Dec.29.–  The Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s “permanent revolution” destroyed tens of millions of lives. From the communist victory in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, through the upheaval, famine, and bloodletting of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until Mao’s death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set segments of Chinese society against one another in successive spasms of violent class warfare. As wave after wave of savagery swept China, millions were killed and millions more sent off to “reform through labor” and ruination.

Mao had expected this level of brutality. As he once declared: “A revolution is neither a dinner party, nor writing an essay, painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely, gentle, temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Today, even experts on Chinese history find it difficult to keep track of all the lethal “mass movements” that shaped Mao’s revolution and which the party invariably extolled with various slogans. Mao launched campaigns to “exterminate landlords” after the Communists came to power in 1949; to “suppress counterrevolutionaries” in the early 1950s; to purge “rightists” in the late 1950s; to overthrow “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s; and to “rectify” young people’s thinking by shipping them off to China’s poorest rural areas during the Down to the Countryside Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 Kigali, Dec. 21.– Another year, another Umushyikirano. To a casual observer, the just completed two-day event, now traditionally held under the splendid dome of the Kigali Convention Centre, or KCC, might seem little more than a gathering of the great and the good, which concludes with the last speech, to be repeated again the following year. In reality, the two days are some of the most important in the national calendar. The true nature of Umushyikirano as a forum for policy analysis, can be clearly glimpsed in last year’s concluding presidential address.

One could pick any year, but, last year’s was as good an illustration as any before it. It is perhaps not entirely accurate to call it a presidential address. The president, who chairs Umushyikirano, opens it with a State of the Nation address. This is delivered with the formality one would expect of such an address to the nation.