Toen China’s nieuwe Wet op Nationale Verdediging (国防法 guófáng fǎ) op 1 januari dit jaar in werking trad, trok een toevoeging aan Artikel 2 de aandacht. Naast soevereiniteit, eenheid, territoriale integriteit en veiligheid betreft defensie nu ook ‘ontwikkelingsbelangen’ (发展利益 fāzhǎn lìyì, Engels: ‘development interests’). In mijn analyse van de welkomstbrief van de nieuwe Chinese ambassadeur in Nederland, Tán Jiàn (谈践) voor China2025.nl lichtte ik ook uit hoe hij in zijn verdediging van de mensenrechten de nadruk legt op het recht op ontwikkeling. Waarom is ontwikkeling zo belangrijk voor China?
(more…)Tag: communism
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Lesje Hongkongs maoïsme: waarom Carrie Lam’s hypocrisie bij nader inzien een waarschuwing was
Vanochtend kwam China’s staatsveiligheidswet voor Hong Kong zoals lang verwacht in actie. De aanleiding voor de grote politieactie? De oppositie wilde een meerderheid behalen in de wetgevende raad (LegCo). Voorverkiezingen moesten helpen bij de beperkingen van een districtenstelsel. Volgens de telling van Holmes Chan zijn er 53 politici en activisten uit het pro-democratiekamp gearresteerd. Peking gebruikt de luwte na de feestdagen en voor de machtsoverdracht in de Verenigde Staten om een grote stap te maken in het gelijkschakelen van Hong Kong. Samen met de ongeveer dertig mensen die al onder de wet waren gearresteerd zijn er nu al meer dan tachtig mensen die onder de door Peking opgelegde regels tot levenslang kunnen krijgen.
Sommige mensen beschuldigen Chief Executive Carrie Lam nu van hypocrisie. Die zei in juni immers dat slechts een ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ zou worden vervolgd. Dat is wel zo, maar die kritiek mist het punt. Hong Kong praat inmiddels ook steeds meer de taal van Peking. De frase ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ (极少数 jí shǎoshù) is namelijk een vaste uitdrukking in het theoretische idioom van de Chinese Communistische Partij. Hij duidt op een specifieke doelgroep. De uitspraak was een waarschuwing.
Het is een mooie theologische vraag hoe communistisch of socialistisch China nog is. Maar ondertussen moeten alle Chinese partijkaders en ambtenaren nog steeds verplicht naar scholing en herscholing om de laatste theoretische ontwikkelingen van het marxisme-leninisme-maoïsme en Xi Jinpings Gedachtegoed over het Socialisme met Chinese Karakteristieken te leren. Wat deze mensen hier zelf ook van mogen vinden, publicaties, rapporten, notities, toespraken, etc. moeten in dit vocabulaire opgesteld worden. Om te begrijpen wat Chinese bestuurders zeggen, moet je deze ideologie serieus nemen.
We zijn dit nog niet zo gewend in Hong Kong. Maar elders is de uitdrukking ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ al vaste prik wanneer de Partij tegenstand ontmoet. Dit gaat net zo bij de kwestie Taiwan, hoewel de Taiwanezen al lang een eigen nationale identiteit hebben en de overweldigende meerderheid niet bij de Volksrepubliek wil horen. Alsnog geeft China de schuld aan de ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ Taiwanese ‘separatisten’ en de ‘buitenlandse krachten’ die hun zouden steunen. Deze groep gemeneriken draait ‘het merendeel van de Taiwanese medeburgers’ (广大台湾同胞 guǎngdà táiwān tóngbāo) een rad voor de ogen en leidt ze in verzoeking.
Want de Partij vertegenwoordigt per definitie de wil van ‘het grootste merendeel van het Volk’ (最广大人民 zuì guǎngdà rénmín). Daartoe behoren volgens Peking ook de Taiwanezen. Alleen de Partij berijpt de ware, objectieve belangen van het Volk en streeft die na. Daarom steunt het Volk per definitie de Partij. Alleen Vijanden van het Volk verzetten zich. Dit is altijd een ‘extreem kleine minderheid’, tegen de meerderheid van het Volk.
Dit heeft te maken met de zogeheten massalijn (群众路线 qúnzhòng lùxiàn), de kern van de Chinese ‘democratie’. Deze bestaat uit drie stappen. Eerst luistert de Partij naar het Volk om hun wensen en noden te horen. Daarna analyseert de Partij de verzamelde input en distilleert daaruit de objectieve belangen van het Volk. Tenslotte gaat de Partij terug naar het Volk om de massa te onderwijzen wat het werkelijk wil. De mensen die tegen de massalijn in gaan zijn Vijanden van het Volk omdat ze tegen de wetenschappelijk gedetermineerde belangen van het Volk handelen.
Vanuit de ideologie van de CCP gezien zijn Hongkongers natuurlijk ook gewoon onderdeel van het Chinese Volk, hoe zeer ze ook door decennia van Britse onderwerping zijn verward en misleid. Het Chinese Volk steunt de Chinese Communistische Partij, want de Partij heeft volgens de maoïstische wetenschap bepaald dat dit objectief (in de marxistische betekenis van dat woord) in hun fundamenteel belang is. Ook Hongkongers steunen de Partij dus per definitie. Peking kan niet toegeven dat de meerderheid wantrouwig staat tegenover de regering. Dat past niet in haar epistemologie.
Daarom moet de conclusie dus zijn dat de gemiddelde Hongkonger – net als de gemiddelde Taiwanees – in verzoeking is geleid, verward door kwaadaardige personen en buitenlandse inmenging. Dat zoveel mensen in Hong Kong het pro-democratiekamp steunen komt omdat ze het zicht op hun objectieve belangen kwijt zijn geraakt. De personen, krachten, en economische factoren die dit kwaad veroorzaken moeten aangepakt worden.
Dit wereldbeeld leidt bestuurders al snel tot complotdenken. Ik denk persoonlijk dat veel Chinese leiders werkelijk geloven dat ‘monsters’ en ‘terroristen’ zoals uitgever Jimmy Lai en activist Joshua Wong samen met geheime CIA-operaties en meer van zulke dingen de onrust in Hong Kong door manipulatie hebben gecreëerd. Peking denkt dat ze het merendeel van de Hongkongse medeburgers door deze leiders uit te schakelen tot ‘rede’ kan brengen. Dit blijkt uit het woordgebruik: de politieactie was slechts gericht tegen de ‘actieve elementen’; de meer dan 600,000 stemmers bij de ‘illegale’ voorverkiezingen waren slechts passief en hoeven voorlopig niet voor vervolging te vrezen.
Toen Carrie Lam in juni 2020 zei dat de staatsveiligheidswet slechts een ‘extreem kleine minderheid’ zou raken, was dit een waarschuwing. Door deze specifieke maoïstische formulering maakte de Chief Executive duidelijk welke theorie achter de bestrijding van de onrust zit. De strategie is niet tegemoetkomen aan de zorgen van de mensen, maar keihard het ‘vergif’ uit de samenleving verwijderen. De vraag is of dit zo blijft als de Hongkongse bevolking niet magischerwijs in het gareel valt. Dan is verdere ‘heropvoeding’ misschien alsnog noodzakelijk…
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Het belang van aanhalingstekens in Chinese politieke correctheid: de juiste woorden voor de zogenaamde ‘objectieve waarheid’
Het is makkelijk om je vermaken over de bombast van het taalgebruik wanneer de Chinese partijstaat zich weer eens boos maakt over iets of iemand. Er zijn veel gevoeligheden om rekening te houden in de betrekkingen met Peking. De juiste woordkeuze is daarbij belangrijk. In diplomatiek verkeer is dat natuurlijk altijd zo, alleen is het bij China nog gevoeliger. Dat is niet alleen een effect van de (overschatte) ‘confucianistische’ erfenis, maar ook van het feit dat de Volksrepubliek nog altijd officieel een marxistische-leninistische-maoïstische staat is. Elke ambtenaar en partijkader moet op ideologische les en leert dus ook lezen en schrijven volgens het wereldbeeld van het Socialisme met Chinese Karakteristieken.
Denigrerende aanhalingstekens
Een van die karakteristieken uit zich in het veelvuldig weglaten of juist toevoegen van aanhalingstekens, al dan niet met een extra ‘zogenaamde’ (所谓 suǒwèi, ‘so-called’). Er zit een groot verschil tussen de betekenis van aanhalingstekens in de Westerse wereld en in China. Dit komt deels door een andere academische geschiedenis: in de klassieke Chinese traditie hield men al veelvuldig eerdere werken aan zonder te citeren of aanhalingstekens te gebruiken — niet alleen waren er in die tijd nauwelijks leestekens, men werd ook geacht om verwijzingen simpelweg direct te herkennen, aangezien de literati tijdens hun studie alle belangrijke werken uit hun hoofd leerden. Nog altijd tref je in Chinees academisch werk veel minder voetnoten aan.
Maar het komt ook door een versimpeld marxistisch onderscheid tussen ‘subjective’ en ‘objectieve’ waarheid. Jouw belangen bepalen hoe je de wereld ziet en bijvoorbeeld ‘kapitalistische’ media spreken dus, namens hun eigenaar, de subjectieve waarheid. De Partij spreekt namens het Volk en verkondigt dus de ‘objectieve’ waarheid. In officiële publicaties geven aanhalingstekens aan dat iets subjectief — verkeerd — is. China heeft simpelweg soevereiniteit over de Diaoyu/Senkaku-eilanden, Japan claimt ten onrechte zogenaamde “soevereiniteit”.
Dit vind je ook terug in de berichten van staatspersbureau Xinhua. Het verslag van de ontmoeting tussen de Chinese ministers van buitenlandse zaken Wáng Yì (王毅) en premier Mark Rutte gebruikt geen enkele aanhalingsteken. De paragrafen tekst van beider uitspraken wordt simpelweg geplakt achter een ‘Wang said …’ en ‘Rutte said …’.
Dit gebruik kan ook tot culturele misverstanden leiden. Florian Schneider haalt in zijn boek over digitaal Chinees nationalisme de aanslag van 2014 in Kunming aan: toen westerse media in hun koppen de gebruikelijke vorm gaven, in de trant van ‘Chinese overheid zegt dat mesaanval “terreuraanslag” was’, leidde dit tot woedde onder enkele internetgebruikers, die hierin een ontkenning van deze claim zagen. Want de overheid en staatsmedia gebruiken aanhalingstekens om de illegitimiteit van het geciteerde te benadrukken.
In de boze reactie van Xinhua op de felicitaties met haar herverkiezing aan President Tsai Ing-wen van de Amerikaanse minister van buitenlandse zaken Mike Pompeo staan de woorden “partnership”, “Taiwan independence”, en “president” tussen aanhalingstekens, al dan niet vergezeld door een ‘so-called’. Maar dat het woord ‘president’ valt is slechts omdat Pompeo het gebruikte; in andere gevallen moet dat woord vermijdt worden.
Wijs Taiwan op zijn plaats
Want naast gevaarlijke woorden te isoleren met zogenaamde ‘aanhalingstekens’ is het voor Peking bij gevoelige zaken zoals Taiwan ook belangrijk om de juiste woordkeus in acht te nemen. Die moet de objectieve — dat wil zeggen: ‘correcte’ — werkelijkheid weergeven. Een los ‘Taiwan’ is gevaarlijk. Ook al kunnen verwijzingen naar een provincie als Shandong zonder, dan nog zul je China vaak horen spreken over ‘China’s Taiwan’ of zelfs ‘China’s Taiwan region’.
In een academisch artikel vertaalt Anne-Marie Brady een document van het Kantoor voor Taiwanzaken van de Chinese Staatsraad uit 2002 dat de correctie terminologie voor het bespreken van Taiwan uitlegt.
De regering van wat formeel nog de Republiek China heet mag nooit zo genoemd worden, dat moet ‘de Taiwanese autoriteiten’ zijn. Alles met ‘Centraal’ of ‘Nationaal’ of ‘Ministerie’ in de naam kan niet, want dat suggereert dat Taiwan een staat is. Dus: niet ‘Ministerie van Onderwijs’ maar ‘onderwijsautoriteit’; niet ‘Nationale Universiteit van Taiwan’, maar simpelweg ‘Universiteit van Taiwan’; niet ‘President’, maar ‘leider van de Taiwanese regio’; niet ‘grondwet’, maar ‘regeling van grondwettelijke aard’. Als deze termen echt genoemd moeten worden, dan alleen tussen aanhalingstekens.
Dit gaat ook tot beleid: een ‘white paper’ van de Taiwanese regering mag niet zo worden genoemd, want in de Chinese bureaucratie zou dat een autoriteit signaleren die Taiwanese autoriteiten natuurlijk niet hebben. Om dezelfde reden werd ook het recente bezoek van de Tsjechische senaatspresident aan Taipei een ‘so-called “visit”’ — in China is de naam die aan een reis van een hoogwaardigheidsbekleder wordt gegeven een teken van autoriteit. Concepten zoals Taiwans formele onafhankelijkheid zijn zo verfoeilijk dat die ook door aanhalingstekens in quarantaine moeten worden gezet. Taiwanezen hebben geen ‘paspoort’, maar een ‘reisdocument’.
Ook met verwijzingen naar de Volksrepubliek moet je oppassen. Het is verkeerd om ‘Mainland China’ te zeggen, want dat impliceert dat er nog een ander China is naast het Vastelandchina. Dus: ‘Chinese Mainland’. Als de context niet om Taiwan, Hong Kong, of Macao gaat, dan moet je het ‘Vasteland’ helemaal niet noemen, want de Volksrepubliek is simpelweg China. De oorspronkelijke bewoners van Taiwan — aborigines, yuánzhùmín (原住民) — mogen ook niet zo genoemd worden. Volgens Peking zijn ze op het eiland waar ze voor de Chinese kolonisatie de baas waren slechts ‘minderheid’ (少数民族 shǎoshù mínzú).
Op Google Maps kun je een continu heen-en-weer zien tussen Chinese nationalisten en Taiwanezen die steeds de namen van universiteiten en andere gebouwen aanpassen. In Taiwan kun je de pro-Peking academici eruit pikken door te kijken hoe ze op hun cv’s hun academische achtergrond beschrijven. In sommige gevallen worden Taiwanese academic gedwongen hun affiliatie aan te passen op last van Chinese redactionele regels. De Chinese staat leest uit je woordkeus welk politiek standpunt je inneemt. Het is dus niet alleen de zaak voor buitenlandse overheden om te zorgen dat ze Peking niet onnodig boos maken, maar ook dat ze niet onnodig concessies doen aan China’s Één-China-Principe die niet in hun eigen Één-China-Beleid staan.
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Vijf Nooit-Toestaan: met nieuwe campagne luidt China tegenaanval in tijdens herdenking WOII
Tijdens een toespraak voor een symposium ter herdenking van 75 jaar sinds de overwinning in de Tweede Wereldoorlog lanceerde de Chinese president Xí Jìnpíng (习近平) een tegenaanval op de poging van ‘sommige landen’ (lees: de VS) om onderscheid te maken tussen de Communistische Partij van China (CPC) en het Chinese volk. Dit gaat volgens de gebruikelijke manier van formuleren, in dit geval in de vorm van de Vijf Nooit-Toestaan. Het is belangrijk om stil te staan bij deze nieuwe campagne. De toespraak van Xi vond plaats op een symbolisch belangrijk moment. De staatsmedia classificeert hem bovendien als een ‘belangrijke toespraak’ (important speech, 重要讲话 zhòngyào jiǎnghuà), wat aan de partijkaders laat weten dat ze hem goed moeten bestuderen. Theorie doet er toe in China, ook al mogen zowel buitenlanders als de gewone Chinees het maar een woordenbrij vinden. Alle Chinese partijkaders en ambtenaren moeten naar de partijschool voor training in de partijideologie. Ze moeten de partijkranten bijhouden, waarin stukken op basis van die ideologie de beleidsprioriteiten aangeven. Het is belangrijk voor je carrière (en persoonlijke veiligheid) om de theorie goed genoeg te begrijpen dat je door hebt uit welke richting de wind waait. Tenslotte moeten alle beleidsstukken ook in het raamwerk van de ideologie passen.
Deze Vijf Nooit-Toestaan (五个“绝不答应” wǔ ge “juébù dāying”) zijn belangrijk. Ze sluiten aan bij de eerdere pogingen van Xi Jinping om de hele geschiedenis van de CPC in ere te herstellen, ook de Maoïstische periode, en met behulp van ideologie controle terug te brengen over de kaders. Onderdeel hiervan is de campagne tegen ‘historisch nihilisme’ (历史虚无主义 lìshǐ xūwù zhǔyì), namelijk de ideologisch gekleurde partijversie van de geschiedenis ontkennen. In het onderwijs is er het beruchte Document nr. 9 met verboden die de ideologie van de Partij moet beschermen tegen buitenlandse politieke ideeën. Deze nieuwe campagne staat in deze traditie en wordt inmiddels al luid en duidelijk uitgedragen binnenlands in de staatsmedia en naar buiten toe door het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken van China.
Ik vertaal hieronder de Vijf Nooit-Toestaan, vergezeld van de officiële Engelse vertaling met mijn toevoegingen, en het oorspronkelijke Mandarijns.
- “Het Chinese volk zal zeker nooit toestaan dat enige persoon of enige mogendheid probeert de geschiedenis van de Communistische Partij van China te verdraaien, of de aard en het doel van de Communistische Partij van China te belasteren!”
“The Chinese people will never allow any individual or any force to [attempt to] distort the history of the CPC or smear the Party’s nature and mission[!]”
“任何人任何势力企图歪曲中国共产党的历史、丑化中国共产党的性质和宗旨，中国人民都绝不答应！” - “Het Chinese volk zal zeker nooit toestaan dat enige persoon of enige mogendheid probeert de weg van het Socialisme met Chinese Karakteristieken te verdraaien of veranderen, of de grootste verworvenheden van het Chinese volk in de opbouw van het socialisme ontkennen en belasteren!”
“The Chinese people will never allow any individual or any force to [attempt to] distort and alter the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, or deny and vilify the great achievements the Chinese people have made in building socialism[!]”
“任何人任何势力企图歪曲和改变中国特色社会主义道路、否定和丑化中国人民建设社会主义的伟大成就，中国人民都绝不答应！” - “Het Chinese volk zal zeker nooit toestaan dat enige persoon of enige mogendheid probeert de Communistische Partij van China en het Chinese volk uit elkaar te drijven of tegen elkaar op te zetten!”
“The Chinese people will never allow any individual or any force to [attempt to] separate the CPC from the Chinese people or counterpose the Party to the Chinese people[!]”
“任何人任何势力企图把中国共产党和中国人民割裂开来、对立起来，中国人民都绝不答应！” - “Het Chinese volk zal zeker nooit toestaan dat enige persoon of enige mogendheid probeert via pesterijtactieken zijn wil op te leggen aan China, de richting van China’s voortgang te veranderen, of het harde werk van het Chinese volk om een goed leven voor zichzelf te creëeren te blokkeren!”
“The Chinese people will never allow any individual or any force [to attempt] to impose their will on China through bullying, change China’s direction of progress, or obstruct the Chinese people’s efforts to create a better life[!]”
“任何人任何势力企图通过霸凌手段把他们的意志强加给中国、改变中国的前进方向、阻挠中国人民创造自己美好生活的努力，中国人民都绝不答应！” - “Het Chinese volk zal zeker nooit toestaan dat enige persoon of enige mogendheid probeert om het vreedzame bestaan en recht op ontwikkeling van het Chinese volk te beschadigen, de uitwisseling en samenwerking van het Chinese volk met volkeren van andere landen te beschadigen, of de nobele zaak van vrede en ontwikkeling voor de mensheid te beschadigen!”
“The Chinese people will never allow any individual or any force to [attempt to] jeopardize their peaceful life and right to development, obstruct their exchanges and cooperation with other peoples, or undermine the noble cause of peace and development for humanity[!]”
“任何人任何势力企图破坏中国人民的和平生活和发展权利、破坏中国人民同其他国家人民的交流合作、破坏人类和平与发展的崇高事业，中国人民都绝不答应！”
De meeste media-aandacht zal uitgaan naar punt drie, dat de eenheid van Partij en Volk benadrukt. De Amerikaanse minister van buitenlandse zaken Mike Pompeo is het luidst in de recente pogingen van de VS om onderscheid aan te brengen tussen die twee. Dit ligt erg gevoelig, niet alleen vanwege het praktisch belang voor de legitimiteit van de Partij, maar ook omdat volgens de theorie van de Partij er een dialectische eenheid bestaat tussen Partij en het Chinese volk (中国人民 zhōngguó rénmín in nationale zin, en niet het etnische 中华民族 zhōnghuá mínzú). Volgens het marxisme-leninisme vertegenwoordigt een communistische partij namelijk het Volk als haar voorhoede en spreekt dus in naam van het Volk. Hierbij komt nog de maoïstische innovatie van de massalijn (群众路线 qúnzhòng lùxiàn). De massalijn wordt bepaald door eerst naar het Volk te luisteren, daarna op (marxistisch) wetenschappelijke manier daaruit de echte wil van het Volk te distilleren, en vervolgens terug te gaan naar het Volk om te zorgen dat de mensen begrijpen wat ze nu werkelijk ‘willen’. Onder Xi Jinping is het belang van de massalijn bij de formulering van beleid weer onder de aandacht gekomen. De Partij en het Volk uit elkaar drijven zou dus de ideologische claim dat de Partij, dankzij haar theoretische competentie, de echte stem is van de Wil van het Volk in gevaar brengen.
De Partij spreekt dus namens het Volk en bepaalt dus ook wie daartoe behoort. Mensen die tegen de wil van het Volk ingaan — bijvoorbeeld ‘rasveraders’ (汉奸 hànjiān) zoals de Hongkongse uitgever Jimmy Lai — zijn Vijanden van het Volk. Het Chinese Volk op Taiwan wil annexatie door de Volksrepubliek, want de Taiwanezen die dat niet willen hebben simpelweg geen recht van spreken. Er is slechts één versie van de geschiedenis (punt 1), die laat zien dat de theorie van de Partij juist is (punt 2), de Partij vertegenwoordigt het Volk (punt 3), dit systeem willen veranderen gaat tegen de Wil van het Volk in (punt 4), en als de wereld de Volksrepubliek niet haar gang laat gaan dan is dat tegen de wereldvrede (punt 5). Onder de partijtop in Peking — sinds het begin van de regering van Xi Jinping niet meer zo gewend aan negatief nieuws — leeft de gedachte dat het Chinese systeem zich bewezen heeft terwijl de Westerse wereld achteruitgaat. Uit dit optiek laat de pandemie nog maar eens de kracht van het systeem van Socialisme met Chinese Karakteristieken zien. Voorkomen moet worden dat de neergaande VS dit kapot maakt.
Deze conclusie volgt natuurlijk niet alleen uit een erg selectieve lezing van zowel de geschiedenis als het heden, maar ook uit een erg sinocentrisch wereldbeeld. De herdenking waarop Xi de besproken toespraak gaf laat dat nog maar eens zien. De manier waarop Peking de ‘overwinning in de Chinese Volksoorlog van Verzet tegen Japanse Agressie en de Wereldoorlog tegen Fascisme’ viert laat zien dat alles om de Partij draait. Het gaat voorbij aan het feit dat Volksrepubliek China nog niet bestond voor 1949 en dat het communistische Rode Leger van de Partij slechts één van de vele warlords was die deel uitmaakten van het Nationale Leger van de Republiek China (en bovendien niet een erg belangrijke). ‘Volksoorlog’ is een maoïstische term die duidt op een soort guerrilla-oorlog met een hoofdrol voor het Volk, volgens Mao een innovatie van de Partij en de manier waarop hij claimde dat de communisten de burgeroorlog hadden gewonnen van de Nationalisten. In werkelijkheid waren zowel de strijd tegen Japan in China als ook de Chinese burgeroorlog gewoon grootschalige conventionele oorlogen. Dat weerhoudt bijvoorbeeld de Chinese ambassade in Nederland er echter niet van de overwinning te claimen voor het Chinese Volk (via de Partij) en de offers van de Chinezen de benadrukken alsof het een wedstrijd was.
- “Het Chinese volk zal zeker nooit toestaan dat enige persoon of enige mogendheid probeert de geschiedenis van de Communistische Partij van China te verdraaien, of de aard en het doel van de Communistische Partij van China te belasteren!”
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Summarising Zhao Dingxin’s lessons from 1989 for the Hong Kong protests: protest ecology and conflicting state legitimation
Talking about the on-going protests in Hong Kong, pundits love to invoke the 1989 Movement that famously centred around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I myself have previously argued that it might be more useful to compare the overall effect on Hong Kong of the ‘Hard Had Revolution’ to the effect that the February 28 Incident had on Taiwan. But even then serious scholarship on what happened in the run up to and during the June 4th Incident can still provide us with tools to understand the ‘leaderless protests’ in Hong Kong.
In this post I want to summarise a book by entomologist-turned-sociologist Dingxin Zhao in which he tries to provide an empirical sociological explanation for what happened in Beijing in 1989:
Dingxin Zhao. 2001. The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
The most important contribution Zhao makes to understanding the events in 1989 is to describe it in terms of what he calls ‘state-society relations’: the way the logics of the state and of society and the nature of their linkage determine how the movement comes into being and unfolds. Although this is a path-dependent process, it is undetermined and highly contingent.
Besides by ‘the authoritarian and democratic dichotomy’, Zhao argues that the nature of a statue is determined by its source of state legitimacy. He highlights three types (putting charismatic legitimacy aside): legal-electoral legitimacy, ideological legitimacy, and performance legitimacy (which has economic, moral, and nationalist components) (p. 22). Since China is a one-party state, only the latter two matter.
Two legacies from the Maoist era led structures which in Western liberal democracies are conformist radicalise Chinese society: the lack of ‘heterogenous intermediate organisations’ meant that there was nothing to channel grievances. Everybody’s attention was focussed on the state (pp. 25–30). Although in Western countries universities work to reproduce the elite, transplanted to non-Western countries they introduce radical ideas with outside legitimacy (p. 98).
The radicalisation was unleashed by the slow accumulation of grievances during the reform period after 1978. Simultaneously, starting from the Cultural Revolution onwards, as far as the people were concerned, the ideology-based legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime transformed into performance-based legitimation. The continued dominance of the authoritarian regime, however, meant that people kept looking to the state to fulfil its responsibilities (pp. 47–51).
Zhao spends a lot of time unpacking the various intellectual fevers that swept the newly opened intellectual scene in China and discusses the intellectuals’ and students grievances, as well as the continued relevance of marxism’s linear view of history. There is also a discussion of how the system that previously served to control the students now had the opposite effect. This is more specific to that particular moment and place. What they have in common is that the root cause of the ineffectiveness of government attempts to deal with unhappiness ‘resulted from the presence of conflicting views of state legitimacy’ (p. 209). Both sides were talking different moral languages.
His largest critique of the narratives of 1989 common in the West concerns the commonly referenced ‘factionalism’ theory that pits hardliners in the Party against reformers. I find this flawed understanding of the party reflected in the contemporary debate on ‘engaging’ China, where some argue in favour of taking actions that strengthen the mythical reformers in the CCP. These reformers have never materialised in the present era and Zhao argues convincingly why they did not exist as such in the 1980s either (p. 211).
‘What has been neglected is the fact that the majority of the group had one thing in common—they were absolutely loyal to the CCP and believed in the current political system.’ (p. 213–214) The Party elite, especially the elders, had been through the ferocious battle for control over China together. No one of them was about to follow the path of the Central and Eastern European regimes and lose their hard-won power. Zhao Ziyang was unique in his willingness to compromise, but even in his case—no matter later ruminations while under house arrest—the main point of disagreement, as it was everywhere within the elite, was about the best way to make the problem go away (p. 219).
What the CCP leaders had in common was an absolute ideological commitment to their right to rule. This clashed with the return of moral and ritual performance as the source for state legitimacy among the intellectuals, students, and workers. In this climate, high-handed justifications of state actions based on CCP ideology did not strengthen the Party but only antagonised the people (p. 224).
The PRC system also messed with the information flows in ways that aggravated the movement. On the side of the state elite, ‘[w]ith no adequate information and with a rigid mindset, many movement activities could only be understood as organized conspiracies’ (p. 223). When the state media liberated itself from censorship, its open reporting quelled rumours, thereby stabilising the situation (p. 313). But rumours returned as the main source of information when the Party cracked down and that escalated matters (p. 321).
One element that hallmarked the relatively leaderless movement was what Zhao calls ‘spontaneity’. With that he means that many people did many different things and that it depended on their resonance with the logic of the crowd to what extent they influenced the direction of the movement. Even though several people tried to lead the protests through a variety of organisations, their ability to steer it was limited and the tiger would no longer let them ride if they went against the mood. Because their form invoked traditional cultural values, the failure of the government to respond appropriately to the kneeling petition on 22 April and the start of hunger strikes on 13 May led to great moral outrage. It was this performance failure that empowered the 1989 Movement. One major factor in this process is what Zhao describes as ‘ecology’: the way people were living and what they saw led to certain outcomes.
The logic of ‘ecology’ applied especially to campus: the way dorms were set up with people grouped in rooms, the way students all had to cross the same places, and the way the campus walls kept them in their closed community greatly helped mobilisation (p. 240). There is also the matter of groups getting a mind of their own, one that needs to build courage before it dares to flout the rules by—for example—marching in circles across campus before growing numbers and heightened emotions allow the students to force their way through the barricaded gates.
Hunger strikes by young students, kneeling petitions, and (alleged and real) police beatings had powerful effects because of two reasons: the above-mentioned return to moral performance as a way to judge the legitimacy of the state, and the tendency of people to fall back to familiar, traditional behavioural codes when they are acting emotionally (p. 285). Moral issues resonated more than the high-profile calls for democracy (p. 289). The common people seeing vulnerable young students weak with hunger (real or fake) caused great anger at the unmoved state.
However, because the state elite and the protestors operated in such different moral logics, finding common ground was impossible after the state-society interactions had escalated the movement. Initially, the 1989 Movement was about certain grievances held by the intellectuals and students, but in the end it fundamentally challenged the ideological legitimation to which the Party leaders were absolutely committed. Ideological surrender ruled out, to maintain the coherence of their own legitimation their only solution was a brutal crackdown.
Lessons for Hong Kong in 2019
Hong Kong, too, is facing distorted state-society relations. Whereas the people expect a certain moral, democratic, economic, localist performance from their local government, it in its stead has been co-opted by Beijing into its ideological legitimation of Party-rule.
As I have written before, this creates alienation among a public that hears its elite put out statement after statement invoking justifications people does not subscribe to. Because of inadequate information provision by the police and SAR government, rumours swirl. Riot police brutally beating up and arresting young protestors and bystanders go against the moral code of the Hong Kong public, escalating the movement with every viral incident. When your judgement of the SAR government depends on its compliance with PRC ideology, a group of gangsters beating up protestors in Yuen Long is unfortunate but not really damaging to the government’s legitimacy, since that is based on something else. If you judge the government on its moral performance, the obvious police collusion is damning.
Hong Kong has its own unique ‘ecology’, which helps the movement develop as well. Lennon Walls in highly-trafficked places probably function somewhat like the big character posters at Peking University’s famous Triangle. Fruitful studies could be made of the way the road layout and the MTR system shape the marches. Ecology is also at work in protests that develop out of residents coming down to scold the police gathering below their flats in dense neighbourhoods. Besides a lack of democracy, Hong Kong has built up a large reservoir of economic grievance.
Zhao Dingxin’s account should make us worry about the future of Hong Kong. In the end, thanks to the PLA, the Party elite was secure enough materially to securely hold on to its ideological legitimation. With the PRC behind it, the Hong Kong SAR government also has no reason to waver in its ideological commitment. Those in positions of power who have risen to the top since 1997 have been thoroughly inducted in a system where their commitment to the PRC ideology was a requirement for their rise. At the same time, the ordinary people live in a different moral universe. Under the current mode of state legitimation in Hong Kong, real compromise is not possible. In the case of the 1989 Movement, honest state media reporting and concessions by Zhao Ziyang were enough to halt the progress of the movement. Radicals only managed to fire it up again by initiating the 13 May hunger strikes, helped by the Party creating moral outrage by not responding to them and a pushback in the elite and law enforcement to Zhao Ziyang’s conciliatory tone.
If a hunger strike-like action manages to create a similar moral outrage in Hong Kong, the movement could escalate to such a level that a brutal crackdown will replace the slow-motion crackdown that is currently underway. As Mainland China proves, you can afterwards restore government control and assuage society by delivering on most of the output demanded by performance legitimacy, but absent political reform the dormant volcano created by the chasm of legitimacy remains, waiting.
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Hong Kong shows that ‘communism’ is the most efficient creator of alienation
As Hong Kong is gripped in chaos and violence, there is something interesting about the ‘strongly condemn’ statements that Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor (林鄭月娥) puts out at her rare press conferences. Completely in line with the rules prevalent on the Mainland, the first thing she condemns is always the harm done to national symbols of the People’s Republic. A stained national crest or flags thrown into the harbour get precedence over the violence and disorder that has parents dragging their tear-gassed children into lifts to escape the mayhem around their own homes. Much has been written in the recent weeks about the causes of Hongkongers’ disaffection with Beijing and their local government. However, besides the economic and political fundamentals that are not going away, one more problem prevents the people from getting closer to a resolution: total alienation from their leaders.
Every time they turn on their television, the average Hong Kong citizen is faced with the surreal alternative world inhabited by the local elite. There is a strong disconnect between what people see on their streets and the statements coming from officials, pro-Beijing politicians, mainstream celebrities, and the pro-Beijing press. The Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to bring the elite in line with its ideological orthodoxy is creating radical alienation. This is something that happens everywhere the Party aims to expand its control, but the extreme situation makes Hong Kong a good example of the difficulty of totalitarian soft power without totalitarian hard power.
As Václav Havel has pointed out, when a classically totalitarian country changes into a post-totalitarian system, the all-powerful dictator is replaced with that of a self-contained structure of lies: the ‘ideology’. No longer do the commands and wishes of the Dear Leader run the state and fight off challengers. Instead, the self-replicating system of lies maintains power for the Party. Statements such as ‘serving the proletariat’—which formerly had at least some substance—have by now become signalling devices that indicate submission to the Party. The Leninist vocabulary that people have to internalise serves only to prolong its hold over power.
In the uttering of Hong Kong’s elite, the words ‘One Country Two Systems’ and ‘rule of law’ have become unrelated to their original substance; now they make the leaders complicit in the lie. They are shibboleths that signal the person who utters them submits to the system. In return for surrendering their credibility to a logic that only works within the system, they get to partake in its benefits.
But since in Leninism the power of the Party trumps everything else, you cannot burst the bubble of its self-contained logic of lies. A post-totalitarian state has to ‘falsify’ everything: all actors have to live within its lies that reproduce its power at all levels of society. People who, as Havel put it, ‘live within their truth’ are dangerous, because they bring in a logic that the Party cannot control. The plot of reality has its own, uncontrollable direction that has no sympathy for the Party’s supposed infallible and sacrosanct power. It has to be kept at bay.
Under direct rule, the Party can impose a truth under the threat of violence and using its monopoly on media and education. However, outside its direct rule, it cannot use hard power to deal with people living their own truths. This is a problem, because its system depends on forcing compliance with the CCP’s own reality. As a good Leninist party, it uses the United Front to co-opt groups outside the Party. What the United Front does is take over or found groups and force them into the party reality. That is how you get groups for Chinese overseas in New Zealand waxing lyrically about Xi Jinping (习近平)’s great diplomatic acumen and the wonderful benefits of the Belt and Road Initiative. It does not matter how far divorced from the daily life of the average Chinese-Newzealander such party-speak is. This is how the organisation reproduces the Party’s power, which then allows the Party to use similar newspeak to instruct them to undertake certain actions.
However, this takes the Party’s agents out of the target population’s truth. In the case of such overseas Chinese business groups they can ameliorate that by having all businesspeople repeat the lies, but they still only capture the elite. Merchants have hard financial interests in playing along. Normal people can only be reached with soft power. But it is hard to build soft power on lies. If you are dealing with large populations, that leads to problems. More recent migrants might still be plugged into the alternative universe on WeChat or Weibo, but in the other cases, it leads to alienation. You have effectively walled off the co-opted elite from the people and their daily reality.
Karl Marx coined the term alienation to point out how far factory work controlled by capitalists removed the worker from what had meaning to themselves. They became tools whose inner consciousness was no longer required. Under the planned economies of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, this alienation was taken to an extreme when the state—now in total control of all productive factors—determined the everyday lives of its workers with absurd detail. Party secretaries even had to sign off on marriage partners. Your entire life had become a tool for the glory of the socialist economy. A similar situation is the case with the post-totalitarian system: you do not live according to your own convictions, but according to the lies the system tells you to make your own.
Since the PRC began preparing for the return of Hong Kong to a Chinese government, the Party has moved to get the city’s elite in line. It becomes clearer every day how many heavy-handed CCP attempts there are to force in line community leaders, unofficial organisations, media, publishing, mainstream celebrities, and local politicians. The result is double blindness. When Beijing turns on official television, it will only hear the reality it has itself created. Real Hongkongers love China, One Country Two Systems is the best, rule of law depends on following the government, the people of Hong Kong are upset by the damaging of national symbols, the police is only fighting rioters, there was no gang attack. Local elite starts spreading non-sense about foreign agents instigating protests, because they seemingly cannot conceive a reality where these protests come from genuine popular sentiment.
Meanwhile, the common people of Hong Kong—no matter to what degree they support protest and democratisation—see a surreal spectacle when they look at their own leaders. Rather than a serious appraisal of the teargassed reality outside their own window, they hear their Chief Executive and celebrities echo inane CCP-approved speaking points. There is no official actor left in Hong Kong that has not been reduced to spreading the official lies.
How can Hong Kong reconcile the conflict in its society when the people are worse off than lacking representation? The daily observations of an average city-dweller are so out of the CCP-approved reality that they cannot even be mentioned by those in charge. The Party’s ontology is such that every ‘fact’ has to comply with the Party’s unquestioned correctness or it cannot be observed. The result is that the PRC’s only solution will be suppression. Admitting the equal standing of the truth in which Hongkongers live will damage the lie that upholds the system.
We saw a different iteration of this problem on Taiwan under then-President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The KMT’s platform now consists of the promise that only its appeasement of the PRC can give Taiwan safety and dignity. With this agenda, President Ma sought to increase economic integration with China, most notable under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA). However, this led to great alienation among the Taiwanese public. As part of its appeasement of Beijing, the government in Taipei had to make statements about Taiwan’s international situation that were obviously at odds with its de facto independence. Moreover, both the KMT and CCP were ontologically unable to admit the reality of continued Chinese aggression against Taiwan. All of this came to head during the violence of police and unidentified gangsters against peaceful demonstrators during the Taipei visit of the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office head Chen Yunlin (陈云林), which also saw the government remove ROC symbols along Chen’s route. This made a mockery of the KMT’s claim that only accepting the 1992 Consensus would give Taiwan respect, driven home once more by the public humiliation of Taiwanese K-Pop star Chou Tzu-yu (周子瑜) for daring to wave an ROC/Taiwan flag on a live broadcast in South Korea.
In 2016 the people of Taiwan resoundingly rejected the KMT and its presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), who had gone so far into accepting the CCP’s system of lies that she seemed to be speaking about a different Taiwan altogether. However, the CCP’s United Front tactics have since continued to gain ground in Taiwan, even giving it some hard power. Most notably, it shapes public discourse in Taiwan through Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明)’s Want Want China Times Media Group. Both Reuters and the Financial Times have argued that the Taiwan Affairs Office (partially) controls the coverage of part of the popular press. Because of this, the lies of KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) might not be as alienating to some members of the public, since so many have already been drawn into the falsity.
However, polling data shows that Han Kuo-yu is not universally popular on the island. Although many Taiwanese are eager for the economic benefits of cooperation with China, they are not ready to suspend belief in reality. Similarly, survey data from Hong Kong shows that over the past years—when Beijing’s control of the SAR’s elite only increased—the number of Hongkongers identifying as Chinese only has decreased. Its heavy-handed attempts at exporting its version of reality has only fed alienation. Without complete hard power, elite capture in Hong Kong and elsewhere only works to estrange the public from its rulers. That is dangerous, because it leaves few people to control the resulting popular dynamic. It is the cause of what Western press agencies call China’s ‘restive regions’. Xinjiang and Tibet show that once a separate identity has taken root, even inhumane usage of extreme hard power is often not enough to make the people follow their subjugated elites.
If you are not used to it, to understand what it is like to live under a system so radically different as the PRC’s, you have to read widely, preferably authors who do have that direct experience. Some suggestions:
Armstrong, J.D. 1977. Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Havel, Václav. 2010. ‘The Power of the Powerless’. In The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by Steven Lukes and John Keane, translated by Paul Wilson, 10–59. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203857229.
Salecl, Renata. 1996. ‘National Identity and Socialist Moral Majority’. In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, 418–24. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scott, James C. 1998. ‘Chapter 5: The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis’ in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Selznick, Philip. 1952. The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Walder, Andrew G. 2015. China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Party Not Required: nationalism’s long-term threat to the Chinese Communist Party
Xi Jinping’s well-documented attempts to become ‘chairman of everything’—as several observers have argued before me—are in fact a testament to his need to shore up weak central power. The Chinese party-state works through broad project campaigns, launched through the apparatus of party committees and propaganda organs. Local leaders take the cue to come up with actual policies, of which the centre then picks a few to serve as example. This works under leninism-enforced ideological unity. However, the fundamental shift in Chinese society since the Opening and Reform period has cast the ship of party-state on unruly seas. Local authorities’s power and responsibilities have grown while discipline of thought has slackened. In response to this uncertainty the leadership’s party reflexes have brought about the authoritarian turn of the past decade. The old story of Mao’s revolution discredited, the Chinese Communist Party’s hold over is now first of all material. The Party needs a new legitimising tale to mobilise its people. It better be convincing. So now it attempts to equalise the Party with the State with the Nation with the People. But by turning to traditional nationalism, the formerly revolutionary replace a self-written story with an older narrative that does not necessarily require the Party.
These narratives matter. People make sense of the world through stories they tell themselves. These stories have their own internal logic, a plot that explains how we got here and points to the future. We cast the people and groups we encounter as characters in this story, allowing us to quickly make sense of everyone’s (and everything’s) place and extrapolate from there. The Cold War was such a powerful frame, because it was a good story. For the people on both sides the two camps of good and evil made it easier to place countries and individuals, and decide how to behave towards them.
Xi Jinping’s tenure has sped up the post-1989 nationalist turn in Chinese politics. The CCP’s shift in legitimising narrative—away from communist revolution of the workers of the world, to a nationalist rejuvenation of the Chinese ethno-nation—means that the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. continued rule by a leninist vanguard party, is not longer absolutely essential to the official goal. Instead, the main actor has now become the Chinese Nation, an old and familiar character. The new story is the Chinese Dream, which in full is the ‘Chinese Dream of the Grand Rejuvenation of the Chinese (Ethno-)Nation’ (中华民族伟大复兴的中国梦 zhōnghuá mínzú wěidà fùxīng de zhōngguó mèng).
To an orthodox marxist-leninist communist narrative the revolutionary party is fundamental. The vanguard has supposedly achieved awareness of the laws of history, and use their understanding to lead the proletariat to victory. Party cadres and other government officials in China still learn the theories of marxism-leninism-maoism in the party schools they have to regularly attend for training and retraining. This socialises them in party thought: the goal is for them to learn there is how to think, speak, and write in terms of the latest ideological orthodoxy. However, even for the average bureaucrat, the future of China is less about achieving communist utopia than it is about national revival, albeit phrased in terms of historical materialism. It seems less obvious that the continued existence of communist party rule in China is an essential requirement of the nationalist narrative of the Great Rejuvenation.
This does not mean that the CCP has been weakened already. Short-term, nationalism probably boosts the Party’s popular support. Leninist systems provide immensely powerful organisational tools that few Chinese nationalists would discard lightly. After all, the defeated Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, attempted to use the same organisational model. However, this strategic legitimising shift has knocked out a few key supporting beams in the narrative structure. For an orthodox bolshevik revolution, one absolutely needs a vanguard party. Its continued monopoly of power is required for the eventual transition to communism. The marxist-leninist one-party state is at the centre of this well-worn plot. But national revivals can take many forms. Already, mainland New Confucians are reviving talk about ‘national religion’ and reintroducing the old Chinese-barbarian distinction. Far right commentators seem to care little beyond whatever can provide national power. If, amid escalating censorship, it has not become much easier to talk about a China without the Party in official discourse, it has at least become possible.
When the era of high maoism came to its end, the CCP under Deng Xiaoping began updating the Party’s ideological justification: the need to sacrifice consumer welfare for the eventual achievement of communism was replaced with economic growth in the now. After the brutal crackdown on the June 4 movement in 1989 that famously centred around the Tiananmen Square protests, the Party’s ability to achieve nationalist goals and material benefits became the key to make people forget about politics. Even then Deng maintained that the eventual goal of communism was still the Party’s target. But—as with any millenarian faith forced to deal with the failure of the end-time to arrive within the promised timespan—the leader now held that this was still generations away. Still, the goal was maintained, if only formally. Xi Jinping, descendent of a revolutionary hero and allegedly a true believer in the Party, has given this idea a new lease of life. Last April, Qiushi, the theory journal of the CCP, republished an expanded version of a 2013 speech by him that stressed that China is still a socialist country and that it still aims to (eventually) achieve ‘the lofty ideals of communism and the common ideals of socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
This reverses a decline in the importance given to the revolutionary narrative of the CCP’s right to rule. Under Xi Jinping the CCP is pursuing ideology at the cost of economic growth. Party control and the dominance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) goes above trade and private companies. The flexibility offered by sleights of hand such as ‘XX with Chinese characteristics’ and updating the ‘primary contradiction’ does reduce the distance between ideology and reality that Václav Havel identified as post-totalitarianism’s weakness. But the communist ideology still might only appeal to the Party bubble.
Deng Xiaoping limited his Reform to what was required for economic growth, leaving the constitutional system and the elite layer largely intact. For the average Chinese the period of Opening and Reform was a massive change. But the party nomenklatura still live their separate lives in the system. Party schools, cadre housing, preferential health care, and for some even a separate food supply mean that they live in a different world, even into retirement. Privileged cadres read internal newspapers and socialise with their own. In the past, the whole of society was integrated into the communist system through the hierarchy of work units. Now, most people no longer follow the same logic. Even the recently arrested marxist students do not subscribe to the CCP’s official ideology, but act outside the Party.
The leadership is in fact aware of the problem. The Politburo stresses the critical need to improve effectiveness of political education in schools for a reason. Propaganda campaigns strive to bring home the orthodoxy all the way to your apartment’s lift. But for most—for as far as they pay attention—the main take-away from this onslaught consists of the two remaining sources of party legitimacy: economic well-being and Chinese nationalism. The improvement in Chinese living standards has been so substantial and is so recent that the Party’s claim to the credit would probably survive a recession. Moreover, the political system allows control over the fiscal and monetary levers, as well as the statistics. The Belt and Road Initiative, backed by state policy banks, guarantees that the debt-fuelled model of growth through infrastructure will go on for a while, just as China’s work on building higher-level domestic manufacturing are showing results. The narrative is clear: China’s growth was made possible through the Opening and Reform policies, an achievement of the Chinese Communist Party. The risk is not that this narrative turns against the Party, but that it fades away as the middle classes become accustomed to regarding their middling wealth as the norm.
The problem is the nationalist narrative. The Chinese Communist Party propaganda and the ‘patriotic education’ that began in the schools in 1990s base themselves on an old narrative: the idea of cleansing the shame of the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ (百年国耻 bǎinián guóchǐ). The Century refers to the period of Western and Japanese despoliation of the country, roughly starting with the First Opium War in 1839 and ending after the Second World War. This is a powerful story, but not one that was written by any particular party.
Work by William Callahan traces the first National Humiliation Day to 1915. In late May the National Teachers’ Association picked 9 May to commemorate the shame of the Japanese imperialist Twenty-One Demands that were put to the government on that date. The May Fourth movement of 1919— the centennial of which just passed—called for wholesale modernisation to end the nightmare of impotence. When the Kuomintang got hold of the Republic of China in 1927–8 it made National Humiliation Day a national holiday. Just as the Chinese Civil War picked up again, it declared the national shame ‘cleansed’ by its efforts: the Western powers had given up their extraterritorial rights in 1943 and Japan was defeated in 1945. Soon they would be swept aside in a ‘humiliation’ their propaganda blamed on the imperialist Soviets. In their turn, the communists claimed to have cleansed the nation’s shame with their victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed from the rostrum of the Forbidden City that China had finally ‘stood up’.
But after 1989 the narrative made a comeback with the nationalist turn in propaganda. National Defence Education Day is now a public holiday. Cleansing the shame of national humiliation is linked explicitly to the Chinese Dream of the Grand Rejuvenation of the Chinese Ethno-Nation that the Party is supposed to bring about. The end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong was a major cause for celebration. Controlling the South China Sea, achieving great power, and ‘returning’ Taiwan status are all markers of this revival.
But the Party should be careful what it awakens. The narrative of national humiliation has roots in late-19th century nationalism. Its main concern was to, before anything, create a Chinese nation, and then find a means to defend it. It did not matter what means. In fact, this utilitarian approach is what brought many Chinese intellectuals to communism in the first place: without having read much marxism they put their hopes on bolshevism to salvage ‘China’ after the October Revolution in Russia had proven its power. The history of China until 1949 is one of ministers and governments who were seen as weak and unable to stop the humiliation becoming the target of irate nationalists one by one. Some of the most successful CCP propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s was based on accusing Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party of selling out to the Japanese and Western imperialists. Chiang, in turn, accused the CCP of being a pawn of the equally foreign Soviets.
The main point is that the logic of the story has changed. The old nationalist narrative, now revived by the Party, has a different plot: rather than a revolutionary narrative of making China communist, this story is about saving the Chinese nation. The quest it has always contained within itself is to find a method that can finally achieve this. The CCP still has good grounds to argue that it has found the solution. But in reality history does not progress in simple linear fashion. The narrative now no longer absolutely requires a revolutionary vanguard party to safeguard the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat is now merely a means to be judged on its efficacy. When some unforeseen setback to the nationalist project makes it appear that the CCP is but a necessary evil or even a hindrance, inconsistencies will begin to pop up. A narrative can persist with such contradictions for a long time, but a crisis can force a reevaluation of the ‘logical’ conclusion of the plot. Thus weakened, the building of legitimation may prove to be unable to withstand next time a storm comes about.
If Beijing notices that this starts to happen, it will have to devise ways to make sure people do not think for themselves too much. This is why Xi Jinping is so obsessed over ideological control. The more the lower ranks lose faith in communism, the more he needs to centralise power to the core holdout of remaining faithfuls. But such moves weaken the effectiveness of the leninist organisation model. Leninist parties operate in a modular fashion with a great deal of de facto decentralisation. This is possible because its people have been moulded into its ideology and submit to the party, which they see the indispensable means to a shared (often millenarian) goal. When that is no longer the case, its authoritarian instincts will induce the party elite to pursue a project of centralisation that unavoidable reduces government effectiveness.
Of course, one solution to this problem would be for the CCP to come up with a new, coherent narrative of which it is an integral part and force it on the whole of society into it. After all, in Singapore, the ‘leninist-inspired’ PAP still manages to sell itself as indispensable, despite the absence of a revolutionary narrative. However, achieving this is exceedingly difficult, especially in a country much larger and much more diverse. The rhetoric of Chinese socialism is still the only way party cadres are taught to think about politics, even as nationalism dominates the propaganda outside the Party. Just as a growing part of the Singaporean population feels increasingly detached from its leaders’ policy-speak, so do many Chinese simply brush off Xi Jinping’s New Thought. Cynical compliance because of material inducement is a paltry replacement for true faith in the Cause. A switch to a properly neo-fascist nationalism would probably require a war of aggression. A radically new narrative often needs a Big Event to gain hold. But not only would that have dire consequences for China’s neighbours, the current creeping inconsistency in the narrative also means it could have unexpected consequences for he who is for now still safely ensconced in the Forbidden City as the Chairman of Everything.