We darted out between most of the raindrops this afternoon for a welcome walk. Look what omens of the future I found!
Mao Zedong was born on 26 December 1893 so the Chinese celebrated the ‘Great Helmsman’ in his Hunan birthday place yesterday.
It’s hard to express how fundamentally the Party likes celebrations it controls but hates those where surprises or ‘off script’ moments arise.
When National War College delegations met with various PLA hosts (or visa versa as they did send delegations to the United States before relations deteriorated significantly around 2016/17), the encounters were entirely scripted. My preferred termiology is ‘form over substance’ as China must see itself as the greater power so they other side is appropriately aware of the distinction; the substance of the conversation was definitely seen as secondary to the appropriate stagecraft.
I had a group in Urumqi in 2007 meeting with Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) hosts. The topic, as I thought it would be appropriate to put our hosts on the spot, was the advancement of women in the province under the CCP. I never thought they would agree to discussing the topic at all but hearing how the province was working women and men was worth hearing as an indication of one of the many challenges the CCP confronts in governing the country.
Our host was droning on, as the Chinese did back then, about all the great things they had done for women in Xinjiang province. The meeting was following the normal trajectory: an hour duration, our hosts offering 55 minutes of highly vetted dense remarks, soon to be followed by ‘open and free discussion’ which invariably was a single question since ‘we are out of time in. your busy schedule’ would occur at minute 60.
Our War College Commandant was with sitting to my left; an attache’ from the Embassy in Beijing was taking notes on the off chance the CASS people would reveal something new. Several PLA ‘minders’ from the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the PLA were with us to assure we acted appropriately and that the CASS folks stayed faithful to Party script. The PLA guys all were quite fluent in English and had clearly seen the text as it would have been a major faux pas for us to hear it before they saw it. That is how things worked.
The Commandant wrote a note on her page asking how much longer this guy would drone on. I said probably 10 minutes. She wrote ‘Stop him. I want to say some things’.
I wrote back ‘I can’t. They won’t stop because they are too fearful that the minders would put them on report’.
‘No, I want to say something.’
She audibly started rustling her papers, moving in her chair, and making sure everyone in the room knew she was ready for the question period.
The Chinese host blanched but kept right on reading. You would have thought he was deaf. But allowing her to ‘hijack’ the session could have embarrassed the Chinese while also upset the Beijing bubbas who were taking notes on everything.
This is how a ‘form over substance’ authoritarian system works. The Party line is the line.
The Chinese invariably desire to know topics before the meeting begins as if our ‘mutual agreement’ to those areas was a guarantee that everything stays predictable. This structure is not something students in any U.S. university—even a military one—because we recognise that one topic can unveil a completely different line of inquiry for which the hosts don’t know what the correct answer should be. Genuine exchanges only occur, when they do, among people of long-standing acquaintance would allow the Chinese to drop their guard somewhat.
But, China prefers to know the outcome of anything long before it happens.
Why is this the case if China is so certain of its current position as a respected culture and nation? Two primary reasons are important. First, The Party rules over a society with Confucian preference for order and predictability. Mao and the CCP built on that existing structure rather than imposing it.
Second, the ruling CCP is a hierarchical organisation, particularly under Xi Jinping, where any Party member must stick to policy. This is an increasingly doctrinaire body of just under a hundred million people, the Vanguard of the Proletariat, hoping they will lead China in perpetuity. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign originally targeted corruption (allegedly; as I have said repeatedly, he likely rolled up a lot of potential competitors for leadership since the system is pervasively corrupt) but they want to keep power by any means.
Xi announced within the past eighteen months a tightening of Party membership, thus further crushing any expansion of thought beyond the mandatory Xi Jinping Thought which is actually part of the PRC constitution. This is a closed system for which one must play by the rules if one wants to advance. The Party is more the future for aspiring Chinese than it was when Xi arrived as General Secretary in 2012.
The idea that someone would express alternative explanations or approaches to anything Xi advocates has largely vanished. Occasionally we still see somewhat varied explications of global events or the U.S.-Chinese foreign policy trajectory in journal articles overseas or hear about them from small meetings but those are rarer all the time. Those writers tend to be designated engagers deemed ‘safe’ to carry the Party line ultimately with foreigners.
Xi has repeatedly for the past roughly seven years condemned western education (stay home instead of studying abroad with those dangerous ideas or western influences), western values or religion, and anything else that could challenge his future for the PRC. Put bluntly, China welcomes foreign investment and businesses on their terms but little else.
Xi’s vision for the CCP and China is stark, embedded in much self-congratulatory rhetoric regarding the successes of his now eleven plus years in control. Volumes such as Desmond Shum’s Red Roulette paint a less flattering case for what is underway.
The Party is also finding it does not always satisfy those it governs. Party cadres have been issuing highlighting Xi Jinping’s efforts, despite evidence to the contrary, on a par with Mao.
The CCP must be a bit anxious today following assembled crowds in Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace. Students, in small numbers, chanted Cultural Revolution rhetoric such as ‘down with capitalism, revisionism, and imperialism’ while praising Mao’s leadership according to press reports. Mao Zedong certain has been evocative as a CCP icon.
What I noted, however, about the report i saw was that it did not say the students said similar things about Xi.
The Chinese in their late teens and early twenties, especially the educated but underemployed, have been showing frustration with the CCP-led system. Students talk about ‘laying flat’ as a euphemism for their frustration with the system since they cannot sit up straight at a job. Youth unemployment has soared as China finds fewer market exports or options to continue the decades’ of expanding opportunities. The long-expected advantages of studying English, earning a college degree in the extremely competitive education system, or moving to urban areas, keys to advancing in the system during the five decades of the Four Modernisations, no longer guarantee a positive future. Youth frustration, in short, is being rejecting the Party’s actions as Xi increasingly closes the political environment.
The Mao birthday celebration is a single event in a vast country of billions of people. It is easy to overstate these actions. However, in a system built on predictability of behaviour, this was not welcome nor unnoticed. It likely will spur further monitoring of youth activities which lessen the chances of organising to threaten the CCP should frustration boil over into something more concrete.
The Party, however, knows things are not going nearly as swimmingly as Xi wants to make them out. This is why he will always worry about internal challenges before anything else as it’s almost always Chinese overthrowing dynasties (and the Party, in this case) rather than the outsiders, though it’s been convenient to blame the rest of the world for seeking to undermine China.
Convenient argument, isn’t it?
Thank you for reading today’s column. I welcome your rebuttals, suggestions, or thoughts. Please circulate if you think someone would enjoy my thoughts. I to thank those with subscriptions.
Be well and be safe. FIN
Yuri Momoi, ‘Chinese mark Mao’s birthday with Cultural Revolution-era chants’, Nikkei.com, 27 December 2023, retrieved at https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Chinese-mark-Mao-s-birthday-with-Cultural-Revolution-era-chants
Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story on Wealth, Power, and Corruption and Vengeance in Today’s China. London: Simon and Schuster, UK, 2021.