Chinese Whispers: Is anyone still communist in the Chinese Communist Party?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

'Scratch a communist, you’ll find a nationalist underneath’, Professor Kerry Brown, the director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London, tells me on this episode. Together with Professor Victor Shih of UC San Diego, we talk about what drives the Chinese Communist Party (hint: it's not communism), what membership means today and the policy disputes that happen behind the scenes. And: as it prepares to mark its first centenary this year, will it still be around in another fifty years?

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator is Europe's fastest growing current affairs magazine.
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0:26.5	Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu.
0:35.8	Every episode, I'll be talking to journalists,
0:37.9	experts, and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.
0:43.7	There'll be a smattering of history to catch you off on the background knowledge and some
0:47.2	context as well. How did the Chinese see these issues?
0:51.7	A hundred years ago, the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Beijing. Among the founding members
0:57.0	was a young intellectual by the name of Ma Zodong. The party would then go on to change
1:01.7	China's history over the 20th century. A hundred years on, the CCP success is probably more
1:07.0	than any of those young intellectuals could have imagined in that summer of 1921,
1:11.8	but is it still the same party?
1:14.4	What does membership mean these days?
1:16.3	And is anyone even communist in the Chinese Communist Party?
1:19.8	In the West we see the CCP as a monolithic whole, an authoritarian evil mass.
1:24.8	But what are the breakdowns in views and opinions and the changes over time that
1:28.8	the party undergoes that we see very little from the outside? I'm joined by two leading experts
	...

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