The one hundredth birthday party of the “great, glorious and correct” Chinese Communist Party was celebrated with an all-singing, all-dancing, light-show extravaganza in Beijing’s National Stadium, the metal nest built for the 2008 Olympics. On 1st July, a cast of thousands played scenes from the Party’s founding to the present. They didn’t mention that the Party was created with the help of Soviet agents, but the most arresting bits of the performance drew on the best, and worst, of Soviet propaganda.
Over a century ago the director Sergey Eisenstein decreed that, sinceindividualism was horrendously bourgeois, the heroes of Communist film and theatre should be the masses. He created remarkable crowd scenes in films like The Strike, in which “the people” moved in unison like one homogenous being: a collective revolutionary energy. At the CCP’s birthday party, it was the scenes depicting the early twentieth century that notably nodded to early Soviet cinema, with relentless torrents of actors rushing from different angles across the vast stage, coalescing first into an arrow, then into a star.
Interspersed between the crowd scenes were vignettes about Chinese Communist leaders — done in the stiff, declamatory, hysterically happy style of Stalinist Socialist Realism, which replaced Eisenstein’s avant garde ideas as the USSR wore on. Mao was shown founding the CCP with grandfatherly goodwill surrounded by fiery-eyed comrades reminiscent of Petrograd’s proletariat.
After over two hours, history caught up with the present. Ballet dancers dressed in the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army pranced with machine guns, celebrating modern China’s military might. A huge screen showed videos of Xi Jinping giving speeches at the UN, in that vacant, bored way of his, like a hyper-wealthy schoolboygoing through the motions in class knowing he’ll never have to work. Every clip of the President was greeted with high-pitched squeals from the audience, of the sort associated with boy-band concerts: Stalinist cult of personality meets Instagram era energy.
The political message behind the aesthetics was ripped from Soviet propaganda, then: our system achieves success when the masses are directed by a few superior leaders in the Party. The birthday celebrations were another opportunity for CCP flunkeys to restate their favourite mantra: liberal democracy is a mess; checks and balances have degenerated into confusion and paralysis; centralised control is the way forward.
The history of the twentieth century seems to show that this is bunk. In the Cold War, Politburo control lost heavily to the messy but more open approach of liberal democracy. But the CCP is betting that something fundamental has changed. At the climax of the birthday performance, instead of celebrating some Soviet-style Five Year Plan, a great neon blue “5G” hovered above the stage, while hologram ones and zeros drizzled down. The compere, holding a red book, celebrated how China will lead the world in the online era.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeGood article. The potential for advancing tech to enable tyranny as exemplified in China is obvious, and immanent. Can tech alternatives or weaknesses in the system offer us realms of freedom which transcend the totalitarian data/network vice? I hope so. A few clues here.
Great article, proper debate. For me the mention of Pol.is, which I immediately looked up, was eye-opening. Use of tech for civilised discussion and political problem-solving is so much better than the hate-encouraging format of most social media. I am encouraged, it made my day. Borderline-relevant comment: does the fact that the events of interest are in Taiwan lead to the subject being suppressed in CCP influenced institutions (a large category, I realise).
“Imagine if, instead of the rancorous shit-show of our current social media, we actually had public service platforms that created the online iteration of the ancient Greek Agora.” (I thought that was the purpose of Unherd BTL.)
Not only was the citizen who voted in the Athenian Democracy informed on the situation, they were also required to do unpaid public service as government workers – and if they voted for war they suited up and marched to war.
Western voters could never be in a Greek Agora, they are too stupid, shallow, greedy, corruptible, self seeking, and entitled.
The modern Westerner voter is a group who meet in the strip mall or convenience store wile buying fatty foods and cheap consumables, maybe do a bit of shoplifting, and then pay for their stuff with food stamps or credit cards.
“It’s no accident that Taiwan had one of the best responses to the Covid crisis — with relentless tracking of cases, but nothing like the totalitarian measures taken inside China.”
It is no accident they had 5 deaths per million in the entire reigon, wile the West exceeded 2000 per million, because they are resistant to it. Covid-19 is an illness of Westerners. Much like the Europeans going to the New World killed off the natives by common illnesses the Westerners were resistant to.
The whole thing is very curious.
Asians aren’t resistant to the virus. The reason China and Taiwan did better is better leadership.
But all of South East Asia did better, including Laos, Bhutan and Thailand who won’t be winning any ‘better leadership’ awards any time soon.
When we are talking about incremental difference in the mortality rate owing to a single set of policies adopted across the region, that’s the influence of Man.
When we’re talking about differences of an order of magnitude, despite policies as diverse as in the West, that’s nature.
Nature takes it for this one.
It’s odd how the Commies and the tech-sters imagine a Newtonian world where everything works according to billiard ball ballistics.
And yet, ever since Kant said we cannot know things-in-themselves, and Anybodies created the oil, steel, car, computers, internet industries, and physicists imagined the impossibility of relative space and time, we have got where we are on the Uncertainty Principle, that we cannot know how each subatomic state function will turn out.
Warning to tech-sters and all the political ships at sea: the future will surprise you — and all the rest of us.
All I can say is that I demand rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
This was fascinating. But I was hoping he’d expand on “Estonia leading the way”. I’m left none the wiser, maybe I’ve missed some obvious tech headline somewhere! Anyone know what Estonia is doing that matches Taiwan’s digital minister?!