We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  In China, the mandate is traditionally bestowed on a person by heaven when he is a particularly virtuous and capable leader. A person with whom people align themselves like iron filings around a magnet; someone who can bring order to the world by the sheer force of his charisma. And if you don’t really believe in heaven, but are confident that you are the most virtuous and capable of all leaders, then you can simply seize that mandate for yourself. When Xi Jinping appeared at a press conference after the 19th Party Congress, he referred to a famous Yuan dynasty poem. Just as plum blossom did not need anyone to shower it with praise, and it was sufficient that the universe was filled with its scent, he said, ‘I don’t need cheap compliments from anyone. It is enough that my integrity fills the universe.’ These are the words of someone already sure of his imperial status and charisma.

  A few days earlier, I had attended an event in Beijing’s exhibition centre which, according to the accompanying PR material, was all about showcasing the country’s progress. In reality, it was a High Mass for the man whom the Economist, the central mouthpiece of capitalism, had that same week proclaimed the ‘most powerful man in the world’. Pride of place was given to a huge tower of bookshelves, filled with titles by Xi Jinping. An old woman was leafing through his The Governance of China. She introduced herself as Mrs Liu, 72 years old, a practising Buddhist. Oh, I said, a Buddhist? Yes, Mrs Liu replied: after all, people need religion – especially in China. And that, she added, was also why she revered Xi Jinping so greatly. ‘He’s not an ordinary person. He has a destiny.’ As she saw it, the Party intended to bring liberation to the country and peace to people’s souls. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the Communist Party is a religion, too. It’s good for us.’

  †† An article in the Guardian (15 Feb 2019) points out that the app’s name ‘Study (Xi) Strong Country’, is a pun – Xuexi is the word for ‘study’ but also contains the president’s name, suggesting users are to ‘study Xi’. Such are the wonders and ambiguities of the Chinese language, however, that it can be read in several ways. Another translation of the app’s name could be: “Study Xi, strengthen the country”.

  THE DREAM

  How Karl Marx and Confucius are being Resurrected, hand in hand with the Great Nation

  ‘Yeah. You. You. You know / Communism is sweet like honey / I’m your Bruno Mars / You’re my Venus, my dear Karl Marx.’

  Rap song by the band Xiangshui zuhe (‘Perfume’), 2016

  Marx may be dead, but on 5 May 2018 he managed to celebrate his 200th birthday in grand style, with a Sino-German festival in his hometown of Trier. In China, his rebirth is old news: the country has made it its mission to become the ‘global centre for Marxism research’. (It’s also the global centre for Karl Marx worship – not that there’s much competition.) All this is thanks to Xi Jinping, who took the busts of Marx down from the shelf, where – even in China – they were gathering dust, polished them up and invited the Party and the people to kneel before them once more.

  New statues of Marx were sculpted and cast in bronze. One found its way to Trier, a gift from the People’s Republic of China to mark the bicentennial of the city’s great son. It stands 4.4 metres high – to the relief of Trier’s citizens, almost two metres shorter than originally planned, but even so a colossus. As is only right and proper, according to Wu Weishan, the sculptor: big philosopher, big idea, big China. Wu was enthusiastic in his praise for little Trier: ‘Home of Marx, dreamland of our spirit!’ he wrote in an article for the People’s Daily. As curator of the National Museum, the sculptor is a cultural bureaucrat, though for many years he has also been kept busy producing works commissioned by the Party.

  His Marx – marching forward with determination in a billowing frock coat – symbolises ‘China’s faith in its own theory, its own path, its own system and its own culture’. As befits a state artist in China, Wu was simply transcribing the exact words of his helmsman Xi Jinping, who demanded these ‘four forms of self-confidence’ from his people. What they mean is that China is self-sufficient now, and so sure of itself that it is setting out to hijack Marxism and reinvent it in Chinese. Xi Jinping Thought is the new Marxism, says the state press. The adoption of Marxism by the CCP was ‘totally correct,’ said Xi in his speech on Karl Marx’s birthday, and ‘the sinification and modernisation of Marxism’ was now also ‘totally correct’.78 He urged his comrades and the whole Chinese nation to make aligning themselves with Marx ‘a way of life’.

  In 2012, Xi Jinping took over a country riddled with corruption and a Party showing all the signs of internal disintegration. There was great uncertainty throughout the country, reaching deep into the Party ranks. From the start, Xi Jinping had a clear battle plan to take back control of Party, state and society. Central to this plan was a wave of ideological purges, which washed through all the country’s important institutions in turn – and was intended to rinse away anything with a whiff of ‘Western values’.

  While Xi was still in the process of acquiring a strangle-hold of censorship on social media, a document from the CCP Central Committee, which was to become famous as ‘Document Number Nine’, began circulating among Party functionaries. Its real title was ‘Communiqué on the current state of the ideological sphere’. This report from April 2013 is a head-on attack against what political thinkers and civil rights activists the world over describe as ‘universal values’. For the authors of the document, though, they are without exception ‘Western values’, ‘Western principles’, ‘Western ideas’. The Party regards all these ideas as subversive, feels threatened by them, and so is at pains to brand them as unsuitable for the world beyond the West.

  The document calls on Party members across the country to take up the struggle against concepts such as civil society, the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, independent media and coming to terms with one’s own history. All these ideas had taken root in the three decades before Xi Jinping took office, even within the Party itself – at least among its more open-minded and critical figures. Now the West was an ideological opponent once more.

  The campaign quickly gathered pace. The propaganda apparatus systematically took various groups and institutions to task. One of the first to attract its attention was the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the government’s most important think-tank, which in recent years had produced many original and independent thinkers. In June 2014, a senior cadre from the powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection – the same organisation that for a long time had led the fight against corruption – accused CASS of having ‘ideological problems’; its infiltration by ‘foreign influences’ had become too dangerous. A few days later, the academy dutifully announced that from now on, it would make checking the ideological purity of its researchers a priority. In December of the same year, the CASS president Wang Weiguang went even further, writing that ‘the class struggle’ lived on in China – a return to Maoist jargon that alarmed many people.

  One month later it was the turn of members of the CCP itself: societal change over the past three decades had unfortunately led to ‘a loss of faith and moral decline’ among many functionaries, according to a declaration that revealed a great deal about the Party leadership’s worries and the subversive attraction of the ideas they had demonised. The cadres had to re-immunise themselves with Marxism, it said, ‘so that they do not lose their way in striving for Western democracy, universal values and civil society.’

  In September, China’s journalists were next in line, receiving the order to follow only ‘Marxist news values’. And in October it was the artists, when Xi Jinping told them in no uncertain terms that from now on, they must once again create only works that ‘serve the people and socialism.’ Both the jargon and the main thrust of his speech had echoes of the notorious address given by Mao Zedong in 1942 that would gag China’s artists for decades.

  Very quickly, the state apparatus also set its sights on the country’s universities. In December 2013, Xi had already m
ade a speech calling for Chinese higher education institutions to take a new ideological direction, and it took them less than six weeks to obey. Their institutions now formed the ‘front line’ on the ideological battlefield, education minister Yuan Guiren told the vice chancellors. The specific enemies they had to wipe out were Western values and Western textbooks. The university vice chancellors and Party secretaries instigated a purge of the course plans and lecture halls. In place of Western ideas, the minister said, they must use all their strength to drive the ideas of Marx and Xi Jinping ‘into students’ classrooms and into their heads’. (This prompted a few brave souls who still dared to ask questions in China to wonder out loud from which point of the compass Marx and socialism had come in the first place.) In Seeking Truth, the magazine of the Central Party School that sets out the ideological direction in which the CCP will march, Minister Yuan upped the ante: young teachers and students, he wrote, were ‘the primary targets of infiltration by hostile foreign elements’. The ministry announced the introduction of new textbooks for schools and universities, which would implant ‘red genes’ back into students.

  It was only natural that this ideological zeal would hit the universities harder than most institutions: they are the home of a generation of professors and lecturers who have seen more of the world than almost any other group in China. As teachers, they also have a great influence on the brightest and best of the young generation. The attacks have not yet subsided, and the purges are ongoing. Inspectors from the Central Discipline Inspection Commission have toured the country’s universities several times, criticising even elite institutions such as Tsinghua and Peking Universities for ‘weak ideological and political work’ and demanding that they submit immediately and completely to ‘the Party’s guidance’.

  As a rule, such criticism from the feared Discipline Commission results in panicked activism from the institution criticised. More than a few independent minds have been fired or sidelined, perhaps for permitting themselves a critical remark about Mao Zedong, or showing a shade too much enthusiasm about free speech. Others have disappeared behind a veil of silence. Even in 2012, we correspondents could still find some of our most exciting and original sources at CASS or the major universities; and they were often Party members. Today, they often don’t even pick up the phone.

  The Party doesn’t just use threats; it also buys the loyalty of university teachers. Two friends of mine, both English lecturers at a large Beijing university, informed me with great astonishment about the introduction of a new wei-wenfei, the ‘maintaining stability bonus’ being paid to all teaching staff – provided that they hadn’t attracted negative attention by making critical comments in their classrooms. One had received 40,000 Yuan and the other 50,000, sums which at the time were the equivalent of around £4550 and £5650 respectively. ‘Just imagine,’ said one of them. ‘All that money!’

  Peking University – once a beacon of liberal values in China – led the way: in 2015, it named one of its buildings after Karl Marx, and put together a team to collect Marxist classics. The project was called Ma Zang, which can be translated as ‘Marxist canon’. This is not without irony: until then, zang has been the term used by Chinese scholars for collections of the sacred or canonical texts of Buddhism, Taoism or Confucianism. When the Beijing Global Times reported on the project in 2015, the article’s author allowed himself a note of scepticism. On the political education courses regarded by many students as a hateful, tedious hoop to be jumped through, he wrote: ‘Marxism itself has lost attraction among students. The teachers can do few things about it. The students learn Marxism just for academic credits.’79 Three years later, the same newspaper felt duty-bound to report: ‘More than 90 percent of Chinese college students surveyed said they are inspired by political and ideological courses in China.’80 The paper quoted the education minister, who proudly announced that students had to ‘fight for a seat’ on some popular courses. Which sounds like something an education minister might say when he wants a pat on the head from the Party leadership.

  The ideological training seems to have made a particularly deep impression on the administrators of the sperm bank at Peking University Third Hospital. When they were looking for new donors in 2018, they not only required potential applicants between the ages of 20 and 45 to be free of inherited or infectious diseases and ‘obvious male-pattern baldness’; the advert on Weibo also asked for ‘excellent ideological qualities’. Sperm donors would only be accepted if they ‘love the fatherland, support the rule of the Communist Party and are loyal to the Party’s mission’. So that the red genes really are passed on.

  What does the CCP leadership intend to achieve with this ideological revival? A campaign like this only makes sense if the aim is to secure power at any price – including intellectual impoverishment. Yet the Party is striving to establish itself as the one entity with the intellectual capacity to govern judiciously, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of ‘the great rebirth of the Chinese people’. With an eye on its big rival, the USA, the CCP wishes to propagate a world-class economy, world-class research and world-class think-tanks. How it is going to achieve this whilst feeding intellectual pap to its best people remains a mystery. The truth is that the Party is desperate for original, creative and critical minds in fields such as IT, physics, mathematics and chemistry – but they must instantly fall into a deep sleep upon contact with politics, history or religion.

  Before Xi Jinping came to power, the Party had a problem: for several decades, it had lacked an ideology and a value system that would hold the nation together. ‘What we have in China is a total disconnect between theory and practice, where what is said is not only different from, but often the opposite of, what is done,’ the intellectual Rong Jian wrote in a much-admired essay in 2013. The massacre of 1989 had turned him from a researcher on Marxism into a curator. ‘Someone once told me that all China’s problems stem from the fact that the capitalism that is being practised is being preached as socialism. This paradox has persisted for a long time and has remained unresolved to this day.’81 Now Xi Jinping is attempting to fill the ideological vacuum that has existed in China since the death of real Marxism with Marxism’s mummified remains. At first, it smacked of desperation. Unlike Mao Zedong’s ideological purges – there was no shortage of the faithful in Mao’s time – Xi’s Marxism campaign has an overwhelmingly negative thrust. It defines itself first and foremost by its enemy: the West and its values. What it demands from the public is not faith, but gestures of submission to this stuffed Marx, gestures unifying the oath of loyalty to the Party with the rejection of non-Marxist Western aberrations.

  When a handful of new genuine believers recently appeared in Xi Jinping’s China, the Party’s reaction was telling. These were young people, students, who called themselves fervent Marxists and were deeply affected by their country’s inequality, the lack of a social welfare system, the scale of corruption and environmental damage, and above all the lot of the exploited working classes. When they got together to try to do something about these issues, they felt the fist of the Party. On 24 August 2018 alone, the police arrested 50 students in Shenzhen; not since Tiananmen Square in 1989 had the Party apparatus come down so hard on protesting students. To many, the spectacle of a supposedly communist party taking such repressive measures against Marxist students was further proof that Chinese socialism has become just an empty phrase.

  Marx may be on Xi’s lips, but Lenin is in his bones. ‘To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin,’ he said in an internal speech not long after he was named General Secretary of the CCP, ‘is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels.’82 The Chinese journalist Gao Yu, who dared to bring both ‘Document Number Nine’ and this secret speech to the public’s attention, was arrested and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in 2015 for ‘betraying state secrets’. Following protests, e
specially from Germany and the USA, she was later released from prison ‘on medical grounds’ and placed under house arrest.

  The campaign against Western values brings forth some colourful flowers. The attack on Christmas is among them: over the last twenty years, celebrating Christmas has become popular in China’s cities. As in other parts of Asia, young Chinese people in particular have adopted the more fun aspects of the festival, stripped of all religious components, to make it a time of year for parties and shopping. ‘Finally, a festival just for us, without any family stress, far away from parents and grandparents,’ a friend once told me. But the passionate official anti-West sentiment has not spared this Christmas Lite. In several provinces, the regional CCP leaders have instructed their members to avoid all Western festivals and customs. The ban also extends to Halloween, Valentine’s Day and even April Fools’ Day, which the Xinhua News Agency warned against in the strongest terms on 1 April 2016, on its Weibo account. April Fools’ jokes were ‘irreconcilable with core socialist values,’ it said. ‘So please do not start any rumours, do not believe them and do not spread them!’

  The main target, though, remains Christmas. In 2017, the city of Hengyang banned all civil servants and Party members from taking part in Christmas celebrations; after all, communism also means atheism. With one eye on the West’s incursions into China more than a century ago, the Communist Youth League in Anhui called Christmas a ‘festival of humiliation’, and the Pharmaceutical University in Shenyang warned its students against the ‘corrupting influence of Western religious culture’. They would do better, it said, to work on restoring their ‘faith in their own culture’. ‘Christmas is a festival celebrated by Christians and, is hence, a wound to the Chinese people. It is not suitable for the Chinese,’ said an article circulated on WeChat at the time. ‘We should not forget the shameful history of our country.’83