China Analysis Digest #84

"as the curtain closed on the congress, students of its ‘spirit’ may be left pondering: just how might a Party official find the time to keep up with the Party Centre’s preferences, digest the latest in Xi Thought, discern flutters of grass—and all while leading every node of the state’s activities? And what is the fate of the state as its Party-defined role becomes more of a supporting one to the Party protagonist?"

"Individual worth and human autonomy have been topics of concern to China’s Communists, and their opponents, since the Yan’an Rectification Campaign of the early 1940s...They were again taken up by Mao and his theoreticians in the early 1950s and remained a central feature of the Maoist remolding of China thereafter.

After Mao’s death, the question of humanism and human value, and concomitant issues like human rights, would be a focus of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983-1984...and a prelude to the crushing of the mass protests of 1989.

The Communist Party’s view of human worth, particularly its usefulness in achieving and maintaining political power, has been consistently, and narrowly, utilitarian and inhumane, as well as anti-humanist."

"the Korean story is one in which political authoritarianism was accompanied by miraculously fast economic growth, which in turn became the material basis for a democratic push led by the middle class. Could China take a similar path?

...

South Korea is often cited as evidence that democratization is indispensable to achieving high-income status. It is true that China may reach that level by the mid-2030s without competitive elections or even significant liberalization. Still, the next 10-15 years may open a window for democratization of the kind that Koreans scrambled through from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s"