“All the work by the Party’s media must reflect the Party’s will, safeguard the Party’s authority, and safeguard the Party’s unity,” he said at national broadcaster China Central Television. “They must love the Party, protect the Party, and closely align themselves with the Party leadership in thought, politics, and action.”
Former Chinese official Liang Jing says Xi’s day of lectures to media cadres—widely scorned and ridiculed both inside and outside the country—marked the “official opening of Xi Jinping’s Cultural Revolution.”
The original Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago next month, instigated by Mao Zedong, the charismatic first leader of the People’s Republic. On May 16, 1966, the party’s Politburo, spurred on by Mao, created a “Central Cultural Revolution Group” to cleanse the ruling organization. His stated aim was to rid the party of careerists and counterrevolutionaries—those he said “wave the red flag to oppose the red flag”—but his real goal was to purge personal enemies.
Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, had already begun a purge of officials in the Ministry of Culture and had started a campaign against writers critical of her husband. Taking her lead, a professor in Peking University’s philosophy department wrote a “big-character poster” denouncing the school’s administration. Soon faculty and students in universities and high schools across the country were doing the same.
Jiang Qing stoked the radical movement, handing out armbands to students, calling the eager, impressionable youths “Red Guards.” At a mass gathering in Tiananmen Square in August 1966, Mao himself donned a red armband. Students, he said, should “learn revolution by making revolution.”
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a personal power play that eventually became a decade-long movement, almost destroyed the People’s Republic. Mobs closed government offices, party agencies, schools, and factories after Mao urged some 11 million Red Guards to “Bombard the Headquarters.” He called on them to destroy the “Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. The upheaval eventually became a civil war in many parts of the country, leaving scars that remained long after the army restored order, after Mao died, and even after Jiang Qing and the other members of the notorious “Gang of Four” were sentenced to long prison terms.
Now, four decades after the Cultural Revolution burned itself out, another Maoist is running China.
Xi Jinping adopted overtly Maoist themes and promoted Maoist-inspired policies right after becoming the party’s general secretary in November 2012. He made a show of visiting locations Mao made famous, reminded audiences of the Great Helmsman’s iconic sayings, and reinforced Maoist education and indoctrination from one end of the country to the other. He has even tried to build a Mao-like personality cult around himself.
In Xi Jinping’s universe, the main ideological crime is “historical nihilism,” criticism of China’s Communist past. It is one of his “Seven Don’t Mentions.” Today, propaganda guidelines permit no criticism of Mao. Xi has linked survival of the party to its reaffirmation of Mao Zedong.
Xi could not celebrate Mao except in a period of enforced orthodoxy made possible by his relentless accumulation of political power. To accumulate that power, he had sought to rid himself of competitors. His primary weapon has been a campaign against corruption, a ruthlessly convenient way to get rid of anyone who opposes him. As Charles Burton of Brock University points out, Xi’s ongoing campaign has all the hallmarks of Mao’s “continuous revolution.” In his time, Xi has “deconstructed” the patronage networks of his adversaries and in the process made himself the most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s canny successor—or perhaps even since Mao himself.
Moving with an aura of power, Xi has looked different than his contemporaries. “I have sensed from the start that he has the kind of ambition that makes other people worry,” says the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Waldron, a noted China historian. “I feel that he is reaching for more power than any of his immediate predecessors had and that he is also seeking to lift himself up above the group of people who would otherwise seem to be very similar to him.” As Burton says, Xi has “maneuvered himself into a position of unassailable authority.”
That is exactly what Mao did as he became the party’s undisputed leader prior to his victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949. His near-absolute power led to enormous mistakes like the Great Leap Forward, which eventually forced him to the sidelines of China’s politics. The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s way of making himself the center of China again.
The eerie parallels between Mao and Xi have made many worry about the possibility of Cultural Revolution 2.0.
Chinese politics these days is filled with references to the original Cultural Revolution. That deadly decade, however, is poorly understood in today’s China, largely because the Communist party has limited discussion of it. In 1981, while the political situation was still unsettled, the party under Deng issued its official verdict—the Cultural Revolution was termed “a most serious setback and loss.” Many in China have gone along with the official silence that followed because as onetime Red Guards they have crimes in their youthful past to hide.
This year, however, the Chinese have evidently decided to talk about that disastrous decade, not because of the impending anniversary but because Xi has been imposing “red culture” on a resistant people and trying to achieve a uniformity of opinion in an increasingly modern society. As the Global Times, a tabloid controlled by the party’s People’s Daily, complained in March, critics “like to overuse the label of the Cultural Revolution, linking it to all problems today, and to make their case that the Cultural Revolution will return.”
Critics are found throughout society. For instance, the 81-year-old Wang Meng, a former minister of culture, essentially called for a re-assessment of the Cultural Revolution when in early March he declared that the party had an obligation to “further explain” that time.
Xi’s propaganda officials disagree and are trying to derail any questioning of the official 1981 verdict. Twice this year, the Global Times has issued editorials on the topic. “If China brings up a wave of reflections and discussions as wished by some,” the paper said last month, “the established political consensus will be jeopardized and turbulence in ideas may occur.”
The political consensus may already be in some jeopardy. Xi’s enemies have dared in the last few months to challenge him publicly, an extraordinary show of defiance. The party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the main instrument in Xi’s “anticorruption” campaign, recently took a swipe at his authoritarianism with an online essay titled “A Thousand Yes-Men Cannot Equal One Honest Adviser.” There was a mysterious public call for Xi to resign, posted on a semi-official website, and the official Xinhua News Agency published an article calling him “China’s last leader.”
Today, like fifty years ago, China’s leader has lost support. Will Comrade Jinping turn to some sort of Cultural Revolutionary, Maoist movement of his own? Unlikely. Because China is an increasingly outward-looking nation, and the Chinese people cannot today be as easily manipulated into another mass campaign. Xi, unlike Mao, does not have a monopoly on information, and his emphasis on Maoism does not sit well with an increasingly sophisticated populace. Most Chinese condemn, not celebrate, Mao’s great tragedies. As the University of Pennsylvania’s Waldron says, “Now the Chinese people are stirring, thinking for themselves, and asking questions for which Xi has no credible answers.”
Xi’s problem is that he sounds as if he is from another era. He can say, as he did in mid-2013, that “our red nation will never change color,” but it in fact already has. The Chinese people, now modern, have simply moved on.
Xi, however, is not the type of autocrat to let modernity stand in the way of his vision for China. That determination ensures continuing alienation—and friction—between him and the Chinese people, as he must increasingly coerce them into accepting his rule. That means more repression, which only delegitimizes the Communist party in the eyes of an increasingly skeptical public.
Which is bound to make Xi’s China even less stable than it is now. And more dangerous too. As we saw in the Cultural Revolution, insecure Maoists are capable of most anything.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China.
