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This Tuesday, October 1st marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. A military parade must demonstrate Chinese power against the United States. And to prove that the "Chinese dream", Xi Jinping's slogan, is at hand. But what does this dream mean? Is it the same as that of Mao seventy years ago?
The gesture is not so common. On Monday, September 30, Xi Jinping bowed three times in front of Mao Zedong Mausoleum on Tian'anmen Square. The Chinese president wanted to register more than ever in filiation with the "Grand Timonier". At the same time head of the Party, the State and the army, he jostled for two years the rules of succession, authorizing himself to stay in power as he pleases. Since 2013, it imposes a "fight against corruption" intended primarily to eliminate rivals. In 2020, he is preparing to generalize a "citizen rating system", allowing a high tech social control, which Mao would have dreamed during the Cultural Revolution.
However, when "President Mao" proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949 in Tian'anmen Square, he did not do exactly the same "Chinese dream" as Xi Jinping, his motto today. 'hui. The "Great Helmsman" intended to generalize in the middle empire the Soviet political system, from collectivization to the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Maoist nightmare
Mao could not have guessed that in 2012, the son of one of his oldest companions, a "red prince" named Xi Jinping, would carry the dream of a capitalist superpower, second world economy, on behalf of the Party Communist. A party that welcomed corporate bosses, labeled "red capitalists", without fear of contradictions.
That's not all. We must add the return of Confucius, exalted by Xi in the name of a "traditional culture of 5,000 years." In the continuity of Deng Xiaoping, the current Chinese number one celebrates the values of imperial Confucianism: a rigid social order, family at the top of the state. This is the quintessence of the "Four Vieilleries" vilified during the Cultural Revolution. In short, a "Chinese nightmare".
Pragmatic dreamer
Do not be mistaken. In bowing to Mao, Xi Jinping perpetuates here the pragmatic line of "Little Helmsman", Deng Xiaoping. From the 1980s, the architect of the Reforms took the country out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and widespread poverty. This pragmatic line plays on all fronts, with its improbable syncretism between state capitalism, the one-party dictatorship and the symbolic respect of "Mao Zedong thought".
No more than Deng, Xi wants today to get rid of the best source of legitimacy for the Party: Mao, the father of the nation, the "liberator", the Chinese De Gaulle. Erase it from tablets like Khrushchev, and you can say goodbye to absolute power, as in the former USSR.
The nation first
In the end, what to remember from an expression as nebulous as the "Chinese dream"? Xi Jinping promised above all the "rebirth of the nation". This takes up an essential element of Mao's message in 1949: to restore China's national pride after the "century of humiliation" started with the "opium wars".
The idea of rebirth is not even that of Mao. " This dream of wealth and power (fuqiang), is not very different from the old project of the reformers of the Chinese Empire " in the 1890s, says sinologist Jean-Pierre Cabestan, professor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong and research director at the CNRS.
" The idea of" rebirth "has been in the Chinese political vocabulary for more than a century, since it was Sun Yat-sen [the leader of the Chinese Revolution in 1911] who has formulated it, explains Sebastian Veg, researcher at EHESS. The term "recovery" (zhenxing) persisted during the Republican period and into the 1980s. The word "renaissance" (fuxing) appeared with Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, against the background of a grand patriotic education campaign. post-Tiananmen. "
An anti-american dream
But Xi goes further than Mao and Deng. China, according to him, must become the world's leading power by asserting "against" America. The rivalry is now assumed, unlike Mao who was closer to Nixon, and Deng who wanted to maintain the "low profile". With Xi, it's over. And without complex.
" Xi Jinping is in a very frontal position against the Americans," said Xiaohong Xiao-Planes, a professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco). On each plane he compares military technology with the United States. Xi thinks the Americans can not accept the Chinese dream. That's how he tries to mobilize the army and the people. "
Double challenge American and Hong Kong
In a way, Xi Jinping's dream has been granted. The confrontation with the United States has been a reality since the beginning of 2018, when Donald Trump imposed his first customs duties on Chinese imports. This summer, the US president has even conditioned a trade agreement to a "human" solution to the political crisis in Hong Kong and respect for human rights. The former British colony enters its seventeenth week of pro-democracy protests.
" Anti-Chinese extremist forces in the United States are trying to turn Hong Kong into a battleground of the Sino-US rivalry ," Xi Jinping responded on September 3 in front of the Central Party School in Beijing. They want to transform the high degree of autonomy of Hong Kong into a de facto independence, with the ultimate goal of containing the rise of China and preventing the rebirth of the Chinese nation. "
" Two hundred years old "
For François Bougon, a journalist with Mediapart and author of the book Dans la tête by Xi Jinping (Actes Sud, 2017), " this Chinese dream is first and foremost a Han dream ", the majority ethnic group at 92% in the country. " The Han nation ," the journalist goes on, " tries to impose his power, his cultural identity. This corresponds to what Xi Jinping puts in place: a policy of Han colonialism, which enslaves minorities, from Tibetans to Uighurs. The authoritarian Han regime is unable to understand what is beyond its identity, like Hong Kong, which does not have the same language and comes back from more than 180 years of English influence. "
Unfazed, Xi Jinping set a double goal in the national calendar: the "two centenarians". In 2021, for the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party, he promised a "middle-class society," with a middle class representing 60 percent of the population. In 2049, for the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic, Xi promised to make China a "fully developed country," as in the West or Japan. Against them, if necessary.