So China, a country that’s about 4,000 years old, just threw itself a 60th birthday party. What gives? It’s only the Communist Dynasty that’s 60, the latest in a long series of Chinese Dynasties beginning with the Xia Dynasty in 2100 B.C., which lasted 500 years. They’ve had like 20 of them, with most of them lasting a lot longer than 60 years. A lot of them also had some real bloodthirsty Emperors who didn’t really care about the lives of ordinary citizens, but none of them half as deadly as the guy who founded the Communist Dynasty, Old Murdering Mao Zedong, who killed scores of millions of Chinese on his watch. Whether or not his Dynasty can last as long as some of China’s other Dynasties remains to be seen.
There’s a lot of grassroots noise in China about democracy, a dirty word to Communist Dynasty officials. It’s their own fault, really, since it was their idea to industrialize the place into a mirror image of Western industrial nations, only bigger, thereby unleashing the energy of 1.3 billion Chinese who have had a taste of making real money for the first time in 4,000 years. They got so busy that China now officially manufactures everything, now that Mao is safely dead and deified. Mao wasn’t interested in money, he was all about the murdering, wielding power for power’s sake and doing things that made no sense just because he could, like 5 Year Plans that failed miserably and The Cultural Revolution that targeted the nation’s smart people for murder and relocation to Bronze Age farms.
Doing senseless things, truth be told, is an old Chinese Dynasty tradition, with a whole bunch of Dynasties chipping in on building the Great Wall to keep out invaders, which never worked. Then there was their very first Grand Emperor, who had himself buried with thousands of soldiers made out of pottery on a lake of liquid mercury. So Murdering Mao had a lot of company in the Insane Dictator Department, and took it to a whole other level of blood and power lust. And just to be a real bona fide nut job, he turned his back on 4,000 years of exquisite arts and vibrant colors and dressed his entire nation in drab grey suits and funny little caps.
Well, as soon has he dropped dead, the new leaders of the Communist Dynasty got busy building factories, schools and modern communication facilities and commanded a nation to put their noses to the grindstone. They responded admirably and now China is poised to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy. Unlike Mao, the new Communist Dynasty guys are emulating their more ancient ancestors and enriching themselves on the labor of the masses, accumulating vast fortunes that they deny possessing, what with personal enrichment going against the grain of Communist dogma.
Not only that, the huge economy they have created is building many private fortunes too, and for the first time ever the Chinese population is enjoying material prosperity and a decent life style. Or at least half of them are. There’s still that pesky half a billion Chinese souls living lives of backwardness, poverty and hunger, reaping few rewards of the boom times in The New China. To these unfortunate souls, the New China is certainly not some 60 year-old nation created out of thin air by the Communists, but merely one more oppressive dynasty in a long line of brutal fools.
How long the Communist Dynasty can keep up this juggling act of full blown Capitalism grafted onto a repressive Communist regime is anybody’s guess. The tons of money flowing through China these days has corrupted their government and industrial institutions so they that are pretty much unrecognizable from the Communist Puritanism of Murdering Mao. As anywhere else, corruption leads to calls for reform, and like in any other industrial society, democracy seems to be the preferred manner of reform being called for by those brave enough to defy the totalitarian Communist Dynasty. Who knows, maybe the Communist Dynasty will shock the world by quietly going away like the Soviet Union did in 1991. No one saw that one coming, so maybe the next decade will see the founding of the Democratic Dynasty in a Newer China. Meanwhile, Happy Phony Made Up Birthday to the Communist Dynasty and their wealthy overlords.