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CHINA’S COMMUNIST PARTY AT 100
1 One party has ruled China for 72 years, without a mandate from voters. That is not a world record. Lenin and his dismal [sombrios, lúgubres, sinistros] heirs
[herdeiros] held power in Moscow for slightly longer, as has the Workers’ Party in North Korea. But no other dictatorship has been able to transform itself from
a famine-racked [assolado pela fome] disaster, as China was under Mao Zedong, into the world’s second-largest economy, whose cutting-edge [da vanguarda]
technology and infrastructure put America’s decaying roads and railways to shame. China’s Communists are the world’s most successful authoritarians.
2 The Chinese Communist Party has been able to maintain its grip on power for three reasons. First, it is ruthless [cruel, implacável]. Yes, it delayed before
crushing the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But eventually it answered the demonstrators [manifestantes] with bullets, terrorizing the country into
submission.
3 China’s present leaders show no signs at all of having any regrets about the massacre. On the contrary, President ΞXinping laments that the Soviet Union
collapsed because its leaders were not “man enough to stand up and resist” at the critical moment. For which read: unlike us, they did not have the guts
[coragem] to slaughter [massacrar] unarmed protesters with machine-guns.
4 A second reason for the party’s longevity is its ideological agility. Within a couple of years of Mao’s death in 1976, a new leader, Deng Xiaoping, began
abandoning the late chairman’s productivity-destroying “people’s communes” and setting market forces to work in the countryside. Maoists complained, but
production soared. In the aftermath of Tiananmen and the Soviet Union’s downfall, Deng fought off Maoist diehards [da linha-dura] and embraced capitalism
with even greater fervor. This led to the closure of many state-owned firms and the privatization of housing. Millions were laid off, but China boomed.
5 Under Mr. Ξ the party has shifted again, to focus on ideological orthodoxy. His recent predecessors allowed a measure of mild dissent; he has crushed it.
Mao is lauded [lovado] once more. Party cadres [quadros] study “ΞXinping thought.” The bureaucracy, army, and police have undergone purges of deviant and
corrupt officials. Big business is being brought into line. Mr. Ξ has rebuilt the party at the grassroots [na base], creating a network of neighborhood spies and
injecting cadres into private firms to watch over them. Not since Mao’s day has society been so tightly controlled.
6 The third cause of the party’s success is that China did not turn into a straightforward [pura, aberta] kleptocracy in which wealth is sucked up exclusively by
the well-connected. Corruption did become rampant [desmedida, galopante], and the most powerful families are indeed super-rich. But many people felt their
lives were improving too, and the party was astute enough to acknowledge their demands. It abolished rural taxes and created a welfare system that provides
everyone with pensions and subsidized health care. The benefits were not abundant, but they were appreciated.
7 Over the years Western observers have found plenty of reasons to predict the collapse of Chinese communism. Surely the control required by a one-party
state was incompatible with the freedom required by a modern economy? One day China’s economic growth must run out of steam, leading to disillusion and
protests. And, if it did not, the vast middle class that such a growth created would inevitably demand greater freedoms – especially because so many of their
children had encountered democracy first-hand, when they got their education in the West.
8 These predictions have been confounded by the Communist Party’s continuing popularity. Many Chinese credit it for the improvement in their livelihoods
[sustentos, meios de vida]. True, China’s workforce is ageing, shrinking, and accustomed to ridiculously early retirement, but those are the sorts of difficulties
every government faces, authoritarian or not. Vigorous economic growth looks as if it will continue for some time yet.
Adapted from The Economist, June 26 – July 2, 2021.
In the first sentence of paragraph 5, the phrase “Under Mr. Ξ the party has shifted again…” is most likely connected to which of the following statements?
