What Gescher calls a ‘5,000 year pursuit of utopia’ is, in a sense, at the heart of the CPC’s argument to sustain its one-party rule At a joint press conference in March with China’s Premier Li Keqiang in Canberra, Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reflected, “China’s history, 3,000 years of civilisation, is so remarkable”. Without waiting for a second, Li interrupted him, holding up five fingers of his right hand. “5,000!” he said. “5,000 years?” Turnbull corrected himself, as the journalists laughed. “There you go! So remarkable!”
The episode highlights how seriously the rulers of China’s Communist Party (CPC) consider China’s “5,000 years of history”. In the new book, Becoming China, Jeanne-Marie Gescher, who has spent over 25 years in China as a strategic advisor to a number of organisations—from…
