President Xi Jinping. Manish Swarup/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Visions of a great future have played a huge role in China’s past, particularly since the rise of the communists and their victory in 1949. Mao Zedong's thinking had a utopian strand from the very start, married as it was to progressive ideas about human, political and social perfectibility. Society was marching towards a future that was bold, bright, and wonderful. This was a fundamental article of faith in the early ideology and propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and saturated the party's art and messaging.
This luminous future was at least mitigation against the often challenging present. In the 1950s, with a world to rebuild after international and domestic war, it fired the prevailing optimism. China was finally, in the words of its constitution, master of its own house. The country was able to rebuild its decimated infrastructure. Human-development indexes rose. Mortality rates increased from a horrifying 32 in 1949 to the mid-50s fifteen years later.
For Mao, at least in his poetry, the future was ten thousand years hence. But in the prosaic world of policy, it was a little nearer – if still decades away, up to a century. One of the popular stories his propagandists widely circulated told of the old man and the mountain. Sons, grandsons, great-grandsons would all labour away trying to move a mountain. Their achievement would take generations. That didn’t matter. They were all working to invest in a happy time and place that they and their most immediate offspring would never see, but their forebears one day world. That made it worth doing.
