One of the fascinations of China is that it is a country where social engineering has been practised for 50 years on a scale unknown in history, except in the former Soviet Union. And yet while Soviet communism collapsed, the Chinese revolution continues. The successors of Mao Zedong, who proclaimed the Chinese People's Republic in Tiananmen Square on October 1st 1949, continue to control his "people's democratic dictatorship". Today they will indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation on modern China's 50th birthday.
The Middle Kingdom has indeed been transformed beyond recognition in 50 years. Before 1949 it was exploited by foreign nations, and knew only war, famine and chaos. At the Republic's birth it was laid waste and robbed of its gold reserves and national treasures by the retreating nationalist army of Chiang Kai Chek. Today it is a regional power in Asia. It has huge US dollar reserves. Its people are well fed. It has expanded to reclaim Tibet and Hong Kong. Its leaders are courted by the world's politicians and business tycoons. Many of its citizens enjoy a lifestyle more concerned with designer fashions than ideology.
But while President Jiang Zemin and other communist leaders extol the greatness of the founder of the nation, much of his social engineering was a disaster for the people. Officially Mao is blamed for "gross mistakes" but to the party his contribution to the Chinese revolution far outweighs his errors. In the early days, Mao's ambitious plans for the peasantry extended far beyond land reform. Opium addiction was eradicated, foot-binding was ended, literacy was promoted, religious temples were destroyed, free speech was suppressed. Some 400 million peasants were recruited into collective farms. As in Russia, collectivisation resulted in falling grain yields and famine returned to parts of the country.
In 1957 Mao briefly encouraged open debate when he let "a hundred flowers bloom", but then turned on those who spoke out against corruption and excesses. Nearly a million intellectuals, including the current Prime Minister, Zhu Rongji, were imprisoned or banished to the countryside. The crushing of opposition paved the way for Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1958, when he initiated massive water and irrigation programmes and set about formalising China's greatness with such grandiose projects as the Great Hall of the People. Impractical industrial methods, such as village steel furnaces, along with the advent of major floods, caused the great famine of 1958-1962, when up to 30 million people are believed to have starved to death.
A deterioration in relations between China and the Soviet Union over post-Stalin reforms introduced by Nikita Khrushchev led to an ideological split and the withdrawal of Soviet aid in 1960. The party refused to adopt political reform - this would again distinguish it from the Soviet Communist Party in the 1980s - opting instead to maintain a whipped-up level of revolutionary zeal. Mao's thoughts were collected in a Little Red Book by the head of the People's Liberation Army, Lin Biao, and made required reading.
In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to create new socialist structures overnight. The result was chaos. Red Guards killed and persecuted intellectuals, teachers and anyone with the remotest connections to capitalism or foreigners. Leading reformers in the party, such as Deng Xiaoping, were labelled "capitalist roaders" and purged. Former president Liu Shaoqi died in prison.
An exhausted China turned to the PLA to restore order, and stability returned with Mao still in control and Deng back in government. In 1972, US president Richard Nixon visited China and normalised relations. When the leading reformer Zhou Enlai died in 1976, people used his funeral as an occasion to express anger at the influence of the Gang of Four, the group behind the throne led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, responsible for the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Zhou to the masses was a symbol of decency and order. Their protest in Tiananmen Square was suppressed by police after Mao branded it as counter-revolutionary, and again Deng Xiaoping disappeared from view.
Mao died on September 8th, 1976, and by 1977 Deng was back in power, facing a crisis of faith in communism among a people exhausted by power struggles and repression. His response was to begin opening up China to the world. In rural China agricultural households were allowed to sell their surplus food on the market and in coastal regions special economic zones were set up. China embarked on a period of phenomenal growth averaging 9 per cent a year. People began to acquire the "eight bigs": television, fridge, stereo, camera, motorbike, furniture, washing machine and electric fan.
But corruption and inflation continued to stir popular discontent. The catalyst for student protests in 1989 was the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformer who had been forced out by hardliners. Throughout April and May students led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. A million Beijing people demonstrated during the visit in May of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Deng labelled the protests counter-revolutionary and Li Peng declared martial law immediately after Gorbachev had left. Early on June 4th army units loyal to the hardline leadership crushed the protests with great bloodshed. Since then no organised opposition to the communist leadership has been allowed. Leaders of the 1989 protests were jailed and exiled. Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang was ousted for sympathising with the students. He was succeeded by Shanghai party secretary Jiang Zemin. The hardliners did not stop economic reform, however. Deng, retired but still all-powerful, declared in 1992 that "it is glorious to be rich" and the economy took off.
During this time another great experiment in social engineering was taking place, the introduction of a one-child policy to control the size of the population. To mark its success, the government proclaimed this week that it had prevented the birth of 338 million people, far in excess of the United States' population of 270 million.
Today the country is led by career politicians who remember October 1st, 1949 and have inherited the ideal of planned nationhood. On the eve of the birth of modern China, Mao wrote that the Communist Party "is no longer a child or a lad in his teens but has become an adult". In the half-century since then, in the words of a Chinese academic, the party has aged, it has become autocratic and cranky, and has trouble keeping its children in order.
No public dissent against the official line is tolerated, and members of unapproved religious groups and promoters of labour rights are often imprisoned. At the same time there are regular, lowkey street protests all across China against corrupt officials, non-payment of wages and pensions and unemployment. They are tolerated because they pose no direct threat to the government. By contrast, in the last year the organisers of a pro-democracy party were given long prison sentences. Foreign publications are often banned. Resentment seethes in Tibet and Xinjiang province against Chinese colonisation.
The new generation of business-oriented Chinese pays lip service to the system, but one wonders how long they will tolerate the leadership's control of debate and decision-making, both in political and legal spheres, with no democratic accountability. The party and the people are observing a sort of pact: people can do what they like to make money, as long as they do not directly challenge the system of rule. The list of "bigs" now includes a house, a car and foreign travel, but only a minority of urban rich can realistically hope to fulfil such dreams. The peasants, 50 years on, see their lives changed little. The average urban household has 4,185 yuan (£350) in disposable income each year, but in rural areas it averages just 1,617 yuan (£140). Only 6 per cent of families own a car. At the same time China has become the world's third-largest household appliances market, next only to America and Japan.
The world sees China as a huge untapped market. Of the multinational companies which have invested here, 90 per cent are making a profit, according to a Fortune Magazine survey, including McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, IBM, Compaq and Kodak.
The great unresolved issue for China is Taiwan, where 20 million people now enjoy a raucous type of democracy, challenging Beijing's claims that its people are not ready for democratic elections. Taiwan President Lee Tenghui declared bilateral ties should be on a "special state-to-state" basis, infuriating China, which pursues a "one-China" policy for reunification.
Another is the question of the verdict of counter-revolutionary turmoil on the 1989 pro-democracy protesters, which will be reversed only when Li Peng, now the number two in the party, is gone. Pro-democracy activist Wei Jingsheng and student leader Wang Dan have been forced into exile in the US, a constant reminder that individual human rights in China remain subservient to the interests of the party. As the Chinese historian Jonathan Spence wrote, the party that swept to power in 1949 by challenging social political and economic norms now seems to have no purpose but to ensure it faces no such challenges itself.