By Xuefei Chen Axelsson
Stockholm, July 1(ChinaEuropeDialogue) – July 1 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China.
Through 100 years the party has become the largest party in the world and led the world’s largest population in China which is over 1.4 billion and realized the goal of poverty eradication. CPC now has more than 90 million party members and under the leadership of Xi Jinping, it also won the campaign against the Covid-19 and set a good example for the world.
CPC has led the Chinese people to establish the New China or People’s Republic of China and carried out the socialist construction in China. In particular, over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China has made more than 700 million people out of poverty. It is a remarkable contribution to the world’s poverty eradication campaign.
July 1, 1921, a new party was established in a boat outside Shanghai, near Jiaxing in Zhejiang province, east China. This party was called Communist Party of China. It was influenced by the Communist groups in Europe. Some of the members in the party had participated in the activities in the European communist group.
One of the members was called Mao Zedong. The important figures in the party were Chen Duxiu who was the first Secretary of the party and Li Dazhao who was one of the famous democratic members.
This CPC has cooperated with the National Party which was established in 1924. The CPC was more foreign than the National Party at that time. But when Jiang Jieshi became the leader of the National Party and president of China, he began to get rid of CPC. Instead of fighting against the Japanese invaders who invaded China in 1931, he would rather get rid of the CPC.
In 1927，CPC was forced to establish its own army. In 1935, the red army had to go to the western China and began the famous Long March. Through the Long March which lasted a year and ranged 25000 li or 12500 kilometers. Finally, they arrived in Yan’an, Shaanxi province.
Then, Northeastern Army General Zhang Xueliang took his army and people also went to Shaanxi. He liked to fight against the Japanese because the latter occupied his hometown Northeast China.
It was there Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng house arrested Jiang Jieshi and forced him to cooperate with CPC to fight against Japanese invaders.
Then China began the 8 years anti Japanese war which started on July 7, 1937. By then Japanese already stayed in northeast China and North China for six years. Japanese invaded northeast China on September 18, 1931.
After 8 years struggle, together with the world anti-facist wars, Japan surrendered and China won the battle. But the CPC and the National Party led government fought a war again.
From 1945 to 1949, China experienced three wars in northeast China, Tianjin and Beijing and all the northern part of China was taken over by the CPC led army.
Jiang Jieshi left for Taiwan. Mao Zedong declared that Liberation Army should go over the Yangtze River and take over every piece of the land left by the National Party.
October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong declared that Chinese people have stood up. It was heart felt words. Because in old China, coastal areas including Shanghai, Shandong, Dalian and Hong Kong were all occupied by the western powers. They were leased place and Chinese were not allowed to come in. Many Chinese thought this was a serious humiliation.
After 1949, China became really independent. They cleared up all the debts and regrets and began a new way of life.
That was to establish a socialist country with everybody equally work and equally getting paid. People helped each other.
The most impressive progress was to wipe out the illiteracy and established a lot of adult night school to teach people to read and write. The other great achievement is the liberation of women. It means women have the rights to decide their own marriage and marry whoever they love instead of being arranged by parents. The slogan by Mao Zedong that women can hold up half of the sky encouraged hundreds thousands of women. They became drivers, workers and laborers working together with men.
Another great achievement was the national patriotic health movement to get rid of all kinds of epidemics and pandemics such as tuberculosis, hepatitis, measles, water spots, polio, and big thick neck which was due to lack of iodine. All these problems were eliminated by 1970s. The polio was vaccinated in the 1990s.
In a peaceful environment, with relatively developed Chinese medicine and western medicine, infant survival rate substantially increased compared with the old China.
Chinese population increased dramatically. Another reason for the increase of the population was the Korean war. Due to the Korean War, Mao thought there would be more war to happen and we needed more people. Thus women were encouraged to have children. Many families had six or seven children in the countryside in the 1960s.
The collective ideas permeated everywhere in the country as China established many communes since 1956.
Indeed, there were hunger in 1958 to 1960. Many people die of hunger and disease. But the birthrate is far higher than the death rate.
In the 1970s, China began to talk about mechanization and modernization in agriculture, Industry and National Defence. Tractors were used in all the villages.
During Mao’s time, people were not encouraged to make money. The spirit was to have a relatively good collective life. More emphasis were put on equal distribution and collective working. All the children went to school free of charge. There were no fierce competition. Universities were closed.
After Mao’s death, the Communist Party of China reflected and reviewed the policies in Mao’s period and judged that the cultural revolution was not right. Many intellectuals, teachers doctors were criticized and suffered a lot of physical suffering and spiritual suffering.
But in general China has made great progress in health and social development. But people didn’t have money because the market economy didn’t exist. It was called socialist mass market.
1978 marked the breakthrough in establishing market economy. A free market was established in the countryside every three days. If people like to travel about 15 kilometers, they could have the market everyday.
People could take their product such as water melon and fruits directly to the market and sold it. The price fluctuated according to the demand.
This policy was welcomed by farmers in the countryside. If we say Mao’s time people paid greater attention to ideal and theory, after 1978, people paid more attention to material life. Food and clothes are more focused and immediately people felt the progress with enough food to eat and enough clothes to wear.
Universities reopened in 1977. And all the young people began to study hard and try their best to go to university.
I went to Liaoning University in 1984. I was the only university student in the village in over 20 years.
From then on, we only felt the life is better and better day by day.
After the rural reform, urban reform also began in the 1990s. Hot economy and radical ideas caused a shock in 1989.
But soon everything resumed and Deng Xiaoping encouraged the people to be bold enough to do good business.
His famous slogan was poverty was not socialism. Science and technology are the first productivity.
Since then, more and more young talents jumped to the sea of business and became entrepreneurs.
CPC has an important ideological transformation. In Mao’s time, the party paid too much attention to ideology. In Deng’s time, people began to pay attention to facts and reality.
The same CPC, but the thinking changed greatly.
After Deng, the government paid great attention to economic growth. After the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, China walked on the rapid development track. In fact, the development began in 1992 after Deng’s visit to South China.
Southeast Asian crisis didn’t affect China too much. China began reform in real estate sector, privatized the real estate market, automobile market and many other sectors. The demand increased substantially and the supply also increased greatly.
After China joined the World Trade Organization, China just produced too quickly almost in every aspect. The housing was built fast, the cars were produced fast and all the production, procession and manufacturing were carried out quickly.
China’s economic growth rate has been in two digits for many years.
Meanwhile, the environment became worse and worse.
It was during Jiang Zemin’s period, the entrepreneurs can join the party and became important figures in the party and in the government.
With emphasis in ideology, it means more attention to workers and farmers. Landlords and capitalists, rich businessmen were all treated as enemies. That was also meant the leaders were not capable enough.
When China held the 2008 Olympics and more and more joined the world big family, China became more and more open to the outside world.
China became richer and richer, almost every family has houses, apartments and cars.
But the environment got worse. The air quality was bad in 2012 or 2013.
Then Xi Jinping became China’s president and Li Keqiang became premier. Instead of saying the economic development is the first task, they said the employment is more important and the environmental protection is more important. Xi proposed the slogan Green Mountain is also Gold Mountain and China should put ecological civilization as one of the important goals in development.
To get a blue sky is as if to fight a great campaign to protect the sky from being polluted.
China has been challenged many times such as who could feed China? But the CPC has always discuss these issues with the people’s deputies, experts and many others.
Chinese political system is actually under the leadership of the CPC and many parties, 9 parties to be accurate to cooperate with each other to rule the country.
A lot of wise men in those small parties and a lot of good advice put up forward to the CPC in order to meet the demand of the people.
CPC is a party by the people, for the people. Thus it has been very successful in many ways such as poverty eradication and improving people’s lives.
With the rapid development of real estate and automobile as well as demand from the west of all kinds of products, China became a manufacturing country. It has been dubbed as the world plant.
During the sudden attack of the Covid 19, CPC under the leadership of President and Party Secretary Xi Jinping, China mobilized all forces from all walks of life, carried out the right policy of taking masks, quarantine and massive test to put the virus spreading under control.
With about two months efforts in the spring of 2020, China controlled the pandemic in Hubei province and prevented from spreading to all over China. Sporadic cases took place in various province, but through the strict restrictions, they all have been put under control.
Since then when the virus spread all over the world, especially in European countries and America, China had very small number of cases mostly got it through airplane passengers from other countries.
Through 100 years of persisting efforts, Chinese people’s human rights situation have greatly improved and most people feel quite satisfied with their life.
CPC has achieved remarkable achievements over the past 100 years and Congratulations to CPC. Wish you a greater success in the next 100 years!