Now Executive Director of the China Media Project, leading the project’s research and partnerships, David originally joined the project in Hong Kong in 2004. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village (Penguin), a book of reportage about urbanization and social activism in China, and co-editor of Investigative Journalism in China (HKU Press).
The Sixth Plenum has finished, culminating with the release yesterday, November 11, of the much-awaited Communique, an appetizer offering a taste of the heftier document to be expected in coming days. Surprises could yet arrive with the release of the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on the Major Achievements and Historical Experiences of the Party’s Hundred-Year Struggle, the third resolution on history since the founding of the CCP. But as we await the full resolution, and detailed observations from the many experts picking through the communique, let us run quickly through the essentials.
We do not yet have, in the Communique itself, the shortening of Xi Jinping’s “banner term,” or qizhiyu (旗帜语), as the five-character “Xi Jinping Thought” (习近平思想) from the more ponderous “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” a crucial step in the consolidation of his power and legacy. This is something to look out for as the full “Resolution” is released, but it is likely in fact that the shortening will be achieved fully at next year’s 20th National Congress of the CCP, following the pattern set by Mao, whose “Mao Zedong Thought” emerged at the 7th National Congress of the CCP in April-June 1945, following on the heels of the introduction of the first historical resolution during the 7th Plenum of the 6th Central Committee, concluding in April 1945.
In any case, we can clearly see the laying down of the foundation for this elevation of Xi next year, and his continued leadership of the Party, in the most important passage of the Communique. We offer the official translation with a couple of casual bolded notes on translations that seemed to slightly vary from the original Chinese:
Comrade Xi Jinping, through meticulous assessment[scientific judgement] and deep reflection on a number of major theoretical and practical questions regarding the cause of the Party and the country in the new era, has set forth a series of original new ideas, thoughts, and strategies on national governance revolving around the major questions of our times: what kind of socialism with Chinese characteristics we should uphold and develop in this new era, what kind of great modern socialist country we should build, and what kind of Marxist party exercising long-term governance we should develop, as well as how we should go about achieving these tasks. He is thus the principal founder (主要创立者) of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. This is the Marxism of contemporary China and of the 21st century. It embodies the best of the Chinese culture and ethos in our times and represents a new breakthrough[a new leap] in adapting Marxism to the Chinese context. The Party has established Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee (核心地位) and in the Party as a whole and defined the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. This reflects the common will of the Party, the armed forces, and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, and is of decisive significance for advancing the cause of the Party and the country in the new era and for driving forward the historic process of national rejuvenation.
This passage is the culmination within the Communique itself, coming after a rather lukewarm assessment of the contributions of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. It portrays Xi Jinping as a strong and innovative leader — the “principal founder” (主要创立者) of Xi Jinping Thought . . . . — who has rewoven the fabric of Chinese governance, and it should be read as an advance notice of two facts: “Xi Jinping Thought” will hatch from the egg of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”; and Xi Jinping will continue as the unassailable leader of the Party beyond 2022.
This week’s Sixth Plenum will be historic. Which is to say not that it comes at a historic juncture, or that it is momentous of its own nature, but rather that the event will re-mold and re-shape China’s understanding and consensus on history as a reflection of the party’s dominant priorities. Those priorities can ultimately be summarized in a single name: Xi Jinping.
The Sixth Plenum will bring a tempest of political discourse in the form of a document called Resolution of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on the Major Achievements and Historical Experiences of the Party’s Hundred-Year Struggle (中共中央关于党的百年奋斗重大成就和历史经验的决议), to be “examined and approved,” or shenyi (审议), during this week’s session. But the essential function of all of this verbiage, make no mistake, will center on the person and power of Xi Jinping, defining his leadership as the way forward, on the basis of an understanding of history that defines his core agenda.
Back on October 18, at a meeting of the CCP Politburo, the country’s top leaders discussed, according to the official People’s Daily, “the documents to be submitted for examination and approval by the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee.” It was at this point that the full name of the upcoming “Resolution” was publicly revealed. That report said that all those present at the meeting “fully affirmed the draft resolution, and were unanimously in favor of the framework structure and main content of the draft resolution, holding that the draft resolution was factual, showed respect for history, was thematically clear and comprehensive in its summary.” So the “Resolution” was by that point a fait accompli — and the plenum’s process of shenyi is a meaningless gesture, a mere affirmation.
There will be nothing to examine or approve this week. The “Resolution” will be unveiled in full to the world, so that we can all pick apart its finer points – beyond, that is, Xi Jinping’s blunt claim to power. But we can prepare for the release of the “Resolution” with a bit of historical context. What do such resolutions mean? And why should we care about them at all?
First of all, this week’s “Resolution” will be the third such resolution on history since the founding of the CCP. This resolution, however, will be different in the sense that it is not a resolution on historical “problems” or “questions,” or wenti (问题). Instead, it centers on “major achievements” (重大成就) and “historical experience” (历史经验), as the title of the document clearly indicates. As such, we can say that this week’s resolution is not a third CCP resolution on “historical questions.” It is not meant to be, as the previous resolutions were, a corrective to certain “errors” within the CCP.
The first history-related resolution within the CCP was the 1945 Resolution on Certain Historical Issues (关于若干历史问题的决议), which unfolded against the backdrop of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Yan’an Rectification Movement, the first ideological mass movement within the Party, which began in 1941. By March 1943, Mao had gained real supremacy over the Party, and had proceeded to carry out a purge of elements within the Party opposed to his rule. The first resolution was meant to summarize the lessons of the political movement under the CCP since its founding, focusing on the period from the 4th Plenum of the 6th Central Committee (January 1931) and the supposed damage brought about by “left-leaning opportunism” (左倾机会主义).
The Communist Party of China has traversed sixty years of glorious struggle since its founding in 1921. In order to sum up its experience in the thirty-two years since the founding of the People’s Republic, we must briefly review the previous twenty-eight years in which the Party led the people in waging the revolutionary struggle for New Democracy.
The document focused on “Left errors” in the principles governing economic and political work, on the “confusing of right and wrong,” which resulted in extensive suffering that the resolution acknowledged, with grudging admission of Mao’s culpability, without undermining his revolutionary role. “Chief responsibility for the grave ‘Left’ error of the ‘cultural revolution,’ an error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration, does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong,” said the document. “But after all it was the error of a great proletarian revolutionary.”
By contrast with these previous two resolutions, the “Resolution” introduced this week will be far more expansive in time frame. While the first resolution covered a period of around 14 years, and the second covered “thirty-two years since the founding” of the PRC, Xi Jinping’s “Resolution” will cover the period from the CCP’s founding a hundred years ago up through the present day.
The effect of this expansive history will be to focus the CCP’s experiences, achievements and historical legitimacy in the present-day glories of Xi himself. As such, all previous top leaders, including Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, will be phantoms (都是虚的, as one knowledgeable observer explained), and Xi Jinping’s achievements and experiences will become the overriding facts of Chinese politics.
There will be much language to unpack and debate this week, naturally. But the simplest conclusion to be drawn from this moment of historical and discursive significance can be summed up in just two Chinese characters: 连任. Xi Jinping will seek a third term in power.
NOTE: Those wishing today to unpack the significance of the Plenum from the CCP’s own perspective, might begin with this summary, posted yesterday by the app of the official People’s Daily.
When a branch campus of the Nanjing University of Science and Technology organized a study session for Chinese Communist Party cadres last month, the men huddled in a small conference room drew inspiration from a number of sources. Foremost, of course, were the speeches of Xi Jinping. But when the time came to address the study of Party history one source was noted in particular – a three-part documentary series extolling the virtues of Xi Jinping’s governance of China and his new concepts of development.
The most extraordinary thing about the series in question was not its unvarnished praise of the CCP chairman. That was a given. Rather, it was the fact that this documentary series was a glossy production that had first been aired on Discovery, one of the most widely distributed subscription channels in the United States and across the world. In research elsewhere, I have detailed the circumstances of the production and release of China: Time of Xi (习近平治国方略：中国这五年), a program produced by a UK-based company, but in fact backed by a major communication group operated by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department.
The use of the documentary in Nanjing recently offers a fascinating look at how a production that is essentially “mainstream” by Chinese political standards – meaning in this context that it fully accords with the CCP’s ideology, orientation and goals – can manage to be distributed as entertainment content to audiences in living rooms across several continents.
A promotional poster for China: Time of Xi, the three-part documentary series released globally from 2017.
Official sources make clear that China: Time of Xi has been the subject of keen study within the CCP for several years, viewed and discussed in study sessions on CCP ideology and history at all levels across the country, and serving ultimately to consolidate Xi Jinping’s hold as the “core” of Chinese political life. Back in July 2020, for example, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s macroeconomic management agency, held a collective study session on the second installment of the documentary, dealing with governance. According to a release from the commission, participants “uniformly believed” that the documentary “fully explained China’s new development concept and its successful practice.”
And given its broad distribution outside China, the documentary has also been viewed as a textbook example of the successful telling of “China’s story” — this being the key CCP buzzword in the Xi era for the effective application of the older concept of “external propaganda,” or waixuan (外宣). In an article earlier this week, Culture and Tourism China (文旅中国), an official website operated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, wrote that China: Time of Xi had, “compared with other similar documentaries, created a new paradigm for political documentaries ‘telling China’s story well.'”
“Documentaries are an important media in the transmission of the national image,” said the CTC article. And the Discovery series, produced by the UK’s Meridian Line Films, had “used suspense, a point by point [structure], showing large [concepts] from details . . . . in order to present China from an objective point of view and expand the breadth of ‘telling China’s story well.'”
American designer Danny Forster, one of the sources interviewed for the three installments of China: Time of Xi. The documentary is shown here on the state broadcaster, CCTV.
This application of the word “objective,” coming right on the heels of talk of projecting a positive national image, naturally follows the CCP’s understanding of the concept – as avoiding facts or observations that lead to critical, or negative, views of the issues discussed. Within the prevailing CCP discourse, the CCP’s framing of issues is by definition “objective.”
The article goes on to analyze the documentary series in detail, explaining the techniques used and the content covered in each of the three parts. The article concludes:
This film leaps beyond the traditional political propaganda model, and through multiple narrative perspectives, story-based themes and international forms of expression . . . . to successfully tell China’s story. Moreover, it supports the wisdom of China’s “Belt and Road” Initiative and the ‘building a community of shared destiny for mankind’ and the opportunities they have brought for the world. [The film] has created a new paradigm for the political documentary in ‘telling the China story well,’ and has blazed a path forward for the international communication of China’s national image and for the construction of China’s international discourse system. It deserves more in-depth study by the [media] sector and by academia.
Such talk of “China’s international discourse system” around a documentary series released by an American multinational media conglomerate is astonishing — and for some, perhaps, sobering — in the wake of the much-publicized collective study session of China’s Politburo back in June this year. That study session was led by the director of Fudan University’s Institute for Chinese Studies, Zhang Weiwei (张维为), who back in 2013 spoke of a coming era of “post-Western discourse” (后西方话语) that would entail the rise of a “Chinese discourse system” (中国话语体系).
If China: Time of Xi is truly a textbook example of how products emerging from a “Chinese discourse system” might attract global audiences and be compelling, what does this say about the role of foreign media distribution channels and production cultures in the manufacture of such success stories?
In fact, China’s claims, like those in the CTC article, about the successes of external propaganda often reveal the weakness of such approaches when one digs between the lines. One such example can be found in the CTC article as it talks up the international reception of China: Time of Xi. After mentioning that episode 2 of the documentary series aired first in the United States, the article reveals that it was also shown at the Golden Tree International Documentary Film Festival in Frankfurt, Germany.
Certainly, a public screening at an international documentary festival would seem to further substantiate the fact that the series was a critical success. But the Golden Tree International Documentary Festival is the creation of Germany’s DCM Deutsch-Chinesische Medien GmbH, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huayun Shangde International Culture Communication (北京华韵尚德国际文化传播有限公司), a Beijing-based company that by its own description “principally provides expert exchange, publicity, planning and business consultation services for governments, associations and individuals.” For several years running the company was designated by China’s Ministry of Commerce as a “Priority Enterprise for National Cultural Export” (国家文化出口重点企业).
Both companies are run by Wang Libin (王立滨), who has directly mentioned Xi-era concepts of cultural diplomacy in interviews with Chinese state media. In June 2018, Wang told Xinhua News Agency in an exclusive interview that Golden Tree was held every year in order “both to tell the China story well through this platform, and to promote cultural trade.” Whatever the relationship on the China side, Wang’s company has clearly capitalized on the official agenda of “going out,” and more recently on “telling the China story.”
Everywhere, it seems, there is China’s gloved hand. The subsidiary of an enterprise operated by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department strikes up a deal with the Discovery channel to produce a documentary praising Xi, marketed by Chinese government-backed media as something independent, and this production is shown at a festival in Europe that again has the external publicity goals of China at heart.
State media have frequently turned to Wang Libin and Huayun Shangde as proponents of smart external publicity that foreigners can relate to. Wang’s company was also behind “Laikanba,” a cultural program that was aired by the private, Dusseldorf-based broadcasting company NRW.TV from 2010, and that Chinese media promoted at the time as the “first and only Chinese topical TV program to enter the mainstream media in Europe.” In a 2019 profile, Wang offered her views on international communication: “Telling the China story in a way that others can accept can happen more quietly,” she said. “It doesn’t need to be about saying how good we are, or how great we are. As we go through the process, every action represents the Chinese temperament and the Chinese character.”
Xi Jinping is promoted as an unparalleled leader through the official account of the CCP’s Xinhua News Agency on Twitter on November 6, 2021.
What would it mean on the international stage to have a “Chinese discourse system”? What would it look like, and how would others in the world participate? What would the values be to which humanity could aspire? These are broad and difficult questions. But the answers so far, glimpsed through productions like China: Time of Xi, are narrow and self-serving. The values are those of the CCP as refracted through the personality of a single powerful leader — closed vision we are simply to accept as it insinuates itself into the global open spaces of media and culture.
Quietly though they may emerge, these productions do speak volumes about the temperament and character of “China’s story.” And as such they should watched and heeded.
Echoing Mao Zedong before him, Xi Jinping regularly stresses the Party’s domination of all aspects of life. “East, west, south, north and center, Party, government, military, society and education—the Party rules all,” as he has said. The latest target of this drive to domination is “fandom culture,” or fanquan wenhua, which refers to online youth communities that coalesce around shared obsessions with celebrity idols. According to the Cyberspace Administration of China, “toxic idol worship” threatens to poison the minds of future generations. Last month, a newspaper published by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department warned that internet addiction among teenagers “results in health risks that cannot be ignored.”
This effort to control fandom culture comes against the backdrop of a crackdown on youth entertainment in China, including harsh restrictions on online gaming. But all this talk of rescuing Chinese youth from their own appetites is in fact a smokescreen for a far more serious purpose. Closer scrutiny of China’s recent internet crackdown suggests these moves are part of a broader effort to reassert the Party’s control over the internet as a key battleground for political and ideological security. The struggle, which touches on the future of the regime, is for the hearts and minds of China’s Generation Z. For policymakers considering how to respond to China’s crackdown on online freedoms, it is vital to understand the full scope of its efforts to consolidate power, which go far beyond just the tech industry to include online culture.
In the eyes of the Party, the country’s hitherto vibrant internet and entertainment sector is a thing to be tamed, and the official backlash facing fandom culture in recent weeks is one of the clearest examples of how even apparently benign aspects of the internet can run afoul of a leadership obsessed with control. Just as the Xi regime has sought to bring the country’s technology companies to heel, it also seeks to control online culture more deeply, and this does not bode well for the long-term development and vibrancy of China’s internet sector.
From stargazing to collective action
For many young people in China, particularly those born after the 1990s, fandom culture—which can be traced back to the idol worship of the 1980s and 1990s—has offered a rare avenue for identity formation and community building in a society where associations of all kinds are subject to strict government control. As networked and often highly organized communities of fans rallying around their beloved idols, “fandoms” have enabled close parasocial interactions in which fans feel a kind of intimacy with the object of their shared interest, as well as a sense of active participation that can be empowering and identity forming.
Examples of fandom culture include the hit show “Idol Producer,” which launched in January 2018 on the online video platform iQiyi and empowered fans to select and promote their favored contestants from among 100 aspiring performers. The ultimate goal of the program was to select nine performers to form a brand-new male idol group. As fans organized to promote their favored idols through social media platforms, their interactions were fueled by Gen Z-focused services like live-streaming and live commerce.
Fandoms have become big business in China. A report published by iResearch Consulting Group put the market value of the fan economy in China at close to $620 billion in 2019 and estimated that the fan economy would grow a further 50 percent by 2023.
It would be easy to dismiss fandoms as shallow and celebrity-obsessed, but the highly organized online communities forming around China’s fandoms have already demonstrated their potential for both social activism and political organization. Perhaps the most prominent example of online fandom communities’ potential for political expression came in 2016, when the so-called “Diba expedition” saw thousands of highly organized cyber-nationalists, mostly “fan girls,” mob the Facebook account of Taiwan’s newly elected leader, Tsai Ing-wen.
A definition of the term “fandom girls” shared online in China. The text next to the image of young women wearing red scarves and brandishing a keyboard reads: “[The term] does not refer specifically to a group of fans of a particular celebrity. Unlike the traditional fandom culture, they gather spontaneously and use their own fandom culture to discuss and mock Western media on overseas social media.” Source: Matters.
Fandoms and their capacity for collective action were also one of the largely untold stories of China’s fight against the COVID-19 epidemic in its early stage. In January 2020, as it became clear that an epidemic had emerged in Wuhan and surrounding areas, the government response was far too slow in many key areas, including the provision of protective equipment. By contrast, the networks already formed within fandom culture—the same that allowed mobilization in support of chosen idols—enabled the rapid marshalling of resources. On Jan. 21, 2020, one day after China confirmed human transmission of COVID-19, the fan network of Zhu Yilong, a young actor originally from the city of Wuhan, mobilized funds to purchase more than 200,000 protective masks. These and other supplies were delivered to Wuhan within 24 hours, offering much-needed support for medical personnel and others on the front lines. The aid offered by the Zhu Yilong network is just one of many examples of how online groups provided a crucial means of support amid a rapidly unfolding crisis.
Perhaps more worrying for the CCP has been their potential for mobilization on a global scale. Within 10 days of China’s formal acknowledgement of the coronavirus outbreak in January 2020, a group of 27 fandoms from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan known as the “666 Alliance,” had sourced nearly half a million-yuan worth of medical supplies for use in Wuhan. As one Chinese scholar wrote of fandoms in 2020: “They are a huge population, are well-organized, and have a clear division of labor, giving them an explosive power many would find astonishing.”
Screenshot of coverage by Shanghai’s Jiemian News of the “666 Alliance” of fandom groups and its work sourcing supplies for the fight against Covid-19.
Guiding Gen Z
The Chinese leadership understands the immense impact youth movements have had in the country’s political past—from the May Fourth Movement at the start of the 20th century, to the chaos wrought by Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, to the large-scale pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. It may seem a stretch to compare such historical upheavals to the myriad iterations of online youth culture in China today. But it is important to recall that the most enduring lesson Party leaders took away in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre was the imperative of mastering the social zeitgeist, ensuring especially that the thoughts and ideas driving China’s youth can be directed through effective controls on culture and the media. As China’s reform-minded premier, Zhao Ziyang, was shoved aside in the wake of the massacre, and as Jiang Zemin assumed leadership of the Party, the project of ensuring the control of news and ideology to preserve regime stability was given a new catchphrase: “guidance of public opinion.” The phrase came directly from language in the Party’s assessment, published in the journal China Comment, of Premier Zhao’s failings of that spring.
Meeting with propaganda leaders in May 1989, as pro-democracy demonstrations continued to grab international attention, Zhao had urged the officials to open things up a bit. “Make the news a bit more open. There’s no big danger in that,” he said. “By facing the wishes of the people, by facing the tide of global progress, we can only make things better.” The consensus from the start of the Jiang era was that Zhao’s tolerant approach had “guided matters in the direction of chaos,” hence the phrase that came to dominate the project of media and internet control for decades to come.
The CAC’s Aug. 27 notice on fandom communities—“Notice on the Further Strengthening of the Management of ‘Fandom Chaos’”—describes the political objectives driving this clean-up of “fandom chaos.” The notice says that “all regions must further improve their political stance,” or zhengzhi zhanwei, which is a term that came to prominence in 2018 to signal allegiance to Xi Jinping and the CCP. The term is a distillation of what is known as the “Four Consciousnesses,” which is fundamentally about Xi Jinping’s “core” status. Crucially, the notice urges government authorities in all regions of the country to govern “fandom chaos” in order to “preserve online political security and ideological security and create a clear online space.” This spells out far more clearly—by the standards of China’s often obscure political rhetoric, anyway—the urgency of controlling fandom culture in order to maintain the stability of the regime. There is also explicit language about the need for platforms that host fandom activity to take on a “guiding responsibility,” a subtle yet unmistakable reference to the aforementioned media control phrase and the events of 1989.
China’s leadership has been pushing insistently for better “guidance” of fandom culture since at least the second half of 2020. Fandoms came under much greater official scrutiny from February to July of 2020 following an online controversy centering on Xiao Zhan, an actor and internet idol. When AO3, a fan fiction site outside China played host to an overtly homoerotic work of fan fiction about Xiao and a former co-star, some of Xiao’s millions of fans were enraged. They retaliated by reporting the fan site to government authorities, who answered with a wholesale blocking of the site from inside China. This prompted bitter reprisals against Xiao Zhan fans, including name-calling and doxing, from other fandoms dedicated to AO3. Xiao quickly became a toxic figure for major brands like Cartier and Estée Lauder, who backed out of endorsement deals.
The online storm around Xiao Zhan became known as the “227 Incident” (referring to the date it began, Feb. 27) and brought a wave of official criticism in the Party-state media. One official newspaper wrote via its news app in early May 2020 that fandom culture is a “highly-organized” threat to ideological security. The role of fandoms in “self-identity construction” had caused them to “constantly intrude upon or subsume other ideologies to form a fierce and aggressive and highly-organized machine.” Fandoms’ “potential social influence in broader arenas” cannot “be underestimated,” the paper warned. Following an initial apology in March, Xiao Zhan again issued a mea culpa in July 2020, using the Party’s own language of ideological control: “I do have a duty to guide correctly and to actively advocate [for the correct values].”
By July 2020, the stage was set for this year’s curbs on fandom culture as part of a much larger crackdown on China’s internet. From that point on, “fandom chaos” was a regular topic in the official media. A headline that month in Guangdong’s official Nanfang Daily read: “Relevant Departments Focus on ‘Fandom’ Chaos: Media and Celebrities Must Properly Carry Out Guidance of Public Opinion.”
Idolizing the general secretary
Attacks on fandom culture and online entertainment in China’s state media this year have continued to dwell on the impact on the health and well-being of young people and on the damage supposedly done to the country’s “online ecology.” But accepting this official rationalization for the crackdown on fandoms requires that we turn a blind eye to the most defining trend in Chinese domestic politics today—namely, the Party’s push to build a culture of loyalty, and even infatuation, around the person of Xi Jinping. Celebrity worship may be on the way out in China. But strongman worship is the order of the day. By cracking down on fandoms, the Party seeks to ensure that the vigor of celebrity worship is re-directed toward Xi Jinping himself, as the embodiment of Chinese ethics and values.
Despite all the chatter in the official state media about the “chaos” of fandoms, the push to make China’s internet giants to give back, the need to safeguard data privacy and official morality, and so on, the most fundamental driver behind wave after wave of new internet restrictions this year has been far more basic: the need for the Chinese Communist Party and its charismatic leader to shore up the foundation for political and ideological stability. On Aug. 24, just three days before the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee issued its new regulations on fandom culture, China’s Ministry of Education announced that the study of Xi Jinping’s personal governing concept will be incorporated into the official education curriculum, helping China’s youth “build faith in Marxism.” Primary school children in China—now restricted to their two hours of online gaming per week—will now also be obligated to study not just the governing concepts of Xi Jinping, but to study and internalize the stories of Xi’s life and deeds. The country’s leaders may decry a commercial internet culture in which everyone is “striving for eyeballs.” But the fundamental point here is that the Party too is striving for eyeballs. And its future, it knows, will depend on China’s obsessed youth.
This article previously appeared at Brookings TechStream, and is republished here with permission.
It has long been a basic maxim of public opinion control under the Chinese Communist Party that one of the chief means of restricting information is to limit those outlets having the right to report the news. The state-granted privileges allowing media to conduct news reporting have been referred to as “news gathering rights,” or xinwen caifangquan (新闻采访权), and these rights have been vested with trusted media that are in various ways tethered to official institutions.
As the internet became increasingly central in the distribution and consumption of information in China, the authorities maintained strict limitations on “news gathering rights.” For example, when the Regulations on the Administration of Internet News Information Services (互联网新闻信息服务管理规定) were promulgated in 2005, they stipulated clearly that commercial news portals (such as Sina, Sohu and QQ) did not have “news interview rights” and therefore could not directly produce original news content. What properly licensed websites could do, however, was to repost, or zhuanzai (转载), news on current affairs.
In the chaotic world of the rapidly developing internet, now supercharged by social media and big data, it has been crucial for China’s leadership to maintain control over the process of zhuanzai. The hope, with the goal of ensuring CCP “guidance of public opinion,” is that news content remains clear at the source, produced by politically trusted sources, and that it does not become murky, or politically toxic, as it makes its way downstream through the expanding digital media terrain. One important means of mastering zhuanzai has been to clearly demarcate the sources of reposted news content that can be safely used.
The release yesterday by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) of a new and updated version of its Internet News Information Source List (互联网新闻信息稿源单位名单) has precisely this goal in mind. The CAC document, an update of the first version released in July 2016, about five months after Xi Jinping’s speech urging a re-consolidation of CCP media controls, provides a comprehensive list of the news “units” – 1,356 in all – that are approved as “report sources,” or gaoyuan (稿源).
What does this mean? Essentially, the existence and enforcement of the list means that digital media of all stripes are prohibited from reposting current affairs and breaking news stories originating with sources other than those appearing on the “Source List,” including international media as well as public accounts on major platforms like WeChat and Weibo. Website and portals that do not keep strictly to the “Source List” in republishing news “will be punished according to law and regulations,” according to the CAC, which also said that it would closely watch “source units” (稿源单位), ensuring that they did not have “information security liability incidents and other issues.”
Why is the list being updated and released now? This is perhaps the more interesting question, given that these restrictions on sourcing of news stories are not particularly new. The CAC release, and coverage by the Party-state media, explains that the new “Source List” is about “adapting to the new situation, new changes and new demands of internet communication, further consolidating the foundation of internet communication management, and enriching the supply of internet news information.”
The “new situation” and “new changes” are really about the proliferation of digital media since the introduction of the last list in 2016, including the transformation of the Party-state led digital media infrastructure. One of the most noticeable differences between the two lists, in fact, is the addition today of many hundreds of official public accounts, or gongzhong zhanghao (公众账号), these being accounts operated by licensed and politically trusted media at the national, provincial and prefectural levels on China’s most crucial social media platforms, WeChat and Weibo.
The addition of public accounts is the primary reason why the sheer number of “units” on the updated “Source List” has expanded so notably since 2016. So what we can see here is an effort to maintain and reinforce the Party’s control over news at the source on the one hand, and to expand sourcing on the other hand in a way that befits broader changes to the country’s information landscape. So much activity in terms of official reporting and commentary – in other words, CCP and government messaging at all levels – is now happening through public accounts. Therefore, the scope of official sourcing must be expanded in order to authorize these “units” while also amplifying them, maintaining strict propaganda controls throughout.
Among the three notable priorities on the CAC list, named by the CAC itself and by Party-state media in their reporting today, control is not surprisingly at the top. The CAC notes, first and foremost, that the list “adds a group” (新增一批) of trusted sources, the goal having been to ensure that sources on the list “adhere to a correct political orientation, [adhere to] public opinion guidance, [adhere to the correct] value orientation.” Secondly, the CAC notes that the list “verifies a group” (核校一批), meaning simply that the list needed to be updated to reflect closures, name changes, changes to “sponsoring institutions” (official sponsors, essentially) and so on, resulting in some cases from institutional reform over the past five years.
Finally, the CAC notes that the new list “eliminates a group” (剔除一批). Listen in as it explains this key priority:
Units from the 2016 version of the source list that are no longer eligible, have poor regular performance, or lack influence have been removed from the list to effectively maintain its seriousness and credibility.
Define “seriousness” and “credibility.”
In fact, the absences themselves offer the best explanation of how the CAC has applied its standard of credibility and seriousness. Scrolling down past the expanded list of “central news websites” and “central news units,” past the likes of the People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency, and their various websites and public accounts, then past the list for CCP and government organs and other official organizations, we come at last to the group from Beijing – the first of a long string of listings categorized by province and municipality.
On the 2021 “Source List” for Beijing, there are a total of 15 media units, including seven websites and eight other news organizations. The list of websites include those for the official Beijing Daily (北京日报网), The Beijing News (新京报网), the website of the Beijing chapter of the Chinese Communist Youth League (北青网), and so on.
The Beijing listing for the updated “Source List” for 2021 released by the CAC.
These websites are all to be expected, and we can note that all but two (The Beijing News and Beijing News Radio) now have official WeChat public accounts that are also authorized sources for zhuanzai.
But if we refer to the 2016 “Source List,” we immediately find our first instance of a media unit that seems to belong to the “elimination” group. The website in question is Caixin Online (财新网), regarded by many readers outside China, and certainly inside too, as one of the country’s most credible and serious sources of news reporting.
Caixin Online appears in the Beijing section of the 2016 “Source List.”
In fact, Caixin, which was founded in 2009 by the highly-respected editor Hu Shuli (胡舒立), has itself sought to prevent the zhuanzai of its content without permission, and much the outlet’s coverage is paywalled. Nevertheless, the outlet’s absence from the 2021 “Source List” effectively means that its news content cannot be shared by other outlets even if permission has been secured from Caixin.
Bloomberg has reported this morning, just as this short analysis was wrapping up, that the Caixin exclusion amounts to an “ouster,” and that the move “means its articles cannot appear on the internet platforms such as Sina.com that are popular ways for the Chinese public to consume news.” This may risk an overstatement of the significance of the exclusion for Caixin, for the reasons I just mentioned. This “Source List” has little to do with curbs the outlet might face as it attempts to report breaking news stories, or to carry out in-depth investigative reporting.
But whatever the case, the exclusion is certainly indicative of the Party’s continued consolidation of control over the upstream and downstream distribution of news and information in China.
Last month, a blog article declaring China to be in the midst of a “profound revolution” fueled speculation online after it was republished by several Party-state media outlets. In the comparatively moderate intellectual climate of the 1990s or early 2000s, such a leftist screed, with its talk of a “red return,” would have been beneath the notice of the majority of news media and readers in China, suited only to fringe online forums like Utopia (乌有之乡). But the high-profile official treatment of the post, written by a virtually unknown blogger named Li Guangman (李光满), seemed to signal a more profound leftward slide in China’s politics at the top.
In a post to his WeChat public account on October 9, Li Guangman doubled-down on his September thesis, citing two recent media-related cases to support his conviction that a “profound transformation” is underway in China, with deep implications for politics, business, culture and the media.
The first of these cases was the release by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s top macroeconomic management agency, of new draft rules unambiguously prohibiting the involvement of all “non-public capital” (非公有资本) – meaning private capital of any kind, domestic or foreign – in news gathering, production and dissemination. While restrictions on news content and its production are of course not news in China, these new rules are so salient and broad in their prohibitions that they seem to remove all strategic ambiguity.
The second media case cited by Li Guangman was the detention on October 7 in Hainan of well-known entrepreneur and former professional journalist Luo Changping (罗昌平), who was charged with insulting and defaming the martyrs of Chinese history by criticizing a new film about China’s involvement in the Korean War. Luo’s detention, widely reported by state-run media, underscores the resolve of the Chinese Communist Party leadership in policing the bounds of the CCP’s official narratives, the stories and mythologies that undergird its power and legitimacy.
Goodbye, Private Capital?
In his October 9 post, Li Guangman in fact reviewed four major events he claimed had “symbolic significance” (标志性意义). In addition to the new NDRC rule and Luo Changping’s detention, these included the recent antitrust fine against the shopping platform Meituan, the second major penalty so far this year against a Chinese internet firm, and the withdrawal of plans for a 1.6 billion dollar listing by Lenovo Group on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Li Guangman begins his post by repeating the line for which he has become so well known: “We are right now going through a profound transformation!” This ecstatic declaration is followed immediately by his rundown of the NDRC draft rules on media investment. After reviewing the language of the NDRC release, he summarizes:
We can note first of all that non-public capital here should include all domestic and foreign non-public capital. Second, news collection, editing, broadcasting and distribution businesses here cover all aspects of the news, including print news media, television news media, and internet platform news media, including traditional news media and new media. In summation, the entire news sector will be closed to non-public capital, and only public capital will be permitted to participate in related operations, without exceptions. I would also like to emphasize that there are no exceptions in the formulation here — the entire news sector is to be brought under the operation of public capital.
Li’s reading of the letter of the NDRC draft rules is certainly not wrong. The release tells us clearly that the rules “raise prohibitions on the illegal (违规) development of business related to the news media.” And the language is actually quite expansive in defining the relevant areas of media activity – the clear point being that “non-public capital may not invest in the establishment and operation” (非公有资本不得投资设立和经营) of such entities. This includes traditional and new media, so that the rules would seem to prohibit outright, for example, a Tencent investment in Caixin Media, the professional outlet founded by veteran editor Hu Shuli (胡舒立), as much as an investment from a smaller online gaming company in a youth-oriented history or sports news product distributed through an app or WeChat public account. In terms of media type, the rules would seem to prohibit private capital across the spectrum — if they were implemented to the letter.
And what about content? Li Guangman revels in the expansiveness of the rules in terms of content coverage as well, and his glee is not misplaced. The rules include a laundry list of activities, checking all the boxes for content in key areas, including politics and current affairs, culture, science and technology, military affairs, foreign affairs, health, education and sports. And the draft adds to the concrete areas of content prohibition for “non-public capital” the dragnet language “and other activities that concern political orientation, guidance of public opinion and value orientations.”
The language here about “guidance of public opinion” will be familiar to seasoned observers of China’s press policy. It is the concept, underpinning press controls since the beginning of the 1990s, that the CCP’s concerted control of all media is essential to the maintenance of regime stability. The term dates back to June 1989 and the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, and came from the consensus after the crackdown, as Jiang Zemin took on the top leadership position, that Premier Zhao Ziyang had “guided matters in the direction of chaos” by urging propaganda leaders in May 1989 to “open things up a bit” (China Comment, June 1989).
“Political orientation,” another important catchphrase here, is more squarely about obedience to the political line of the CCP Central Committee, but especially to the leadership of Xi Jinping. If “guidance” is about ensuring that public ideas and sentiment are managed through control and direction of the media , “political orientation” is more about enforcing the political and ideological dominance of Xi and his CCP, of his rebranding of the Party for the 21st century. Think of his overarching banner term, the ponderous “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era,” which could in due course be distilled into the potent “Xi Jinping Thought.” But think also of the populist notion of “common prosperity” (共同富裕), which turned heads (with concern) in early August this year, coming months into a broad crackdown on the tech sector that has shamed the scions of Chinese entrepreneurialism and innovation into pledging allegiance to Xi’s project of red revival.
Here too is where the talk of “value orientations” comes in. Along with the crackdown on the internet sector and tech sectors – here, Li Guangman’s mention of the recent Meituan fine is apropos – the use of big data and so on, have come restraints on many aspects of internet culture that have been regarded of late as effete, excessively materialistic, even morally objectionable. With volleys against “fandom culture” and online gaming, and moralistic attacks on online influencers such as “Buddhist beauties,” China seems to be sliding into an era of rule by shame when it comes to social values. The right values combinea kind of stiff-faced adherence to CCP political values (manly and heroic) with a healthy attitude toward consumerism that eschews excess materialism and its effeminacy. Tech gurus are the first and obvious casualties of this “profound revolution” (to borrow again Li Guangman’s words) because they have profited from and super-fueled a tech-driven consumer and lifestyle revolution that has placed in their grasp the data of a billion lives. They epitomize commercial and technological power, and they impel the social and cultural transformations that could undermine the Party’s position at the center.
In a nutshell, these rules are abominable. But still, one crucial question remains: Will they be implemented according to their letter, or will they simply be applied in an ad hoc manner? In fact, similar rules regarding private capital involvement in traditional publishing have been around since 2005, and in 2017 the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top internet control body, also issued prohibitions on private capital involvement in news reporting. Given the focus in the past on traditional publishing, and given a history of selective enforcement, the feeling at media outlets with financing from private companies may be that strategic relationships remain most critical, and that the most important factor will be ensuring no red lines are crossed (or crossed egregiously) in terms of coverage.
This is cold comfort against the backdrop of recent actions against internet platforms in China. Sure, it is likely that a chill will run first through those media products on platforms like WeChat, including those with financing from internet firms like Tencent and Alibaba, before the temperature drops for legacy media. But the rules are explicit, and at the very least they are likely to drive private capital further away from media ventures and promote the continued consolidation of Party control over information products across the board.
In his latest gleeful declaration of “profound revolution,” Li Guangman also finds encouragement in the fact that these rules come from the NDRC, and not from the CAC or other propaganda agencies. “There is definite wisdom in the fact that this time public capital is taking back the right to news and public opinion not through departments in charge of news, public opinion and propaganda, but through the DRC’s ‘Negative List of Market Access,'” he writes. “As soon as this “negative list” is released and implemented, a profound transformation will occur in our country’s news sector.”
Policing the Faith
Will Li Guangman’s “profound transformation” in the Chinese media come to pass? Right now, it is impossible to say with certainty. But we should also view the NDRC rules in the light of how “political orientations” and “value orientations” are being policed in China. When we consider how the media atmosphere lately has been electrified with “red gene” jingoism and demands for fealty to the ideals of the CCP, the medium-term outlook does not give cause for optimism. Arriving at Shenzhen’s Bao’an Airport wearing her bright red dress last month, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) epitomized this prevailing ethos as she delivered her speech on the tarmac, amid the fluttering of bright red national flags: “If faith has a color,” she said, “it must be Chinese red” (如果信念有颜色，那一定是中国红). Or think of the way that Wang Xing (王兴), the billionaire CEO of the Chinese shopping giant Meituan (美团) said during his group’s second-quarter earnings call in September that “common prosperity is rooted in Meituan’s genes.”
Woe be to those who lack the faith. And the fate last week of Luo Changping is an egregious case in point. Luo’s alleged crime is “infringing the reputation and honor of national martyrs” in violation of a 2018 law that criminalized criticism of “heroes and martyrs” with the stated goal of “cultivating and practicing core socialist values, and inspiring the glorious spiritual force of the realization of the China dream of the great renewal of the Chinese nation.”
Luo’s crime, specifically, was to question the authenticity of the story of Chinese soldiers during the Korean War as portrayed in the new blockbuster film “The Battle at Lake Changjin” (长津湖), released in theaters last month. A notice from police in Hainan on Friday said that Luo’s comments on the Weibo platform had slandered China’s volunteer soldiers and had “serious negative consequences.” The internet, it said, was not a “land outside the law,” and it hoped that “the majority of Chinese internet users would consciously follow laws and regulations.”
Police issue a notice on October 8 announcing the arrest of “Luo X Ping,” later confirmed to be former journalist Luo Changping, for defaming China’s heroes and martyrs.
The fact that Luo’s case has been widely reported by Party-state media suggests he is being pursued in order to set an example to others – not least to online influencers (Luo has more than two million followers) who have the potential to impact public opinion.
For Li Guangman, who cites Luo Changping’s detention as further evidence of the “profound transformation” underway in China, action against public intellectuals is long overdue. For too long, he says, the country’s martyrs have been neglected. The situation has improved since the implementation of the 2018 law, but still “people like Luo Changping have not hesitated to test the law.” Li quotes from Jun Zhengping (钧正平), a writer at the People’s Liberation Army Daily, who said in a recent commentary venting outrage at Luo Changping’s remarks that, “We must not let those who malign the martyrs do whatever they want with impunity.”
Concluding his recent post, Li Guangman rails against private capital, which he says has “monopolized public opinion on China’s internet.” But the transformation now underway, he says, is “changing our society, our ideas, our concepts and our lives,” and is “destroying certain people and forces, and healing Chinese society.”
“What we are seeing and feeling now is the tremendous power brought by this change,” he writes. “Although it is one event after another in different arenas, the changes brought by these events to our society are comprehensive, profound and long-term, and each of us should face this profound change, be awake to change, and have the courage to accept change.”
It is likely that for months if not years to come, observers of Chinese history and current affairs will weigh the significance of an article making the rounds on China’s internet this past Sunday. Appearing on scores of official Party-state media websites and commercial internet portals, the article is penned by a virtually unknown blogger named Li Guangman (李光满), who claims that revolution is in the air in China, with profound transformations to be felt by all.
“This change will wash away all the dust, and the capital market will no longer be a paradise for capitalists to grow rich overnight,” he writes. “The cultural market will no longer be a paradise for effeminate stars, and the press will no longer be a place for the worship of Western culture.” The author’s next line reeks of Maoist nostalgia: “The red has returned, the heroes have returned, and the grit and valor have returned.”
The article opens with a summary of recent moves by the Chinese authorities to bring the entertainment industry in check and curb the influence of celebrities, coming on top of the suspension last year of the blockbuster IPO of China’s Ant Group, the fining of Alibaba, and the crackdown on “fandom culture” (饭圈文化). All of these moves have come amid intensified calls by Xi Jinping, and in the state media, for the country to pursue a renewed form of “common prosperity,” or gongtong fuyu (共同富裕).
Li also mentions recent actions taken directly against music composer Gao Xiaosong (高晓松) and the actress Zhao Wei (赵薇), noting with seeming glee that both have been yanked from major internet portal sites, and that “Zhao Wei’s name has been expunged from the [online video platform] iQiyi.”
The red has returned, the heroes have returned, and the grit and valor has returned.
Li Guangman
Such punitive actions, which have now set the internet and entertainment industries trembling, are apparently what Li means by “grit and valor,” or xuexing (血性), a term that references an attitude of toughness and combativeness that has been actively encouraged within the People’s Liberation Army since 2013. “[All] of this tells us,” Li says, summing up the zeitgeist, “that China is undergoing a major change. From the economic sphere to the financial sphere, from the cultural sphere to the political sphere, a profound transformation is underway – or, one might say, a profound revolution.”
The article from Li Guangman appears on the website of the official Xinhua News Agency on August 29.
This talk of “revolution” quickly dominated discussion on many chatrooms and social media threads through Monday. Such language, appearing on the odd social media account, might ordinarily be dismissed as the ravings of a Maoist outlier. But this post, though attributed to Li’s own public account, “Li Guangman Freezing Point Commentary” (李光满冰点时评), was shared on the websites of eight major Party-state media on August 29, and on scores of commercial sites, all with the same headline: “Everyone Can Sense That a Profound Change is Underway!” (每个人都能感受到, 一场深刻的变革正在进行!)
The re-publishing by Party-state media of an article from so-called “self-media” or “We media” (自媒体), a term referring to digital social media platforms such as WeChat that integrate self-publishing with chat and other services, is a very rare occurrence. The assumption many observers have naturally made, therefore, is that the joint posting of this WeChat article across Party-state media websites must have been coordinated by the Central Propaganda Department and other relevant offices.
In the social media comment sections this week, the concern has been palpable. “A movement has begun,” one user commented underneath a Weibo post on the Li Guangman article. “They’re blowing a wind to see what fish they can stir up,” said another. A third comment was more portentous: “History is being repeated,” it said.
A Weibo post about Li Guangman’s “revolution” article draws concerned comments about political movements and the repeating of history.
No one need ask what history we are talking about here. The fear is that the central leadership has effectively green-lit a “Cultural Revolution-style” article, as one user on the Zhihu question-and-answer platform wrote, and that China might be sliding inexorably toward another political movement that would be destructive to the relative openness of the past four decades. Another user on Zhihu wrote of Li Guangman: “This is extreme rhetoric, murderous in tone. To hear him is to return again to that catastrophe of 50 years ago. Any country that wants long-term peace and stability must be moderate internally. And moderation does not mean permissiveness, but rather the resolution of problems in a reasonable and practical manner.”
A New Resolution on History?
In fact, the exact nature of this apparent joint release of the Li Guangman commentary remains a matter of speculation – even for the author himself. On Monday, in the wake of the widespread posting of his article, Li commented on the phenomenon, giving his post the giddy headline: “People’s Daily Online, Xinhua Online, CCTV.com, China Military Online, Guangming Online and Other Central Media As Well as Scores of Provincial, Regional and Municipal Media All Place A ‘Li Guangman Freezing Point Commentary’ Article in a Prominent Position!” (人民网, 新华网, 央视网, 中国军网, 光明网等央媒及数十家省区市媒体集中在重要位置转发”李光满冰点时评”文章!). Li’s apparent surprise and speculation about the attention given to his article suggests he was unaware of any broader propaganda strategy around the piece. “Obviously, this was a unified arrangement by the news and propaganda departments and the Cyberspace Administration of China, generating an extremely strong propaganda outcome,” he wrote.
But is it really so obvious? “It’s hard to imagine,” one media analyst in Beijing said in an exchange over e-mail, “that propaganda departments and the CAC would demand that websites run this piece.”
The fact remains, however, that the Li Guangman article has been widely promoted. There can be little doubt of the article’s importance as a harbinger of something. But of what, exactly? Why would such an article be encouraged and supported at this time?
One possible explanation concerns the possibility that we are about to witness the release of a new “resolution,” or jueyi (决议), on the history of the CCP. Given practices within the Party in the past, such a step would seem necessary if Xi Jinping is serious about defining the current period as a “new era” (新时代), which would go further in making the case for his leadership beyond the 20th National Congress of the CCP in 2022.
A Xi Jinping resolution on history would be the third in a century for the CCP. In 1945, at the 6th Plenary Session of the 7th CCP Central Committee, Mao Zedong issued the “Resolution on Certain Historical Issues of the CCP” (关于党的若干历史问题的决议), the CCP’s first historical resolution, which established and consolidated Mao’s ideology and position. Nearly four decades later, in June 1981, Deng Xiaoping led the passage at the 6th Plenary Session of the 11th CCP Central Committee of the “Resolution on Certain Historical Questions Since the Founding of the Nation” (关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议), which established Deng Xiaoping as the “core” of the second leadership generation and defined his opening and reform policies as the direction of the era.
A number of scholars and observers in recent years have predicted the release of just such a resolution. Analyst Gao Xin (高新) wrote in 2018 that Xi Jinping’s release of a third resolution on history was “simply a question of time.” The same year, Deng Yuwen (邓聿文), the Chinese journalist and former Study Times editor, wrote in the New York Times that if Xi wished to “truly open a ‘new era’ belonging to himself,” then “he must carry out a ‘correct’ summarization of the historical experiences of the past 40 years of reform and opening.”
“The current state of affairs is again a delicate one,” Deng wrote at the time, amidst the elevation of Xi Jinping’s banner term. “While the 19th National Congress of the CCP proclaimed a new era, it is not altogether clear what the essential characteristics of this new era are.”
This week, in light of the Li Guangman article, Deng has again suggested that a new resolution from the Party on its history is imminent, and could be unveiled at the 6th Plenum of the 19th Central Committee in November this year. In fact, there may be some clues in the language emerging from yesterday’s Politburo session.
It was pointed out at the meeting that, by learning from history, we can understand [the laws] of rise and decline. Summarizing the major achievements and historical experiences of the Party in its century-long struggle to build a modern socialist nation century of struggle is necessary to persist in the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era, is necessary to enhancing a political mindset, a macro-mindset, a ‘core’ mindset, and a mindset of compliance, to maintaining confidence in the path, confidence in [the Party’s] theories, confidence in the system, confidence in our culture, and to firmly maintaining General Secretary Xi Jinping’s status as the core of the party center and the entire party . . . .
In this passage we can clearly see, despite the thickness of the rhetoric, the link between the protection of Xi Jinping’s “core” status and the reading and summarizing of the Party’s “century-long struggle.” It may be difficult to see what social and political changes lie ahead for China. But a new resolution re-framing the Party’s history is not difficult to foresee – and history has certainly shown that such political acts can have profound implications.
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Who is Li Guangman?
Li Guangman has described himself as a columnist for CWZG.cn (察网) – which describes itself on its Weibo account as“the most influential patriotic portal in the country,” despite the fact that its URL seems inactive – and as an editor and freelance journalist. He also claims to be involved with the Kunlunce Research Center (昆仑策研究院), an online platform that claims association with the likes of political scientist Zhang Weiwei (张为为), who led the June collective study session of China’s Politburo, and Guo Songmin (郭松民), a leftist commentator and former air force pilot who has repeatedly raged against “historical nihilists.”
Talk of wealth redistribution is in the air in China. And two words, “common prosperity,” uttered by Xi Jinping earlier this month at a meeting of the senior commission responsible for economic coordination, have condensed hopes and fears over the changes to come.
The phrase “common prosperity,” or gongtong fuyu (共同富裕), was given prominence in the media coverage that attended the August 17 meeting of the Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs ( 中央财经委员会). Both the headline of the official Xinhua release coming out of the meeting and the lower-third text during the evening broadcast of CCTV’s Xinwen Lianbo (新闻联播) included the newly significant words, imbedded in the longer phrase “promoting common prosperity in high-level development” (在高质量发展中促进共同富裕).
As Bloomberg noted in a recent report on “common prosperity,” however, Xi Jinping’s use of the phrase has soared this year, well before the August meeting, reflecting his stated commitment to addressing income disparity in China, which has come with efforts to restrain “unreasonable income” and to encourage the super-rich to give back to society.
Bloomberg’s conclusions on the basis of Xi’s speeches are borne out again when we look at use of “common prosperity” in the CCP’s official People’s Daily newspaper. The graph below shows the number of articles in the newspaper since January 2020 that use the term “common prosperity” in the headline.
SOURCE: People’s Daily Database.
But the phrase “common prosperity” is much older than the recent wave of attention might seem to indicate. So where does the phrase “common prosperity” originate within the history of CCP discourse, and what can this history tell us about the present struggle to define the direction of China’s development?
Collective Resources for Common Prosperity
The phrase “common prosperity” first appeared in the People’s Daily on September 25, 1953, as the paper published a list of 65 approved slogans for the commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Slogan number 38 was less a slogan, in fact, than a lengthy spill of exclamations:
Male and female peasants! [We must] work to increase production and save! [We must] work for the fall harvest, reducing losses and doing everything possible to enlarge the harvest! [We must] work at autumn planting, preparing for winter-time production, striving for a rich harvest next year! [We must] work on water conservation, on plowing and sowing deeply, on improving seeds, increasing fertilizer accumulation, and reasonable fertilizer application to increase yield per unit area! . . . . Men and women of the agricultural production mutual support teams! Men and women of the agricultural production cooperatives!
United together, [we must] bring into play the spirit of collectivism, improving productivity, increasing production of grain and other crops, increasing income, striving for lives of common prosperity, according to the principles of willingness and mutual benefit . . . .
The first use of “common prosperity” in the People’s Daily appears in September 1953 in a list of slogans for the PRC’s fourth anniversary.
The first article using “common prosperity” in a headline in the People’s Daily was published on December 12, 1953, part of a series in the paper called “Promoting the General Line to the Peasants” (向农民宣传总路线). The choice before the people was simple, it argued. There were just two possible paths forward. One was capitalism, described as “a road of a few getting rich, while the vast majority are poor and destitute” (资本主义的路是少数人发财、绝大多数贫穷破产的路). The other was of course socialism.
The article, “The Path of Socialism is the Path to Common Prosperity” (社会主义的路是农民共同富裕的路), made clear that “common prosperity” could only happen through collective ownership, meaning that the resources of production – including land, large farm equipment, major livestock and so on – were held in common. By the end of 1952, land reforms in the young People’s Republic of China had nearly been completed, and preparations were being made in the leadership for the nation’s first Five-Year Plan, modeled on the planned economy of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
While the main focus on the First Five-Year Plan was to be on industrialization, the CCP also sought to transform the agricultural sector. Collectivization was the order of the future, beginning with the reorganizing of Chinese society into mutual help teams. “When the means of production are publicly owned, there will be no more exploitation of people by people,” said the People’s Daily article. Common prosperity, therefore, meant that resources were held in common.
Therefore, the development of mutual aid teams and cooperatives can not only avoid division among the peasants and avoid the path of capitalism, but can also enable peasants to achieve common prosperity step by step and finally reach a socialist society.
A poster from 1954 reads: “Joining the Mutual Aid Team Means Walking the Road to Common Prosperity.” Image from Chineseposters.net.
On December 16, 1953, four days after the above-mentioned article, the CCP released its “Resolution on the Development of Agricultural Production Cooperatives” (关于发展农业生产合作社的决议), which is often cited as the origin of the term “common prosperity” in its earliest, Maoist, understanding.
Overcoming Egalitarianism
The 1950s dismissal of capitalism as “a road of a few getting rich” when it came to the question of “common prosperity” was turned on its head in the late 1970s, as Deng Xiaoping came to power and pursued a new economic development strategy, “reform and opening,” or gaige kaifang (改革开放). The changes that came in the wake of the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978 brought about a radical rethinking of the notion of “common prosperity” that in fact encouraged “a road of a few getting rich” as a means of enriching all.
The theoretical basis of Deng Xiaoping’s approach to regional economic development was that “common prosperity” could be reached by allowing certain regions and groups of people to get rich first. This idea was summed up best in the phrase “permitting a few peasants to get rich first” (允许一部分农民先富起来), which allowed more industrious and better-connected households to accrue wealth rapidly. Various permutations of this phrase can be found in the official press from around 1979, referring first to “peasants” (农民) and to “commune members” (社员). The phrase became popularized internationally in reference to “people” only after Deng told visiting New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange in March 1986: “Our policy is to let some people and some regions get rich first, in order to drive and help the backward regions, and it is an obligation for the advanced regions to help the backward regions.”
The link between “get rich first” and “common prosperity” was there from the very beginning of the debate over the substance of reform and opening in the late 1970s.
The first mention of the “get rich first” concept in the People’s Daily came on February 19, 1979, in an article to the right of the masthead that reported the remarks of the top leader in Gansu province, following the “good policies” of the central leadership. The leader was reported as having told a group of commune members shortly after the Spring Festival that certain highly productive members “can get rich first, taking first steps forward in agricultural modernization” (可以先富起来，在农业现代化上先走一步).
An article on page one of the People’s Daily on February 19, 1979, right of the masthead, discusses the policy of letting some peasants “get rich first.”
The change in policy was reportedly welcomed by some. “This idea was accepted by more and more teams and became the guiding idea for some team cadres and masses as they made plans and introduced measures to increase productivity in the spring production,” the article said.
But the more controversial aspects were plainly visible in a second article appearing on page two of the same edition of the paper. The article, bearing the headline, “A Portion of Peasants Getting Rich First Should Be Encouraged” (一部分农民先富起来应受到鼓励), sought to argue through the restrictions that had been placed on production in the name of socialism, and to dispel fears that changes in the system of wealth distribution meant a return to capitalism.
After a political potshot against Lin Biao (林彪) and the then much-derided “Gang of Four” (四人帮), the article rejected outright the previous notion of “common prosperity” as spelled out and practiced in the Mao era. “What was originally intended to guide commune members down a road to ‘common prosperity,’ in the end made a rich team poor, and then poorer and poorer,” it said.
An article on page two of the People’s Daily on February 19, 1979, at far left, says some peasants should be encouraged to “get rich first,” and rejects the previously defined path to “common prosperity.”
Far from marking a return to capitalism, empowering the individual forces of production could lead, the article said, to greater wealth for all. The alternative was an empty political devotion to principles of collectivism that dragged everyone down (to paraphrase).
We engage in socialism, not to limit or refuse to meet the needs of individuals, but to constantly improve and enhance the needs of the material and cultural life of the working people. That practice of talking only emptily about politics and shutting up about the material interests of the people is in no way a principle of socialism.
The article suggested that one of the chief problems limiting progress toward prosperity was the failure to recognize that there were in fact gaps in income distribution among peasants in the socialist era. The “Gang of Four” had “used restrictions to keep rich teams down, so that they could not step forward,” thereby depriving socialism of its vitality. Restrictions had been carried out in the name of egalitarianism (平均主义), which was now, clearly, to be a dirty word:
First of all, [we must] acknowledge [income] gaps, oppose egalitarianism, and allow and encourage the allocation of more to members of advanced teams with higher collective income, allowing them to live better, and to take the lead for poorer teams, serving as models and allowing poorer teams to be encouraged and see hope.
Once the “Gang of Four” had been smashed, said the article, communes had begun to “correct the egalitarianism of equality between those who work more and those who work less” (纠正干多干少一个样的平均主义).
Such opposition to egalitarianism, while upholding the wealth-generating vitality of the individual, was part and parcel of the effort in the early reform period to reframe Chinese socialism and set the country on a new path of development that could lead to a “common prosperity” re-defined. All of these concepts could be seen readily in an article appearing on April 15, 1979, in the People’s Daily, bearing the headline: “A Few Getting Rich First and Common Prosperity” (一部分先富裕和共同富裕). The article laid out the CCP’s new approach to “common prosperity” in clear terms:
Our Party’s leading of the peasants along the path of socialism is about ‘making all rural people achieve common prosperity.’ Allowing some peasants to get rich first is a practical policy to achieve common prosperity.
The previous notion of “common prosperity,” panned as a legacy of the period when “Lin Biao and the ‘Gang of Four’ ran amok,” was a stultifying egalitarianism. “[If] we practice egalitarianism, artificially limiting wealth in order to safeguard the poor, taking from the wealthy to make amends for the poor, ‘eating from a big pot of rice,’” the article said, “then the hope of reaching common prosperity under socialism can only be a flower in the mirror, or a pie in a picture.”
A People’s Daily article in December 1979 (共同富裕不是平均富裕) was even more explicit in its drawing of lines: “Socialism is not egalitarianism, and common prosperity does not mean equal wealth,” it said.
Re-redefining “Common Prosperity”
Understand the above history, and Deng-era criticisms of “pie in a picture” notions of egalitarianism, and you can begin to understand the anxieties arising in China today around the re-surfacing of the notion of “common prosperity” over the past year. Deng Xiaoping enabled and empowered new forces of practicality and productivity that led China into an era of unprecedented growth, creating substantial wealth through much of Chinese society.
So Xi’s recent emphasis on wealth redistribution, and his re-opening of the question – visible throughout the Party-state media – of how to promote “common prosperity,” naturally begs the question of whether, and to what extent, he plans to unravel the support for private enterprise that has marked the reform era. Is he a “pie in a picture” idealist, determined, as some investors fear, to drag a vibrant private sector into an ideological campaign for social values over commercial ones? Is he promoting a new egalitarianism?
A Xinhua News Agency special on August 21 bears the headline: “How to Promote Common Prosperity? Here Are the Deployments the General Secretary is Making.”
“Chinese experts have increasingly expounded upon the idea of common prosperity in the media, while Chinese firms scramble to join in the ideological edification,” analyst Sara Hsu wrote recently in The Diplomat. “Whether China’s flourishing private sector can continue to grow under such a heavy hand has yet to be seen.”
Nikkei Asia wrote on August 18, in an article headlined, “Xi Moving Away From ‘Get Rich First,’” that “President Xi Jinping has called for stronger ‘regulation of high incomes’ in the latest sign that a 10-month campaign targeting China’s largest technology companies is rapidly expanding to encompass broader social goals.”
It was concerns like the above, responding to the historical baggage of “common prosperity,” that prompted Han Wenxiu (韩文秀), executive deputy director of the General Office of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, to speak to the issue at a briefing in Beijing earlier this week held by the Central Propaganda Department to promote a published volume called The Historical Mission, Action and Values of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党的历史使命与行动价值). At the briefing, Han sought to allay fears that efforts to tackle inequality might stifle the economy and discourage entrepreneurialism and investment.
“Common prosperity means doing a proper job both of expanding the pie and dividing the pie, on the foundation of the comprehensive building of a moderately prosperous society, energetically promoting high-quality development,” Han said. Invoking Deng’s language about letting a few “get rich first,” he emphasized:
[We] must encourage hard work to get rich, entrepreneurship and innovation to get rich, and permit some people to get rich first, and after getting rich helping others to grow richer. [We] will not ‘kill the rich to help the poor.’
要鼓励勤劳致富、创业创新致富，允许一部分人先富起来，先富带后富、帮后富，不搞 ‘杀富济贫.’
Echoing the language from the late 1970s that rejected egalitarianism as a value inhibiting development, Han described Xi’s concept of “common prosperity” as “not a pure and simple egalitarianism, but a common prosperity in which there is still some disparity.” This in turn was echoed by Xinhua News Agency in an English-language release yesterday in which it stressed that “common prosperity is not egalitarianism.”
Casting about for a scapegoat for what was clearly also a serious internal messaging problem, coming in conjunction with its recent string of sweeping purges of large private enterprises in China, the Xinhua release pointed a finger at reports outside of China, stressing that common prosperity was “by no means robbing the rich to help the poor as misinterpreted by some Western media.”
But what “common prosperity” really means for Xi Jinping and the current leadership of the CCP is a question that will have to remain open for now. There can be little doubt that the changes suggested by the leadership would require, at the very least, as Professor Pan Helin (盘和林), argues in today’s China Youth Daily, require “a change in people’s ideas of self-interest.” And in the absence of a vibrant civic space, such changes to the ideas that underpin society are a difficult, and potentially intrusive, proposition. As with the development of this phrase in the past, the meaning of “common prosperity” will become clearer in future rhetoric as well as in future practice.
In recent days, the Taliban’s seizure of control in Afghanistan and its capital, Kabul, amid the rapid withdrawal of US military forces has topped the international news headlines, prompting concerns about possible reprisals on the local population from the Islamic militant group. In remarks yesterday, UN Secretary General António Guterres said he had received “chilling reports of severe restrictions on human rights” across the country.
For its part, China, which in recent weeks has closely engaged with the Taliban, even hosting a delegation in the city of Tianjin in late July, seemed to embrace developments in Afghanistan. Asked at a press conference yesterday how China viewed events in the country, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying (华春莹) responded by saying, as though change had not been brought about by armed Taliban fighters: “We respect the will and choice of the Afghan people.”
But one of the oddest responses came yesterday in a post by the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party to its official Weibo account. At 3PM Beijing time, the People’s Daily issued a post titled, “What Kind of Organization is the Taliban” (塔利班是什么组织) in which it briefly described the origins and development of the organization. The post suggested the Taliban had arisen as a group comprising “students in refugee camps” (难民营的学生). The Taliban had begun, it said, as a group of around 800 people, but then had grown owing to popular support. “Because it received the support of the poor,” the People’s Daily Weibo post said, “the strength of the Taliban grew dramatically.”
The post quickly rose to the top of the trending posts roster, becoming the fifth-ranked post on Weibo by late afternoon yesterday. It also quickly drew the ire of many internet users in China, who viewed it as a whitewash of an organization with a violent past.
“Why no mention of terrorism?” one user asked in a Weibo comment on the post. “So it’s a good thing to behead people?” Another asked, referring to frequent reports of such conduct from the group in the past. A third user wrote: “You endorse such an anti-human regime. How true to form!”
Referring to the destruction by the Taliban in 2001 of the famed Bamiyan Buddhas, dating back to the 6th and 7th centuries AD, and to the group’s treatment of women, one user raged: “I really don’t understand this. Who deprives women of their legitimate rights as human beings? Who arrests people and beheads them in the streets? Who is the most recognized terrorist organization in the world? Who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas?”
The outpouring of critical comments on the post prompted the People’s Daily to delete the post about four hours after it appeared.
The online controversy was summarized in a WeChat article today called “People’s Daily Post on Taliban Flops in Face of User Comments” (人民日报发博塔利班 网民评论大翻车). The post, however, was deleted with 5-6 hours, leaving only the following warning:
One story has dominated the hearts and minds of people across China today, as harrowing scenes of record flooding in the city of Zhengzhou have proliferated on social media. The scenes shared on WeChat and Weibo in the past 24 hours have been heart-wrenchingly human – passengers trapped in subway cars as the underground floodwaters swell up to their chests, and lifeless bodies lying out on the Shakou Road subway platform.
In rather stark contrast, the story in the Party-state media has been far more subdued, and in some cases backgrounded entirely, as the authorities have sought to downplay the images of chaos.
On the front page of the Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper today scenes of flooding were not to be seen at all. Instead, coverage to the right of the masthead focused on the translation into “many languages” of Xi Jinping’s speech to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Below the masthead, the focus was on revisions to family planning law to legitimize the three-child policy.
The front page of the July 21, 2021, edition of the People’s Daily. Floods? What floods?
Only on page seven did the CCP’s flagship newspaper finally offer coverage of flooding in Henan, focusing on the all-out effort, the images depicting resolute action. The headline gave nothing away: “Henan Suffers Heavy Precipitation, Departments in Many Areas Take Countermeasures: In Rescue Efforts, All Parties Going All Out” (河南遭遇强降水，多地多部门采取应对措施 抢险救援 各方全力以赴).
Page 7 of the July 21, 2021, edition of the People’s Daily. Finally, floods get mention.
At People’s Daily Online the focus today, in the large headline across the top of the photo slideshow, was on Xi Jinping’s “important instructions” concerning rescue efforts in Henan (more on that below). The images were again of rescue teams making preparations. The news stories to the right, however, all dealt with other matters, including the publication of Xi’s CCP centennial speech in foreign language editions, and the third article in a special series on “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”
On the website of the official Xinhua News Agency, this pattern of coverage was repeated. The top headline dealt with Xi’s “important instructions,” coming over the top of a tame image of passengers waiting outside Zhengzhou East Station.
Coverage to the right again dealt with Xi Jinping’s July 1 speech, and with other official matters, such as new regulations from the Cyberspace Administration of China on child internet celebrities (网红儿童) and changes to family planning policy.
Xinhua News Agency headlines Xi’s “important instructions” in the flooding in Henan, but the stories below Xi’s image at right deal with other government matters.
At regional Party papers, coverage of the flood was either downplayed (usually, news of Xi’s “important instructions” only) or not visible at all. One might think that the Henan Daily, the official mouthpiece of the CCP leadership in the province most seriously impacted by the flooding, would be right on top of the story. On the paper’s website, however, the top story today was a propaganda piece for the CCP’s centennial called “A Century of Struggle, Setting Sail on a New Journey (奋斗百年路 启航新征程). This was followed by a special on Xi Jinping called “Keeping the Mandate in Mind, Advancing as Guided by the General Secretary” (牢记嘱托 沿着总书记指引的方向前进).
Did coverage of the flooding follow behind these these propaganda set pieces? No, it did not. The story that followed was about China’s first hybrid motorcycle rolling off the line in Luoyang. Next came a story about a ceremony held for the province’s first styrene project.
The website of Henan Daily, the official CCP mouthpiece in Henan province, covers much else before dealing at all with the disaster immediately at hand.
At Nanfang Daily, the CCP paper in Guangdong province, the translation of Xi Jinping’s centennial speech into foreign languages was the top story. Below that came another article about the Party’s “century-long struggle” for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.” Next came changes to the family planning policy, followed by an article about the response to a typhoon in Guangdong.
The front page of today’s edition of the official Nanfang Daily.
Xi Over Li
Between the lines of this toned-down coverage of the floods in Henan, however, is what is perhaps an important political story in the making – the complete sidelining of Premier Li Keqiang (李克强) in official reporting of the flood response.
It is general practice in the case of major disasters for the general secretary and the premier, the heads of the Party and the government, to jointly “issue important instructions” (重要指示) and “make written comments” (批示). We talk a bit more about these two important phrases in the CMP Dictionary. For example, following a deadly gas explosion in the central Chinese city of Shiyan last month, Xinhua and the People’s Daily reported both Xi Jinping’s “important instructions” and (in a smaller headline just below) Li Keqiang’s “written comments,” reflecting concerted action from these two top leaders.
In the June 14, 2021, edition of the People’s Daily, a report below the masthead mentions both Xi’s “important instructions” and Li’s “written comments” regarding the gas explosion in Shiyan.
It is quite unprecedented today to see Xi Jinping’s “important instructions” on flooding in Henan without mention of Premier Li.
The only mention we have at all of Li today concerns an Executive Meeting of the State Council, which dealt with financial sector opening (金融业开放), and at which the premier also mentioned flood relief efforts. On tonight’s official nightly newscast, Xinwen Lianbo, mention of Li’s meeting came only at around the 15 minute mark.
We would generally always expect Xinhua News Agency reports mentioned “important instructions” to also mention “written comments.” What we might be seeing in the case of the Henan floods is a change to this unwritten rule, which related to Xi Jinping’s dominating position within the Party.
