China: 2009 a year of notable dates

Beijing's rulers are keenly aware that 2009 will be shadowed both by global economic downturns and equally bedeviled by a series of anniversaries marking key chapters in the political lineage of the People's Republic. Such anniversaries present the Chinese Communist Party with an unsettling political geomancy.

First and foremost is 1949.

After conquering the Mainland, Mao's communists established the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The vanquished Nationalists retrenched to the island of Taiwan, thus creating two de-facto and politically competing Chinese governments ever since. The horrible humanitarian and human rights excesses of the PRC's first thirty years are now but a forgotten footnote to the majority, both on the Mainland and abroad. While the early events of the People's Republic were judged through the proletarian prism of the Maoist era since 1978, people have been increasingly enthralled by its socio/economic success.

The “reform era” cautiously initiated by Deng Xiaoping transformed China's moribund Marxist system by allowing elements of enterprise and common sense to replace the rigid cookie cutter socialist mold forced over the Mainland since 1949. This was not, as is often perceived replacing Marxism with Markets, but actually a last ditch effort to save the People's Republic political regime from its self-inflicted mistakes.

In December 1978, the rather innocuous sounding Third Plenum of the Communist Party of China, the focus shifted from the proletarian class struggle to the Four Modernizations.

Just a few months ago, Beijing's Premier Wen Jiabio, addressing the United Nations, stated,” This year marks the 30th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up policy, a policy that fundamentally changed the closed, backward and ossified situation which had existed in China for years.” Yes, outsiders may know this but here is the PRC's Premier openly admitting the failures of the CCP's first thirty years.

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