Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

2009 has been a year of many anniversaries: the 80th anniversary of the Wall Street crash, the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II and the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. But this year is historically important because of two other anniversaries. On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China at Tiananmen in Beijing. Mao was then a loyal ally of Stalin and the Soviet Union, and it looked as if the march of communism across the world would be unstoppable. But, just over 40 years later, in November 1989, the whole edifice of the Soviet Union came crashing down.

The iconic moment in the stirring events of 1989 was the opening of the Berlin Wall. A little remembered politburo spokesman Gunther Schabowski, who muddled his lines, was probably responsible for it as much as anything. This led very rapidly to the fall of the regime in East Germany. The Bulgarian communist party exited history a few days later. At the end of November, 20 years ago this week, came the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia where that great democrat Vaclav Havel led a democratic revolution. In December of that year the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his feared Securitate were overthrown, and Ceausescu was executed.

Meanwhile, the economic and political system of communism in the Soviet Union itself was crumbling. Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, his attempt at reform, led only to a more rapid demise. At the end of 1991 the Soviet Union was officially dissolved and its 15 republics became independent states. Two relics of the Stalinist system survive—the impoverished outposts of Cuba and North Korea, where the Castro brothers and the Kim dynasty cling to the power. In Vietnam and Laos there are communist regimes that have survived by allowing just enough economic reform to create modest prosperity that keeps the people from revolting.

The great survivor of communist politics has been the Chinese Communist Party, which celebrated 60 years in power with a grandiose military parade and self congratulatory speeches, apparently as firmly in the saddle as ever. In 1949, China was a land in ruins after decades of warfare, apparently destined to permanent dependence on the Soviet Union. But the People’s Republic has outlived the Soviet Union by nearly 20 years and appears stronger than ever. The key to this apparent paradox is another anniversary. Thirty years ago, in 1979, Deng Xiaoping began a sweeping economic liberalisation of the Chinese economy. We all remember his famous saying: ‘It is glorious to grow rich.’ Agriculture was decollectivised and farmers were allowed to sell their produce. In a country which was 80 per cent agricultural, this led to a rapid rise in living standards and set off a chain reaction of further form. Capitalism and foreign investment were reintroduced and a new middle-class consumer society was born in China’s booming cities. Deng and his successors have been adamant that economic reform will not be accompanied by political reform. They showed that with the Tiananmen Square massacre, whose 20th anniversary we marked in June.

The Chinese Communist rulers are riding a tiger that they dare not dismount. The Chinese people have been willing to put up with a lack of political freedom so long as the regime continues to deliver ever rising living standards. This is becoming increasingly difficult as the economy comes up against the constraints imposed by the strictures of economic and political power. These include state control of banking and credit, the overvaluation of the currency, a 17 per cent exponential growth in military expenditure, corruption, inefficiency and the arrogance of the party and its bureaucracy.

We may not see a moment as electrifying as the fall of the Berlin Wall in China any time soon. Chinese history moves at its own pace. But as good Marxists, the Chinese leaders know that history also has its own inevitable laws which cannot be ignored forever. The so-called market Stalinism of the past 20 years is not sustainable in the long run. As Gorbachev discovered, there is no sustainable halfway house between communism and capitalism; between dictatorship and democracy. Eventually the Chinese people will choose another form of political system. I doubt that they will choose to go back to the dark days before 1979.