Life expectancy in China is now close to 77 years so, at 100, the demise of the Chinese Communist Party is long overdue. That this happens speedily and as peacefully as possible is all we can wish the long-suffering people of China on their masters’ centenary. Alas, as with many other wishes, this one looks unlikely to come true any time soon.
Having been responsible for some 60 million deaths, the Chinese Communist Party is the most blood-soaked criminal organisation of the last hundred years. In the past four decades, as it has largely ditched Marxism while retaining Leninism, it has also emerged as one of the canniest and most effective. Thanks in part to harnessing new technology, its apparatus of surveillance and control would make Stalin and Hitler weep with envy, while its pivot towards “guided capitalism”, where the Party and business world have more or less seamlessly merged, ensures that it controls resources – and therefore power and influence – that the old-style communists and other assorted totalitarians and authoritarians could only dream of. This is a potent and dangerous combination.