Decision from the Third Plenum: High Mountains & the Nouveau Riche
There's consensus about a need to cut the rich down in size, except for the problem: Anglophiles are retelling a CPC story that the Rich, especially if White, are indispensable to China's reforms.
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This is the first in a series on China’s Third Plenum of the CPC Central Committee upon which the Chinese had wanted to pin their hopes but find emptiness.
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Intro: THE PROBLEM WITH THE PLENUM
The Third Plenum (July 15-18) of China’s Communist Party (CPC) is not the business of the world. Nor, in truth, does the world care, other than western embassy First Secretaries who must, to justify their existence, spit out regular reports to Washington DC, London and Canberra.
Indeed why bother. Most of us Chinese don’t, anyway. We still must wake up before the meetings convene: the street must be swept, the deliveries made, the mantao 馒头 is waiting to be steamed, rain’s come, the fields overflowing, and the village party Secretary came the night before still nagging for an itemized list of any substantial landed property holdings.
Fanning herself, Grandma said to him with an air of serenity: “Can’t you see, we are poor peasants. We can’t afford an accountant to do the job?”
The Secretary sighed, and shuffled in his chair. Poor man. Lifting his head to down his tea, he then stood up to signal he was leaving: “Is Yutang back from the army?”
Grandma: “He should be, anytime now, if he’s not dead.”
He rolled his eyes and sighed again. The Secretary is the village most familiar face though I rarely see him other than the time he came, with the county Secretary, to Xiaoying’s home one morning.
Strangely, I remember well every moment of that visit, recalling the Secretary’s palm on grandpa’s shrivelled arms who was tossing twigs and stirring the fire in the brick stove that looks like it would topple over any moment.
He had come, the senior Secretary said, to announce that Xiaoying’s family must move. The municipal government was taking over the mountain — and everything on it, including their only ramshackle hut. Yes, the mountain has been family property since, heaven’s knows… On record, 44 generations, a thousand years before the CPC was founded.
Now, they want to build a highway over it. The family would be compensated, though, with a single non-negotiable lump sum, 60,000 yuan that can’t buy a parking lot in Mid-Level Hong Kong.
That deal was the end of the family. Within a month of the remittance, uncles, aunts, in-laws, cousins, everybody came. No conversation lasted peaceably for more than five minutes before it turn into curses and shouting matches. One time, somebody brought out a sickle. All this is the net effect of capital.
Since then Xiaoying’s words ring endlessly in my ears: “I worked so hard to get out of the mountains. No, never! I won’t go back!” These days I can only visualize the cedar and pine forests, the creeks, softened by the running streams and by the tones of water flowing.
Grandma, for reasons unknown, was on the roll that day. She glared at the Secretary, fire in her eyes: “When are you people ever going to expel those foreigners?”
She meant the Japanese. Or, other than Japs, there are perhaps others as well because, sometime ago, rumors were rife that there had a been an outside offer, proposers unknown, to buy an entire village, an hour’s drive down the mountain. The village was hemmed in between a vast, crystal clear lake and the mountains, an ideal location, they say, for vacation homes and a private resort.
This is the kind of stuff that the Ronnie Chans and the Hang Lungs of Hong Kong are after in China.
Startled by the question — it was actually a demand — the Secretary again sighed, bend forward and lowered his tone:
“Grandma, please…. These are matters beyond me. These are decisions made in Beijing. The mountain is high and the emperor is far away.”
Often times, we imagine marching to Beijing — these days though we take the HSR. If the CPC won’t act, we, the people, will do so, like the Boxers a century ago. Since when is our Motherland for sale, to barbarians in particular? We demand the list of names of all officials who had agreed to such sales. After which, in the name of our ancestors, we will hang their heads in a row on the highest flagpoles in Tiananmen!
We discuss such things openly when a chance meeting turns up, usually around a fire beneath the autumn stars.
We want foreigners expel from China, without exception! We, the indigenous people of China, don’t care for other people’s money. The CPC people forget, or conveniently chose to forget, our Motherland thrived for nearly 2,000 years, becoming the world’s wealthiest economy entirely on its own: no open door, no foreign capital, and especially no Communist Party of China in its present form and construction whose officials betray the People and then hide that fact, lying with grandiloquent claims.
To flatter their importance in the eyes of their western Masters, Anglophiles in the CPC sell the Plenum as if it will bring to the world a new dawn. “Impact” the world, say these people. (Think Bananas, yellow outside, white inside: Hu Xijin 胡锡进 that cockroach face of Global Times, Wang Huiyao 王辉耀 alias Henry Wang, their Ronnie Chan real estate sponsors, assorted bloggers, and unemployed Whitey hangers-on.)
At the Global Times was this proclamation: “Third plenum boosts confidence, injects certainty into world.” Yet, beneath that title, nothing validates nor demonstrate, empirically, the claim. Boosts confidence? How? Is the breasts of the Yankee and their Hongkie agents now puffed up? Inject certainty? What certainty? In what? How? What for?
Clearly, it was another in a long list of Banana cases abusing State media resources to advance a liberal, White-preferred agenda, which is that China has now taken a giant leap forward ever closer to the West. So, they conclude, the Third Plenum was decisive in that way, hence successful.
But, is that the truth?
Does that narrative even matches the wishes of the People for whom the CPC claims to work for. Or, is Hu, his Banana clique and their Whitey hangers-on lying for liberal propaganda effect?
These days, though, grandma, Yutang, Xiaoying, grandpa, her family, our family, and everyone in the neighborhood seems to have given up caring for what the CPC does, that is, watching over the watch dog. Thus, I’m reduced to whining in these pages instead of spending the time to get rich. Like persuading everyone to sell the lake, the mountains, the cedar forests, the pines, the creeks, the streams, entire villages, even the birds and the bees, indeed heaven and earth, all to get rich so as to fuck the CPC and contribute to its ruination by the time of the PRC’s 100th anniversary! (See, Capital Theft in China, 2024 July 4.)
But, we also know that none of our grievances stem from the CPC. It was never made that way nor had Mao Zedong intended it to be. Rather the fault falls on the dishonor and betrayal of some officials who, it’s no coincidence, are Anglophiles collaborating with property developers and western hedge funds managers.
But the corrupting effects of the resignation is, exactly, the situation, the attitude and the people’s values in the final years of Qing China’s collapse. Xiaoying’s words grow truer by the day: “I worked so hard to get out of the mountains. No, never! I won’t go back!”
On a WeChat video call one day, she asked, “When are you coming home,” a question to which she already has the answer a long time ago.
“What’s wrong,” I replied instead. Her eyes looked like she had been crying.
“Nothing. When are you coming back?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Can you come home sooner?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
It is in days like this when leading an honest life grows ever more difficult that her feelings towards officialdom hardens. This usually happens after some minor misfortune but one result is, our distrust of the CPC expands or, more precisely, it is an enmity towards its betrayal — or seeming betrayal. The Plenum? Forget the Plenum.
(To be continued, hopefully. Part 2: WHAT TO DO WITH THE RICH)
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