(Rana Mitter teaches at Oxford University and is the author of ‘China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism.’ This piece first appeared in Indian Express’ July 21 edition.)
- A hundred years ago this month, a group of young men gathered in Shanghai and founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ragged dozen had no idea that the body they were founding would turn into a machine that would rule over a quarter of humanity. Today, the CCP governs a country of 1.3 billion people with cities studded with skyscrapers. It maintains some of the most entrepreneurial cultures of technological and economic innovation on earth, while also ruthlessly repressing political dissent. Mao Zedong, one of those founders, was fond of discussing the Marxist concept of “contradictions”. There are contradictions aplenty in today’s CCP …
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