Governance in China

China's stability and growing prosperity has been dearly bought as, over the years, the Communists have fought to impose their doctrine, and the ruling caste has sought to maintain its power. The most recent example of this was the massacre, by the People's Liberation Army, of over 2,000 young pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The People's Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949 after the Communist forces of Mao Zedong won a hard-fought war against the Nationalist Kuomintang government of Chiang Kaishek. In 1950, Chiang fled to Taiwan (then known as Formosa). China became - or, more accurately, continued to be - a one-party state, this time with the Chinese Communist Party in the driving seat.

Under the government's first five-year plan, great stress was placed on nationalisation, the development of heavy industry, and collectivisation of agriculture, the intention being to drag China from the feudal age into the modern world. The Great Leap Forward, initiated in 1958, emphasised the development of local political structures under Communist Party control, and the establishment of rural communes. It also led to the death of millions in the famine that followed.

Purists versus Pragmatists

Intellectuals began to chafe under the restrictions placed on their freedom of expression. In partial response to this, the party launched its Hundred Flowers movement under the slogan: 'Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend'. Those who took advantage of the apparent openness to voice anti-government opinions were identified and purged.

The struggle continued between those who supported Mao in preaching revolutionary fervour, and the pragmatists who were willing to ditch much Communist baggage in favour of progress - with the crucial exception that the party had absolutely no intention of relaxing its monopoly on political power.

As Mao and his supporters felt their control of the party slipping away to what they considered 'capitalist readers', Mao struck back with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1967. For 10 years, China remained in the grip of an ailing Mao's obsession with permanent revolution. Youthful Red Guards launched a wave of terror in which opponents were banished to the countryside, tortured, or killed.

Mao's death in 1976 and the arrest of his closest supporters (the so-called Gang of Four, including Mao's wife, Jiang Qing) cleared the way for the next party chairman, Deng Xiaoping.

Pragmatism Rules

Deng introduced more pragmatic policies in the economic sphere, flirting openly with capitalism and releasing the native energy and business skills of the Chinese, allowing them to benefit personally while developing the country's overall economy. With the death of Deng even more freedom appears to have been given. Recent years have even seen a small-scale introduction of a voting system in some areas to elect village leaders and communities, pointing the way towards a kind of democracy. Indeed, President Jiang Zemin and premier Zhu Rongji have done their utmost to promote international trade to make sure the open-door policy never slams shut -China's hosting of world summits such as Fortune 500 and APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) are major examples - China is today a member of the World Trade Organization; and Hong Kong and Macao's return to China have heralded a new tolerance to Western-style government. However, despite many changes, freedom of speech is still very much taboo, an example being the suppression of Fa Long Gong supporters, but there is a great deal of hope among the youth of China for their motherland, the 'sleeping dragon'.