Mao Revisited

Xi Jinping at the Steamed Bun Shop by Tutou Jueren (“Stubborn Baldy”)

The Chinese Communist Party has a long tradition of using its state media as a tool to maintain its legitimacy and control its masses through party propaganda.  While ancient China also used propaganda, Chairman Mao Zedong was the first Chinese leader to successfully use modern mass propaganda techniques.   Mao-era methods included incarceration, “struggle sessions,” self-criticisms to bring about “thought reform,” and the construction of role models such as Lei Feng.  Mao also resorted to mass mobilization campaigns (The Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962) and a nationwide system of loudspeakers and banners.  Teams were created to monitor and promote ideological thought, which included the memorization of party directives and quotes (Mao’s Little Red Book).  After Mao, the first significant propaganda campaign was in 1983, and referred to as the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign.  Following the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, China reestablished its control over ideology despite undergoing an era of economic reform and modernization.  Economic reforms led to an improvement in the economic fortunes of many Chinese, looser media commercialization, and greater editorial independence.  The last decade has seen the rise of social media such as Weibo, a microblog, which has weakened government control.

The trend toward media independence and free thought now appears to be stymied.  Last month, China’s ruling Communist Party told state media they should not be reporting on “wrong points of view” and instead cover positive stories that promote “socialist values.”  The party mandate comes as China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, attempts to crackdown on national media and rein in newspapers.  Under the new guidelines, management of the media will be strengthened, to include shutting down  “channels for the propagation of the wrong points of view” and to “strike hard against online rumors.”  Media organizations and their employees “must strengthen self-regulation, and earnestly increase their sense of responsibility and ability to promote core socialist values,” and to “steadfastly uphold the correct guidance of public opinion.”

The tightening of media control has been traced by some reporters and academics to last January — just a few weeks after Xi had taken over the Communist Party — when a New Year editorial in Southern Weekly called for China to enshrine constitutional rights.  After the government censored the editorial, journalists from the newspaper went on strike for several days.  Over the summer there were a number of editorials concerned with the party’s loss of control over public discourse, with the official Beijing Daily describing the party’s struggle to win hearts and minds as a “fight to the death.”  Activists who planned to gather in Guangzhou to commemorate the anniversary of last January’s protests at Southern Weekly have been warned or detained, and security tight outside the gates of the Southern Media Group, which owns the Southern Weekly, with at least eight police vans and jeeps parked outside, and scores of uniformed and plainclothes police patrolling the area.

What Xi Jinping is doing now is borrowing from Mao’s populist playbook — he may have seen how successful it worked for the popular Bo Xilai (prior to his imprisonment).  From Xi’s recent photo-op at a small dumpling shop to show his affinity for the common man, to the crackdown on dissent, his actions recall similar behavior by Mao.

While there must be limits to press freedom in any country, to protect against slander and false accusations, the limits need to be set at reasonable levels.  Should the limits be set too stringent, the possibility of escalation exists.  We only need to look back at what happened during China’s Great Leap Forward to recall the dangers of attempting to control information and weed out the “wrong points of view”.  During that time, in what  author Yang Jisheng of Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 calls “The Contagious Insanity of the Exaggeration Wind”, party cadres were incentivized to falsely report on crop yields and production figures. Cadres who spoke the truth were labeled “deniers of achievement” or “right deviationists” and were subjected to “struggle sessions”, during which some were beaten to death.  In Henan, the province in China which Yang Jisheng refers to as the national standard-bearer for the Great Leap Forward, yields of corn, sorghum and millet were reportedly “100 times the average yields of the past”.  Wild, exaggerated reports of crop yields led to both overconsumption by local cadres and too many of the crops being exported.  In the province of Yunnan, cadres claimed a new factory opened up every 1.05 minutes and that each factory cost only two yuan (approximately 33 cents) to establish.  What was really happening in the provinces was widespread starvation, and reports of starvation were being held in check by “dissuasion stations” set up along the roads to block the escape of starving peasants.  Refugees who escaped were sometimes rounded up by armed guards patrolling borders or agents sent to return them to their places of origin.  In 1960, Mao eventually learned the truth from relatives in his home village, one of which, his cousin Mao Zerong, told Mao, “Chairman Brother, no cadres dare report any of these matters to you.  You live in Beijing, as remote as the emperors of old, and you don’t know what’s happening.”  Nowadays, with the proliferation of the internet, microblogs and social media, party leaders are better informed.  But this rich source of information could dry up should the party seriously crack down on the “wrong points of view.”

Perhaps the party trend toward greater media control is best exemplified by the recent efforts of the fervent nationalist and self-proclaimed “Most Influential Person of China” Chen Guangbiao, listed as one of China’s 400 richest people and a man known for his publicity stunts.  In an op-ed in the state-run Global Times newspaper, Chen put forth his intention buy the New York Times, writing, “The tradition and style of The New York Times make it very difficult to have objective coverage of China.”  The New York Times website has been blocked in China and its journalists have had difficulty obtaining Chinese visas following its Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 investigation into the family wealth of then-premier Wen Jiabao.  Chen states that if he is successful with his bid, he “will conduct some necessary reforms, the ultimate goal of which is to make the paper’s reports more authentic and objective, thus rebuilding its credibility and influence.”  Chen further added, “I find Americans know little about a civilised and open China that has been enjoying unprecedented development.”

Maybe most Americans do understand little about today’s China — but clamping down on domestic media or buying up opposing points of view does little to alleviate an already opaque situation.  Perhaps today’s opinion leaders should listen to the brave voice of Zhang Wentian, also known as Luo Fu, who served as one of the CCP’s top leaders during the Mao years.  Zhang believed that “leadership must create an environment that encourages those below to dare to express their opinions and create a situation that is lively, vital and free.”  We all know from history what happens in a closed environment in which individuals are not free to express the “wrong points of view”.. The Chinese Communist Party would do well to learn from its own history and not attempt to stifle criticism.