The two hours of Xi Jinping's speech at the opening of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China marked the consecration of a modern copy of Mao Zedong, with a richer, more competitive, more militarized and more influential country in the less developed world.
I covered the 13th party congress in October 1987 for this newspaper. With a similar ritual, Deng Xiaoping, the author of the Chinese transformation, was set aside, and a transitory period of continued growth was entered that has led to this congress that has anointed Xi Jinping as the most powerful dictator on Earth. Thirty-five years ago there were 47 million members of the Communist Party who controlled the lives and meager estates of the Chinese. Now the almighty communist militancy amounts to 90 million.
I still remember Deng's slogans written on the huge murals in the streets of Beijing. One of them said: “Time is money, efficiency is life”. The economic miracle has been produced with an unprecedented formula that many have described as authoritarian capitalism.
I read that in 2021 there were more than six million Chinese millionaires and that in 2026 the figure of 12 million will be reached. The classification will continue to be headed by the United States with more than 27 million millionaires within four years. In Monday's newspaper it was reported that Spanish companies will need more than 200,000 engineers in the next ten years. They will be able to hire them in China, where in 2018 more than half a million students obtained an engineering degree.
Authoritarian capitalism draws the attention of conservative businessmen and a certain radical left that, in the name of social engineering, with the architects of souls that Maxim Gorky said in the midst of Stalinism, seek to change societies from above to impose new forms of life by resorting to Gramsci's cultural hegemony. The old PSUC studied this phenomenon well.
Is freedom necessary to prosper and build a more just and equitable society? I think so and that representative democracy is essential, with its many shortcomings and imperfections, to satisfy the ambitions and conflicting interests of citizens, as the wise Solon of Greece said some 25 centuries ago.
I am engrossed in reading a book that I plan to talk to you about soon and that deals precisely with the fascination that authoritarianism arouses among people of order and radical groups on the left and right. It has been written by a brilliant journalist, Gideon Rachman, head of the Opinion section of the Financial Times. The age of the strongman travels the world studying how the cult of strong leaders threatens democracy in the West. It reminds me of my childhood, when it was said that Primo de Rivera had built roads and years later Franco raised swamps that we saw in the node, before movies started in theaters.
Putin is the archetype of a dictator by instinct. Erdogan has gone from being a reformer to an autocrat. Trump and Modi in India have things in common. There are many more. The conversation between Fernando de los Ríos and Lenin is well known, collected in his book My trip to Soviet Russia (1921), in which the one who would be Minister of the Republic asked Lenin about freedom in the Soviet Union. Freedom for what? and Don Fernando replied: "Freedom to be free." Authoritarianism will not disappear, but neither will freedom.
