Predictably, the Chinese Communist Party, at its 20th Party Congress, allowed Xi Jinping a third term as President. He was applauded, in a sinister Stalinist and Maoist tradition, for his long, boilerplate ideological monologues. We have to find a way to cope with him for the foreseeable future. Neither economically, nor diplomatically, nor strategically is that going to be easy.
But let’s just imagine that Xi Jinping had sprung a surprise on the Party Congress the way Nikita Khrushchev surprised the 20th Party Congress of the now defunct Communist Party of the now defunct Soviet Union, in 1956. Better still, let’s imagine – rather extravagantly – that he did so not in the dour manner of Khrushchev, but with a dash of Jay Billington Bulworth.
In 1998, Warren Beatty, then a sprightly 60-year-old, co-wrote, co-produced, directed and starred in an uproarious political satire called Bulworth. The jaded and bankrupt American senator (Democrat, California), Jay Billington Bulworth, running for re-election in 1996, as President Bill Clinton faces off against Republican challenger Bob Dole, has a nervous breakdown and lets it all hang out on the campaign trail.
To a private audience of Hollywood grandees, he declares that they make a lot of rubbish and care about nothing but the money. To an audience of bankers and insurance brokers at the Beverly Wilshire, he breaks into a rap chant, denouncing their sordid deals with politicians and their moral hypocrisy, and calling for socialized medicine. To everyone’s astonishment, starting with that of his minders (played by Oliver Platt and Joshua Malina, who would later appear in The West Wing), his approval ratings soar.
May the Great Dictator become famous, then, for this speech, though, alas, he never gave it – with apologies to Warren Beatty.
Comrades, I stand before you having sought to overturn the basic principles of collective leadership and the ban on one man rule or the cult of personality, by having you grant me a third term as President of the People’s Republic of Amnesia.
You all know why I sought this vote and why you are here to vote for me as directed. It’s all about the China Dream. It’s because I set out a brilliant vision that all 1.4 billion Chinese people find compelling. Compelling, comrades. That’s Xi Jinping Thought.
No, hold the applause. Hold the applause. You see, I had a China dream myself, in my Zhongnanhai quarters, the other night. It didn’t go according to plan. It disturbed me greatly and yet I couldn’t wake up at will. It held me in its grip. I need to share that dream with you, comrades. I need to share that dream with you.
I found myself on the banks of a wide river. Not the Yellow River or the Yangtze. It was clear, unpolluted, flowing abundantly. On the far side, I knew, lay a socialist paradise of prosperity, freedom, equity and sound education for all, in a peaceful and democratic country. I was rooted to the ground and could not cross the river. But masses of people, good Chinese people, were crossing it, moving past me in immense numbers.
I swelled with pride, assuming that this was the realization of my China Dream. I might not be able to enter this land of promise, but I consoled myself with the thought that across the river was a bright future of socialist civilization and that the masses were moving towards it, fulfilling my hopes for them under the guidance of our Party. Xi Jinping thought, I told myself, and all this came to pass!
But then the dream changed. For, using field glasses, I saw that there were border crossings on the far bank and that the country to which the masses of people around me were intent on migrating was not our People’s Republic of Amnesia. It was clearly marked: Finland. Finland, comrades! Imagine my astonishment.
Yet those around me were clearly Chinese. What was going on? What did Finland have to do with the fulfilment of Xi Jinping Thought? It was then that I realized that all the people crowding past me, all these Chinese people moving towards and across the wide river, were ghosts. There were millions of them, but they all had the appearance of dead people: starved and emaciated, bloodied by gunshot wounds and the marks of bludgeoning and torture.
I began to toss and turn in my sleep. The dream had become a nightmare. Why were the dead, in their millions and tens of millions, all Chinese, going to Finland? Why was I stranded on the near bank? What river was this? Then I realized, comrades, who these millions were. They were those we, the Party, executed, starved to death, worked to death, tortured, drove to suicide, in the name of revolution and liberation.
I cried out in my sleep, ‘Historical nihilism! Stop it!’ But I couldn’t wake up or close my eyes to the spectacle. Then three prophetic figures came and stood before me: Su Xiaokang who made that indictment of our Party, River Elegy, in 1988; Liu Binyan, the journalist, who defied us in 1989 over our crushing of the bourgeois democracy movement; and Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist, another notorious dissident. All three fled to America, if you remember.
They looked into my eyes and I couldn’t look away. In their eyes, I saw what I didn’t want to see, what we – all of us here – insist that the country, even the world, forget. That, after all, is why we call ourselves the People’s Republic of Amnesia. Talk about River Elegy!
In the eyes of Su, Liu and Fang, I saw the stories of these countless ghosts. Long before we seized power in 1949, there were those tortured and executed as landlords, as suspected Nationalist spies or anti-Bolsheviks; those starved to death in Manchuria in the hundreds of thousands by our requisitions in the civil war – 160,000 in just the ruthless nine-month siege of Changchun by Lin Biao.
But that was the merest beginning. As the vast flow of people moved past me to the river, they, too, turned their gaze on me. All those countless, ghostly eyes! It was terrifying! There were the millions rounded up and executed in the years immediately after we seized power, denounced as counter-revolutionaries and bad elements, class enemies and reactionaries.
There were the hundreds of thousands arrested and imprisoned in the Anti-Rightist campaign in 1957, because we resented their open criticisms of the way we were running the country. You will all remember, comrades, that it was Deng Xiaoping himself who ran this campaign, just as he’d conducted the mass killings in Sichuan in 1950-51. He reported to the Politburo that he had liquidated 800,000 in Sichuan. How many in the Anti-Rightist campaign? Ah comrades, that’s a state secret. Who remembers?
Then came the victims of the Great Famine, due entirely to Mao’s reckless policies, enforced by the Party and unchecked because there was no independent press, political opposition, civil society or judicial system to bring it to light, much less bring it to a halt. How many dead, comrades? Su, Liu and Fang pressed the question on me with their silent gaze.
Forty-five million in three years. That’s how many. We, of course – I not least – have striven to bury this dark matter. But the conscientious journalist Yang Jisheng put it together, in his investigative book Tombstone. It had to be published in New York, of course, not here. We could hardly allow that kind of writing to circulate in the Republic of Amnesia, could we?
He followed it up, with a history of the Cultural Revolution called The World Turned Upside Down. Again, naturally, it was published in New York, not here. Actually, it was published first in Hong Kong. No wonder we had to shut Hong Kong down. I didn’t want to know these things, comrades. Trust me, I didn’t. Yet the three stern, unwavering figures and the haunted eyes of millions impressed it upon me. The Cultural Revolution? Millions dead again, tens of millions of lives uprooted. Why? That’s what they were asking me.
But, you and all those useful idiots abroad who have followed our fortunes since the death of Comrade Mao and lapped up the narrative spread by our organs – not least the ‘peaceful rise’ line propagated by comrade Zheng Bijian and his colleagues at the Ministry of State Security – will say, all this is rightly forgotten, because we have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and become an economic superpower.
Comrades, here is the truth, as I realized in my dream, my Zhongnanhai nightmare. We did not lift those hundreds of millions out of poverty. They lifted themselves out of poverty, just to the extent that we got out of their way and allowed them, starting with the peasants, to use their initiative. We also enriched ourselves, let’s face it. We’re a parasitic mafia, not a liberating force.
That’s what my old colleague from the Central Party School, Cai Xia, now in exile in America, has declared. That woman speaks the truth! A mafia, comrades! We have insisted on running a gigantic protection racket, maintaining political control, financial control, judicial control, whatever the cost to the people. And I am here to tell you that this has led to economic gridlock and the prospect of stagnation and social upheaval.
We forget. We deny. We lie and we suppress. We are, in very truth, the People’s Republic of Amnesia. But the people don’t want our forgetting or our lies. They don’t want suppression. They want ‘Finland’, comrades. They want Finland! And we cannot give it to them. I cannot give it to them. I realize, to my shame, that I have become an enema of the people. You are all enemas of the people!
The Party has colonized and exploited China in a manner the foreign devils never did and has killed far more Chinese people than all the Westerners and Japanese combined. Even the economic reform and opening has been bungled, because our old revolutionaries had no understanding of economics. They were all Stalinist retards. I’m a Stalinist retard, I realize. Well, a retread, anyway.
I have presided over the People’s Republic of Amnesia now for a decade and my nightmare has made me realize that we are trapped in a dead end of our own making. We have appalling environmental problems, gigantic debts, an aging and unbalanced population. We have eviscerated all civil society, all the generous idealism of human rights lawyers and anti-corruption activists. We – I – have imprisoned them by the hundred.
Instead of opening up the economic system, we have been turning it into a huge, state-debt-driven Ponzi scheme. Instead of educating our people to become effective entrepreneurs and responsible citizens, we have spent enormous sums keeping them under surveillance, censoring them, indoctrinating them, repressing them, lying to them. I think, comrades, that it isn’t only the dead who long for Finland.
We have been lying not only to the masses, but to ourselves. Crushing the democratic uprisings of 1989, Deng Xiaoping declared ‘Only socialism can save China’. Save it from what? It needs to be saved from the awful condition to which our obsessions and our ruthlessness have reduced it. And it cannot be saved from those things by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
What I realized in my dream, comrades, is that it cannot be saved by what I pretentiously called Xi Jinping Thought. I do not have answers to our problems. A true revolution is needed in this country: a democratic revolution and a lightly, intelligently regulated market economy.
I, we, have no more idea of how to usher these in than the stupid old revolutionaries who took over the country in 1949 and turned it into an impoverished slaughterhouse. Enough, already! Taiwan has set the example we must follow. Therefore, comrades, I do not seek and will not accept nomination to a third term as your President. I am resigning - effective immediately.
Paul Monk is a Fellow of the Institute for Law and Strategy (London and New York), the author of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018). His latest book is The Three Graces: Companionship, Discretion, Passion (2022), a book of 300 love poems.