October 1st 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. They deserve our admiration. True, many bad things were done by the communists, and it is true too that they are far and away from being a perfect government or society.
BUT: look where they came from. The earlier regime, the KMT Nationalists, for all of its reinvention as a democratic party in Taiwan, was more fascist than anything else. I'm not just using the whole "Nazi" thing as a bad word to call someone you don't like, as it has become in USA. Bush is Hitler! No Obama is Hitler! How un-American to call our president Hitler. No. The KMT really was in bed with the Nazis. Hitler's Germany gave the KMT material aid and advice, and in return the KMT provided the Nazis with almost all the tungsten essential for the manufacture of modern armor plating ... and we all know what the Nazis used that for. [While we're sharing blame around, the Japanese got a pile of iron from the Australians. That's why Australians still call Robert Menzies, the minister responsible at the time, "Pig Iron Bob."] The European fascists had their Brown Shirts and Black Shirts ... the KMT had their Blue Shirts. The CCP (Chinese communist party) was a rebel group, hiding in the back country, as the KMT with German military advisers and equipment, tried to hunt them down. The only reason the Germans stopped their cooperation with the KMT was because it came down to a choice of either China or Japan, and the Japanese looked like the more useful ally.
Then, from 1931 to 1945, China was subjected to a brutal occupation by the Japanese. Both the KMT and the CCP held on by the skin of their teeth, but even while the KMT got massive aid from the Allies (which it hoarded rather than use to fight the Japanese), the CCP was cut off from aid, even by the Soviets, who didn't want to risk their non-aggression pact with the Japanese. Nevertheless, the CCP grew in strength in these years, mostly because the people (correctly) judged that they were the only ones with any real interest in resisting the Japanese. Ancient Chinese philosophy has always emphasized that victory depends more on moral correctness than on equipment, and this rather odd idea (at least to western ears) was proven to be entirely correct by the events of 1945-1949. The CCP were outnumbered by 3 to 1, and also badly outgunned by the KMT who had all that material from the Allies. The Allies airlifted KMT troops to take Japanese surrender (and equipment) and the CCP was left to pick up what it could. Only in the far north did they get any help at all from occupying Soviet troops, but even then the Russians were more interested in looting and carrying off industrial equipment back to mother Russia. Yet ... the CCP won the Civil War, and they won it decisively. The people backed them, and their troops had infinitely superior morale compared to the KMT. No objective examination of the material advantages of the KMT would have predicted the result. It really did come down to moral superiority, or at least superior morale.
So, by 1949 the CCP had won. But what had they won? A scarred country, internationally isolated, with little industry barring what was left by the Japanese in Manchuria. They had a medieval countryside and a few early modern cities. They were even forced into a fresh war in the 1950s against the Americans in which they suffered horrendous casualties including the loss of Chairman Mao's own son. [Note, I'm talking from their point of view here. Anyone who studies Chinese history should know that the Chinese would feel compelled to intervene once American troops starting pushing into North Korea, and it's not as if they didn't give advance warning of this fact.] In the years following 1949 they made a lot of quite astoundingly successful reforms, and they also made some horrendous cock-ups, most particularly in their agricultural policy which lead to mass starvation at one point. They emerged from that, only to fall back into insanity in the 1960s with the Cultural Revolution, something that is now widely acknowledged in China to have been a really bad mistake. Rational pragmatism returned in the 1970s, and look what has been accomplished since then. China is now Australia and Brazil's biggest trading partner, amongst others. She has a rising middle class bigger than the entire population of USA. More people enjoy comfort and security in China than have ever experienced it before. Yes, there are still problems, and some of them are really nasty ones, and some of them are even self inflicted ... but it bears remembering that they've basically moved from the industrial revolution to the modern age in those 60 years. They deserve our admiration and respect. Happy 60th birthday PRC.
[It doesn't mean we have to ignore civil rights violations etc., but let's get a little perspective here. Where was the west in terms of human rights 60 years after the industrial revolution, when we hadn't even emerged out of the 19th Century? Let's not even talk about environmental protection at the time!]
