The country therefore managed to move forward. The big step in moving forward was Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up, which provided economic inspiration and real fuel for the nation. It motivated everybody and also held the country together because collectively the Chinese felt that they could get to a better tomorrow. A propaganda poster touting Mao Zedong’s edict that youngsters from cities must go to the countryside for re-education. In 1976, at the end of Mao’s rule, the Party and the country were in shambles, and it was not clear how they could move forward. Everybody was disillusioned and didn’t believe in the Party any longer. Fortunately, at the time, China was not under heavy external pressure and the demise of Mao’s rule created new hope in the people. The fledgling structure of the state set up after the republic’s foundation, the Party design that took shape in the anti-Japanese resistance and then the civil war, and the first attempt to manage the country were de facto destroyed by this method of ruling and the systemic punishment and re-education of Party leaders. Without points of reference, however, the Chinese state soon became engulfed in a messy decision-making process that eventually centered only on Mao Zedong, who ruled by basically issuing statements that were to be followed countrywide. It was uncharted territory where only the wisdom and the practical sense of the leaders of the time tried to move statecraft and decision-making along. In the first decade or so of the PRC, the influence of the Soviets was paramount in China still, after less than a decade or so, the PRC started to shed the Soviet influence and tried to move in a different direction, which was not that of Moscow, not the example of Western countries, and not the feudal past of China. The PRC underlined its specific nature by calling on “Chinese characteristics.” These Chinese characteristics were to set apart the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the Russian Communist Party and claim that the CCP and, therefore, its PRC were to be quite different from the USSR and how it was managed. And the empire was very different than before.Ī similar political and cultural shock swept China in the last moments of the Qing empire through the civil war, the Japanese invasion and the foundation of the People’s Republic. China was searching for a new identity, a new way of thinking and a new way of ruling itself. In the third century AD, China was returned after centuries of internal wars that slaughtered most of the population. Amid the vast bloodshed, China also went through an unprecedented cultural and intellectual revolution.īuddhism came to China from India and radically changed the Chinese way of thinking about the world. After some five centuries of turmoil and strife, and an uncertain power balance, a unitary China was re-established under the Tang dynasty. However, these rules were not ready-made. China possibly never suffered a similar situation. The PRC was founded by a Western-inspired Communist Party that believed the old Confucian thinking was the root of decadence. The fall of the past dynasties was due to imperial thinking and imperial statecraft. Therefore, the new state had to be grounded on different rules. Unlike other dynasties established through foreign intervention (like the one founded by the Manchu in 1648) or through “popular revolutions” (like the one that put the Ming Dynasty in power in 1368), the PRC didn’t want to brush up and reenact the feudal dynastic past. That is, it didn’t want to reapply most of the toolkit that made the Chinese state reestablish itself over and over again during the past 20 centuries. In 1949, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established, the new country was facing issues that were unprecedented in its long history. This predicament didn’t happen because of ill feelings or the lousy judgment of past leaders but because China was facing new problems the old state structures had not been geared for since the beginning. It was unclear who made decisions, how, and through what process things could be hijacked at any moment for any given reason. The Chinese state was facing unprecedented fissures that could disrupt the country and, by extension, also create significant problems abroad. Simply speaking, these challenges were branded “corruption.” But it was far more than corruption it was the complete disruption of the decision-making process of the state coming after years of festering of long-existing problems. When President Xi Jinping came to power at the 2012 Party Congress, he had to face serious and systemic challenges to the structure of the Chinese state.
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