The Observer, Saturday 29 September 2012 09.21 EDT
A hammer and sickle logo at the Chinese Communist party’s school in Shanghai. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters
To understand the long journey of the People’s Republic of China and its rulers you might start at a modest two-storey grey brick building in Shanghai’s former French Concession. It lies a short stroll from the Harry Winston store, with its blazing diamonds, past over-priced bars and glassy towers.
It was in 1921 that 13 young Chinese men gathered in this newly built home, then located at the edge of the city, overlooking a vegetable field. Though most were lodging at a nearby girls’ school as the Beijing University Summer Vacation Tourist Group, sightseeing was not on the agenda. In strictest secrecy, with the aid of two Comintern representatives, they were hammering out the programme for the newly formed Communist party of China.
Threatened with discovery by the police, they fled to the nearby town of Jiaxing, where the Communist party’s first national congress concluded on board a pleasure boat on South Lake.
Six weeks from now, their descendants will gather in Beijing for the 18th congress and will hand over power to a new generation of leaders, with Xi Jinping at the helm. The Communist party is now the world’s largest and most powerful political movement, with more than 80 million members; it controls a fifth of the globe’s population and the second largest economy.
The congress is expected to be its shot at returning to business as usual, after a tumultuous year culminating in Friday’s announcement that the disgraced politician Bo Xilai, who was once tipped for promotion in this transition, faces criminal charges. He is accused of abusing power, corruption and sexual impropriety; he is said to bear responsibility for his wife’s murder of the British businessman Neil Heywood.
Though most of November’s meeting will take place behind closed doors, the party no longer needs to cherish obscurity; these days the congress is a carefully mounted display of power and unity. More than 2,200 delegates will meet at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in considerable pomp and some splendour. Police will have silenced any hint of discord; activists and dissidents will be detained or put under surveillance.
“The 18th party congress is coming, so we thought we should learn about the first one,” said Wang Yao as he left the site of the first meeting, now a museum. “The first generation had such difficult conditions when they started, but now China is more and more prosperous, and it’s getting better and better.”
