We Have Been Harmonised

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We Have Been Harmonised Page 12

by Kai Strittmatter


  The Party is still like God, and it is still everywhere – but one thing at least has changed with the arrival of Xi Jinping: you can see it again. Xi is making sure the Party is worshipped, openly and fervently. After decades of the ‘reform and opening-up policy’ in which the CCP often ducked out of the limelight and contented itself with pulling strings behind the scenes, Xi decided it was no longer in the Party’s interests to hide or water down the essence of its system: ‘It doesn’t matter whether it is the government, the military, the people or the schools; east, west, north, south or the centre – the Party rules everything.’68 Not much room for ambiguity there: Xi is doing away with the separation of Party and state that Deng Xiaoping once envisaged. Away with the freedoms for which civil society and parts of the media had fought. Away with the illusion that the People’s Liberation Army serves the country and the people first and foremost. Strictly speaking, China’s army has never been China’s army – it was always the Party’s army, and it still is today. ‘You should have unshakeable loyalty to the Party’s absolute command over the army, always follow the Party’s call, always obey the Party,’ Xi Jinping told the troops who had assembled for manoeuvres to mark the PLA’s 90th anniversary. ‘Wherever the Party points, you should march.’

  Party cells are also regaining power in universities, think tanks, NGOs and companies; the Beijing historian Zhang Lifan speaks of the ‘partyfication’ of the country. China’s colleges, he says, are in the process of transforming themselves into ‘Party schools’. Xi Jinping is a control freak: he is using the reanimated Party cells to recentralise power, and in he is making sure people get the message. State, people and Party – for the leader and mastermind of the CCP, these are all just different manifestations of the same thing, and, like the Holy Trinity, they’re difficult to separate. If the Party is now swallowing up many parts of the state and taking its place, then it is just making the system a little more honest. The restructuring of the government in spring 2018 was a logical step: CCP steering committees took control of the ministry of the economy, the finance sector, foreign policy and cyberspace, which had been within the purview of government authorities. The Party’s central propaganda authority took over the regulation of film, press and publishing from state authorities.69 And the CCP’s United Front Work Department swallowed up the state offices for religious affairs and for relationships with Chinese citizens abroad.

  The Party is no longer hiding. And businesses in China are starting to feel it, too. There have always been Party cells within companies, though for the past few decades they’ve been nothing more than a formality. Sleeper cells. Now they are being woken up; they want to have a voice, to help make decisions. Even in private companies; even in foreign companies. The Chinese joint-venture partners of Western firms are demanding that the Party cells in their businesses are included in strategic business decisions.70 All Party members, so it says in the statutes of the CCP, must place ‘the interests of the Party and the people above all else’. One Chinese judge put it this way: where there is a conflict of interests, the ‘Party nature’ of a CCP member must always outweigh his ‘human nature’.71

  At the offices of the internet firm Tencent in Shenzhen, there is a board on the wall showing how many employees are Party members (in 2018, that number was 8,000). The Tencent penguin on the board proudly displays a hammer and sickle on his chest.

  Private companies have long been the engine of China’s development and modernisation, but China’s new class of entrepreneurs knows that they are reliant on the goodwill of the CCP. ‘There is no such thing as free enterprise in China,’ says the American professor of economics Christopher Balding, who teaches in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. ‘It is all just varying degrees of Beijing servitude.’72 China’s businesspeople are not supposed to simply earn money. First and foremost, as Xi Jinping himself once told a group of business leaders, they have to ‘love the fatherland, the people and the Communist Party and actively practise the core socialist values’. In May 2018 the Cyberspace Administration and China’s internet giants came together to launch the China Federation of Internet Societies (CFIS),73 whose stated purpose is to ‘promote the development of Party organizations in the industry.’ Afterwards, the People’s Daily said that the CFIS would ‘conscientiously study and implement the spirit of Xi Jinping’s Strategic Thought on [Building] an Internet Power’74. The vice presidents of this new organisation are China’s most famous internet bosses Pony Ma (Tencent), Jack Ma (Alibaba) and Robin Li (Baidu), whose ‘voluntary’ cooperation was highlighted.

  The CCP opened its ranks to ‘new layers of society’, as it called them, more than 15 years ago. Since then, the relationships between power and money have been particularly close. In March 2018, when the National People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference (which always meet in parallel) came together to hold another coronation mass for the ‘people’s leader’ and ‘helmsman’ Xi Jinping, no fewer than 153 of the delegates were also listed among China’s ‘super-rich’ in the Hurun Report published in Shanghai. Together, their massed wealth is the equivalent of 650 billion US dollars, or just slightly less than the GDP of Switzerland.

  The big cheeses in the online sector vie with each other to sing the praises of the Party and its leader. Liu Qiangdong, head of the e-commerce giant JD.com, shared a surprising epiphany with his audience in August 2017: he had been looking at the progress of artificial intelligence, he said, and had ‘suddenly discovered that communism can actually be realised in our generation.’ In the autumn of the same year, Alibaba boss Jack Ma presented his insights from the CCP’s recently-held 19th Party Congress. In summary: over the last five years, the Party had grown ‘even greater in its ability to improve and reinvent itself.’75 Private companies have never had it so good as they do in today’s China. Jack Ma pointed to permanent political disagreement in Washington and praised China’s ‘advantages’: no other country in the world could boast such ‘political stability’. This subservience is a calculated strategy in a country where it is the Party, and not the market, that makes the rules. A Party whose inspectors and agents regularly make the bosses of even the largest firms vanish overnight, and keep them for days, weeks or months while they ‘assist with investigations’. Incidentally, Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma was revealed by the People’s Daily to be a long-standing Party member in November 2018.

  The Party itself often inadvertently lets slip that the all-round renewal of the CCP under Xi still has a long way to go. In the city of Ningbo, for example, functionaries printed their own handbook to encourage ‘a more noble spirit’ among cadres.76 One chapter is headed: ‘What one should not say to the masses,’ and lists 44 examples that, one may infer, are in common use. Not every Party member, it seems, is working his fingers to the bone in the service of the people. Here are seven:

  ‘I completely agree with you. But the officials up there in the city don’t.’

  ‘I’m busy, don’t disturb me.’

  ‘If something happens, don’t come to me under any circumstances. I don’t want to be promoted, anyway.’

  ‘So much work and so little money. I’ll do it tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about anti-corruption regulations… They’ve been doing that for years.

  We’ve got through two years now, it will pass, everything will be alright in the end.’

  ‘The Party is just as bad as you say.’

  ‘If there’s an election, vote for me. I’ll make it worth your while.’

  Immediately after Xi Jinping’s speech at the 19th Party Congress, the internet giant Tencent, which is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, brought out the app ‘Excellent Speech: Clap for Xi Jinping’. It was a game in which the player had 19 seconds to applaud Xi Jinping as enthusiastically as they could. And it was a hit: just 24 hours after its release, people had already given Xi a total of more than a billion claps.

  Applauding Xi Jinping has become a national sport. Shortly after t
he Party Congress, the state network CCTV began its evening news programme with a memorable four minutes of uninterrupted applause for Xi from worthy comrades. As the Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé observed, Xi was no longer just the ‘Chairman-of-Everything and Chairman-for-Life’; he was now also ‘Chairman of Everyone and Chairman of Everywhere’.77 The Party had enshrined him alongside its highest thinkers, by including him in the Party statutes with ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. A few months later, ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ was added to China’s national constitution, making Xi the first leader since Mao to be given this honour during his own lifetime. In practice, it means that for the rest of his life, he is unassailable. From now on, anyone who criticises him automatically makes himself an enemy of the Party and the constitution.

  Many have seen the writing on the wall. In Yugan County, Jiangxi, a province which is home to many Christians, officials have forced people to remove pictures of Jesus from their houses and replace them with portraits of Xi. Or in Henan Province, where local Party leaders who made a pilgrimage to Lankao County in the north east of the country to visit a tree. More precisely, an empress tree – one that Xi had planted with his own hands, eight years previously. The photos could be admired on the Party cell’s website, where you could also read about the group gazing upon the tree in meditative awe, whilst reflecting ‘carefully on the mission of the Communist Party’. They then listened to a reading of a poem from the pen of Xi Jinping: its verses pay homage to a good Party functionary who, just before the Cultural Revolution, worked himself to death in the service of the people.

  In recent years, nothing has been more guaranteed to provoke an allergic reaction from Party representatives than the suggestion that a new personality cult is being born. ‘No, certainly not!’ exclaimed Xie Chuntao, one of the leaders of the Central Party School, shortly after the Party conference. China had learned from history, he said, alluding to Mao. ‘Such a thing will not happen again.’ What we were seeing was the people’s ‘respect and love’ for Xi – both of which were ‘natural’ and came spontaneously ‘from the heart’.

  Mao’s disciples used to say the same thing. And where once upon a time the propaganda department invented the Little Red Book for Mao, it has now given Xi a Little Red App. Its name is ‘Study (Xi) Strong Country’†† – and, as was only right and proper, it became the country’s most-downloaded app shortly after its release in January 2019, ahead of WeChat and the wildly popular video app TikTok. Party members can not only find the President’s latest speeches and thoughts there; they can peruse the Party press, download Marxist classics and revolutionary films, chat and send each other ‘red envelopes’ containing gifts of money. But most importantly – and this is what makes it a killer app – they can collect points: one for every essay they read from the pen of Xi, and one for every video they watch.

  There are ten points available for every 30 minutes of ‘Xi-time’ (as one heading in the app calls it) you indulge in, or for giving correct answers in a Xi-themed quiz. And if you give the app your attention between 06:00 and 08:30, or in the evenings from eight o’clock onwards, the points you earn are automatically doubled. Gone are the days when Party members could let the evening news wash over them and put the People’s Daily in the recycling unread; now your smartphone registers every minute you devote to something and every paragraph you read. The Party is creeping back into every crack of people’s lives. Party cells in some parts of the country have already started holding Xi study competitions with the app, and giving their workers point targets to reach, and keeping some people awake half the night.

  Xi was once lauded as the ‘core’ of the leadership team. Those days are gone.. He is now the one and only, the ‘reform strategist’, the ‘supreme commander’, the ‘world leader’ and the ‘helmsman’. The Party press is beside itself with amazement and awe. ‘What is it that makes the great Xi Jinping Thought so great?’ was the headline in one issue of Study Time, a Party School newspaper.

  The amazement is warranted. Viewed from a distance, the sheer speed, the tactical skill and the force with which this man has ascended to the emperor’s throne is incredible. It couldn’t have been foreseen in 2012, when the Party, in desperate need of a saviour, elected a bland apparatchik by the name of Xi Jinping. And it certainly can’t have been what all sections of the ruling kleptocracy wanted.

  Xi is a member of the red aristocracy, the son of an old revolutionary. As a young man, he was sent off to the countryside, and for years he lived on the Loess Plateau in central China, later climbing the career ladder as a bureaucrat in the provinces. In all that time, he made no great impression. But he was doing what you have to do to survive in an apparatus as merciless as the CCP: he kept a low profile. This probably explains why he was raised to the top of China’s hierarchy: powerful Party grandees thought this colourless man would pose no danger to them.

  Xi Jinping surprised them all. He proved to be a superb power strategist, dispatching his rivals one after another – even those who had previously seemed invincible. He was aided in this by the longest-lasting anti-corruption campaign the People’s Republic had ever seen. Shock and awe. Gone were the days when such political campaigns would come and go like the tides, when anyone with real power could get themselves to safe ground in time. Party bigwigs have always removed political power from defeated opponents, but only rarely did they take their money and more rarely still, their freedom. Xi broke with this tradition. He took everything from his enemies. He has drawn all power to himself, bringing the security services and the army under his control. On the global stage, too, he has proved an astute tactician, quick to exploit other countries’ weaknesses: for instance, with the speech he made to the World Economic Forum in Davos just after the world-blind Donald Trump was elected US president, in which he promoted China’s leading role.

  Of course, Xi has allies in the CCP, chief among them the current vice president, Wang Qishan. He was Xi’s right-hand man during his first five years in office, when he was the Party’s most senior anti-corruption crusader. Xi and his allies have resurrected the strong leader, no doubt partly to compensate for the fact that the shared values that are supposed to cement society together are in short supply in China. Sentiment and rhetoric are being made to stand in for genuine reform. Yes, Xi continues to promise the poor and the middle classes a better life – but because he is aware of the great dissatisfaction in the country and the sheer numbers who have been short-changed, he also gives his people the prospect of sharing in the Chinese dream of a strong nation.

  The aim of the personality cult around Xi is to marshal the people behind a symbol. In part, the China Dream, the growing nationalism and the rhetoric of unity are the Party’s response to the extreme split in Chinese society between rich and poor, the wealthy cities and the left-behind interior. Economic growth is slowing year on year. This may not concern many members of that small elite who have amassed obscene wealth with the help of the CCP, but ordinary people are worried. Now, though, the Party has Xi the problem-solver, who doesn’t forget the little people. Xi the visionary, who gives China a dream. Xi the hero, who makes the nation a force on the world stage again. Xi the thinker, whose volume of essays about government naturally just happens to be lying on Mark Zuckerberg’s desk at Facebook HQ when Chinese reporters go past. The book, so the People’s Daily reports, is ‘thrilling readers’ from Cambodia to the UK. Xi the wise ruler, who reconciled the ancient philosophers Confucius and Han Feizi first with each other, and then with Marx and Mao, thereby proving to China its ‘exceptional status’ among the nations of the world (exceptional meaning that China, alone, is made for the eternal rule of the Communist Party).

  Again and again, the propaganda machine shows images from the hard years of Xi’s youth, when he was dispatched into the countryside like so many of his generation, to ‘learn from the peasants’. We hear about him working tirelessly to help the farmers of the Loess Plateau
, in the yellow earth of Shaanxi Province, the mythical heartland of Chinese civilisation; sleeping in caves, looking after sheep, and ‘carrying 100 kilos of wheat up a five-kilometre mountain path, without changing shoulders even once.’ The village was called Liangjiahe, and it is destined to go down in history. China’s academics have been called upon to conduct research on the ‘great teachings of Liangjiahe’. On the evening news, you can watch Xi in the place where he once worked, patting babies, admiring apple trees and saying, ‘This is where I left my heart.’ He asks the farmers whether their life is good. They reply: ‘The Party’s policy is good. The farmers are full of hope.’

  The message is: ‘Look, here is someone who comes from the people himself’. In reality, Xi is one of the so-called ‘princelings’, a scion of the red aristocracy, son of Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary once close to Mao and Deng. He is one of the chosen ones, and he knows it. Xi’s self-confidence comes from his pedigree. All his life, he’s been groomed for the task he is now fulfilling: the salvation of the CCP’s power in a hostile environment, in a world for which it was not really made.

  Xi is aware of his country’s heritage, and he makes deliberate use of it. When he brought an end to the extravagant binges that corrupt party functionaries were enjoying on a daily basis, it was with a decree that henceforth, only ‘four dishes and one soup’ would be served at official meals. No more of those sprawling banquets with which government officials all over the country had been filling their days. It is hard to believe Xi didn’t know that the exact same menu – ‘four dishes and one soup’ – had been prescribed 650 years previously by the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, for his courtiers in Nanjing. Zhu had fought his way to the top from lowly beginnings in a poor peasant village, and won the mandate from heaven that made the emperor into an emperor.

 

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