Portside

One could mistake the intersection of Wanfuging Dajie and Jinyu Hutong in Beijing for Times Square, or perhaps Tokyo's Ginza district.  Splashy Apple, Samsung and Prada stores beckon customers to sample their wares, while bright plasma screens above them illuminate the night with advertisements to suggest how affluent Beijing residents might spend their money.

This is not your Chairman Mao's China.

My two-week trip to the Middle Kingdom was undertaken not for the purpose of observing the society's politics and culture, but rather to help chaperone an educational trip sponsored by my fifth-grade son's Mandarin immersion school.  But I could not help comparing the sights before my eyes with the images and ideas I'd gleaned from afar during my lifetime - the bicycle-filled city streets at the time of President Nixon's 1972 visit; the ill-fated Tiananmen Square protest; and the prodigious output of China's factories, much of it by workers earning near-starvation wages.

The China I saw was much different than the picture in my mind's eye.  In many ways it looked like America written in Chinese script:  busy and modern, with traffic-choked streets, downtowns with high-end shops, and buildings reaching to the sky.  But in the major cities - including the three I visited, Beijing, Chengdu and Guiyang - affluence and conspicuous consumption exist side-by-side with poverty and hardscrabble lives, the keepers of tiny shops barely large enough to turn around in, the beggars, the streetside food vendors.  Again, not so different from the United States.

However, this is a China whose official ideology once condemned wealth and inequality, whose government treated "rich peasants" as criminals and trumpeted the necessity of individual poverty and self-sacrifice in the service of building socialism in the world's most populous country.  And yet today wealth is celebrated in China -- as author Evan Osnos puts it in his book Age of Ambition:  Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China - much as it was in America's own Gilded Age of the late 19th Century.  Yet while the substance of the old socialist faith has been thrown on the dust-heap, the party that once promoted a savage kind of equality - and then maneuvered a 180-degree turn to capitalism - remains firmly in power.

And what of the architect of the old ideology, the great leveler, the enemy of wealth?  What of Mao Zedong?

To answer that question, one need only to pass through the security checkpoints to Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 uprising in which hundreds of Chinese (the exact number remains in dispute) demonstrating for greater democracy in their society were gunned down by their own country's armed forces.  On the north end of the square, a giant portrait of Mao hangs over the gate to Beijing's historic Forbidden City, home to the emperors that once were regarded as "sons of heaven."  And on the south is the massive mausoleum that contains Mao's preserved remains for all to visit and pay tribute to.

All day, the faithful stream into the mausoleum bearing yellow daisies (sold by vendors at the entrance) that they lay before a marble statue of the late Chairman, prostrating themselves at the image.  Then they stream past the body within its glass enclosure, almost close enough, were it not for the glass barrier, to touch the red flag pulled up to this chin.  From somewhere in the chamber an amber light shines upon Mao's face, one that makes it appear that the Chairman himself is the source of the light.  Even in death, Mao casts his brilliance upon China.

Next, travel 1,000 miles to Zunyi in country's southwest.  A small, provincial city by China's standards, Zunyi still is home to more than 1 million persons, although it lacks the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the great cities of China's East - here one rarely encounters a speaker of English and foreigners are the object of much curiosity.  All around Zunyi one sees posters encouraging a visit to the two-story colonnaded building that is the city's claim to fame - the site of the 1935 conference in which Mao was elected chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.  Visitors stream through the humble, dusty building in which the remnant of the party's leadership, which had been decimated in defeats at the hands of the Nationalist government, met to rethink their strategy and leadership.  At Zunyi, the party cast out the old "failed" leaders and their Comintern-appointed European advisors and elected to pursue a more Chinese-style revolution, with Mao as its leader.  And th e rest, they say, is history.

And for that history, one need only walk across the courtyard from the conference site, past the lady selling Mao-style fatigue uniforms as souvenirs - the outfits almost all Chinese wore at the time of Nixon's visit but no one does today - to the hulking "Zunyi Conference Museum" that dwarfs the conference building itself.  All of the exhibit descriptions are in Chinese, but the outlines of the museum's story are clear even to someone who reads no Chinese:  When the success of the revolution was in doubt, Mao emerged to deliver the "correct" strategy and lead the people to victory.  Through photos, maps, artifacts, dioramas and plenty of socialist-realist art, Mao is cemented in place as China's savior and inspiration. Outside the conference site, along "Red Army Street," the faithful can walk in the footsteps of Mao, Zhou Enlai and other party leaders and visit historic buildings where they once lived and worked.

The image and memory of Mao is exalted while the substance of his ideas lies in tatters.  How is this possible?  Even the Party, during the reign of Deng Xiaoping - Mao's eventual successor and the architect of the country's hairpin turn to capitalism - judged Mao as 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong.  Nevertheless, the party finds maintaining the cult of Mao useful to legitimating its monopoly on power.

Yet the adulation of Mao at the mausoleum and the Zunyi museum are not mere creations of the party - no one is forcing people to lay daisies before Mao's image.  To many Chinese, Mao represents something more than his Communist ideology:  He is the symbol of China's unity and emerging power, its advancement to the forefront of the world stage.  Before Mao came to power, China experienced war, division and dominance by foreign powers; since the revolution the world has been forced to respect, and at times fear, China.  Mao's accession to power took place while many living Chinese had personal memories of the "century of humiliation," the disastrous 19th Century in which China's self-image was shattered by Western invasion and domination.  Older Chinese today harbor traumatic memories of the Japanese invasion.  Now, in 2015, China is as impervious to foreign military domination as a country can be.  But it has traded one kind of invasion for another - the invasion of t he capitalist world market.

Thirty-six years have now passed since Deng officially buried Mao's radical egalitarianism by proclaiming, "Let some people get rich first and gradually all the people should get rich together."  Since then, many Chinese have gotten rich - although the vast majority has not.  But only 26 years have passed since the Party's even clearer statement, written in blood in Tiananmen Square, that it had no intention of allowing economic liberalization to be accompanied by political reform.  The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union only confirmed in the minds of China's leaders that it had adopted the right course; no glasnost for us, thank you.

Analysts have long predicted that China's embrace of capitalism would inevitably lead to democracy, or at least democratization - if nothing else, increasing contact with the West should lead to a more free flow of information that would lead the Chinese to question the Party's monopoly grip on power.  And indeed, today there is more information flowing though China than ever before - as Osnos notes, today the Chinese are the world's largest users of the Internet.  However, it is an Internet without Google, Facebook or other sites blocked by the government as a bit too free-flowing for its comfort.  Tiananmen did not erase dissent from China - countless people protest their treatment at the hands of a government that does not regard itself as obliged to consider the views of the governed.  And yet, as observed by Osnos and others, the dominant ethos in China today is the individualistic quest for wealth and status - an ethos the government is only too happy to enco urage.

After 36 years of China's experiment with capitalism, it seems safe to conclude that free enterprise and authoritarian government can live comfortably together.  In fact, it is a model that could be profitably exported elsewhere.  A country whose government s willing to suppress dissent, squelch independent unions and keep its low-wage workforce in a state of insecurity is an inviting target for foreign investment.  Vietnam, for one, is embracing free enterprise within a "socialist" system.  Is this also the future of Cuba?

It appears that if China is to ever become more democratic, it will not be due to its embrace of capitalism.  One does not achieve freedom by demanding riches.

Thanks to the author for sending this to Portside.