Migrant workers, engineers, bankers, cooks, taxi drivers, farmers, students and bureaucrats lock arms and sing the national anthem. On this 60th anniversary, China is marking its resurgence as a great nation that will soar to ever greater heights as long as all Chinese people stick together.

The show ends with “Long Live the Great Communist Party” flashing on the screen.

“Road of Renaissance” mixes two conflicting sentiments: victory and victimization. These clashing themes of unbridled national pride vs. distrust of foreigners are cross-stitched throughout the fabric of China’s national psyche and political culture. They are also deeply entrenched in China’s vast economic planning bureaucracy and fused into the DNA of the country’s extensive new industrial policies that Party leaders have hung under the banner of “Indigenous Innovation.”

The result is an indigenous innovation political and economic campaign that amounts to an all-hands-on-deck call to action for the Chinese nation to roll up its sleeves and complete the mission of catching up and even surpassing the West in science and technology that began 200 years ago when foreigners with modern weaponry and transportation technology came calling as the Chinese dynastic system was dissipating.

The full report can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, innovation
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If I may be allowed a bit of simple prognosticating, let me say that the next ten years will decide China’s future.

2012 is the year that Hu Jintao will pass power to the next generation of leaders. While the CCP’s statutes do not place limits on the tenure of the general secretary, provisional rules on term limits issued in 2006 (党政领导幹部职务任期暂行规定) specify that party leaders should hold office for no more than two terms.

If during the coming ten years China’s political climate continues at its present tempo, if there are no dramatic political bumps, we can be fairly certain that the leader who takes the reins at the 18th Party Congress in 2012 will remain as China’s national leader when the 70th anniversary rolls around in 2019.

China cannot be allowed to slide into chaos. This is something all Chinese can basically agree on. But if the CCP continues to drag its feet on political reform, we should all be deeply concerned.

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Post tags: 1949 60 years, CCP 5th generation, China's future, political reform
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Mao, Deng, Jiang and Hu were all represented together during the festivities. And in fact, the ceremonies included two anthems symbolic of Hu Jintao’s leadership.

“Oh, Lovely Land,” which accompanied the massive portrait of Hu, is perhaps not an anthem in praise of him personally, but praises him indirectly as a leader who “governs for the people”:

The ordinary people are the earth;
The ordinary people are the sky.

“On the Sunny Road,” which Peng Liyuan (???) sang over the grandiose fireworks display, was a clear and conscientious choice:

On the sunny road,
In the air the banners soar.
Scientific development and harmony,
Guide China to brighter shores.

“Scientific development” and the “harmonious society” are of course markers of Hu Jintao. They are his political banners.

These four songs — or five — all fall into China’s tradition of what can be called “song politics,” or gequ zhengzhi (????). They mark the intersection of high-level power plays and political slogans with the realm of culture and popular entertainment.

They are also relics of the totalitarian era.

Watch Peng Liyuan perform “On the Sunny Road”:

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, Peng Liyuan, propaganda
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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, Beijing, photographs
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Last summer, at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, a similar extravaganza led viewers through 4000 years of Chinese history and then—in a telling silence—skipped the years 1949 to 1979. Those Mao years are hard to look at, and a lot of flash is needed to cover what actually happened. A man-made famine killed at least 30 million people; ideological campaigns and labor camps killed millions more, traumatized the entire society, undermined a nation’s idealism, and turned public political language into a cynical game of intimidation and word-manipulation. (And this leaves out the initial violence that brought the communists to power.) These are the major facts of those years, and it is a trick to celebrate them.

Defenders of the Communist Party’s record argue that “the second thirty years” are very different from the first. “Reform and opening” has brought economic growth, higher living standards, integration with the world, and greater flexibility in daily life. These indeed are important advances over the Mao period, but to “credit” them to China’s ruling elite, rather than to the billion or so people who are ruled, is a bit perverse. Imagine things from the point of view of an ordinary Chinese worker: a brutal regime has its foot on your neck for years; then it relents, but says “now you may make money, but only that—no politics, no wayward religion, no trouble-making.” So you take the one category of freedom you are offered and pour everything into it.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese have taken this deal, and have worked long and hard, for low wages, often in sweatshops, with no unions, no medical insurance, no workers’ compensation, no recourse to independent courts—and have made money, at least more than they had before. About a quarter of the population still lives in dire poverty, while the ruling elite, now leaders of a large political-economic interest group, has been catapulted to wealth and even to gaudy opulence. Economic polarization is now greater in China than in the U.S. (where it has been growing). The Communist Party credits itself with “lifting millions from poverty,” but it is more accurate to say that the millions have lifted the Party.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, PRC history
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Shortly before the 60th anniversary of communist China’s founding on October 1st, police in the south-western city of Chongqing opened an unusual exhibition. On display, to invited guests only, were 65 luxury cars formerly owned by the bosses of the city’s crime gangs as well as an assortment of jewellery, guns and drugs. Chongqing, the wartime capital of China, had been a hub of organised crime in pre-communist days. Now the gangs are back, with roots in the party that almost wiped them out six decades ago.

In Beijing the huge military parade on October 1st, China’s first in ten years, was intended to show off a modern, powerful face. The country’s leaders had reason to flaunt their stuff this year. Not only has China made enormous economic and technological strides since 1999, but it has also weathered the global financial crisis with remarkable resilience. Officials had worried that widespread lay-offs in export businesses could lead to social unrest. But, apart from bloody rioting in the far-western region of Xinjiang in July, fuelled mainly by ethnic rivalry, the past few months have seen no obvious increase in the number or scale of protests.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, Chongqing, Chongqing corruption, Xinjiang
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I am highly suspicious that the director is employing irony in his method. Take for example that scene when those founding generals uproariously sang L’Internationale, and when Mao Zedong said, we should be forever united. (At that moment) I sensed this movie’s real potential to become a true classic: if it did not end in 1949, but rather in 1976! In 1949, the sincere people sincerely embraced the sincere Mao Zedong and the sincere New China. Yet, after 60 years, the people still do not own even a single meter of their own land. We are all no more than tenants. Before, our ‘old society’ was composed of many classes. Now it is much simpler, there are only four: the poor, the housing slave, the rich and the obscenely rich.

In another sense, The Founding of a Republic is like a love story. It artistically recounts the story of an impoverished boy who was pursuing a rich family’s daughter. The Communist Party was the poor boy, the New China is the daughter waiting to be married, the KMT is the fiancé and all those democratic parties and independents are the daughter’s friends. The boy’s secret to success is to have dreams, brag about future, relentlessly network and make many empty promises. Of course, being unafraid to fight is the most important of all. At last, he successfully married the New China. Apparently, the life after this marriage is not much different than the life after your marriage.

Have you met your promises you made when you were dating?

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, Han Han, The Founding of a Republic
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My house arrest in the compound would be temporary and voluntary, and merely a side effect of Beijing’s careful preparations for a parade, which allowed for no unauthorized bystanders along its route. But there was something more threatening about these particular rules. A collection of dismal concrete high-rises surrounded by big walls and guards, the compound always had the feeling of a refuge and a kind of prison. To hammer the point home, the parade, I had heard, would be first and foremost a show of China’s military might.

Most of these walls aren’t that hard to climb over. The Manchus invaded. These days, a piece of software, a virtual private network, can let your eyes wander outside China’s nanny internet, to such risque enclaves as Twitter or Youtube.

But there are bigger walls, harder to surmount. The house arrest, the real kind, is a favorite pastime of the Beijing police. They’re always likely to send grim looking men to camp out outside your apartment building if you’re an outspoken AIDS activist or a human rights lawyer, especially when US congressmen are in town, or a sensitive anniversary is approaching.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, Fag Binxing, GFW, house arrest
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Thousands of prisoners in China benefited from last week’s celebrations to mark 60 years of communist rule, with sentences reduced and parole granted by provincial authorities, a human rights group said Thursday.

China’s leaders did not issue any special pardon for the holiday, which saw a carefully choreographed military parade attended by Communist Party chiefs, the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation said. Instead, the actions were taken by authorities in three provinces, it said, citing state media reports.

It was not clear if any of the inmates were political prisoners, such as those arrested for taking part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement or prosecuted under China’s broad state security laws.

Prison authorities normally announce sentence reductions and paroles ahead of traditional festivals such as Chinese New Year but not for political celebrations like last Thursday’s National Day celebrations, the human rights group said.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, prisoners
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@wenshiyi:  The order of the three slogans yelled by Hu Jintao was very interesting.  Long Live the Great Chinese Communist Party! Long Live the Great People’s Republic of China! Long Live the Great Chinese People!  To use Mencius‘s language: the ruler ranks the highest, the state comes next, and the people count the least.  [Mencius's original quote was "The people rank the highest, the state comes next, and the ruler counts the least."]

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@ Gongminyaoyao: I only have one thing to say about the military parade: the government can drive tanks on the street to show off the nuclear missiles,  but ordinary citizens could not get kitchen knives in the supermarket.

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@ anonymous: [Internet censorship instructions to website editors]?The following type of information is strictly forbidden to appear on all websites. If you see it, immediately delete it and report the posting IP  [to Internet police]
1. Eulogy for sixty year anniversary of the Chinese nation. ??????
2.The Great Motherland is much older than sixty years. ????????????
3.Demonstrate in black on October 1st. ??????
4. Demonstration in Wuxi over illegal evictions. ??????????
5. The explosion in the Xinjiang restaurant in Beijing is a deliberate human action. ????????????
6.  Xi Jinping failed to be promoted to the vice-chairmanship of the Central Military Committee Xi?????????
7. The Rights Protection Group of Hong Kong Investors going up to Beijing to petition again.  ??????????????????

@hansenguy : If Lu Xun lived today: most people would say they have never heard of him, and a very small group of people would have heard of him after they climbed over the Great Firewall. And a tiny tiny group of people, exiled overseas, would protest in front of the PRC embassy, demanding his release. 

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@wangpei: Han Han wrote: in our country, citizens have the freedom to publish, but the government also has the freedom to not let you publish, and the latter has the right to interpret [the Constitution].

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@try2feel: I asked two venture capitalists after a couple drinks during a banquet: Why do you guys care so much about politics? One said: to understand the CCP is my professional need.  The other said: therefore opposing the CCP became my personal hobby. 

??????????????????????????????TG?????????????????????TG???????

Twitterers are often not just tweeting short texts, they also share photo links in their networks as well. Here are some photos from the parade:

And a cartoon: The Qin Shi Huang block in the parade ???????????? http://twitpic.com/kbutg

The above comments and images represent one line of thinking that was apparent on Twitter in recent days. However, because Twitter is blocked in China, those who still using the service from China tend to be those netizens who make the effort to “jump over” the Great Firewall. Therefore, Chinese tweets tend to be more political and more critical of the government that other online forums. If readers surf Chinese BBS (online forums), they are far more likely to find more celebratory comments about the military parade during National Day. Here is a very popular music video, made by two Tsinghua graduates who are currently living in North America, which expresses such feelings:

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, Ai Weiwei, bloggers, grass-mud horse, nationalism, tweets
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