China’s historical whitewash: Kohler

Watching the pictures of China’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Communist Revolution on TV last night was a deeply unsettling reminder of just how communist and armed to the teeth China still is.

The perfectly coordinated goose-steppers, the phallic military hardware, including 52 new weapons systems, the thrusting statues of big-chested workers holding flags, the line of identikit party chiefs, with numero uno in a Mao suit: it was all there – North Korea on Imax, in 3-D.

Never mind the Great Leap Forward that starved 36 million people in 1958, or the nasty Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 or the 10-year Cultural Revolution that nearly destroyed the country, or the massacre of dissidents in Tiananmen Square by Mao Zedong’s successors.

The present day Chinese Communist Party remains one the most enthusiastic and systematic history-whitewashers in the world and has generally succeeded in keeping China’s younger generations in total ignorance about their unsavoury past.

Clive Palmer will probably call me a racist, but I thought the 60th anniversary march-past yesterday was worse than kitsch – it was an unapologetic statement by the leadership Communist Party that they are still profoundly Marxist and they’re not going anywhere.

There’s no doubt that the survival of the Chinese Communist Party despite 60 years of crushing incompetence is a huge achievement.

And the past 30 years, since Deng Xiaoping got control of the Party in 1978, has seen average economic growth of 10% per annum, taking per capita GDP to about $7,000 – still a low income country on that measure, and well below Australia’s $44,000, but China is now passing Japan as the world’s second largest economy and is still growing at 8%.

But imagine if, instead of the lunatic Mao Zedong taking power on October 1, 1949, China had got someone like Konrad Adenauer, who was elected the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany three weeks earlier, on September 7, 1949.

Like China, Germany was a ruined nation, destroyed by an aggressive external war rather than civil war and Japanese occupation.

Adenauer was 73 when he became Chancellor and, amazingly, led Germany for 14 years, until 1963. He founded and led a stable democracy and integrated the FDR into NATO and OECD while reconciling with France.

He established a unique economic model that rejected the free market capitalism of the United States and instead combined it with extensive social welfare and regulation – not exactly socialism, but not exactly capitalism either.

While Mao was purging the capitalists in 1957 and then again in the Cultural Revolution of 1966, having slaughtered millions of his citizens with the incompetent economic policies of the Great Leap Forward, Germany was enjoying its Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle).

Now Germany’s economy is going backwards because of its reliance on trade and debt, while China’s own economic miracle gathers pace despite last year’s collapse in exports because it had become a vast creditor, not a debtor, thanks, in turn, to having a currency pegged to the US dollar at an artificially low rate.

Yesterday’s absurd preening by the Chinese Communist Party can’t change the fact that at least half of the 60 years they are celebrating were disastrous and much of the rest of it has been focused on covering that up, so that the Communists can stay in power.

Yes, imagine if China had got Adenauer in 1949 instead of Mao. Then they would really have had something to celebrate yesterday.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator.