…Continued Ushering in a new era of development in the cause of socialism 5.1 The Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee was a significant transition in the history of the party and the state since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. the CPC central collective leadership with Comrade Deng Xiaoping as its core throroughly reviewed the lessons from its experience in socialist construction, emancipated their minds, sought truth from facts, made the historic decision to shift the focus of the Party and country’s work to economic development and to implement reform and opening up, laid out the Party’s basic line for the primary stage of socialism and the three-step strategy for modernizing the country, created Deng Xiaoping Theory and blazed […]

The following is copied word for word from the exhibit “The Road to Rejuvenation” at The Chinese National Museum in Beijing (and as far as I know has not been published online prior to this). The exhibit focuses on China’s history from 1840 to the present. The Chinese National Museum reopened in March 2011, offering the most official and most recent account of China’s history as told by the Communist Party (for more on the museum I recommend this excellent NYT piece about the difficulties the Party had in agreeing on how the past should be portrayed). This is the story taught to hundreds of millions of Chinese students; it shapes every discussion of China’s future. I hope this series of posts will help foster discussions of […]

This week we’ve been looking at how the party relies on improving its citizens quality of life for its mandate to rule. We started by looking at how GDP is no longer enough to maintain that stability, and what changes will be coming in the next few decades. Today I want to focus on some ways the Party could eventually transform its system of rule. As you read remember that the Party will maintain absolute power until a majority of the population feels that their lives are no longer improving. The most important idea to understand, is that there is no action considered beyond the pale for maintaining their position of power. As Fei Xiaotong points out in his book, “From the Soil”, they would […]

Continued from Yesterday The following post was written by one of my Chinese friends who is an active member of the Communist Party. What the Party Means to Me To me, any nation or ethnic group shares one common ideal so that they could be united, fighting for the same goal, such as racial superiority (Tom’s note: this is not a “loaded” term in Chinese), or the same religion. And in China, it has always been moralism. I don’t mean that Chinese people enjoy the noblest morals; it is just that we always try to act upon the unique moral standard which is widely-accepted in the country so that Chinese cultural has survived a long time. By the end of the Republic of China, the […]

Last week I posted a short piece by my friend who hadn’t joined the Party. Today brings us a post from his best friend who did join the Party. Again I have left it unedited, so I hope it is still understandable. His article was a bit longer, so I will be posting more of it over the next few days. Why I Joined the Communist Party I find that joining the party for me is quite a natural way during my personal development. Because when little, every kid was encouraged to join the Young Pioneer, and then when we reach our teens, it means that we are doing very well in every field if you could join the Communist Youth League earlier which is […]

A few weeks ago I wrote a post where I commented that the Communist Party doesn’t interfere with my daily life for the most part. That was accurate. However it should also be modified, since the party is ubiquitous (American’s can’t even pretend that what we have is ‘big government’ by comparison). After looking at that chart it should be no surprise that today in China there is 1 government official for every 40 people. My thought is that this is at least partially an effort to limit unemployment. Even though there have been Party officials at every place I have worked, I’m still not really sure what it is they do. At the hospital we have two offices for Party leaders. According to Grace […]