The all-important centennial speech that China’s President Xi Jinping gave on Tiananmen Square on July 1 included an extremely blunt message for those forces in the West who want to “teach China a lesson.” And even the Xinhua translation had it toned down a bit, but the message has been all over the internet and in the media. Xi’s comment, “The Chinese people will never permit outside forces to bully, oppress or enslave us. Those who dare will find themselves up against a steel wall built of the blood and flesh of 1.4 billion people and find themselves badly bruised” (the actual phrase in Chinese is “with broken heads and flowing blood") met with the greatest applause. No doubt the Anchorage attempt by the U.S. to again “humiliate” the Chinese people through their interlocutors, met with strong emotions among the Chinese people.
Xi went through a broad sweep of Chinese history in order to explain the point where they now stand in the evolution of the nation. He outlined the various attempts to bring China out of the “century of humiliation” by the foreign powers, the Taiping revolt, the reform movement of 1898, the Boxer rebellion, and the 1911 revolution. All had been unsuccessful until the formation of the Communist Party, which introduced new ideas. “The founding of a communist party in China was an epoch-making event, which profoundly changed the course of Chinese history in modern times, transformed the future of the Chinese people and nation, and altered the landscape of world development,” Xi said.
“Since the very day of its founding, the Party has made seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its aspiration and mission. All the struggle, sacrifice, and creation through which the Party has united and led the Chinese people over the past hundred years has been tied together by one ultimate theme—bringing about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
“Through the Northern Expedition, the Agrarian Revolutionary War, the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, and the War of Liberation, we fought armed counter-revolution with armed revolution, toppling the three mountains of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism and establishing the People’s Republic of China, which made the people masters of the country. We thus secured our nation’s independence and liberated our people.”
