CHAIRMAN MAO IS BACK

One of the things that endeared Deng Xiaoping — the father of modern China — to the Chinese rank and file was his magnanimous gesture of retaining Mao Zedong— the founder of modern China — in his place in history. Any other leader would have erased all that Chairman Mao stood and still stand for. But Paramount Leader Xiaoping being himself couldn’t allow his comrade, notwithstanding his undoing, to be cast into the dustbin of history. So from Tiananmen Square to any government building in China, the giant portrait of Chairman Mao hangs.

It all started after the defeat of Chiang Kai Shek and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Chairman Mao harnessed a powerful cult of personality by purging many of his comrades in arms (Deng Xiaoping included). Thus establishing the dictatorship of Mao rather than the dictatorship of proletariat that Marx talked about.

The dictatorship of Mao was marked by two policies that brought China on its knees — The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It took the intervention of Deng Xiaoping to reverse the equation. And in so doing, constitutional term limit and collective leadership were established. Deng Xiaoping and other senior leaders of Communist Party of China (CPC) vowed that they would never let a single individual accumulate so much influence like Mao again.

It is this beautiful system that made China a unique dictatorship that the incumbent Chinese president — Xi Jinping — has overturned. The old constitution allows a once in a decade transition of power and leadership recruitment. With the term limit removed in an almost unanimous vote last Sunday by the National People’s Congress, President Xi is set to rule indefinitely .

Chairman Mao has returned. He is Xi Jingpin in spirit.

“Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Let’s see how it goes with President Xi.