The People's Republic of China (PRC) celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding on October 1. That was a moment of joy for friends who have benefited from the liberation of a country that has recontoured the political map of the world forever since its re-emergence as a socialist power on the global stage.

The Chinese Revolution of 1949 brought the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Asia. It proved that Asians, like Europeans, were more than capable of taking their future in their own hands, free of both internal and external forces that had reduced Russia to a nation of serfs once and China to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society after the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. The Vietnamese Revolution of 1975, when the two halves of the nation were reunified under socialist aegis, built on the insurrectionary momentum in world history generated by Russia and China.

I am not a communist. But even a non-communist like me can attest to the exhilaration, although vicarious, felt at the appearance of emancipatory moments in history. Born in 1957, I grew up in the knowledge of those revolutionary turning points and others that included the English Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. They were different kinds of turn, but they possessed a common motif: the successful overthrow of an unbearably oppressive existing order and its violent replacement with the ferociously unleashed power of the new.

In China's case, the Long March literally redrew the map of servitude. Its heroism is undeniable although it was a military retreat by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its Red Army, not an advance. From 1934 to 1935, the 10,000-km march relocated the revolutionary base from Jiangxi in the southeast to Shaanxi in the northwest in an epic journey that saw troops cross 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers. About 160,000 Red Army soldiers and CCP cadres had embarked on that national journey: Fewer than 15,000 made it to the end.

The reverses were undeniable. However, their dead comrades tied to their heartstrings; the survivors created a pathway to the future. Between 1935 and 1949, China was invaded by the imperial Japanese who rubbed Asian salt into the European wounds that China had suffered since the Opium Wars. The heroism of both the fallen and the survivors of the Long March inspired many young Chinese to join the CCP during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. They did not know whether their revolution would succeed, but they joined it nevertheless. The moment of epiphany arrived on October1, 1949, when Chairman Mao Zedong inaugurated the latest phase of ancient Chinese history. What had been meant to be a retreat had actually turned into an advance. The Long March had succeeded.

Today, no one is immune to the strides that the PRC has made since its founding. However, there is a tendency to view the new China in reductionist economic terms. China certainly deserves accolades for being the world's second largest economy, but that is not all there is to the China story. The rest of the story has to do with the historic resilience of an honest and hardworking people against terrible odds, has to do with the revolutionary fervour that catapulted a downtrodden nation into the forefront of global history.

China in the years ahead

Not all rejoice at this outcome.

Professor Wang Gungwu, the globally-respected historian of China and Southeast Asia who is based in Singapore, noted the resistance to China's further rise.

"Should the PRC succeed in providing an alternative route to prosperity and independence, the US (and elsewhere in the West) would see that as a fundamental threat to its (and Western European) dominance in the world. Those who feel threatened would then do everything they can to stop China. I think this is what most Chinese believe is what American leaders are prepared to do," Professor Wang said in a 2020 interview.

"It did not help that the US as the leader of that West has made serious mistakes as the world's sole superpower, including that of letting rampant capitalism dictate the globalisation process," he added. "The negative reaction among those in the US who turned against its liberal ideals has left the country's allies in confusion and thus opened Western hegemony to question."

He concluded: "But even if the West should be in relative decline, that does not mean that China will be the beneficiary. Much will depend on whether China's alternative perspective is credible and attractive to those who are now more skeptical of what the West stands for."

Wise words. Here, the key question is: Will China replicate Western hegemony as it rises to challenge the West?

Realist International Relations theory suggests that it will. Countries behave in predictable ways in comparable circumstances. China will thus protect and advance its national interest like any great power before it. Should even the relative decline of the West open up opportunities for China, it will pursue them as the West had done, in Asia for example from the 16th century for 400 years till the Western model of imperialism and colonialism was destroyed by World War II. Imperialism and colonialism were territorial functions. Today, neo-imperialism works through the capture of new "trade routes" - finance capital, intellectual capital, social capital and ultimately strategic capital.

On that point, it would be interesting to see whether China's Belt and Road Initiative follows the historical trajectory of the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which stabilised the non-Soviet parts of the global economy in order to provide financial credibility to Western hegemony after World War II.

Also, it would be interesting to watch the evolution of China's military footprint in world affairs, beginning with the South China Sea but expanding throughout what the West calls the Indo-Pacific region.

That is in the future.

But now, on the 75th anniversary of one of the world's defining moments, it is necessary to welcome, yet again, the liberation of a great nation from its own feudal and imperial past so that it could stand shoulder to shoulder with developing nations in the interests of a common, equitable global future.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow at the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com