The Chinese Communist Party's 90th Birthday and Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

 “When I joined the party in 1964, I wanted to devote myself to social justice. The party stood for justice and equality and for ordinary people suffering hardship.”

The party - is it the American Democratic or Republican Party? Perhaps the French Socialist Party?

No. It’s a statement made to the Christian Science Monitor, a highly respected American newspaper, by a veteran member of the Chinese Communist Party.

As the Chinese celebrate the Party’s ninetieth birthday, some Chinese are openly questioning the state of affairs today in China: the almost universal corruption brought about by growing too fast too soon without the underpinnings of a popularly-supported government, combined with the realization that for the foreseeable future the Communist Party must survive in order to maintain civil peace and economic development.

Young Chinese join the Party, not seeking justice as did the man quoted above, but to gain access to opportunity, wealth and power.

In the past decade the Chinese Communist Party has ceased to seek the levelling of society proposed in Mao’s and Marx’s idea of communism as taking from those who have to give to those who need - levelling. Now, the Party wants to provide the possibility of social harmony and no longer follows Marx, although he is still in its political pantheon.  

Hannah Arendt (1906-1976) was a German Jew who left Germany in 1933 after studying with the great contemporary German philosophers, and went first to France and then fled again when France fell to the Nazis, going to America. She became one of the greatest political philosophers of the 20^th century. Her writings about totalitarianism and freedom are the foundation of post-Nazi political philosophy. I read Hannah Arendt at university, and she has left an indelible mark on my political thinking.

Arendt said about political thought, “Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.”
That would probably put the Chinese Communists sufficiently in their place, but Arendt continued, “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

To be sure that the point was clear, she also wrote that no cause, in the political sense of the word, “…is left but the most ancient of all, the one in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”

So, the Chinese Communist Party may be able for some time to come to buy silence and social complacency with its strange mix of economic freedom combined with one-party political despotism, but it knows and we know that it will be consigned to history long before its next ninety years have played out.