Happy Birthday PRC

Today marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of PRC! Happy Birthday!

It is debatable whether it is a birthday as such. It may be regarded as more of a winning party (in this case CCP) claiming power of a nation and not founding of a state. It is a day marking the official change of the government of the day.

Admittedly this was accomplished by a civil war and thus PRC could be seen as the second republic. With that we have Oct 1 for the 2nd republic and Oct 10 for the first republic.

Most Chinese may not be concerned with this but fellow Chinese living to the east of the Taiwan Strait and not at ease with the CCP may be.

I won't be too critical today because I am proud and have reasons to be happy of what had been achieved in the last 30 years following Deng's reform despite misgiving I have in many respects of CCP's governance.

Having said that, credit must be given to the Dengist CCP for having managed a 30 years of largely peaceful and increasing more developed China. Broadly between 1840s to 1970s, a period of 140 years, China was in a constant state of chaos (乱世) whether the cause was foreign or domestic. Only in the last 30 years that the real and meaningful changes are brought to the peoples.

Listening to the latest speech of the Premier on the eve of national day reception, I am optimistic that China by 2049 will be a different China. Wen spoke about the vision of a civilised, prosperous, harmonious, democratic, just China. A China that respects ethnic minority and religious practice. A China that is ruled by law.

China being a very large country, there are always signs pointing to different direction. Overall, I am pursuaded that CCP is on the right track. I say this with myself always warned of the fact that there was a generation of Chinese both overseas and mainland who were fooled by the words of Mao, and indeed of any politicians. This generation, if they still live, surely live with regret and anger on one side or they had already vanished.

I have chosen to tender the positive evidence. The recently concluded party meeting sees that the party leadership agreed on tougher party rules on party members requiring the officers to declare assets as well as disclosure of spouse and children's profession and etc. This is intended to
increase the CCP's transparency. Additionally and equally important is that the meeting has agreed to implement ways to increase intra-party democracy.

I was reading a piece of futurist predictionof what China will be in 2049, on the 100 anniversary.
Taiwan will be a federated state of China and the party in power is a splinter group from CCP.

These I regard as secondary. More importantly, by 2049 (I will be 76), what matter will be whether Chinese can live peacefully, comfortably, and with dignity.

By peacefully, I mean peace and safe from internal and external threats to life, liberty and property; comfortably, at the simplest level, I mean creature comfort in harmony with nature and keeping pace with technology; by dignity, I mean conducting oneself responsibly to and gaining not just acceptance but also respect and admiration from others.

Let's China not defined by history but by opportunity!

Happy National Day!