To the Communist Party, socialist emancipation and national salvation have always been inseparable. The CCP is heir to a tradition of reform and revolution going back to China's defeat during the First Opium War in 1842. Since then, the concern of countless officials, scholars, students, rebels, activists, writers, scientists and revolutionaries was to ‘save the nation’ and to overcome the ignominy of ‘national humiliation’ at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialist aggression. The years immediately after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 in particular were times of rapid radicalization. Appalled by the swift deterioration of the new Republic that succeeded the Empire, patriots trawled Western ideas in search of possible solutions to the country's dire condition, among which Marxism initially was only one. In fact, many of the earliest members of the Communist Party turned to communism only after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 showed how powerful a communist nation could suddenly become in a country like Russia which was only a little less poor and backward than their own.

One hundred years on, China as a nation is still very much a work in progress, a project to turn the conquest empire of the Qing dynasty into a modern country and a united nation. In the reform period the relative importance of nation building has increased to the point that nowadays little is heard of a communist utopia. There are three core concepts at the heart of the Communists’ national project: the country of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese nation and the Han people. In this chapter I will describe how the CCP brings its neo-socialist arsenal to bear on each of these, enabling it to go far beyond the very real progress made under Mao. China is on its way to becoming a modern and integrated society in which there is paradoxically more and at the same time less space for and tolerance of any form of diversity that challenges the unity of the country, the nation or the people.

For China to meet both reform and post-reform challenges, the continued rule of the Communist Party is not the main obstacle, but instead, the most important condition. This involves much more than merely the routine, and in itself correct, observation that CCP rule keeps China united and ensures stability and peace. Designing and implementing the necessary policies demands the kind of skill, organization, staying power and legitimacy that only the Communist Party possesses. Although this assessment runs counter to the view that the problems and issues that China faces are inherent to fundamental flaws of the system that must eventually bring communism to its knees, it is intended neither as a whitewash for these problems, nor as a denial that the Party can, and indeed must do a lot better than at present.

The CCP's development can be divided in three distinct phases, each with its own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. Twice has the Party needed to reinvent itself fundamentally to survive. Twice has it done so successfully, the first time between 1935 and 1942 and the second time between 1989 and 1992. Between its foundation in Shanghai in 1921 and the rectification in Yan'an in 1942, the CCP was a revolutionary party that was fragmented, ideologically divided and at the mercy of forces more powerful than itself: Stalin and the Comintern, warlords, the Nationalist Party and the Japanese army. After his arrival in Yan'an at the end of the Long March in 1935, Mao Zedong turned the Party into a personal dictatorship, a military machine and a totalitarian organization that defeated its enemies and transformed China into a communist state. Maoist dictatorship subsequently also destroyed many of the gains of the revolution, ultimately leaving China poor, weak and divided. Many aspects of communist dictatorship were changed during the first decade of reform in the 1980s, but a new phase in CCP politics and organization only really got underway after the crackdown on the Tian'anmen Movement in 1989 and Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in 1992. A unique blend of socialist authoritarianism and liberalization has grown out of this, changing China into an economic powerhouse and emerging global power.

This book has documented and discussed many aspects of this transformation. China has now moved beyond the project of the reform of state socialism to what I have termed neo-socialism.

Perspectives on Freedom and Human Rights

Human rights are alien to totalitarian systems. This is not simply because such systems cannot allow unchecked freedom for fear of instability. The contradiction is much more fundamental than that. Totalitarianism doesn't even need human rights, because a society independent from the Party, the state, the military and the economic plan simply does not exist. Society is part of the totalitarian organism: there is nothing beyond the system that rights can or should protect.

In China this changed with reform. Organizations, families and people have gained interests and identities that they pursue and protect from the state and from each other. Political protection, informal support and interpersonal loyalties and obligations – practices carried over from totalitarian times and enhanced by the greater leeway created under reform – are commonly used to fill this gap. However, as the economy and society become more complex, the need is felt for uniformity and predictability in social relations and economic exchanges that only the rule of law and a rights-based legal system can provide. However, such rights are a gift of the Party and the state, instruments for the correct conduct of human relations and conditional on their proper use. But have these rights opened a Pandora's Box of the introduction of universal human rights that can be asserted independently from and, if necessary, against the Party and the state?

This question cuts right to the heart of the many prejudices, misperceptions and deliberate misconstructions in Western debates on China and the future world order and in Chinese debates on the dominance of the West and China's modernization. Understanding the development and reach of human rights is therefore essential to understand what contemporary China is and where it is going.

The Chinese government views human rights principally as an international relations issue. The 1989 Tian'anmen crackdown made the People's Republic of China the target for serious and systematic allegations of human rights abuses for the first time since joining the United Nations in 1972. In countering these allegations the government has taken a two-pronged approach. First, convinced that human rights are merely a Western stick with which to beat China, the government has sought a prominent role in international human rights forums and entered into a multitude of multilateral and bilateral discussions on human rights issues.

The Politics of Growth

China's economic growth since the onset of the reforms in 1978 has been unprecedented. Beyond this minimal consensus, economists inside and outside China disagree on just about any aspect of China's developmental trajectory. Has economic development principally been driven by the inexorable rise of the private sector, the marketization of the state sector, the opening to the world market, or more generally by sagacious policy making of the CCP? Is reform a linear process that started modestly and gradually deepened and radicalized, or has reform at certain junctures taken abrupt changes of direction, perhaps even rolling back earlier, more radical policies?

Debates on China among economists are generally wrapped in assumptions on how an economy ought to work, leading to conclusions about what is wrong or missing and what still needs to be changed or put in place before the economy can be proclaimed fully reformed. Doing so might come at the risk of losing sight of how the economy actually functions. Each economy, and most definitely the Chinese one, is a unique configuration that only imperfectly fits the moulds of economics. In this chapter I will try to avoid what the economist Ronald Coase called the ‘blackboard economics’ of models and assumptions and stay as close as possible to the reality on the ground. I will draw on the research of economists, sociologists and political scientists on the politics of the complexities and contradictions that shape the economy. I will then gauge the seriousness of the main challenges and opportunities for continued development that depart from Chinese realities instead of wishing to prescribe a particular cure.

We will have to start by questioning several common assumptions. The first such assumption is that Chinese modernization and development started with the announcement of reform at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress in 1978. The Third Plenum's most important contribution was that it created and publicly signalled a consensus among the Party leadership that old Maoist ideas no longer worked, but had led to disaster after the first few ‘golden years’ immediately after the communist victory in 1949.

Why China?

On the evening of 3 June 1989, I rode my bike down to Beijing's Tian'anmen Square, China's political and symbolic centre. I had done so virtually every day since students from Peking University almost two months earlier had posted a giant, black-and-white portrait in commemoration of Hu Yaobang at the Monument for Revolutionary Heroes there. Hu had been secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1982 to 1987, when paramount leader Deng Xiaoping sacked him for his support of widespread student demonstrations the year before. Hu continued to serve on the CCP's Politburo, but on 9 April 1989 he suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed from a heart attack during a meeting of that body, dying a few days later. The students’ commemorative act of political defiance on 15 April triggered an unprecedented national protest movement that involved at its peak on 17 May more than one million people in the capital alone, rocking the very foundations of CCP rule.

My visit to Tian'anmen Square on 3 June was different from my previous ones: I knew it would be my last. Heavily armed units of the People's Liberation Army had already entered Beijing from the Northwest, making their way to the city centre battling largely unarmed and unorganized groups of civilians. Later that evening, other, only lightly armed troops suddenly appeared in streets or intersections much closer to the square, confronting the public in an eerie, silent and ominous stand-off, without moving or trying to do anything. A few hours later, after midnight on 4 June, the army units that had entered the city from the Northwest reached, sealed off and cleared the square. How many students died then and there is still not known. Many more civilians had died during the army's march through the city. Communist Party rule had become a military occupation.

The Tian'anmen Movement – or June Fourth, as it is often known – impressed two conclusions upon me and many other people in China on that day. Despite ten years of reform, communist rule continued to be fundamentally violent, repressive and, in the final instance, based on the Party's control of the army. Furthermore, the Communist Party had lost whatever popular mandate it had and was on its last legs. Its demise would only be a matter of time.