end of the virus and reopen schools with 1.4 million students in September 2020.

The besetting sin of China’s policies is intellectual sclerosis. It saw how allies invariably succumbed to American blandishments and think it can use that as a template.

But it is a different world we wake up to everyday.

Mao Zhedong’s rigid dogma brought intense misery to the Chinese people.

Selected as a mild-mannered compromise candidate in 2012 over Le Keqiang the present Prime Minister, he turned out to be a wolf in bat’s clothing, systematically taking over leadership of the Party and the military, and in the guise of a wildly popular anti-corruption campaign weeded out over a million party officials, ministers, bureaucrats and military personnel.

Xi Jinping’s Thoughts for New Era Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is now state policy.

Even as PingPong is dancing, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says that for doing peaceful human rights work, people are denied access to medical treatment, lawyers and their families.

Xi rides a dragon that is externally intimidating but internally fragile.

(Deepak Vohra is a senior diplomat, special Advisor to Prime Minister on Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil)