Party piece: China’s Communists at 100
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
Pomp and rhetoric marked the centenary of what are arguably the world’s most successful authoritarians. We sit in on the celebrations, tinged with paranoia; we look back to 1921 and how the party came to be and came to power; and we listen to the party-approved hip-hop that represents a new propaganda push.
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| 0:00.0 | Saudi Arabia's economy is transforming. What's behind it? The Public Investment Fund, or PIF. |
| 0:07.1 | It's one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, creating 13 new sectors, |
| 0:12.2 | 66 companies, and more than 500,000 direct and indirect jobs so far. PIF is also the first |
| 0:19.5 | sovereign wealth fund to issue a green bond supporting Saudi Arabia's 2016 Net Zero emissions target. |
| 0:26.6 | Find out more at pif.gov.sa. |
| 0:41.6 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today we'll be taking a hard look at the |
| 0:47.2 | Chinese Communist Party as it marks its 100th anniversary, how it came to be and how it came to power, |
| 0:53.7 | how Xi Jinping has made the party and the state indistinguishable and how the party's ubiquity |
| 0:59.2 | ensures that even China's hip-hop scene has been co-opted for propaganda. |
| 1:05.9 | It's no surprise that Beijing was the site of massive well-orchestrated celebrations today. |
| 1:12.9 | Our Beijing bureau chief David Renny was there, |
| 1:15.7 | heard it by the foreign ministry hours before it all began. China's Communist Party threw itself a |
| 1:23.3 | hundredth birthday party and they did that in Tiananmen Square which is the ceremonial heart of China. |
| 1:28.7 | The crowd was handpicked, they were almost all party members. I was sitting next to some members |
| 1:34.0 | of the People's Congress for the City of Beijing. There was a lot of singing of Communist Party |
| 1:42.8 | songs and everyone around me and you all of the words to those you know, graces fits like you |
| 1:46.9 | know, without the Communist Party there would be no China. So it was this mix of the very grand |
| 1:52.0 | and formal and the kind of national but also this strange feeling of a kind of private family |
| 1:56.6 | gathering of a party celebrating in the open. It's absolute control of this giant country. |
| 2:03.2 | And presumably this gathering was also very carefully controlled. |
| 2:16.0 | Very interesting that this is a very confident party but it's the Chinese Communist Party and so |
| 2:20.3 | there's always an element of paranoia and extreme control. Not only we were all |
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