China's red 'ruling class'

Seventy-five years ago on Monday, China's Communist Party was born when a group of revolutionaries got together in the then French quarter of Shanghai.

On July 1, 1921, their stated objective was to restore China to its position of power within the world.

The movement was as much nationalist as it was communist and was successful, at least, in ending the colonial carve-up of China and unifying what was a fractured land.

But the proclamation of the People's Republic in China in 1949 was not the pinnacle of the Communist Party's power. It was in the mid-1950s that the party began exerting its hold on the country.

In the late 1940s, the communist cadres were ruling China as part of the newly-arrived People's Army, having fought the Japanese and later Gen. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang troops.

And so they had to establish their control at every village, which they did through land reform by dispossessing and at times killing the big landowners.

As China approaches the 21st century, the Communist Party is still very much alive in the country. Though its current membership figure is about 57 million, the party now, however, is not a single revolutionary force which is able to lead or compel its subordinate bodies throughout the country to push through with the social changes it wants.

China's Communist Party now is like a ruling class -- it's the club one has to belong to inorder to make business contacts. So the Chinese who joined the Communist Party now tends to be the ones who want to move forward, rather ironically, in the capitalist world.

The overriding question now is whether the Communist Party can continue surviving in China that is exposed to open markets, globalization, information technology and satellite television.

Of course, that depends on all sorts of unpredictable events and quite likely the party will continue in some form or another, just as in post-Soviet Russia and other former Soviet Republics.

The same people might go on running China but whether they will still do it through the Communist Party is rather uncertain at this juncture.

-- The Nation, Bangkok