Stephen Vines says its current paranoia, by contrast, is not based on fact
STEPHEN VINES
PUBLISHED : Friday, 02 January, 2015, 2:16pm
UPDATED : Friday, 02 January, 2015, 2:16pm
Foreigners played a key role in moulding the party that rules China, as a trip to the party archives will tell us. Photo: Reuters
The names of Mikhail Borodin, Pavel Mif, V.D. Vilensky-Sibiryakov and Adolph Joffe are rarely, if ever, mentioned these days despite their crucial role in the establishment and development of the Chinese Communist Party.
It is highly unlikely that Hong Kong's newly minted super patriots have ever heard of them, while party members choose to draw a discreet veil over their activities. The reason for this amnesia is clear because, as we are told almost daily, the People's Republic of China will tolerate no foreign interference in its internal affairs.
Yet it is a matter of historical record that the party that rules China was very much the creation of the late and not-lamented Comintern, the international communist organisation based in Moscow that sent people like Borodin to direct the activities of the new Communist Party. Moreover, they were hardly kept in the background, as was seen when Joffe signed and Borodin brokered the first historic pact between the Communists and the Nationalists in 1923.
The Chinese Communist Party's first congress, held in 1921, was attended by a modest 15 delegates, two of whom were Soviet representatives. Later, the Chinese party was frequently buffeted by the chill winds from Moscow, for example, during the 1929 anti-rightist purge in the Soviet Union, which was mirrored by turmoil in the Chinese party.
The traffic of people went both ways, with some 1,000 Chinese cadres being dispatched to Moscow's Communist University of Working People of China in the 1920s and 1930s. Later, after the revolution triumphed, the two-way traffic intensified.
This is, of course, ancient history for those who view the past as having no relevance to the present, but it is worth reminding ourselves that the current obsession with foreign interference in Chinese affairs is really chicken feed compared to the crucial role played by foreigners in moulding the party that rules China.
Maybe it was Mao Zedong's bitter break with the Soviet Union that produced this legacy of almost paranoid suspicion of foreign intervention. However, there has never been a dictatorship in modern history that has not shared elements of this paranoia and been quick to paint all opposition to its rule as being fermented by external forces.
The extraordinary thing is the level to which these claims are believed, possibly working on Joseph Goebbels' principle of: if you tell a big lie often enough, people will believe it.
And so here we are in tiny Hong Kong in 2015 and the big lie has yet again gained traction. We are still waiting for the "evidence" of how foreigners directed, financed and manipulated the Umbrella Movement but these claims are repeatedly stated as fact.
However, mere facts do not trouble those who find the story far more compelling than a narrative attributing the upsurge of protest as being a genuine reflection of discontent born and bred in Hong Kong. The insulting idea that the people of this place have neither the ability, creativity nor even the means to organise their own protest movement tells us how these anti-democrats really think about Hong Kong.
Yet, of course, movements in the outside world have influenced Hong Kong, China's most international city. The Occupy movement leaders freely acknowledge that they were influenced by Occupy movements in places like New York and London and, as everywhere else in the world, the flow of ideas is not contained within national boundaries.
However, if you want to see real foreign intervention in action, it would be a good idea to consult the archives of the Chinese Communist Party, which even today provide something of a blueprint for how these things are done.
Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist and entrepreneur
http://m.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1672909/evidence-foreign-interference-look-chinese-communist-partys
