Jacques asserts that no one wants Party rule to end, or democracy. But I heard hundreds of thousands in Tiananmen Square shouting ‘Down with the Party’ in May 1989. Many of them were soon murdered. And one of the founders of the Chinese Democratic Party, Xu Wenli, recently completed a 16-year prison sentence. The heirs of Mao have taken great care to crush opposition.

Jacques disparages those who regard ‘Communist regimes as the devil incarnate’. None of the significant works of scholarship that reveal this devil and all his works, by Roderick MacFarquhar, Michael Schoenhals, Edward Friedman, Paul Picowicz, Mark Selden, Merle Goldman, Robin Munro, and Ralph Thaxton to name but a few, occur in Jacques’ suggestions for further reading or his bibliography, nor do the many volumes on Mao by Stuart Schram.

According to Jacques, ever since Confucius’s disciple Mencius (551-479 BC) said so, Chinese peasants have had the heaven-granted right to rebel. Official historians, however, granted this ‘right’ only after a dynasty fell, and in any event most Chinese have never heard of Mencius. Rebellion against the dynasty was number one in the list of Ten Abominations that led to execution. Jacques then dives over the top — perhaps assisted by the devil incarnate — when he says that this traditional right of rebellion took the form in the ‘Communist era’ of the ‘right of the proletariat to resist and defeat the bourgeoisie’. Bourgeoisie was the term applied to the tens of thousands of writers, artists, scientists, academics, Party members and leaders, and many others deemed to be worthy of torment and death in the Mao years. Now Jacques is optimistic: China he says, ‘is possessed of a 5,000-year history and an extremely long memory … it is blessed with the virtue of patience, confident in the belief that history is on its side … in the 21st century [China’s mentality] will come to fruition’. Lucky Martin Jacques. He is a ‘bourgeois’. If he had been a Chinese in those not so distant terrible years, he would have been a victim.

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