Comments on Visit to China

 Comments on Visit to China

My trip to China was in 2015, before President Trump challenged the Chinese communist party, (CCP), leadership on trade disparities, intellectual property theft and other abuses, - and long before the Chinese-sourced corona virus crisis. Back in 2015, the U.S. attitude toward the Chinese communist party, as expressed by the Obama administration, was that if we treated them nicely and bowed to them a little, maybe they would become responsible world citizens, and would be nice to us.

Of course, the CCP said “ah, so, thank you very much”, and proceeded their well-defined path toward regional, and eventual, world, domination. These leaders of China are totalitarian, but they are not revolutionary, firebrand communists like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De were. The current leaders, like Xi Jinping are communists, but they are also engineers, economists and professionals utilizing market principles within their totalitarian, communist system.

The distances covered in this trip were challenging. The trip covered approximately 5000 km (3100 mi) of domestic airline flights within China, and another 600 km (372 mi) by boat on the Yangtze River.

This was not just a “showcase” type of trip. We really experienced the diversity of China, from the capital and center of government, Beijing to the financial and metropolitan centers of Shanghai and Hong Kong, to the massive Three Gorges hydroelectric project, to the interior cities of Chongqing, Xi’an and Guilin. We visited interior Chinese people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. We also visited schools, jade, silk and cloisonné factories, operas, musicals, the terra cotta warriors, the great wall, – a full range of social and cultural activities.

The overwhelming features of China that I observed were people, people, people and cars, cars, cars. (Other vehicles, too), in a seemingly chaotic mix. There are 1.4 billion people in China. That’s 500 million more people than the U.S and E.U. combined. There are more cell phones in China than the U.S. has people, and they all seem glued to the ears or thumbs of the people in the cities.

There are over 150 cities in China with a population over 1 million. Cities of 1-2 million people are called “towns”. China is a massive, crowded country ruled by an ostensibly communist government with a market-oriented philosophy. That sounds like an oxymoron, but there it is. Everyone in the cities is hell-bent toward capitalism and consumerism. Marx and Lenin and Mao are rolling over in their graves, while Deng Xiaoping smiles in his grave and says “I told you so – just the way I orchestrated it”.

The Chinese are rules oriented, and people obey the rules without too much complaint. Dissension is allowed, as long as it is not too loud. The system is not our system, but it works for them. The per capita GDP in China in 1985 was $600. In 2015, it is estimated as $13,800. This is across 1.4 billion people, and this is absolutely phenomenal growth. Of course, these GDP figures are averages, and the wealth is really concentrated in the large cities and professional classes. The rural peasants (nearly a billion of them), really do not share too much in this wealth or in the social amenities that city residents get. The goal of most rural Chinese is to get to a city and obtain city-based identification.

This almost oligarchic social system must be anathema to hardline communists like Mao Zedong, but Mao tried to equalize the masses and nearly destroyed the country. Upwards of 30 million people died of famine during Mao’s “great leap forward”. And another 1.5 million died during his “cultural revolution”. We had several lectures and discussions during this trip by people who lived through these social upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s. Our tour director’s (George’s) parents were among them, and he expounded on this at some length one afternoon on the Yangtze.

Mao Zedong is still considered the founder of the present incarnation of the country. His mummified body lies in Tiananmen Square. His portrait appears on Chinese paper money. People now say that he was “80 percent right and 20 percent wrong”. Deng Xiaoping is acknowledged as the founder of modern China by instituting a market-oriented economy in the late 70’s. His successors have continued Deng’s policies and we can observe their efficacy by the growth of the Chinese economy over the last 30+ years.

Although there are no official estimates of the population of Beijing in 2012, unofficial estimates put the population at around 21-22 million. Although Beijing is the capital city of China, there are larger cities in the country. Shanghai is home to 23 million people in 2013, and is considered to be China's largest city. Others, however, argue that Chongqing, a municipality of 28,846,200 in the center of China is technically China's largest city. This is because, although the urban population of Chongqing is only 6-7 million, under Chinese law a municipality is considered to be the equivalent of a city. If we take Chongqing out of the equation, Beijing is the second largest city in China and the sixth largest city in the world, behind Shanghai, Istanbul, Karachi, Mumbai and Moscow.

Since 2015, Xi Jinping has aggrandized power and is now the “Paramount Leader” of China, essentially a permanent, dictatorial role.

Recently, The Chinese Communists suppressed knowledge about the corona virus that originated in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China and allowed it to spread, vacuumed up all the PPE they could in the world, and are hacking our vaccine efforts.

Politically, the CCP are in process of imposing a china style security system on Hong Kong, thereby nullifying its 50-year special status, increasing activity in the South China Sea and calling in their economic chips along their “Belt and Road Initiative”. The CCP also “never let a good crisis go to waste”, and they are flexing their political and military muscles all over the world, while the world is busy with the corona virus that the CCP started. The CCP is hell-bent to overcome the United States and the European Union, and become the predominant economic and military power in the world.

Much of the world is responding by classifying the Communist rulers of China a pariah in world affairs and taking legal action against them, but the long-term action against the CCP is to disengage from them in trade and finance, not easily done because of their size and the West’s debt relationship with them, but they can be increasingly directionally marginalized.

President Trump kept the CCP’s “feet to the fire” during his four years in office. Historically, Joe Biden has been “Sino-philic”, with his immediate family accused of using the past Biden vice presidency in pay for play schemes to enrich themselves. Not a positive harbinger for keeping the CCP in check in coming years.

Ray Gruszecki

December 20, 2020

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