CPI(M) DELEGATION’S VISIT TO CHINA
Spectacular
Progress,
Formidable Challenges – (2)
Ashok Dhawale
AFTER our visit to the
political capital Beijing,
the two other places that we visited in China
for the next one week from August
28 to September 3, 2013 provided a clear contrast. The first
was China’s
most populous, most developed city – its
industrial and financial capital Shanghai
on the
east coast, near the confluence of the Yangtze
river
and the sea. The population of Shanghai
is over
23 million – around 3 million more than Beijing.
And the second was Lanzhou,
the capital of China’s
relatively backward rural province
of Gansu
in the northwest, on the banks of the Yellow
River. Gansu
province has a population of 26 million, of which Lanzhou
city accounts for around 3.5 million.
IN SHANGHAI
In
Shanghai,
we had a series of interesting briefings by, and interactions
with, Chinese intellectuals
who were also members of the CPC. These were held at the China Executive Leadership Academy,
Pudong, better known by its acronym CELAP. It is a national
institution funded
by the Chinese central government, with a beautiful and
spacious residential
campus. Participants in the various programmes run by it
include central ministers
and high-level government officials, senior business
executives and
international participants. Opened in 2005, its current
president is Zhao Leji,
member of the CPC Polit Bureau and minister of its
organization department. It
has its own regular faculty and also invites visiting
professors from various
specialities.
Some
of the subjects on which the briefings
and interactions took place were: State Structure and
Political System in
China; CPC’s Grassroots Party Building and Society Management;
Strategy of the
18th National Congress of the CPC; China’s Long Road to
Socialism; Practice,
Exploration and Connotation of the New Urbanisation in China;
and a General
Review of Shanghai. There was a lively discussion and a
question-answer session
on various issues after each briefing.
There
were two interesting field visits in Shanghai to community
centres. One was the Beicai Town Centre of Community Cultural
Activities and
the other was the Kangqiao Community Service Centre - both in
the Pudong New
Area.
The
first showed how the Party and the
local administration runs a community centre for the benefit
of citizens, young
and old; and the second was a good example of relocation in
the process of
urbanisation of over 40,000 residents from an old area of
Shanghai to the new
area of Pudong.
Our
other sight-seeing visits in Shanghai were to the
Oriental Pearl TV Tower, from the top of which you get a truly
magnificent view
of the entire city. This was followed by a boat cruise on the
Huang Pu river –
a tributary of the mighty Yangtze - that runs through Shanghai
city. There was also a visit to the
Bund and to the Nanjing
Pedestrian Road which are the
city’s nerve centres. Shanghai
and Beijing
are truly world-class cities – but with not a single slum in
either!
Historically
speaking, the most interesting
visit in Shanghai
was to the small and quaint house where the First National
Congress of the CPC
was held in July 1921. Only 13 delegates representing a total
membership of 53,
apart from two observers of the Comintern, attended this
historic First Congress
of the Party.
The
delegates included Mao Zedong, who was
then just 28 years old. Starting from that sapling, the CPC
today has a Party
membership of 85.1 million! After an epic and bitter battle
against imperialism
and feudalism that lasted 28 years, the CPC successfully led
the Chinese people
to Revolution in 1949 and it has since been ruling the most
populous country in
the world for the last 64 years.
The
immediate backdrop to the formation of
the CPC was the October Revolution in Russia
led by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party in 1917, and the May 4
movement in China in 1919
which
brought the working class into struggle. There is a small
museum in the house
that traces the major events in China
before the formation of the CPC with an actual life-like
replica of the
proceedings of the First Party Congress in which Mao Zedong is
addressing the
dozen other delegates. It was indeed an inspiring visit for
all of us.
IN LANZHOU
Gansu
province in northwest China
has many interesting historical features. It has several
well-preserved
archaeological relics of the Buddhist era. The westernmost end
of the Great
Wall of China lies in this province at the Jiayuguan
Pass.
And in Huining County of Baiyin is the historical spot where
in October 1936
the First, Second and Fourth Front Armies of the Red Army
joined forces
triumphantly, making it one of the turning points and
milestones in China’s
revolutionary history. The legendary Long March began from Jiangxi
in southeast China,
covered
over 12,500 km for a year from October 1934 to October 1935,
and culminated at Yanan
in the adjoining Shaanxi
province in northwest
China
to set up a strong base area of the CPC.
In
the two days in Lanzhou, we visited five
major spots – the Waterwheel Park; the Streamlined Community
Service Programme
of the Xihu community of Qilihe district; the Dongmen village
of Anning
district; the Gansu Academy of Agriculture; and the Gansu
Agricultural
University. We saw tremendously rapid development of
infrastructure even in the
relatively backward Lanzhou
city.
The
last three spots gave us some idea of
the remarkable progress of agriculture in China.
The Gansu Academy of
Agriculture is a huge 15-storey building that conducts
intensive research into
all aspects of agriculture. It has a greenhouse and a good
piece of land around
it to conduct experiments with various crops. It has a staff
of over 1000 scientific
researchers. More than half of them are party members. It is
government-funded
and has made sterling contributions to agricultural progress
of the province. In
the last few years of research, it has over 200 international
agricultural
patents to its credit. There are similar Academies of
Agriculture in each
province, including the central one in Beijing.
The
Gansu
Agricultural University has a
massive
campus spread over nearly 65 hectares. It has over 18,000
students, of whom
16,000 are under-graduate and 2,000 are post-graduate.
Luckily, the day that we
visited the university was the first day of the new semester
and so the campus
was teeming with thousands of students. The university has a
full time faculty
of over 1,550, of whom 600 are Party members. They have 16
different colleges,
or what we call departments, with a Party committee
functioning in each. The
university runs on funds from the central and provincial
governments and on the
fees paid by students.
The
president of the university is the head
of the administration, and we actually saw him busily moving
around the campus
attending to students’ problems on the first day of the new
semester. All major
decisions like the university budget, teaching, research,
projects,
administration, selection, promotions etc are taken by a
nine-member apex party
committee of the university. The student’s union is
democratically elected by
the students in a multi-candidate election. Around 86 percent
of the students
who graduated got jobs in the public or private sector.
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