The streets leading towards the museum are quiet, even in a city like Shanghai which is perpetually in movement. Walking there, you cross the People’s Park at the centre of the main administrative area. Then you go into more narrow streets, following the signposts to your destination. When you finally find the location of the First National Congress of the Communist Party, it is an unremarkable building. Its significance comes purely from what happened there over a few days in early July 1921, when a handful of individuals assembled to hold what was then classified as an illegal meeting. One of them was Mao Zedong. They were holding the first ever formal event in China of a movement inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, which was largely being bankrolled and supported by Moscow. As a sign of this, one of those present was a Russian activist. Another was a Dutch revolutionary. It is unclear how this hybrid group managed to communicate with 194 each other, as there is no evidence that the foreigners spoke a word of Chinese, nor that any of the Chinese spoke much Russian or Dutch.
Standing in this building when I visited it in 2009 was a strangely moving experience. This was not because of any ideological affinity. I hadn’t come here as a member of the small number of Maoist or Communist parties operating in Britain. It was the awareness of the price that would be paid by those who had spent nine days planning, dreaming and hoping back in 1921. Over the next three decades, they would go through searing experiences. At least four of them – Li Hanjun, Chen Tanqiu, Chen Gongbo and the Dutchman, Henk Sneevliet – were executed in the ensuing decades; He Shuheng was killed fighting the Nationalists in 1935; Zhou Fohai died in prison after the end of the Second World War; Zhang Guotao fled to Canada and died there in the late 1970s, an exile. Only Mao and Dong Biwu would prosper in the years ahead, and make it into old age, still Chinese Communists, and still in power. To be a Communist at the start of the movement in China may have been a glorious thing, I reflected that day, looking at the separate photos of these individuals placed in the museum display, but it was not a good choice if one wanted a long, healthy, peaceful life.
In late October 2017, almost as soon as Xi Jinping and his newly appointed senior colleagues on the Politburo Standing 195 Committee were in place, they proceeded to this same, heavily symbolic place. Saluting the hammer and sickle symbol of their party, which hung prominently on the walls, they swore their oath. ‘It is my will to join the Communist Party of China,’ they all intoned, following Xi’s lead, ‘uphold the party’s programme, observe the provisions of the party constitution, fulfil a party member’s duties, carry out the party’s decisions, strictly observe party discipline, guard party secrets, be loyal to the party, work hard, fight for Communism throughout my life, be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the party and the people, and never betray the party.’ After declaring their faith, they headed off back into the outside world. They had declared the start of the New Era; now it was time to build it.
Communists like Xi Jinping adhere to an optimistic creed. Communism is, at heart, a utopian faith. According to its teachings, after the struggle, all shall be well. This sense of the bright future, visible even through the turmoil and dimness of the present, pervades much of Xi’s language. Announcing the start of the new year in 2022, in his traditional 1 January address, Xi declared that ‘to realise the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will be no easy task, like a walk in the park; it will not happen overnight, or through sheer fanfare. We must always keep a long-term perspective, remain mindful of potential risks, maintain strategic focus and determination, and “attain to the broad and great while addressing the delicate 196 and minute”.’1 But he went on: ‘The hard work and dedication of countless unsung heroes have all added to the great momentum of China’s march forward in the New Era… All the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation will join forces to create a brighter future for our nation.’ Earlier in his time in office, Xi had even given a timetable for the arrival of better days, setting out two 100-year goals. The longer term one was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the country Mao Zedong had founded in 2049, when the People’s Republic would be able to enjoy, in Xi’s words, ‘democracy with Chinese characteristics’. By 2021, the shorter term goal had been achieved – the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party, which was held that year in Beijing in July. To show just how inextricably the past, the present and the future are entwined in the mindset of contemporary Chinese leaders, an historic resolution was issued during a major party meeting, a few months later in October 2021, to add icing to the celebratory cake. This was the first such formal summation of history since 1981, when a similar statement had prepared the way for the Deng era reforms, underlining the significance of the occasion; and Mao’s era had started in 1945, with the first of these resolutions.
Xi is a storyteller. That point has already been made clear. One of the most important stories he has been telling over the past decade is that of the party itself, and of its meaning in 197 Chinese life and the country’s destiny. The year it marked the centenary of its founding was an opportunity to use the party’s track record as a claim to the future. Tellingly, much of the October 2021 document was indeed about that future. Even more tellingly, while much was made of how many times it contained Xi’s name (7) compared to that of Mao or any of his other predecessors, the ‘party’ made over 450 appearances.2 As ever, Xi is the lead actor, but the party is the star attraction.
The document recognised that the path followed since 1949 had not been easy. While there were no explicit accounts of the vast famines in the early 1960s that led to as many as 50 million perishing, nor much on the Cultural Revolution which traumatised the party and created conditions close to civil war in the country, the story really started to bite when it reached events that took place in 1978. Based on the knowledge of what worked and what did not, accrued over the previous three decades in power, from 1980, leaders were able to create a hybrid, bespoke form of economic development and governance. The new slogans were ‘practice is the sole criterion for truth’ and ‘liberate thinking’. In order to allow people to live materially better lives, setting up enterprises and doing business were permitted. This was not an admission of the party’s previous errors. Far from it. It was proof that the party was a learning community, one whose fundamental faith in the great Chinese nation had never swayed. Although leaders 198 since the 1980s had engaged in this epic historic mission and were the architects who built the foundations of the New Era, the mission was now reaching its apogee in the time of Xi. In 1949, the average life expectancy for a Chinese man was 36, and per capita GDP was less than India’s. But in early 2020, with great fanfare and symbolic importance, China was able to announce that absolute poverty had been eradicated, and that it was not the youthfulness of its population that was the main problem, but their ever-increasing age. For Chinese people, living in newly built cities, driving locally manufactured, well-made cars, working in good quality, service sector jobs, able to send their children to universities that now ranked among the world’s best, the China Dream had arrived as fast as one of the high-speed trains rocketing across the country.
A number of promises made by the party in 2021 hinted at what the future might look like for China. The year 2035 was highlighted as a significant moment, a landmark on the way to modernity with Chinese characteristics. New heights will be reached in every dimension of material, political, cultural-ethical, social and ecological advancement, the 2021 resolution promised. Modernisation of China’s system and capacity for governance will be achieved. China will consolidate its role as a global leader in terms of national strength and international influence. The inequalities that have blighted the country’s growth model in recent decades will be addressed, resulting 199 in prosperity for all. As a result of this, the Chinese people will enjoy happier, safer and healthier lives. Finally, the Chinese nation will stand taller and prouder among the nations of the world.3
But what does this grand-sounding language mean in practice for Chinese people? Despite the lack of official survey data about what their priorities might be, it’s obvious that the Chinese government needs to ensure it keeps the majority of its citizens onside, poring obsessively over online data to find out what they want. Behind the slightly unsettling language of Communist politics, domestic bread-and-butter issues in China look little different to elsewhere. Housing and living costs continue to rise. In 2021, the persistent defaulting of major Chinese property developer Evergrande raised the spectre of the Chinese housing market collapsing once more, underlining how absolutely critical this sector is for the country. According to Chinese government data, since 1999 the annual average increase in house prices was 8 per cent year on year.4 Over the same period, the annual average wage rose about 2.5 times, from 40,000 Chinese yuan (about $6,300 at the time of writing) to 97,000 Chinese yuan (about $15,300). As in other countries, property has become a new source of wealth; it is also more and more expensive, moving away from what people can actually afford, with some of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs making money in real estate and development. 200 Huge new apartment blocks have been constructed in major Chinese cities. Beijing is a good case study. At the turn of the millennium, the capital had 10.3 million people. By 2022, this had risen to 21.3 million, with a projection of a further 4 million due to move there in the coming decade.5 Between 2003 and 2014, Chinese builders created 5.5 million new apartments a year, far more than any other country in the world, most of them in urban areas or areas becoming urban.6 But although this construction has been a source of enrichment, it is also a source of potential impoverishment. Since the mid-2000s it has been predicted that the bubble will burst on this immense economic asset. By 2016, a modest-sized 90 square metre apartment in Beijing or Shanghai fetched 25 times the average annual household income, meaning that those individuals buying these properties became slaves to debt and mortgage repayments.7 Communist system or not, the average Chinese person is beset by the same constant pressures to pay their mortgage and try to maintain their standard of living as those in Europe or North America. Like people everywhere, their greatest economic asset is often the place they live in. For the Xi leadership, ensuring that people’s wages are high enough to make their mortgage repayments is a top priority. Creating new jobs for 9 million university students who graduate each year is one important way of doing this – as acknowledged in the delayed 2020 National People’s Congress, which looked at 201 rising urban unemployment and underemployment and committed to addressing both. But will this be enough?
It is not only worries over bricks and mortar and earning enough to live that prey on the minds of the average Chinese person. Health and welfare is crucial too. By 2019, life expectancy was 74 years for a man and 79 years for women, bringing the country almost on a par with other developed countries like the UK and the US.8 Major campaigns to encourage healthier lifestyles by cutting down on drinking and smoking have been complicated by the large rise in eating meat and increased obesity in the country. Infectious diseases have been big issues for China in the recent past. By 2020, the greatest causes of death were exactly the same as those in the West – heart disease and cancer. In the same year, 5.3 per cent of China’s GDP was spent on healthcare, compared to 9.9 per cent in the UK and 16.8 per cent in the US.9 To address future health needs for its population, China’s health system will need dramatic reform and far more resources. Hospitals, which at present have highly variable levels of quality of treatment, are the main point of contact for patients. A basic national healthcare insurance system is in place but, for many, payment for treatment remains the norm. Those unfortunate enough to suffer from chronic illnesses requiring complex and long-term treatment often end up overwhelmed by debt. In 2021, Xi promised that the future would be healthy. But the level of 202 investment this would involve, for 1.4 billion people, would rank this as one of the greatest administrative challenges facing any government in the world today.
This is compounded by the rapidly ageing population. The Xi government has already tried to encourage people to have more children, with very limited success. A second tactic – allowing migration from countries like India or elsewhere with surplus younger populations – is not even being considered at present, due to Chinese attitudes that verge on xenophobia.* Like Japan, China is experimenting with using robots to look after the rising number of elderly people. In 2013, the government even passed a law requiring that children visit their parents.10 But such intervention is hardly sustainable. Decades of migrant labourers arriving from rural areas into the city and high levels of social mobility mean the family structure of today looks very different to that seen as recently as the 1990s. Years of dramatic economic growth have had a social cost; they were fuelled by people working in factories that were often hundreds of miles from their homes, their children brought up by other people. There is now additional conflict between those internal migrant workers who wish to settle permanently 203 in their new place of work and residence, and those who want to return to the place of their birth. Remarkably, China maintains the same internal passport system it has had in place since the 1950s – the hukou, or household registration document, which gives different, and better, privileges to those registered as being born in cities than to those from rural areas. Despite several attempts to reform this system by allowing some people to change their status, for many millions it remains a bureaucratic barrier, meaning they are considered temporary residents of a place where they may have lived for decades. By 2035, the year set by the 2021 resolution, this will have to be reformed. It is a major source of discontent to many Chinese.
Another crucial component of health is mental wellbeing. Before Xi, there was little talk of this, even though the country has had specialist mental health centres in Beijing and Shanghai since the 1980s. The Chinese have discovered, as their Western counterparts have, that capitalism can make you wealthier, and physically healthier, but it can also have a dramatic impact on your mental health. The envy and dissatisfaction that pervades Western social media and culture is now felt strongly in China too.11 In a remarkable study of mental health in the country, Canadian based academic Jie Yang has written of the explosion of new mental health conditions: as there is socialism with Chinese characteristics, so too there are now neurosis with Chinese characteristics. Yang describes three in her book 204 – ‘empty heart syndrome’ for officials, ‘princess syndrome’ for young women and ‘petitioner syndrome’ for the social underclass. Each of these speaks to aspects of society that are unique to Xi’s China. Officials, rich in power and surrounded by people who want their help, realise that they exist in an environment where everyone wants to use them, and no one likes them. Young women live in a country where there are 34 million more men than women, partly because of the distortions of the one-child policies of previous eras. For many of them, the choice of husband becomes so vexed that they demand stratospheric conditions – several apartments, huge wages, large dowries paid by one family to another (usually the wife’s). Failure to find these almost impossible conditions results in a pathological response. There are numerous cases of young women cracking under the family and social pressures placed on them, resulting in tragic breakdowns, or, in the most extreme cases, suicide. There has been a striking rise in the number who chose to opt out of this and not marry at all. Finally, those who have failed to win civil court cases where they are trying to right grievances suffered as a result of official or corporate misbehaviour and subsequently repeatedly petition officials, experience constant frustration, mistreatment by the security agents hired to stop them causing trouble and a sense of hopelessness as they realise they may never get redress; this can lead to breakdowns and severe depression. The provision of counselling and psychotherapy 205 in China is limited or non-existent, depending on location. All too often, those who do break down are placed in asylums and heavily medicated. The Chinese government has recognised that this is unsustainable. But as with governments elsewhere, it also knows that resources are finite and that improving the situation might need almost limitless funds. If Xi wants to create a rich and healthy China by 2035, mental health provision must be a key part of his plan.
And then there is the challenge of the natural environment – how to repair a country whose physical landscape has been blighted by four decades of the most epic and fastest industrialisation a society has ever gone through. The difficulties here are well known – heavily polluted rivers, air that is almost poisonous to breathe, soil so contaminated that it can no longer safely grow crops. It was symbolic that, from 2012 to 2013, Beijing and other major cities were afflicted with a particularly heavy smog. Landing in the capital during this time, I remember the sensation of plunging from clear blue skies above the city into a thick porridge of cloud, in which it was impossible to see the ground beneath us. From one hotel, in the city centre, I was unable to see across the street to the adjacent skyscrapers, let alone catch sight of the Fragrant Hills, which were visible from the same spot on clear days in the past.
This smog was not merely an eyesore but had a real impact on the respiratory health of China’s city dwellers. Bronchial 206 and asthmatic diseases rocketed. The five-year plans set out in 2016 and 2021 were bravely labelled as ‘green growth’ plans by the government. A fundamental part of the China Dream is to live in cities with clean air and good quality water. But Xi cannot easily sacrifice economic growth for a wholly green economy. There has to be a transitional phase. The government has vowed that carbon emissions will peak by 2030, and that the country will be carbon neutral three decades after that. However, these aims are almost certainly not enough. Floods in 2021, similar to ones that blighted Germany in the same year, were largely attributed to the effect of climate change. The source of China’s great rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, are found in the Tibetan Plateau. Glacial melting here, and the resulting floods and disruption, is causing havoc. Hundreds of millions of people live in the impacted area. The Yellow River, with its constantly shifting course and the massive floods it has caused though a large swathe of central China throughout Chinese history, has sometimes been labelled ‘China’s sorrow’. Climate change could well be China’s nemesis – a ticking time bomb, which, while it threatens submerging one part of the country under water, is causing droughts and a permanent lack of water in the north-east.
This list of issues affecting Chinese people looks remarkably similar to those that affect the average European or North American. They want a nice home, a clean and predictable 207 living environment, a sense of security and wellbeing. They want to be able to walk down their local streets, or drive on them, without being threatened or mugged. They want rewarding, well-paid jobs and a pension when they retire. They want a reliable, affordable health service. Despite the screen of politics through which they are often seen, if the China of the future delivers on these promises, it means, ironically, that China will look like the rest of the world – on the surface, at least.
The Communists have often presented themselves as architects of the future. If one wants to see what that future might look like, one should visit Shanghai, where, in many ways, it has already arrived. Before the pandemic, the shops there heaved with people. The streets were clogged with cars, many of them luxury brands, and the subway was extensive, mostly new and, even more staggering for someone used to the London Underground, effectively air-conditioned, despite the frequently sweltering temperatures outside. Shanghai carries a very convincing veneer of internationalisation. It has shopping malls full of familiar products, and people are dressed in the same swish, cutting-edge fashion brands one might see in New York or Paris. There is no sense of cultural cringe here, but of a city rushing with open arms towards the future. Where there were once farmland and warehouses, there now stands the world’s second tallest skyscraper, the Shanghai Tower. One can have tea in one of the world’s highest hotels, the Grand 208 Hyatt, though these days it stands behind a cluster of even more gargantuan structures. In the Xintiandi centre, one can walk in restored heritage streets, visit old-fashioned tea shops or restaurants and sample cuisine from any of the country’s regions, or from Japan, Thailand, Italy or France. The city is, however, like a mirage. As economist Yasheng Huang pointed out over a decade ago in his excellent book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, the vast majority of Shanghai’s economy is in the hands of the state. The great Pudong financial development was mostly achieved through landgrab and evicting farmers so that new development could happen.12 Even so, the energy and sheer passion of the place never ceases to impress me. In 2015, I was invited to debate against Huang, for a conference the Economist organised in the city. We had a good discussion about whether the city would become a global technology centre. Huang made a number of powerful points, full of data and evidence to show that Shanghai talked the talk but would never walk the walk. My reply was that this city would always be conquering the future, through the spirit of its people and the way it captured the imaginations of both its own inhabitants and of outsiders. Despite the barriers Huang set out, if it had the will, it would find a way, I argued. In that debate I just about won the audience over by a small margin, despite Huang’s formidable opposition. In 2021, despite the terrible record of outsiders trying to predict where China 209 might be going, and what its future holds, I would still give the country a good chance of bringing about a large part of its China Dream. Even in the depths of 2022, with no immediate end in sight for the Covid-19 pandemic, my faith in China, under Xi or whoever else one day replaces him, being able to surmount the formidable challenges facing it, and creating its own unique version of modernity, is still strong. And what a world that might be – where the whole of China buzzes with the energy and life of the great city of Shanghai. But by that time, Shanghai will already be well on the way to super modernity, monopolising the future, taunting the outside world to try to catch up. 210
Notes
1. ‘2022 New Year address by President Xi Jinping’, 31 December 2021, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202112/t20211231_10478096.html.
2. ‘Full Text Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century’, Xinhua, 16 November 2021, http://www.news.cn/english/2021-11/16/c_1310314611.htm.
3. ‘Full Text of Chinese Communist Party’s Resolution on History’, Nikkei Asia, 19 November 2021, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Full-text-of-the-Chinese-Communist-Party-s-new-resolution-on-history.
4. ‘China House Prices Growth: 1999–2021’, CEIC Data, https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/house-prices-growth.
5. ‘Beijing Population 2022’, World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/beijing-population.
6. Edward Glaeser, Wei Huang, Yueran Ma and Andrei Shleifer, ‘A Real Estate Boom with Chinese Characteristics’, Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter 2017), https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/jep_2017.pdf
7. Ibid. 234
8. ‘Life expectancy at birth, male (years) – China’, World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locations=CN.
9. ‘Current health expenditure (% of GDP) – United Kingdom, United States, China’, World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?locations=GB-US-CN.
10. Celia Hatton, ‘New China law says children “must visit parents”’, BBC News, 1 July 2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23124345.
11. Jie Yang, Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition, and Therapeutic Governance (London: Wiley, 2017).
12. Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The chapter entitled ‘What is Wrong with Shanghai?’ shows the faults and issues that lie beneath the surface of this great city.
* In April 2020, the Group of African Ambassadors wrote to China’s foreign minister, protesting at the discrimination their countrymates were facing from the Chinese authorities during the spread of Covid-19, particularly in the southern city of Guangzhou.