China at 70: Much to celebrate but with geopolitical clouds to watch

A SPLENDID military parade, among other events, in Beijing on Tuesday will mark the 70th anniversary of Mao Zedong's proclamation of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

New weapons, including the Dongfeng-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, will be on show. The spectacle will serve as a reminder that the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) victory came at a heavy price - the civil war against the Nationalists, allied to Washington, lasted decades and killed millions. Then - as now - the communists were allied to Moscow, then the core of the Soviet empire.

There was more social and cultural upheaval, famines and other sundry disasters under Mao that left the country both poor and backward by the time he died. In the late 1970s, the party under Deng Xiaoping shed its ideological blinkers and changed direction to become the world's second largest economy, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Significantly, the CCP's rule has outlasted the Soviet Union's existence by a year.