So the suits 'wunnit'! In other words, one lot of suited, smiling, smiling, smiling men (God, how they smile!) with died black hair have taken over from another bunch of suited men who didn't smile quite so much. At least the suits were standardised American-style politician suits, not those faux-pleb suits the old Maoists used to affect, so that's an improvement So what's changed?
Well, the first thing that has changed is that this lot have a perfect shit-storm of problems to deal with unlike their predecessors who simply dumped some of the worst aspects of Marxism and after allowing a bit of pseudo-capitalism to operate they then sat back and watched the money roll in. I call it 'pseudo-capitalism' because of course it was really an uneasy mixture of state-capitalism on the Hitler/Putin model allied with good (or do I mean 'bad'?), old-fashioned gangsterism. It is a sort of vicious, self-deluding opiate, rather like the so-called 'quantitative easing' we are getting addicted to, which looks good, feels good and by golly - it leaves you feeling like shit!
About twenty years ago you could have pointed to the mass of the Chinese people - and, boy, are there ever masses of them! - and summed them up accurately as an example of a lumpen proletariat. No doubt, like the rest of humanity, they had their wants and desires and hopes but there was absolutely no chance of them getting any of it so they just concentrated on staying alive. But now, courtesy of pseudo-capitalism, they have been inundated with baubles, bangles and beads. And now - they want more. And more. And still more! And the ones who haven't yet had their share but have seen the others enjoying theirs, want it,too, like now, or better still - yesterday! Even a hint that this golden stream might dry to a dribble will provoke an anger that the men in suits would be well advised to avoid.
As always, the times they are a-changin', and the new men in their new suits will have to grapple with the problems that arise when the money does not flow in at the rate they, and their people, expect. For a start, they will have to grip the gangsters and wring out of them the money that belongs to China. By and large and on the whole, gangsters don't care for that sort of thing, and when a nation is riddled from top to bottom with corruption it might be difficult for the 'suits' to find allies in their efforts to enforce a tax-collecting policy. Equally difficult is the fact that their state-controlled banks are all technically broke - just like ours! - and when the government - any government - is beginningto feel the pinch, that's the last thing you want to have to deal with.
The other vociferous demand of 'The People' (dread words, especially to a political party who claim to represent them) is that universal irritant to politicans everywhere - freedom. Of course, in these early days, and in a country as huge as China, the yearnings for liberty are inchoate - but they are growing with the help of the internet. As John Simpson reported from the 18th Congress of the CCP in this week's Spectator - a corker edition, by the way! - it all took him back nearly 25 years to the past:
And it was then, with a uniformed security guard watching me tolerantly, that I started to get a flashback. Somewhere, some time, I’d done this before. Then I remembered. It was Moscow: the Kremlin conference hall on 28 June 1988, the opening of the 19th Conference of the Soviet Communist Party. The assembled delegates were there to work out what on earth to do. Three years later, of course, history decided for them, and tipped the whole lot into its capacious dustbin.
Simpson's article is well worth reading in full. Whether Xi Jinping will do any better than Mikhail Gorbachev no one can tell. All I know for certain is that I would not want his job for, er, all the tea in China!
