The Chinese Revolution of 1949 is one of the great historical events of this century. Its 50th anniversary was marked yesterday by awesome and elaborate patriotic celebrations. There is a great deal its people can be proud of, most obviously on the basic indicators of health, life expectancy, self-sufficiency in food, literacy, welfare and lately of economic growth and development. International strength and respect have transformed China's image around the world, compared to its parlous state in the late 1940s. But in terms of political liberty the record has been far more retrogressive.
China was exposed over the century before the communists took power to the most profoundly humiliating encounters with European and Asian imperialist powers, which were well able to exploit the weaknesses of its traditional society and leaderships. From the Opium Wars through to the brutal occupation by the Japanese in the 1930s and during the second World War there was an intimate connection between Chinese and imperial power holders. The conflict between the communists and nationalists over the three decades before 1949 was fought out as a civil war within the resistance to foreign rulers. As a result, the communists were able to call on a vast reservoir of patriotic feeling and legitimacy when they set about modernising the country and restoring its international standing.
Their efforts to call on that reservoir have been an abiding feature of their 50 years in power. There was a continual oscillation of ideological communism, with periods of recuperation when market mechanisms were allowed return and more reliance was placed on nationalism as a social bond. Tens of millions of people lost their lives through these huge shifts of policy in the 1950s and 1960s, through the Hundred Flowers purge, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
But the Communist Party held on to power. And after Mao's death its leadership under Deng Xiaoping laid out an ambitious scheme of modernisation based on markets, growth and decentralisation, which has further transformed the country. This policy has been in place for 20 years now; but it has been combined with an unrelenting monopoly of political power by the Communist Party. In 1989, it acted ruthlessly to suppress a burgeoning movement of democratic dissent in Tiananmen Square. Since then, an ideology of stability and nationalism has been substituted for communist egalitarianism, as social and regional inequalities have steadily grown and many people lost their jobs as a result of economic restructuring.
But the political system is quite unwilling and ill-prepared to provide the due process of law, regulatory authority, democratic accountability and freedom of speech needed to run a modern economy. Despite its monopoly of power, the Communist Party presides over a surprisingly weak national centre in Beijing. It is increasingly less able to stand up to the most powerful provinces and shares power with a military anxious to assert itself against Taiwan and in Tibet, two crucial testing grounds for the regime's enduring nationalism. Without such political transformation the communists are most unlikely to preside over another such celebration in 2049.