Dan Snow's History Hit - 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

100 years ago the Chinese Communist Party was founded and across the span of that century has become one of the most powerful organisations on the planet. Today, it is an economic powerhouse and a superpower challenger to the United States. Its origins were humble though with just a few members at its foundation. Indeed, the official anniversary date of 1 July was chosen by Chairman Mao years later as the real date remains a mystery. China saw an epic struggle through the 20th century both with external enemies and between its own people with the CCP emerging victorious in 1949. Following the communist victory, there were decades of Mao's rule which became increasingly erratic and led to the death of many millions during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural revolution. Following Mao's death, the country changed tack and started to move towards the China that we know today economically and politically. To help make sense of this tumultuous 100 years and where China stands today on the world stage Dan is joined by Richard McGregor a journalist and author and formerly the Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Dan Snow's History. The date is disputed.

The circumstances unclear. But the world today, the 1st of July 2021, is marking the 100th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party. Today, or thereabouts in 1921, a handful, tiny group of young Chinese men gathered together to found the Communist Party. 100 years later, that communist organization does not just wield total power within China, but is feared, studied, sometimes emulated, discussed all over the world. It's one of the great forces of the 21st century. Here to talk to me about that founding moment and about the hundred years since is the excellent Richard McGregor. He's a journalist. He's won many awards and author.

He was the Financial Times Bureau Chief in Beijing and Shanghai for 10 years at the beginning of the 21st century. And he's written a few books, as you'll hear, about China's history, China today, and where China might be going in the future. This is a subject that we need to know about, folks. We need to know about because the Chinese Communist Party is going to have pretty big influence over our lives, those of our children, and in fact, over the future of the human race on this planet. Apart from anything else, its leadership is now arguably

the key player in the human fight against catastrophic climate change. So let's find out where it all began. Just before you do so, lots of people actually joining historyhit.tv at the moment. Perhaps it's because everyone's sick of the ads. I don't know. But anyway, if you want ad-free podcasts, or because they visited our stand at the Chalk Valley History Festival and hung out with the team and realized what a brilliant, brilliant thing historyhit.tv is, for any of those reasons and more, historyhit.tv is going through a little mini boom at the moment, which is very nice to see. You just head over to history.tv, you sign up, you get hundreds of hours

of history documentaries, and you also get this podcast without the ads. Very nice. In the meantime, here's Richard McGregor marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Enjoy. Richard, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. For one of the most powerful entities, organisations on planet Earth in 2021, the Chinese Communist Party at its birth, you wouldn't have picked it out, would you? No, well, it started small, like most babies, I guess, but it's about 12 to 13 people, all but one or two of them Chinese. In the French concession in Shanghai, they had a member of the Comitern or the Communist International there. In fact, the Communist International was really a driving force in the way the Communist Party of

China ran in its early years. And they had a series of meetings over some weeks in July of 1921. We're celebrating the 100th anniversary of the party on July 1, but even that date is not certain. I think Mao was asked to nominate a date in the late 30s. He couldn't remember when that exactly met. And he nominated July 1. So that's what it is. And that's why the 100th anniversary falls on that day. Who were these young men who decided that they were

going to start a communist party? And were they heavily influenced, as you say, by the international communism? Yes, well, they were heavily influenced by a number of factors. First of all, in China itself, you know, revolution was already in the air, right? The last Chinese dynasty, the Qing dynasty, had fallen in 1911. There was a real sort of upheaval of emotion amongst the Chinese people to rid the country of the foreigners who'd carved it up in so many different ways and, in fact, would continue to do so for the next few decades. There was a republican movement as well, which is the Kuomintang, the nationalist party. And then, of course, there was the Bolshevik Revolution, which was the inspiration for many

labor movements, left-wing movements around the world. And China was no different. And in fact, you know, Stalin, who I don't think by 21 had taken over the Soviet or Russian party, and the Russians were really one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Communist Party. And to make one other point, it was the Russians or the Communist International who basically made the communists cooperate for a long time with the Kuomintang or the Nationalist Party. So they were kind of a united front for many years against anti-foreign, anti-imperialist, anti-Japanese. And China was a tricky one, wasn't it? Because people went back, looked at Marx and said,

hang on, there should be a bourgeois revolution here. What was the thinking at that early stage? What did the communists want to achieve? Well, I think most of all, it was independence from China, but that was laced with a sort of anti-imperialism. It was the communists who were behind the organisation of a lot of labour unions or trade unions in those days. Remember, this was also a period in which we had tens of thousands of Chinese returning from overseas where they'd been studying. After 1911 and before that, many had been able to go overseas and imbibe foreign ideas. And the two most important countries in that respect were Japan and France. And I think

it was in France that the Communist Party or Chinese communists were very well organised and brought their ideas back. And it was in Japan that they got the idea of how to modernize an Asian country to catch up with the West. So I think there's two big competing streams, if you like, Western communism and modern Asian nationalism. And they were sort of combined both in the Chinese Communist Party and also in the Chinese Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek. What's the next stage here? How do you go from almost a discussion group of young idealists to something that had ambition to actually seize, to hold territory, to actually rule parts,

and then one day the whole of China? Well, I think the first part of it is you had Chinese communists, but you also had Chinese anti-communists and very vehement ones who were, of course, encouraged by various forces overseas. And so when Chiang Kai-shek had a chance to crush the communists, remember he'd been forced into an alliance with them by the Russians, he did. And so in 1928 and 1930 and the 31 in Shanghai. They arrested, killed, wiped out the Communist Party and cut a long story short, the party and its army basically fled in a series of lengthy retreats all the way almost to the border of Tibet and then north to sort of central western China, Shanxi province,

and that's where they hold up. And then Richard, what happens next? And does the character of the party change from this kind of, I guess, urban Shanghai, internationalist young people to, it sounds like a peasant insurgency now? Yes, well, that was Mao Zedong's great insight, I think, at the time. China was predominantly a rural society or a peasant society, if you like, and he thought revolution wasn't to be led by the industrial masses, but out of the Chinese countryside. The party, as it were, was in the countryside, in the back blocks, and they also had very considered policies about how to handle any villages they went through, any villages they

held and the like, and to try to treat them differently than what the Nationalist Party had. But I think the character of the party in that respect was set in this time at Yan'an because they behave, I'm afraid, like communist parties have through history. Mao took over, they had murderous purges and the like. Ideology, rectification were all extremely important. And that's the sort of party that emerged towards the end of the Pacific War when the Japanese were on the retreat and about to lose and made them into a strong fighting force to take on the nationalists at the end of the Civil War. And I guess being in Yunnan, by luck, I suppose,

but you're a long way from where the Japanese and the Chinese nationalists were fighting a titanic series of battles at enormous cost to both of them. So they were in the kind of perfect place geographically. Well, they were. They were hard to get to for anybody, particularly two big armies fighting each other. Remember, the nationalist government had also retreated to western China, a place called Chongqing on the Yangtze River. But they were able to preserve their strength, such as it was. I mean, the party these days doesn't like to talk about it. But most of the fighting against the Japanese was done by the Nationalist Party and done by Chiang Kai-shek, and they took most of the casualties. They didn't emerge from that totally weak, but they were certainly weakened.

And that's really a major reason, plus some very creative generals, why the Communist Party was able to defeat them and really take over the country in 1949. And it's just worth repeating this, but if it wasn't for this extraordinary attempt by the Japanese to conquer much of mainland China, the Chinese Communist Party might have remained a kind of peasant insurgency on the fringes of China, which, as we see from the Cold War and beyond, like northern Uganda, just a kind of intractable but almost a localized problem. Well, there are many what-ifs, I think, in Chinese history. The Japanese were kind of the worst of the imperialist powers, but there were many others. There were the French and the British and the like who all took a slice out of China.

I think it's also important to remember that Russia was in a way as well. I mean, we in the West tend to focus on the Pacific War, that is the sort of war between the US and Japan, but the Asian War was much bigger, much more significant, much more complicated. The Russians were heavily involved in that. I think the longest Chinese border is with Russia, and Russia at different times and the Soviet Union have taken territory off China. That's a sort of underlying tension in the relationship. Plus, of course, then that's on top of the Japanese as well. The Japanese were fighting with the Soviets, the Chinese were cooperating with the Soviets and then fighting

them as well. And that was a much bigger theatre of conflict than the Pacific War that we focus on in Asia and Southeast Asia. And how did the communists sustain their support? How did they run villages? Was there something distinctive? I mean, is it communist? Or is this just another rather authoritarian regional insurgency? Look, I think it's a bit of a mixture. To be honest, I'm not a total expert in this. But yes, the character of the Chinese Communist Party is, was, and always has been authoritarian.

Remember that they designed their system according to, you know, China runs on Leninist software or Soviet software still. And that was the case in the 20s and 30s and is the case these days. But I certainly think they tied to win over many of the peasant communities. And later when they did come to power, of course, one of the achievements of the Communist Party in the early part of their rule was to actually educate more people, to make a larger proportion of the population literate. They improved health care.

Remember, these were terribly impoverished, poor places in which they were settled. But there certainly wasn't a democracy in any sense and they didn't take backchat, if you like. But certainly they used a variety of techniques to win support. And remember, what was the alternative? The Japanese? Brutal. The Nationalists? Corrupt and brutal. So the Communist Party had some room to manoeuvre in that respect. And we get the revolution itself following the war. What's the reason for the

Chinese Communist Party's complete victory over its nationalist competitor? Well, I think the nationalists were weakened, number one. They didn't get the timely support, the all-in support from the Americans that they wanted. The Americans didn't commit themselves to fighting on the nationalist side in the war. I think around 48, 49 in the US, there wasn't this sort of colonizing sense or need to act as an anti-communist bulwark at the time. That really only came with the Korean War a few years later. And the communists had built up their strength and they had a number of famous generals, Jude most significantly, who fought very skillfully and in fact quickly routed the nationalists in 48 and 49, even though they really didn't have superior weapons. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. It's China's Communist Party's 100th birthday. More after this. Romans, gods, Spartans, the wars of Alexander the Great's successors,

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Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And then we've entered a period of communist Chinese rule. The Cultural Revolution obviously looms pretty large there. It's a big question, but describe that kind of trauma in Chinese history. Well, there's multiple traumas. They don't start immediately. In the early 50s was a relatively open period. The Communist Party allowed some experts who were non-communist to be ministers. They re-industrialized with the help of the Soviets. They relied on the Soviets in those days. They also, it's pretty little known, but in Manchuria, where the Japanese

had ruled, they used the Japanese equipment and they kept Japanese engineers and the like on as basically prisoners of war. So they used all that to re-industrialize. But eventually Mao became an insecure and very unstable leader. We had the anti-rightist campaign in the late 1950s. You'd remember that because that's when the famous phrase, let a thousand flowers bloom, comes from. You know, it's ironic, by the way, because Mao said, let a thousand flowers bloom. And then when he saw them blooming too much and criticising them,

he chopped them all down. Then we had the great leap forward, the man-made famine, 35 to 40-odd million people starved to death of all ages. And that was because Mao ordered these insane targets for steel production, by the way, to take over Great Britain at the time in steel production. And that basically meant many farmers didn't grow grain. They lied about it because to have done otherwise would have got them into trouble. And lots of people starved. And then, of course, we have the Cultural Revolution.

This is once again Mao worried about rivals, starting in 1965. So he unleashed the Red Guards, ferocious ultra-leftist students, encouraged other students to pile in. ultra-leftist students, encouraged other students to pile in. That's when you get pupils killing their teachers, kids denouncing their parents, people sent down to the countryside. One of the most famous phrases at that time is bombard the headquarters, which always reminds me of Donald Trump. And it had a kind of Trumpian flavor to it because it was using the masses to turn on the establishment. And well over a million people died, families destroyed, the economy sort of cratered, and that sort of petered out a few years later. But the country didn't really recover

until after Mao died in 1976. I always remember this date, 1976, this year I was born, and it may turn out that I was born, and maybe that date is remembered like 1492 or 1815. 1978, you get this, the insiders come together, and it's the nadir, but it's the point at which they begin this journey towards what now looks like an economic miracle. a plug for 1976 since you raised it, but it is genuinely a pivotal moment in history. 78 is important, but let's deal with 76 first. One of my favourite old history books, I think, is 10 Days in London, I think by an English-Hungarian historian, which describes the moment when Halifax and Churchill debate whether to seek terms with Nazi Germany or whether to fight. And of course, Churchill prevailed, thankfully, and we all know that eventually had a happy ending. 1976, China could have gone one way or another way. After Mao died, his wife, who's the head of the Gang of Four, which are a bunch of ultra-leftist radicals with a power base in Shanghai, tried to take over the government. But Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng, who was the successor to Mao,

managed to win over the loyalty of what's called the Central Bodyguard Bureau. And late at night in Zhongnanhai, which is the residential compound next to the Forbidden City, which has a kind of dark, shadowy, Gorman gust feel to it. The Gang of Four were arrested in the dead of night, and China was set on a new path. And we eventually get to 1978, and the economic policy changes. They decided to enter the global market. And so 1976 and 1978 are, I think, are the two crucial moments. And that really changed world history, frankly. It could have gone one way or the other,

and it went for the Chinese people in a much better direction. So it could have looked a bit like North Korea today. Well, it could have probably a little bit better than North Korea, but Chinese joke when they go to North Korea on these package holidays pre-pandemic and they say, oh, gosh, just like China during the Cultural Revolution. How quaint.

Package holiday in North Korea. That's a fascinating idea. And then you and I both witnessed, I mean, you far more than me, but I've been a couple of trips to China. It's difficult, I think, for people to understand the scale and the speed of transformation since 78. Have you got some personal anecdotes that kind of reflect the revolution that's taken place there? Yes, it's not only just the scale and transformation since 1978, it's that it keeps going on. And this is an important thing for us to remember. I mean, the average Chinese income is really about a quarter of that of the US. So China's got a long way to go. And so if you go backwards from where we are now,

got a long way to go. And so if you go backwards from where we are now, the past 10 years, they've really built the biggest fast train network in the world. And by the way, it works very well. The 10 years prior to that, they built the biggest highway network in the world and a car industry to fill it. I can remember in early 2000, when I was with the Financial Times in Shanghai, one of my jobs was covering the car industry. And I went to see the head of General Motors there at the end of that year. And he said he just sat down his staff and told them sales doubled this year. But I want to tell you, it doesn't happen like this. This will never happen again.

But of course, it happened for the next three or four years in a row. Prior to that, in the 90s, I'm still going backwards. They decided to reform state-owned industries, which dominated the economy. They literally laid off 50 to 60 million people, which is a feat and a brutal one if you were laid off. And then you go back to the 80s. And the 80s, we forget about it now, is in fact the kind of golden era of political and economic reform when private businesses, which had sort of names which didn't call them private businesses, started to take off. And

Xi Jinping has never given an interview on his life to a Western reporter. In 1987 at the Party Congress, the Politburo Standing Committee, by the way, this is a reminder of what sort of government is. We have these names, you know, the Central Committee, the Politburo, the Politburo Standing Committee. But we had in 1987, the Politburo Standing Committee invited the Western press for a cocktail party to kind of shoot the breeze over drinks at the end of the Congress. You don't get that anymore. But they've had just successive waves of development. Japan developed fast, South Korea, Taiwan, but nothing is like China because it is so big. And when I lived in Shanghai, went back to China in 2000, you kind of, oh, there's a new building on this corner. You'd wake up the next hour, there's a new skyscraper there.

You almost become oblivious to it, but it is kind of exhilarating and exhausting to live in. And this is a big question that all you China experts get asked, but what's this got to do with communism? Has China proved John Locke wrong? Have they invented a new hybrid system of government that proves that the kind of Western liberal democratic experiment is a dead end? Is it genius? Is it luck? What's going on here? Well, that is the big question. First of all, Chinese government is communist, or let me put it this way. I think the former UK ambassador put this to me very well. He said, China is not a communist country, but it has a communist government. So in other words,

if you look at the way the Communist Party works, people kind of thought Western business would come to China and they'd see all these LVMH and Starbucks and rich people and they'd think the sort of they've got a united front wing to bring together people who are outside the party, they've got an ideological wing, and they've got a wing to manage us barbarians, the barbarian handlers. And so they have built on the Soviet system and refined it. But having said that, this Leninist system, we've all got to learn what that means these days, by the way, didn't arrive in China in a spaceship. It fits very snugly into a country with more than a thousand years of bureaucratic tradition, meritocratic, not entirely, but meritocratic exam culture, performance culture. So the two sit together, the Chinese bureaucracy with the Leninist organisational apparatus. So it is genuinely, as the Chinese themselves say, socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The second part of your question is, is this a whole new world? Well, so far it is actually, and it's held together and been more productive and successful than just about anybody predicted. There was a famous book about 20 years ago called The Coming Collapse of China. Well, it hasn't happened, and it's not likely to happen. And so for the West, it's a challenge politically, geopolitically, it's a challenge on technology, it's a challenge economically, but it's also a systemic challenge. The West thought we had the best governing system. The Chinese are pretty cocky at the moment, and they say, well, our system works, actually,

and yours doesn't. So we're sticking with it. I guess last thing, as you're saying all that, I'm thinking to myself, what is the outlier historically? Is it sort of the 19th century and up till 1976, like 100 years, 150 odd years of chaos, anarchy, experimenting with communism. And is this period we're now in actually a resumption of deeper historical trends, as you say, kind of strong, central, bureaucratic, with power and authority centralized in the person of the emperor? Well, there's definitely a little bit of that.

China has a tradition of strong central governments, imperial authoritarian figures, and it also has dynastical cycles where the dynasty falls. I think the Chinese Communist Party is very keen to make sure that they're not just another dynasty and that they fall apart. But it's also the success of the party since 78, 79 has been driven by the fact that they've been playing catch-up economics. Now, they've done a pretty good job of it, but things are about to slow down. Not dramatically, I think, but they're not going to have double-digit growth rates anymore unless we have a few pandemics and there's an elastic like bounce back. They're going to have slower growth rates. The people have a few pandemics and there's an elastic-like bounce back. They're going to have slower growth rates. The people who've been big winners in recent years

have been the urban middle classes. Well, they're no longer going to have the easy gains that they once had. The society is ageing rapidly. The rest of the world is not nearly so open to China as it was. So I don't see it falling apart, but it's not going to be smooth sailing forever into the future. I don't underestimate them, but by the same token, I don't think we should underestimate our own regenerative abilities either.

Well, that is fascinating. Thank you for taking us that whirlwind tour through the last 100 years of Chinese and Chinese communist history. Richard, how can people follow your work It's fascinating. Thank you for taking us on that whirlwind tour through the last 100 years of Chinese and Chinese communist history. Richard, how can people follow your work and buy your books and all that kind of stuff? Well, that would be fantastic. I wrote a book on the Communist Party 10 years ago, which I think I would say this, having lived in America, the one thing I learned living in the States is that modesty in any form is a capital crime. So the book called The Party,

that's on the Communist Party. And also another thing for another podcast, I'd wrote a book on relationship between China and Japan called Asia's Reckoning. And I'm just going to plug it very quickly in this fashion. If you go into any book shop in the UK, when I lived there, there's literally libraries about the UK and France, the UK and Europe, the UK and Germany and the like. You go in America, for example, you've got libraries of books there about the US and the Middle East, the US and Asia. There's almost nothing about Japan and China, the two Asian superpowers with just an incredibly fractious, interesting relationship. So I did a diplomatic history, a post-war one with a lot lot of never-seen-before material.

And so that's called Asia's Reckoning. So I'm going to give that a big plug as well. And it was reviewed brilliantly everywhere, everyone, so go and get it. And if you fancy it, please come back on the pod and we'll talk about that. That'd be great. Thanks very much, Dan. I appreciate it. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all work on and finish thanks folks you've been a wonderful episode congratulations well done you

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Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. any of us when I'm done with you.