Antonio Navalón
We all lack a lot of study, knowledge, and reflection on who they are, what they are like, what they think, and what the Chinese and Xi Jinping want.
These are bad times to be the leader of a country, a political party, or any situation related to politics and its practice. On the one hand, as they have always done throughout history, people want someone to take on the risk posed by the solution and mark or clarify the direction to follow. On the other hand, people are willing to follow their leader, albeit up to a point. Or rather, people are willing to follow their leaders to the point where these characters and their actions match their stomachs, pockets, and most primary needs. We have long understood that the development of some of the essential values of life – such as patriotism or the capacity for sacrifice – were linked or depended on fulfilling the basic needs of human beings.
We are at a time in history in which the world comes from an erratic, incomprehensible leadership, full of screams and barks in the form of messages posted on Twitter. To this day, a leadership characterized by hair and hairstyle remains the main unknown of the Donald Trump administration. Everything else was clear; it was the representation of a rich and spoiled child who, on many occasions, managed to get away with his own way by throwing tantrums, taking advantage of the loopholes of the law, and with a culture that did not come from Harvard, Yale or the French ENAC. Trump’s culture and experience were forged by negotiating with the construction unions in New York, where – as the movies say and although this is not directly linked to him – many of the buildings have the remains of dissidents in their foundations.
Today, leaders are more present than ever. Look at Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, or the case of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Except for the case of Putin, these are leaders who are characterized by being incredible. The current ones are also unipersonal leaderships. This is not like the time of Hugo Chávez or Fidel Castro, in the sense that regimes are not built today. This is not a time when a group seizes power; Currently, this type of leadership is represented by characters who know it and have it all. It does not matter whether it is day or night; these leaders are lonely men and on whom the entire state swings. Also, I want to think they are leaders who do not obey the condition that happens to any human being, which is to be a victim of their weaknesses, whims, or fears.
No code or manual teaches how to be a good leader. It is something that can not be studied anywhere, and no one gives a degree that validates those abilities. However, in these moments in which it is necessary to have references of efficient or well-managed leaderships, I would like to bring to the present the memory of who, for me, is the most complete leader of the 20th century. A leader whose legacy permeates more and more every day. with greater force, coherence, and roundness. Comrade Mao Tse Tung had a curious smile; he was a man who, although he could have the complexity of a well-informed and prepared intellectual, in the end – as happens to other rulers – he was an intuitive man, coming from and raised between the field and the trenches. In it, there was no middle ground between harvest and a Kalashnikov rifle. It took Mao more than 40 years of struggle to consolidate his power. October 1, 1949, was the day he came to the top of his country’s power, giving birth to the People’s Republic of China.
Mao ruled China for more than 25 years with undeniable success. He learned from Joseph Stalin that you don’t have to kill many, but you have to know how to kill. But above all, Mao managed to carry out the all-important process of re-educating his people. He was such a rational man that he understood that a character like the last emperor of China, Puyi – who was also the main architect of the creation of Manchukuo and its disastrous outcome – would best serve him as a gardener at the National Botanical Garden Center in Beijing.
The Red Book of Mao is still valid, as some chapters of The Prince of Nicholas Machiavelli do. In his book, there are principles that everyone who is in combat and seeks to be victorious must not forget. The most important of them was to explain that when one is persecuted, it is better to hide until the required forces are gathered. And later, carry out what he said well: “When they rest, I attack.” Mao’s was a leadership based on the integral use, not of a blind following – as, for example, that carried out by the Japanese samurai -, but that it was a leadership that made the most of and used all the enemy’s weaknesses to its advantage. With Mao’s smile, without neither China nor the world understanding the Cultural Revolution very well and after the great Chinese leader’s revenge against his own, we arrived at the current situation.
The chiaroscuro of Mao’s figure is as impressive as the consequence of his work. As in the case of Joseph Stalin, there is no statistic on how many millions of deaths Maoism cost. But what is certain is that from being a country anchored almost in medieval times – with all its antiquated procedures and a structure close to slavery – the Chinese Communist Party had absolute dominance. However, despite its contradictions, Maoism succeeded in making China today ex aequo – along with the United States – the world’s leading economic power. In this sense, the great winner as a leader – above all others – is Mao, considering that 100 years later, his Chinese Communist Party has not only not lost its validity, but it is also directly identified as one of the causes of the unstoppable development of the new China.
Currently, there are thousands of Chinese who from their first years of life are studying English. Contrary to this, today, there are very few – they can even be counted in a few hundred thousand – who study Mandarin. The Chinese have no interest in being understood by the world. However, the Chinese – as with their investments – have every interest in continuing to work until they understand and dominate us completely. But in this school of leadership, in this recomposition of the world of the 21st century and in the midst of the uncertainty about what will happen from this moment on, it is important to recover what the Cultural Revolution really meant.
In the end, the Cultural Revolution was nothing more than Mao’s revenge on his own. It was because some – as was the case of Deng Xiaoping and other historical figures such as Lin Biao – from the Central Committee of the Communist Party dared not to question him or discuss Comrade Mao’s theses, but to have and carry out a political practice different from his own. And Mao – married for the second time to an activist wife seeking to rewrite history – began to play and receive crazed homage from the youths and Red Guardians, burning all of China in the process. From modern leaders, from one-person leaders, from those who do not have governments or parties and who at dawn only care what they think, we must learn the lesson that – sooner rather than later – they end up taking revenge on their own—those in the middle matter little.
Last week marked the first 100 years of existence of the Chinese Communist Party. A party based not only on the Long March, on the inexhaustible Civil War, on famine, or all the sacrifices of the people, but it is a party that was developed and instituted under the certainty that its historical fate could change. The Communist Party, which under the leadership of figures like Mao or others has enlightened China for so long, is a party made based on what has characterized China best: the Great Wall. This structure of more than 21 thousand kilometers in length is the best proof that China, beyond being a conquering country, has always been characterized as a permanently invaded nation. That is why it is surprising that at the same moment in which the country climbs a position in which nobody ever imagined that it would do it – neither in time nor how it has done it -, the speech of President Xi Jinping, above all, speaks of not allowing again Chinese oppression. China represents the success of the effort, sacrifice, and the impossible. But it is also a country that lives under extreme contradiction. China is the richest, most capitalist, and wild country. And, in addition, it is the best communist country on the planet.
In the rereading that involves knowing how to treat China, one must be aware of three things. First, China was never a hegemonic power that sought to conquer the world; in fact, what best symbolizes this nation is to be constantly defending itself from the attack of its enemies. Second, this is the first time that the Chinese are – incontestably – the absolute leaders, not spiritually or using the teachings of Confucius, but in a material and political sense of the world today. Its formula has turned out to be the most successful.
In their consolidation as leaders, the Communist Party did not fall. They managed to position themselves as the richest country on the planet and where most billionaires live. Besides the fact that China is the most uniformed and controlled nation in the world. In China, even Covid-19 subsides and behaves. While the rest of the world suffers and struggles with the emergence of new variants of the coronavirus, the Chinese have succeeded in coping with Covid-19 and all its manifestations successfully. Apparently, China has managed to decipher the formula to control and eradicate any representation of the virus that continues to threaten and attack every other country on the planet.
In the midst of all this, we must not forget that the president of China, Xi Jinping, has only one model, which is not Deng Xiaoping, nor is it the evolution or the war against the cult of personality. The great example of the current Chinese president is a leader who managed to end the Chinese Civil War and who, on October 1, 1949, entered Tiananmen Square triumphantly to establish the People’s Republic of China, which continues to this day. Despite this, I do not believe that Xi Jinping will create the Gang of Four or foster the conditions that ended up unleashing the Cultural Revolution. However, what I do believe is that we all lack a lot of study, knowledge, and reflection on who they are, what they are like, what they think, and what the new masters of the world and its leader, the Chinese and Xi Jinping want.
