In October, a Communist Occasion–run tv community within the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program known as When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the traditional Chinese language sage hold forth on their doctrines and uncover that their concepts are in good concord.
“I’m eager for a supreme and far-reaching supreme world, the place everybody can do their greatest and get what they want,” Marx says. “I name it a communist society.”
“I additionally advocate the institution of a society the place everyone seems to be pleased and equal,” Confucius responds. “I name it the good unity of the world.”
This system’s message is that trendy Chinese language tradition ought to be a synthesis of Marxism and China’s traditions—a fusion achieved by one other nice thinker, the Chinese language chief Xi Jinping. “There was limitless debate about how conventional tradition ought to be handled,” one scholar on the present explains. However lastly, due to Xi’s knowledge, “the issue was actually solved, and folks’s certain ideas all of the sudden turned clear.”
The Marx and Confucius present is only one small a part of Xi’s marketing campaign to trend a brand new ideological conformity in China. Its obvious purpose is to foster unity in preparation for struggles at dwelling and overseas—however with the final word goal of tightening Xi’s grip on China. Chinese language leaders “need to have a really highly effective, socialist, ideological framework that may congeal the inhabitants, and that is after all underneath the celebration’s management and steerage,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine, advised me. “What’s a extra highly effective method to centralize energy than to manage individuals’s thought?”
Xi’s push for communist conformity might sound anachronistic within the age of social media and the worldwide digital commons. But it surely’s just one means he’s dragging China again into an older, darker time. He has reversed many years of market liberalization in favor of renewed state intervention within the economic system, returned to Chilly Warfare–model confrontation with the West after a interval of fruitful cooperation, and reestablished one-man rule to a level unseen for the reason that days of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder. Now he’s trying to revive the extreme ideological indoctrination of earlier years of Communist rule—the period of Mao’s Little Pink E-book—in a quest for nationwide “unity,” as he defines it, and whole Occasion dominance.
On this sense, China is within the throes of a tradition warfare—one which the state has been waging in opposition to society for a while, utilizing the measures of repression obtainable to its chief. Xi has already intensified censorship and strangled personal schooling. Now his marketing campaign is choosing up tempo. In October, he unveiled a framework he calls Xi Jinping Thought on Tradition, the most recent installment in a rising corpus of his “thought” meant to direct overseas affairs, the army, and different facets of coverage and personal life. With this pronouncement, in response to the state information company Xinhua, Xi’s purpose is to “present a robust ideological assure, religious energy,” and “a socialist ideology that has the facility to unite and encourage the individuals.”
Neither is this indoctrination meant to cease at China’s borders. “Profound modifications within the worldwide panorama immediate an pressing want to extend China’s cultural comfortable energy and the attraction of Chinese language tradition,” Xinhua famous. In a associated transfer in March, Xi launched the “World Civilization Initiative,” a manifesto through which he advocates “respect for the variety of civilizations” and that “coexistence transcend emotions of superiority.” Nations, he provides, ought to “chorus from imposing their very own values or fashions on others.”
That’s Xi-speak for denying the existence of the common rights and values that undergird the worldwide primacy of democracy. Xi’s tradition warfare has geopolitical implications on this regard: In searching for to undercut the West’s cultural affect overseas, Beijing seems to appreciate that profitable its battle with america would require not simply missiles and microchips, however media and messaging as nicely.
Chinese language leaders have an extended historical past of attempting to manage thought. In 213 B.C.E., the primary emperor of the Qin dynasty turned irritated with students who in contrast him and his insurance policies unfavorably to rulers of the distant previous. His answer, so the story goes, was to confiscate suspect texts on historical past, philosophy, and different topics and burn them. He did this, one historical historian commented, “with the intention to make the individuals silly and make sure that in all underneath Heaven there ought to be no rejection of the current by utilizing the previous.”
Two thousand years later, Xi Jinping is trying one thing related. In October, a Chinese language e-book distributor recalled a latest reprint of a biography of the Ming dynasty’s final emperor from sellers with no clear rationalization. The Chongzhen emperor, as he was identified, hanged himself when his dynasty collapsed in 1644. Maybe the e-book’s cowl language, which advertises that “Chongzhen’s repeated errors” had “hastened the nation’s destruction,” could possibly be construed as an implicit criticism of Xi amid the nation’s mounting financial issues and geopolitical tensions. Regardless of the cause, right now’s censors, very like the Qin emperor, appear to favor that readers not examine current and previous.
Xi’s imaginative and prescient for China’s current consists of old school and supposedly “socialist” morality. In October, the Chinese language chief shared his view that girls’s correct position in Chinese language society is to remain dwelling and have infants to reverse the nation’s inhabitants shrinkage, caused, partly, by his celebration’s misguided insurance policies. He urged ladies to comply with “a brand new development of household” and confused the necessity to “actively domesticate a brand new tradition of marriage and childbearing.” In an indication of the instances, Lisa, a member of the Okay-pop group Blackpink, was lately suspended from the Chinese language social-media platform Weibo for unspecified causes; the ban got here after she had carried out a burlesque present in Paris that was controversial in China. The Hong Kong celeb Angelababy was additionally banned, maybe as a result of she could have attended the efficiency.
Others with existence that the state considers unhealthy for communist society have additionally come underneath strain, most notably members of the homosexual, lesbian, and transgender communities. In 2021, censors barred imagery of “effeminate” males from native tv and closed dozens of social-media accounts related to LGBTQ teams. Simply this month, the federal government’s prime web watchdog introduced a crackdown on quick social-media movies which have sexual content material or pictures of cross-dressing.
Ethnic minorities have fared nonetheless worse on this ideological framework. Xi has used his notion of nationwide tradition, largely outlined by the Han Chinese language majority, as a bludgeon for forcibly assimilating the nation’s Uyghurs, Tibetans, and different such teams. Touring Xinjiang—dwelling to the Uyghurs—in 2022, Xi made the case that minority societies had been all a part of a larger “Chinese language tradition,” as a result of they’ve been linked to Chinese language civilization from time immemorial.
That narrative is inaccurate. Uyghurs and Tibetans, as an example, have their very own languages and non secular practices. Their societies have distinct cultural roots and have been ruled by entities largely unbiased from China for many of their histories. Xi nonetheless instructed native officers that his model of the connection needed to be taught extra concertedly with the intention to “firmly forge a China coronary heart and Chinese language soul” throughout the area’s numerous peoples. This effort to amalgamate minorities right into a single class of “Chinese language”—versus “residents of China”—could also be behind the severity of Xi’s suppression of minority conventional life: The federal government has smothered Uyghur tradition by destroying spiritual websites; curbing the research of Uyghur tradition, literature, and language in colleges; and associating the apply of Islam with extremism. A 2020 coverage diminished the research of the Mongolian language in favor of Chinese language in colleges in northern China, main ethnic Mongolians to protest.
The West is topic to a parallel erasure. In a latest video that went viral on Chinese language social media, Jin Canrong, an professional on U.S.-China relations at Renmin College, in Beijing, argued that “there’s a query as as to whether Greece and Rome existed.” Aristotle, he claimed, is a fabrication: No single particular person might have written a lot on so many matters. Even the writing supplies for such a quantity of phrases would have been unavailable in antiquity, he claimed. Against this, historical Chinese language works had been comparatively quick—and, by implication, extra more likely to be actual. His listeners bought the purpose. “It’s simply widespread apply for European leaders to make up philosophies and philosophers with the intention to rule and unfold their ideology,” a commenter on Weibo opined.
Throughout China’s many years of reform, tradition and beliefs took a again seat to nationwide growth and the pursuit of wealth. Xi has apparently seen match to reverse this pragmatic flip, and to take action by selling a brand new concoction of Chinese language traditions and socialism. Selling this cultural fusion, he stated in a lately printed speech, “is the strongest assurance for our success,” as a result of “solely with cultural confidence can a nation stand agency and tall and traverse nice distances.”
Xi’s authorities isn’t simply urging the general public to undertake his new tradition. He’s imposing it. In October, China’s rubber-stamp legislature handed the Patriotic Training Legislation, which mandates the intensive educating of ideology, nationwide protection and safety, “ethnic solidarity,” and the “deeds of heroes” in colleges, in response to Xinhua. The aim, a spokesperson for the legislature advised native media, is to “information individuals to deeply perceive the trinity of loving the nation, the Occasion, and socialism.”
Such heavy-handed efforts might sound poorly matched to the instances. Sources of data abound, and enormous numbers of Chinese language individuals journey and research overseas—certainly the federal government can’t limit them to state-approved concepts.
However solely a small proportion of the Chinese language populace possesses the curiosity, language expertise, and sources to hunt out info past the censors’ firewall. The bulk nonetheless rely on Chinese language media and different sources of state-sanctioned info. Chinese language authorities use this intensive management not simply to maintain undesirable content material from the general public’s eyes, but in addition to actively form what individuals consider. All through the disaster in Gaza, as an example, Chinese language state media have fed the general public a gentle stream of pro-Palestinian messaging that has contributed to an upsurge in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel discourse on-line. Censors might simply suppress such sentiments, however they don’t, as a result of they assist construct home help for Beijing’s overseas coverage.
The potential penalties of Xi’s tradition warfare ought to fear the world. An ever extra remoted, indoctrinated, and politicized Chinese language populace might change into that rather more hostile to the West and extra supportive of nationalist causes, akin to a army assault to say Taiwan. Xi’s quest for social management presents dangers for the Communist regime as nicely. Although some Chinese language individuals could discover Xi’s conservative and nationalist values interesting, the segments of the inhabitants that do see past the firewall, or which have grown accustomed to a extra open setting, are more likely to bridle. In consequence, “you would possibly see some important polarization inside Chinese language society,” Mary Gallagher, an professional on Chinese language politics on the College of Michigan, advised me.
The precedent for such tensions just isn’t encouraging. Again in 1966, Mao’s Cultural Revolution convulsed the nation in violence, as radical Pink Guards sought to stamp out concepts and practices they noticed as corrupting. That marketing campaign, too, was the work of 1 man decided to protect his energy.
