China, Xi and the New Revisionism.

What is not important is the news that the Communist Party of China, in the next couple of days, will abolish the two-term limit for the president and his vice, a restraint entrenched in its own constitution. For some time now observers have expected President Xi Jinping to browbeat the party and the rubber-stamp Chinese parliament,  the National Party Congress, into bending the succession rules to enable him perpetuate himself in power. Ten years in power is a very long time, too long by western democratic standards, and the alarm now is that Xi will be given a carte blanche to continue in power as long as he likes in China, a vital player in global economic, social and political affairs.
It is not clear if the party is going to ramp up the limit, three-term or even four but it is instructive to take a closer look at the kite being flown by a party scholar and member: 'China needs a stable, strong and consistent leadership from 2020 to 2035'. Xi was born in 1953 and will be 82 by 2035 in case someone is preparing him or he is preparing himself for such longevity in power. If this is not a revision to Mao, China didn't build a Great Wall.
Mao was a great leader, no doubt, but it is difficult to argue that what he did for China was far greater than the contributions of another great communist leader, Deng Xiaoping. So a heavy argument against dictatorship in present China subsists. The country has witnessed strong economic growth under Xi but it even saw faster growth under his predecessors; he has launched well-publicized crusades against corruption, but any other leader was going to do that anyway, for the sake and survival of the party itself, corruption having eaten deep into the fabric of the officialdom and was fast alienating the common man in the street. The fight against corruption has also conveniently eliminated real and perceived rivals in the communist party. His nationalistic postures have endeared him to many of his countrymen but Trump isn't doing badly too in his 'American First' policy. The same with Putin in Russia. As Trump himself has pointed out, your country first does not mean your country alone. Hence what endears Xi to his people now are ultimately less important than the orderly political succession and stability that China needs. The Gang of Four conundrum that ensued after the death of Mao almost took back the country to the mayhem of the pre-revolution years. The country is now a far more advanced place and is very unlikely to survive any schism that a power struggle will bring. Xiaoping himself realized this and had to orchestrate the present succession pattern that Xi is trying to topple. The arrangement might have thrown up grotesque individuals like Premier Li Peng, architect of the infamous Tienanmen Massacre but by and large it has helped spawn acceptable and capable leaders who had helped steer the affairs of state creditably. What the country can do without now are the grumblings of political repression and exclusion that would eventually unravel in Tienanmen Square.
The communist party has done well in bringing economic growth to China, especially the feeding of its huge population. All thanks to the vision of Deng Xiaoping. And any arrangement he has made for the sustenance of this vision should be held sacrosanct by Xi and his cronies in the Central Committee of the party, a body very similar to the notorious Politburo of the old Soviet Union. The USSR will eventually implode, no thanks to the longevity of Leonid Brezhnev in power. It is a fate that will not augur well for China. And the whole world

The Curse of Liberators.

All countries on earth, without a single exception, have been under one sort of occupation or the other before attaining their present sovereign/independent status. Either the occupiers were foreigners, or were native rulers who had visited so much toil, ruin, suffering and unease on their own people that they soon grew to become horrid, repulsive aliens.In both cases, they had to be driven out by largely peaceful but intense political pressure- India, Nigeria, Ghana- or by violent insurrection, uprising: Russia, China, the US, Zimbabwe, South Africa.
But it is expedient to look into recent political history to understand better a scourge that is just becoming well-defined but which has always ravaged, on all fours, polities as diverse as Liberia and Ukraine. We have all heard of the curse of resources in Nigeria and Congo, yet it is the same African continent that has seen the worst of the curse of the freedom fighter, a pestilence that ate its cancer so unobtrusively into the social, political and economic fabric of the countries under its invasion that it is only now the full extent of the hideous damage it had wrought is being fully felt. Yes, we are talking about ANC, ZANU-PF, FLN, to mention a few of the insurgent groups that played a key role in the decolonization or, to use a more glamorous term, liberation of Africa. But we are not talking about the copious atrocities they too committed even on their own populations while driving away the much-hated, arrogant foreigners: excesses that have been poorly recorded, acknowledged, Excesses that were even celebrated in the euphoria of grand heroism. What eventually mattered was what they did with the power they wrestled from the terrible occupiers. The present scourge in Zimbabwe did not start with the British, it started when that hero of liberation, Mugabe, started entrenching himself as a long-term dictator: too long for his own good or for the good of his country. It was a common plague in Africa. Hardly had the colonial masters left when they were supplanted by the torrid dictatorships of Gaddafi, Siaka Stevens, Sekou Toure, Dauda Jawara; freedom fighters and independence heroes of yesteryears. It could be argued that similar outcomes unraveled in Russia, China, Vietnam, but rickety republics like Nigeria Liberia, Burundi had no technological prowess, economic resilience or organizational acumen to paper over the defaults and in many cases of these African countries, fresh political upheavals such as coups and  mass rebellions had to inevitably erupt  to resolve some of the scourge. Often unsatisfactorily. The victims have been social, political and economic progress. The symptoms have been appalling poverty, telling political repression and a wave of migration most of which end up in the watery graves of the Mediterranean.
Authoritarian regimes or lines of party succession that were as far from democracy as Timbuktu is far from Toronto and likely to throw up characters as outlandish as Jacob Zuma. Succession that implied George Washington telling Americans: "Hi folks! We did well to secure your freedom from the infernal Brits and it is legit if your leaders till eternity come out of a line anchored on me, or my comrades." It wouldn't be monarchy, but certain blood must prevail.
The blood is increasingly going under the microscope and folks must necessarily turn to China, a country whose influence is growing very powerfully in Africa and whose leaders have become very adept at tweaking the line. In Zimbabwe, the military had to step in to effect a mini purge, before Grace Mugabe got too powerful, a situation that looked like a perfect recreation of the Gang of Four conundrum after the death of Chairman Mao. And still borrowing from China, the ANC has done very well to ease out Zuma. Jacob Zuma is actually a likeable guy but the controversies surrounding him were getting a bit tiring and he could have been more careful of his association with the Guptas. As shopkeepers or as managers of big enterprises, Indians have a business reputation a bit on the unsavory side in Africa. Of course nothing really has been proven yet. It might even have been a myth made popular by the infamous Idi Amin but Zuma should have realized his hobnobbing with the Guptas was going to profit him little.
He had to go. Not for his own good but for the continued good of the ANC. Cyril Ramaphosa has his work cut out and perhaps our Zuma would have more time to perfect his celebrated recipe for AIDS cure.