Domestic considerations always come first for China’s Communist Party: Rana Mitter on the CPC at 100
The Hindu
‘Xi Jinping has staked out a greater global role for China even while championing a message of assertive nationalism at home’
As (CPC) turns 100 on July 1, its current leader, Xi Jinping, has staked out a greater global role for China even while championing a message of assertive nationalism at home. How China will manage these two increasingly conflicting trends remains to be seen. For China, says, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford, and author of "China's Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism”, at the heart of the party’s aspirations is domestic stability and prosperity, and the fear of the system somehow being overturned. So, domestic considerations will always come first. Excerpts from an interview: What the ceremony showed was the continuing importance of history in the way that the Chinese Communist Party thinks about itself. Also the way in which that history is used to burnish a narrative, which essentially is about the sort of inevitability in the eyes of the party of its eventual victory. You mentioned a couple of the wars, the Chinese Civil War in which the party was seen to have showed its legitimacy by defeating its Nationalist opponents and the former leader, Chiang Kai-shek, and then the Korean War. This actually came back into prominence last year in 2020 after a long period because in China, the Korean War is not called the Korean War, it’s called the anti-American war [“the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea”]. During the period of increased tensions between the U.S. and China, it has a certain sort of historical resonance, but I think it is a really important indication that when the party thinks about 100 years of its own history, it sees it as a continuity. It sees it really as a narrative that has struggled to overcome, and doesn't really have reverses in the way that it thinks about it. That’s a large part of what the message that was being put forward today [June 29] had to say.More Related News