By QIAN GANG
Keyword: political system reform (政治体制改革)
Ever since the 17th National Congress in 2007, the Chinese Communist Party has shilly-shallied on political reform. For advocates of political reform who see it as essential to China’s continued development the signals emerging from the leadership have brought constant disappointment.
Searching the phrase “political system reform” — which can more simply be translated as “political reform” — in the official People’s Daily since the beginning of the 1980s, one derives a surge and sag pattern that mirrors quite closely the history of the Party’s engagement with this issue. Usage of the phrase surged before and after the 13th National Congress in 1987, during which time political reform was integral to the agenda. But the phrase fell precipitously in the wake of the June Fourth crackdown on protests in 1989, and has never recovered.

This is the historical pattern drawn by Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, whose efforts to promote political reform in the 1980s ultimately failed, and by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, who in the years that followed were unable to move out of the shadow of June Fourth and take steps in the direction of political reform.
But China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, has called repeatedly in recent years for political reform, and popular voices clamoring for political reform have by some measures grown more insistent. The pattern emerging from a search, using China’s domestic Baidu search engine, of uses of “political reform” in news headlines since 2003 is quite different from the People’s Daily pattern above.

The graph shows that before and after the 17th National Congress in 2007, the term “political reform” rose generally in China’s media. These results are for all media, including Party-run newspapers, market-driven metro newspapers and magazines, and websites. The pattern may reflect broader expectations of political reform at the time. In 2009, however, China’s leaders introduced a concerted campaign to propagate the so-called “China Model,” and this clamor was accompanied by new attempts to stifle discussion of political reform. As China proclaimed that it had arrived at a glorious new model of development, it would certainly have been untimely to suggest there was an urgent need to reform.
In 2010, Premier Wen Jiabao made seven important references to political reform in within a period of weeks. He remarked in a CNN interview that “the people’s wishes for, and needs for, democracy and freedom are irresistible.” But another bump in the “political reform” curve followed, and once again, the discussion was quickly muffled.
During the first half of 2012, there were just 31 articles in the People’s Daily making use of the phrase “political reform,” a sign that Party media remained cold on the issue. But online articles using the term during the same period totaled 781, suggesting that the issue of political reform was enjoying a new high, surpassing even the bump in 2010.
Over the years of the Hu-Wen administration, Wen Jiabao has consistently been the leader within the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party who has spoken out most insistently on the issue of political reform. Premier Wen has made eight government work reports to the National People’s Congress since taking office, and in every single one he has spoken of political reform. He has held eight press conferences for each of these NPC sessions, and at all but two of them (2005 and 2006) he has spoken directly about political reform. In 2007, in particular, he was insistent on the issue, exploiting each question raised by reporters as an opportunity to discuss his political reform views.
Fielding a question from a report in 2007, Wen Jiaobao said: “Things like democracy, rule of law, freedom, human rights, equality, universal love, these are not unique to capitalism. These are fruits of civilization that have emerged in common across the world through a long historical process, and they are values humanity pursues in common.” These remarks occasioned a series of fierce exchanges that year between liberal intellectuals and hardliners in China.
In October 2008, Wen Jiabao was interviewed by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria while on a visit to the United States. When Zakaria asked Wen what lessons he had taken from the Tiananmen Square crackdown on protests in 1989, the premier responded: “I believe that while moving ahead with economic reforms, we also need to advance political reforms; as our development is comprehensive in nature, our reform should also be comprehensive.” He added that in addition to greater rule of law, and more oversight exercised by the Chinese people, “We need to gradually improve the democratic election system so that state power will truly belong to the people and state power will be used to serve the people.”

[ABOVE: The China Media Project’s book on Premier Wen Jiabao and the political reform discourse in China in 2010.]
Wen again raised the political reform issue in 2010. In his government work report to the National People’s Congress in March that year, he said: “Without political reform, our economic reforms and modernization drive cannot possibly succeed; fairness and justice are brighter than the sun in the sky.” Five months later, he used the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and other events of moment, such as his presence at the United Nations General Assembly, to further press the issue of political reform. His remarks seemed to become heftier with each utterance. He said on one occasion: “If we run counter to the will of the people, then the road ahead is a blind alley.”
In these instances, what have since become known in China as Wen Jiabao’s “seven mentions of political reform,” the thrust was that without political reform China’s economic reforms, and the gains they have brought, will ultimately fail. Further, he said, the problem of over-concentration of power and insufficient checks and balances had to be dealt with. The ruling party had to abide by the nation’s law and govern according to the Constitution. Finally, he emphasized that fairness and personal freedom were the ultimate measure of democracy and rule of law in a country.
Wen Jiabao’s political reform remarks were supported by many Chinese, but they were resisted by the Party’s upper ranks. The Central Propaganda Department responded by issuing stiff restrictions on coverage and discussion of political reform. On China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo, then just over a year old but already a crucial platform through which millions of Chinese gathered with a thirst for information, both of the long and shortened forms of the term “political reform” were blocked.
Premier Wen was undeterred. On September 14, 2011, attending the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos held in the Chinese city of Dalian, Wen delivered a speech in which he said, “We must continue to promote economic reform and political reform.” He added that China must “adhere to national governance by rule of law, reforming on an institutional level the over-concentration of power and [the problem of] insufficient checks and balances, protecting the democratic rights of the people and their legal rights and benefits, preserving fairness and justice in society.”

[ABOVE: Wen Jiabao addresses the Davos forum in 2009. Image from Flickr.com, shared by the World Economic Forum under Creative Commons license.]
Again, on June 15, 2012, Wen said as he addressed the Counselors’ Office of the State Council: “The goal we are pursuing is not just the development of the economy, but freedom and equality for the people, and comprehensive development.” He spoke again about democracy, both so-called intra-party democracy – essentially, more shared decision-making within the Party – and the “institutionalization and legalization of democracy in the political and social life of the country.”
Wen Jiabao’s most recent appearance was a speech delivered at Tsinghua University on September 14, 2012. Addressing the issue of universal values, Wen said that “democracy and rule of law, fairness and justice, freedom and equality, are ideals and goals for which all of humankind were striving.” He again called on China to be “unswerving in carrying out political reform, developing socialist democracy and rule of law, promoting social fairness and justice, and realizing freedom and equality for all.”
The scores of speeches in which Wen Jiabao has addressed political reform during his 10 years in office have come to form a kind of peculiar garden within the terrain of contemporary politics. Within the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, he has gone the farthest in voicing his hopes and expectations for political reform. Based on his remarks, his political ideals can be distilled by two simple ideas: protecting civil rights and checking government power. While Wen’s ideas have met resistance at every turn, the Chinese media have done their utmost, against the odds, to utilize and pass along these “Wen-style utterances”:

[ABOVE: A headline on the front page of the March 15, 2012, edition of Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post reads: “Reform Requires the Awakening and Support of the People.”
On May 14, 2012, the People’s Daily devoted an entire page to a special series of articles under the main headline, “Advancing Steadily on Political Reform.” The series purported to catalogue China’s progress on political reform since the 16th National Congress in 2002, the year Hu Jintao stepped into the presidency. There was nothing at all momentous about the content. Most interesting, however, was the page’s design, in which a pair of phrases were emphasized boldly with a traditional block-style print. “Protecting rights,” read the first. “Checking power,” read the second. Whatever the back-story on this People’s Daily page, this pairing of phrases was distinctly Wen.

[ABOVE: The May 14, 2012, edition of the People’s Daily. The birth of a new pair of watchwords?]
One important, recurring idea in Wen Jiabao’s remarks on political reform has been that the Party must act within the scope of China’s Constitution and its laws. This idea, acting within the law, first appeared in Zhao Ziyang’s political report to the 13th National Congress in 1987. It has since traveled an uneven road, disappearing in the report to the 14th National Congress in 1992, reappearing with newfound emphasis at the 15th National Congress in 1998, disappearing yet again five years later, and finally re-emerging in 2007 in Hu Jintao’s report to the 17th National Congress.
At the Summer Davos in 2011, Wen Jiabao said: “The most important task of a ruling party is to handle matters according to the constitution and laws, operating strictly within the scope of laws and the constitution. This means we must change the Party’s proxy control of government affairs, and the state of absolutization and over-concentration of power.”
One thing to watch at the 18th National Congress will be the leadership’s position on governance and law. Will the political report emphasize the idea that the Party must operate within the law, or will this phrase once again do a disappearing act?
Another political catchphrase that has become a familiar “Wen-style utterance” is “judicial independence,” or sifa duli. In fact, judicial independence is not a particularly sensitive phrase in China’s media. Every political report since 1987 has incorporated the concept of judicial independence, though the specific phrasing has differed in every case, and sifa duli has not expressly been used. On April 14, 2011, in a speech to newly-appointed members of the Counselors’ Office of the State Council, Wen Jiabao said: “We must uphold the rule of law, building a socialist nation of rule of law, in particular ensuring judicial independence and fairness.”
This is another watchword to watch closely at the 18th National Congress. Is it possible that “judicial independence,” or sifa duli, could sneak into the political report?
President Hu Jintao is far more ambiguous than Premier Wen Jiabao on the issue of political reform. While Hu Jintao has mentioned political reform, it is important to note that in the 13 plenary sessions of the Central Committee he has convened since coming into office, he has not once put political reform on the agenda for a “topic discussion”, or zhuanti taolun. In all his most important documents and speeches — from his “decision” on building a harmonious society in 2006, to his July 23, 2012, speech during a topic discussion with provincial-level leaders — Hu Jintao’s remarks on political reform have occasioned disappointment.
Hu Jintao has avoided singling out the issue of political reform. He has tended to lump political, economic, social and cultural reform together, so that no single priority is emphasized, and political reform fades into the larger pattern. Most importantly, Hu has said again and again that political reforms “must be unified with adherence to the leadership of the Party, the people as the masters of the country and governing the country by rule of law.” This phrase, a legacy of the Jiang Zemin era, is in fact meant to restrain political reform.
In my analysis of Hu Jintao’s political report at the 17th National Congress in 2007 I found that Hu had actually backpedaled on political reform. The principal sign of this was that the phrase “political reform” was not included in a section heading in the report, the first time this had happened since the 13th National Congress in 1987. Secondly, Hu Jintao made more frequent use of the “Four Basic Principles” in his own report than Jiang Zemin had in his report to the 16th National Congress in 2002.
The following graph can serve as a benchmark against which to measure “political reform” as it appears in the political report to the 18th National Congress.

Is there hope for political reform in China? This is of course a complex question. But the watchwords used in the political report to the 18th National Congress may give us some clue to related trends within the Party leadership. Will the phrase “political reform” appear more frequently, or more prominently, than it did in 2007? And will “Wen-style utterances” like “judicial independence” make their way into the Party agenda?

After two days of violent anti-Japanese protests in China stemming from a territorial dispute over a chain of islands in the East China Sea, media in China are now calling on the public to remain calm and “rational,” apparently concerned about how violence at home might play internationally over the sovereignty issue.
Over the weekend, hundreds of protesters surrounded Japan’s embassy in Beijing, some reports calling the action peaceful and others saying protesters had tried to break through police barricades. Protesters in the northern Chinese city of Qingdao set fire to a factory run by Japan’s Panasonic as well as a Toyota dealership. Protests turned violent in other cities too, with police in the southern city of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong, reportedly dispersing crowds with tear gas.
Images of protests across the country proliferated on Chinese social media as well. In this photo, shared on the popular Sina Weibo platform, protesters in Inner Mongolia are shown marching with a banner that reads: “Even if all China becomes a grave, we must kill every Japanese” (哪怕华夏遍地坟, 也要杀光日本人).

[ABOVE: Protesters in China’s Inner Mongolia region march with a banner pledging to kill Japanese.]
An editorial on the front page of today’s official People’s Daily newspaper had the audacity to suggest Chinese protesters “did not lose restraint” and had “remained calm.” But the editorial, which emphasized the need for “civilized” and law-abiding conduct as Chinese asserted their territorial sovereignty, was at the same time a tacit admission that events over the weekend had been anything but calm.

[ABOVE: In this photo of anti-Japanese protests in China posted to Sina Weibo, a Chinese protester holds a sign that reads, “Oppose Violence, Love Your Country Rationally.”]
This week’s push for “rational patriotism,” mirrored also in commercial media like Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily, is a reminder once again of the razor’s edge China’s Communist Party leadership has walked in mobilizing jingoistic nationalism to legitimize its power, in the process creating further sources of domestic unrest that can be difficult to manage politically.
A full translation of the editorial in today’s People’s Daily follows:

“Use Civilization and Rule of Law to Gather the Force of Patriotism” (用文明法治凝聚爱国力量)
September 17, 2012
People’s Daily
“The Diaoyu Islands are China’s!” For days now, people in places across the country have shouted this across the waves of the East China Sea. In their fury they did not lose restraint, in their enthusiasm they remained moderate, expressing themselves in a civilized and orderly manner, voicing the determination of the Chinese people in protecting their sovereign territory, forcefully opposing the drama perpetrated by the Japanese government in “purchasing” the Diaoyu Islands, and winning the respect and understanding of the international community.
When the sovereign territory of the Mother Country is subjected to provocation, our anger is irrepressible, and the enthusiasm of the youth of China must have release. These patriotic feelings are precious, and they must be cherished and protected. But, a civilized attitude abiding by rule of law should be the basic conduct of the citizenry. Doing damage to the legal property of one’s countrymen and venting one’s anger on the heads of Japanese citizens in China is extremely inappropriate.
Protection of sovereign national territory of course requires fierce assertion, but at the same time it demands that we act in a civilized manner and abide by the law. In today’s China, we are far from the era of weakness and poverty, no longer a China carved up by others at will. Protecting national interests, acting in a civilized manner and giving priority to rule of law, these are the marks of a powerful country and crucial guarantees of national revival. We must use civilization and rule of law to gather the force of patriotism, transforming our ardent love for our nation into the driving force of a powerful country. In today’s globalized world, we should let the world see a China that is developing peacefully, in which governance is progressing and the character of the people is rising. Therefore, safeguarding our national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and protecting the dignity of our people, requires that we act in a civilized manner and abide by rule of law, remaining cool and calm, expressing our patriotism in a legal and orderly way.

By QIAN GANG
Keyword: stability preservation (维护稳定/维稳)
On July 21, 2012, torrential rains devastated China’s capital, Beijing. The ensuing floods claimed at least 77 lives, according to official numbers. The tragedy, which state media were quick to characterize as a “natural disaster,” in fact exposed the extreme deficiencies of Beijing’s municipal administration. In a panic, leaders leapt onto the defensive, and the phrase “stability preservation” came leaping into the headlines:

[ABOVE: The front page of the July 23, 2012, edition of the official Beijing Daily. The top headline reads: “The Focus of Work Has Now Shifted To Stability Preservation in the Wake of Disaster Relief.”]
The two-character Chinese phrase weiwen is an abbreviated form of the full phrase, weihu wending, meaning to preserve or safeguard stability. The Chinese Communist Party has many such shortened phrases, compact verbalisms that pack a political punch, invoking whole histories of policy and practice. For those versed in China’s political vocabulary, these are important shibboleths.
In the phrase “stability preservation,” stability is a coded reference to social disorder — which is to say, social disorder must be avoided at all cost.
In the chaos that followed the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong talked about the need for “tranquility and unity.” In the 1980s, as social tensions became more acute, Deng Xiaoping first used the word “tranquility,” or “anding,” and later opted instead for “stability,” or “wending.”
Meeting with U.S. President George H.W. Bush on February 26, 1989, Deng Xiaoping said: “Before everything else, China’s problems require stability.” In the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown just over three months later, Deng again stressed this point in what quickly became a hardened phrase: “Stability is of overriding importance.”
The phrase “wending yadao yiqie” could also be translated as “stability above everything else.” This term’s coming of age, you might say, was heralded when it became a headline in the People’s Daily on the one-year anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown in 1990.

[ABOVE: In June 1990 the Party’s official People’s Daily includes the phrase “stability above everything else” in a headline.]
“Stability above everything else” is a slogan much beloved by Party leaders associated with the conservative faction, or baoshoupai, who oppose reforms in China. When Deng Xiaoping used this phrase, however, he used it in conjunction with his advocacy of reform and development.
When Jiang Zemin passed the baton on to Hu Jintao in 2002, a careful balance of these three ideas — stability, reform and development — was maintained. The full phrase, “Stability above everything else,” this hard-edged watchword, did not appear at all in either of Jiang Zemin’s political reports to the 14th and 15th national congresses in 1992 and 1997. The phrase did sneak into the political report to the 16th National Congress in 2002, the year when Hu Jintao took the presidency, but it was dropped again in the political report five years later.
Unrest in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China’s remote northwest, in the summer of 2009 brought a momentary change in this watchword’s fortunes. For some time after Urumqi, “Stability above everything else” made a strong showing in China’s media.
Over time, the phrase “stability preservation” has been used with greater regularity in the Chinese media. From June 1989 to July 2012, there were three peaks in the use of the phrase. The first was in 1990, the year after the Tiananmen crackdown. The second came in 1999, as the Party launched a concerted campaign against the Falun Gong religious sect. Finally, there was peak in use in 2009, which marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Terms like “stability preservation” and “incident handling”, or chutu, short for “handling sudden-breaking incidents” (such as mass riots), are now used as a matter of routine by armed police divisions in China. The shortened form of “stability preservation,” weiwen, was used for the first time in the official People’s Daily in 2002, in the explanation accompanying a photograph of armed police. The term reached new heights of popularity in 2008 and 2009, and has maintained a high rate of use in China’s media ever since.
In this way, a term that had been used routinely only inside China’s police system became one of the Party’s key political watchwords. There are now many related buzzwords, phrases like “stability preservation work,” “stability preservation outlays,” the “stability preservation office,” and “stability preservation teleconference.”
In China’s Hunan province, one county has even come up with a “stability preservation security deposit.” Party leaders throughout the county now have 150 yuan withheld from their monthly wages, and if there are no so-called “mass incidents,” or cases of unrest, on their watch, this money is paid to the officials at year’s end.
As the phrase “stability preservation” has risen in prominence, so has the influence of officials associated with the Central Politics and Law Commission, the Party organization that takes charge of political and legal affairs in the country.
The People’s Daily has even applied the term “stability preservation” to international affairs, as in this article dealing with the recent Libyan civil war, which bears the headline: “Libya Faces ‘Stability Preservation’ Challenge.”

[ABOVE: A headline in the official People’s Daily uses the Party notion of “stability preservation” to frame unrest in Libya.]
Some within China have referred to the 10 years of President Hu Jintao’s leadership as the “stability preservation decade.” During these years, political reform has stalled as an agenda item, and powerful interest groups have hijacked politics and the economy.
As China’s national strength has advanced, China’s population at large has paid a heavy toll. Social inequality in China has worsened substantially. Facing a growing tide of rights-defense movements by disenfranchised Chinese, the response by Party authorities has been to apply pressure on top of pressure. This has sometimes been called “maintaining a high-pressure environment.” Its net result has been a constant outbreak of violent incidents. When thousands of residents in the Sichuanese city of Shifang took to the streets in July 2012 to protest the building of a copper alloy plant close to residential areas, the local government responded by mobilizing armed police, who sought to clear the streets in tightly advancing formations, even firing stun grenades at protesters.
When Hu Jintao came to power in 2002, China was already experiencing a worsening social crisis. In 2004, President Hu offered a rhetorical response to growing internal instability, trumpeting what he called a “harmonious society.” For some time, this new watchword burgeoned, becoming visible everywhere in the Party’s propaganda. But by 2007 it was already on the decline, as “stability preservation” made its rapid ascent. Here you can see both terms as they appeared in the People’s Daily from 2003.

Together, these contrasting pictures of the “harmonious society” and “stability preservation” form a portrait of the real predicament facing President Hu Jintao. A “harmonious society” may be a pleasing idea, but it’s the iron will behind “stability preservation” that packs the real punch. This fact was brought home for many Chinese internet users by the following photograph in which men in fatigues march bearing a red sign that reads: “Building a Harmonious Society.” The appended caption, as the photo was shared online, became: “Who Would Dare Be Unharmonious?”

[ABOVE: A photograph circulated widely on Sina Weibo, a leading social media platform in China, depicting riot police marching with a red sign that reads, “Building a Harmonious Society.”]
In the midst of the 2012 Bo Xilai Incident, as the actions of police in the city of Chongqing — hitherto treated as principled, resolute and efficient heroes — were scrutinized and tainted with allegations of corruption, China’s entire police bureaucracy was subjected to criticism. This leaves open the question of how influential the forces of “stability preservation” will remain within the mix of China’s Party politics. We will have to wait and see how the 18th National Congress deals with the issue of “stability preservation.” In terms of Party watchwords, this leaves us with two important questions:
1. Will the phrase “stability is of overriding importance” appear in the political report?
2. Will the phrase “stability preservation” appear in the political report?
If these terms do appear, this will signal that the Party intends to perpetuate the political line of “stability preservation,” and maintain an atmosphere of high pressure on all perceived forms of unrest, regardless of how legitimate the claims of those carrying out rights defense may be. If these terms do not appear in the political report, the question will be how the report deals with the agenda of social stability, and whether there are watchwords of change to read between the lines.

Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily reports today that Peng Hong (彭洪), a Chongqing resident sentenced to two years of re-education through labor in 2009 for an online re-posting of a satirical cartoon about the city’s anti-crime campaign, has received a formal document annulling his original sentence. The government’s decision, dated September 7, 2012, comes almost exactly one year after Peng’s release from a labor facility on September 10, 2011.
Peng Hong posted a cartoon titled “Umbrella of Protection” (保护伞) to China’s popular Tianya chat forum in September 2009, in the midst of Bo Xilai‘s well-publicized campaign against crime in Chongqing. The cartoon depicted a man (apparently a criminal) running with a knife in one hand while holding an umbrella in the other hand that is topped with the head of a policeman and emblazoned with a golden coin and a government seal. The clear implication was the the anti-crime campaign was a sham in which certain criminals were actually receiving protection from the government, police and financial interests.
Peng Hong’s online post came at a highly sensitive time, as former Chongqing police chief Wen Qiang — eventually tried and executed — faced corruption charges. Chongqing authorities accused Peng with defamation (诽谤) for re-posting the critical cartoon and sentenced him to two years of re-education through labor.

[ABOVE: The cartoon posted to Tianya by Peng Hong in September 2009, shared widely on Sina Weibo today.]
The decision to annul Peng Hong’s original sentence, handed down by Chongqing’s Re-education Through Labor Committee (劳动教养委员会), states that is “was determined through re-investigation that the original decision on Peng Hong’s re-education through labor was inappropriate.”
Peng Hong received legal aid in his case from rights defense lawyer Pu Zhiqiang (蒲志强), a former CMP fellow.

The following post by Hong Kong columnist Ko Waiyin (高慧然) about how protests against “national education” curriculum in Hong Kong are still going on despite the government backing down on plans to make the curriculum mandatory, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 9:21 p.m. yesterday, September 11, 2012. Ko currently has more than 20,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

Hong Kong people are so worthy of pride!.

The post was a comment made to another post, not deleted as of 12:58 p.m. Wednesday, that reads: “It’s 33 degrees outside, and so many people! Protests are still going on.”
The original post shares an image of ongoing protests against “national education” in Hong Kong:

Why was Ko’s post deleted while the original post with a photograph of the protests was not? Possibly because while Ko has more than 20,000 followers, the original poster has less than 3,000.
Ko’s original Chinese-language post follows:

香港人，太值得驕傲！

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

By QIAN GANG
Keywords: The Four Basic Principles and Mao Zedong Thought (四项基本原则/毛泽东思想)
What political trends can we expect to unfold during the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, a once-in-a-decade leadership transition that will set the tone for China’s domestic political environment for years to come? Will political reform cower in the wings, barely visible? Or will it stride out to center stage?
Certainly, China’s political battles are complicated affairs, waged largely behind the scenes, backstage, between flesh-and-blood Party leaders with their own, competing agendas and ideological proclivities. But the language of China’s Party politics, the script that emerges as “consensus” from this backstage melee, can offer us important clues to emerging trends, as well as to the strength of regressive political impulses. China’s political script is rewritten every five years, taking shape in the “political report” delivered at each National Congress.
On the question of political reform, there is one important terminology in particular we should remain alert to if we hope to read, between the lines as it were, the larger political climate of the 18th National Congress: the “Four Basic Principles,” or sixiang jiben yuanze (四项基本原则).

[ABOVE: The site in Shanghai where the Party’s 1st National Congress was held in 1921, by Peter Verkhovensky posted to Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]
If this term continues to appear in the political report to the 18th National Congress, it is possible to say with some certainty that, barring shifts of a more dramatic nature, there is little hope or expectation for substantive political reform. By the same token, a strong showing in the political report for this buzzword would signal an unfortunate turnabout, a backsliding, on the issue of political reform. But the vanishing of the term altogether would be the most important signpost for political reform.
So where does this term, the “Four Basic Principles,” come from? And what does it mean?
On March 30, 1979, Deng Xiaoping marked out the boundaries for a process of reform that had just begun. He said:

First, we must adhere to the socialist path; second, we must adhere to a dictatorship of the proletariat; third, we must adhere to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party; fourth, we must adhere to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Basic Principles” formed the very heart of China’s political orthodoxy. However, they later became the most effective tool by which those on China’s extreme political left opposed Deng’s policy of reform and opening. Deng Xiaoping’s political line in the 1980s was referred to also as the “third plenary political line” (established, that is, during the third plenary session of the 11th National Congress, held in 1978).

[ABOVE: A propaganda poster for the “Four Basic Principles” posted to China’s internet.]
In the ideological struggles that marked the first half of the 1980s, General Secretary Hu Yaobang, a strong advocate of economic and political reform, was sharply criticized by the chief proponents of the left for contravening the Four Basic Principles. Hu was eventually forced to resign his position as General Secretary, opponents claiming his light-handed approach had contributed to public demonstrations in 1987 calling for greater economic and political liberalization. Two years later, it was again the truncheon of the Four Basic Principles that leftists wielded to force the resignation of Hu Yaobang’s successor, Zhao Ziyang, in the aftermath of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Incident. As a result, Deng Xiaoping lost a capable ally.
Hu and Zhao were both conscientious actors for political reform. But as the veteran Xinhua News Agency reporter Yang Jisheng wrote in his chronicle of that time, Political Struggle in the Era of Reform: “The first issue to be resolved in terms of political reform is checks and balances on power. Checks and balances on power would mean upsetting the current leadership system. In both cases, the removal of these general secretaries was prompted by [the struggle over] political reform. In the conflict between the Four Basic Principles and political reform, there was no room at all for either of them to maneuver.”
These two terms, the “Four Basic Principles” and “political system reforms” – the more drawn out term in Chinese for political reform – were locked in fierce opposition throughout the 1980s. In the Party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, we can still glimpse the fossil evidence of this tension.

In 1988, when the political reform movement was reaching its zenith, the Four Basic Principles were in rapid retreat, as can be seen from the graph above, which plots occurrences of each term in the People’s Daily over time. In 1989 the situation was reversed. But we can also see that by the 1990s both terms were in decline, political reform bottoming out by 1990, and the Four Basic Principles joining it at the bottom in 1993, by which time the country was preoccupied with an unprecedented economic acceleration.
In China’s media today the Four Basic Principles occur with very low frequency. In the 10 years since President Hu Jintao came to power, the term has appeared in headlines in the People’s Daily on just three occasions – in 2004, 2007 and 2008.
The last instance came as the Party commemorated the 30th anniversary of China’s policy of economic reform and opening. The second instance came as the newspaper unpacked President Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th National Congress of the CCP in 2007, in which he mentioned the Four Basic Principles.
But the most important case by far was the first one, in 2004. This was the handiwork of one of the most prominent members of China’s Maoist faction, Chen Kuiyuan (陈奎元), the head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Commemorating the centennial of Deng Xiaoping’s birth that year, on August 22, Chen Kuiyuan remarked: “The adherence to the Four Basic Principles is one of Deng Xiaoping’s greatest contributions to the socialist cause.” In a clever stroke of leftist spin, Chen was suggesting that the greatest legacy of the man who has been called the architect of China’s economic rise, was not reform, but in fact the political orthodoxy of the Four Basic Principles.

[ABOVE: The People’s Daily runs an article by Chen Kuiyuan in which he says the Four Basic Principles were Deng Xiaoping’s greatest contribution to the socialist cause.]
Here is how the term Four Basic Principles has played out in successive political reports from the 11th National Congress in 1977 to the 17th National Congress in 2007:

The 13th National Congress in 1987 was the meeting at which political reform became a part of the agenda. But Hu Yaobang’s resignation had come at the beginning of that year, and his successor, Zhao Ziyang, had to waver his way across a political tightrope. He did not dare shortchange the Four Basic Principles and risk drawing fire from his political opponents. So the term peaked just as political reform was in its inception as an issue.
The term came up just once in President Jiang Zemin’s report to the 15th National Congress in 1997, as a nod of acknowledgement, but without particular emphasis. One question remains: why, in President Hu Jintao’s report to the 17th National Congress in 2007, did usage of the Four Basic Principles surpass both of the previous political reports, those in 1997 and 2002?
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party long ago scrapped the first two of the Four Basic Principles. China would “adhere to the socialist path,” said Deng Xiaoping. But in no respect is “socialism” in China today similar to socialism as Party leaders would have understood it when Deng uttered these principles in 1979. Before the opening and reform policy was initiated, China’s economic system was a system of Soviet-style planning combined with Mao Zedong-style command economics. By the standards of the day, today’s China would no doubt be regarded as having taken the capitalist road.
In the second of his Four Basic Principles, Deng Xiaoping said China would “adhere to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” But this idea has, not unlike the original notion of socialism, become something of an anachronism with the Party. It has virtually disappeared from use, except in rare instances where it is raised as a matter of historical fact. The last use of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a matter of current relevance in the official People’s Daily newspaper, in fact, was the August 2004 article by Chen Kuiyuan, the same one I alluded to above.
The current term of favor, replacing “dictatorship of the proletariat,” is “people’s democratic dictatorship,” or renmin minzhu zhuanzheng. And even this term is something of a rarity these days. Here I have graphed the frequency of the use of the term “dictatorship” in successive political reports.

As readers can readily see, use of the term “dictatorship” fell dramatically after the 11th National Congress, held in August 1977, and has declined ever since.
Of the remaining two of Deng Xiaoping’s Four Basic Principles, the “leadership of the Chinese Communist Party” remains unshaken and unchanged. The last, “Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought,” is a matter for further study and scrutiny. In particular, “Mao Zedong Thought,” this deep-red expression, is like a terminological zombie, dead in one sense but in another refusing to die, vested with so much political baggage that it still haunts China’s politics. Clearly, for many Party chieftains this term continues to have utility.
The term Mao Zedong Thought originated with the Party’s 7th National Congress in 1945. In 1956, as the Communist International criticized the cult of personality in which the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had enveloped himself, it seemed untimely to harp on the political philosophy of China’s own personal dictator; Mao Zedong Thought was dropped at the 8th National Congress in September 1956. But after the Lushan Conference in 1959, the term resurfaced in the People’s Daily. This marked a direct and concerted campaign to preserve Mao’s moral and political authority following the calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine.
Under the direction of Marshal Lin Biao, the People’s Liberation Army took the vanguard in “holding high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought.” Before the onset of the Cultural Revolution, the term was already running hot in the Party newspapers. During the Cultural Revolution, the term blazed hotter than the sun in the sky, and more than a few lives were scorched by this ideological weapon, jailed and even killed for “opposing Mao Zedong Thought.”
After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party cautiously questioned and redressed the errors of Mao Zedong. Many of the most integral aspects of Mao Zedong Thought — the people’s communes, class struggle, continuing revolution — were scrapped. But the hardened shell of Mao Zedong Thought stubbornly remained, venerated by some. Here is how the term has fared from the 11th National Congress in 1977 to the 17th National Congress in 2007:

During the 11th and 12th National Congresses in 1977 and 1982 respectively, Mao Zedong Thought continued to make a strong showing. But as the political reform agenda was kick-started at the 13th National Congress in 1987, the term sank to an historic low. For Maoists within the Party, the chaos that followed the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing on June 4, 1989, was an opportunity to restore their leftist agenda; the term Mao Zedong Thought made a comeback in the 1990s, rising steadily through to the 15th National Congress in 1997. In 2002, as he handed the presidency over to Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin tried to shift China’s politics to the right, and Mao Zedong Thought was played down somewhat in that year’s political report. Five years later, in Hu Jintao’s report to the 17th National Congress, the term trended upward yet again.
The uptick of Mao Zedong Thought in the 2007 political report might have been dismissed as incidental. But there were other signs too. In 2009, a mass military procession, full of pomp and pageantry, was planned to commemorate the Party’s 60th anniversary. Initially, there were to be three major parade groups eulogizing the Party leaders of the reform era — Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Three days before the celebrations, however, a fourth “Mao Zedong Thought parade column” was added to the mix. For those awaiting a renewed political reform agenda, the sudden appearance of this parade column was like a thunder roll, signaling stormy days ahead.

President Hu Jintao seems to have been even more tolerant of China’s Maoist left than his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, and has made no apparent attempts to stay the leftists’ advance. The following is a graph of occurrences of “Mao Zedong Thought” in the People’s Daily during Hu Jintao’s term in office:

The 2011 peak holds not just for the Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, but also for its robust online portal, People’s Daily Online, where occurrences of Mao Zedong Thought in 2011 were higher than in the previous three years. This is a reflection of the din of so-called red propaganda, which was driven to a national climax in 2011 by the “red song” campaign of prominent Party “princeling” Bo Xilai, then a top Party leader in the city of Chongqing.
Since the dramatic fall of Bo Xilai in 2012, the term Mao Zedong Thought has cooled somewhat in China’s official Party media. In the first half of 2012, the term appeared 67 times in the People’s Daily (against 227 times for all of 2011). But there are no signs that the term is going away.
On July 12, 2012, China’s Central Party School held a commencement ceremony at which Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao’s presumed successor, delivered the address. According to the official news report from the People’s Daily, the graduates had, thanks to their activities at the school, “deepened their study and understanding of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and particularly the theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Not long after, on July 23, President Hu Jintao addressed a seminar of provincial-level Party cadres and spoke of the “guidance” of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought.
Usage of the term Four Basic Principles by senior Party officials today is roughly the same as the term Mao Zedong Thought. Both are used sparingly, but are still in use. A search of the People’s Daily from the 17th National Congress in 2007 up to August 2012 shows that Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, He Guoqiang and Xi Jinping have all used the term Four Basic Principles. Premier Wen Jiabao has made many public speeches during this time, but not once since 2008 has he used Four Basic Principles or Mao Zedong Thought.
The Four Basic Principles (including Mao Zedong Thought) is an important measuring stick by which we can observe the political trends of the 18th National Congress. Before the 17th National Congress in 2007, many Chinese had hoped for the possibility of political reform. I wrote in an essay for Hong Kong’s Yazhou Zhoukan at the time: “Hu Jintao and his succession team have already come to the great door of political reform. The question of whether they can step over the threshold of history will be answered when we know whether their feet are still shackled by the Four Basic Principles.”
As it turned out, the Four Basic Principles and Mao Zedong Thought were both present in Hu Jintao’s political report, and in fact were used more frequently than in the political report five years earlier. On this basis, I concluded that “we cannot harbor romantic thoughts about the possibility of political reform in the next five years.” My conclusion has been borne out by political realities over the past few years. Now, once again, we can apply this measuring stick to see what possibilities the next five years might hold.

The following post by China Media Project director Qian Gang (钱钢) about The China Model, a text introduced in Hong Kong recently as part of a proposed “national education” curriculum, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 10 p.m. yesterday, September 9, 2012. Qian Gang currently has more than 1.2 million followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

The blasting fuse that touched off a mighty ruckus over education in Hong Kong was this teaching text. The preparation was entrusted to the National Education Center, which is subsidized by the SAR government (reports have said it received one million in funding), and the center then outsourced its production to Hong Kong Baptist University, which in turn outsourced it again — please note, this time it was outsourced to Beijing Normal University. This is really surprising! This sort of controversial content wouldn’t even make it into teaching materials in mainland primary and secondary schools. The “China Model” camp is allied with old leftists in Hong Kong, and they are a danger to Hong Kong that people should really be alert to.

The post, which received more than 4,000 re-posts and 1,140 comments before being deleted, is accompanied by an image of the cover of The China Model.

Qian Gang’s original Chinese-language post follows:

在香港引起国民教育轩然大波的导火线，是这本教材。特区政府资助的国民教育服务中心承接编写（报道说花费百万），外判给浸会大学，然后再次外判——请注意，这次是外判了北师大。实在令人吃惊，这种争议性内容，在内地中小学都不会成为教材。“中国模式”派和香港老左联手，他们对香港的祸害值得警惕。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

In a post yesterday to our Anti-Social List, we shared a deleted Weibo from Chow Po Chung (周保松), a professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chow’s deleted post included an essay in text-as-image form that is purported to have been written by a mainland student reflecting back on 16 years of “patriotic education.”
In his deleted post, Professor Chow encouraged Weibo users to read the essay quickly, before it was removed by internet censors. However, while many posts including the essay have indeed been removed — particularly from scholars and journalists with a strong following on Weibo — it is still being shared on Chinese social media. It was still available here, and here, for example, at the time of this post.

[ABOVE: Protestors in Hong Kong voice opposition to a proposed “national education” curriculum many call “brainwashing”. The protest banner reads: “My mommy teaches me kindheartedness and justice. The Chinese Communist Party teaches me to bury my conscience.” Photo by Ansel Ma, available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]
A partial translation of the essay, and interesting addition to the ongoing debate over a proposed “national education” curriculum in Hong Kong, follows:

Why do I oppose national education? This question is perhaps not a real question, but it nevertheless prompted me to consider it at some length. As an ordinary person without power or money, my parents had no opportunity to send me to an international school or pack me off overseas. Therefore, from primary school all the way to university, like the vast majority of ordinary Chinese students, I spent 16 years in a public school.
National education was a shadow that followed me throughout those 16 years. Nevertheless, it had no affect on me or on my fellows. Among my classmates, not a single person cares about the Chinese Communist Party, not a single person believes that the Chinese Communist Party is supremely great or correct. It seems our 16 years of national education were an utter failure. Well then, is there any real need to oppose national education? The following is my attempt to offer my thoughts on this question from the standpoint of someone who spent 16 years alongside a “great, glorious and correct Party,” educated with the idea of loving the Party and loving the country.
When I was in primary school, we had a class called “Ideas and Morals” (思想道德), about what it meant to be a person with idea and morals, which naturally meant loving the Party, loving the country and loving the people. The language they used was very ambiguous, not like the education materials for national education in Hong Kong right now, but aside from this on every important Party occasion there would be various writing contests, or speech contests, and you were forced to take part. You also you had to extoll and praise the the assessments made by other students of the great achievements of the Party.
In a benighted state we were subjected to “national education” in those days, hearing about the great strategic move that was the Long March (only after studying history at university did I realize that actually this was retreat made after being encircled and suppressed by the Kuomintang); about the glorious exploits of our Party in the anti-Japanese war (again, it was only at university that I learned that it was only the Kuomintang, who had been branded traitors, that had directly engaged the Japanese, and the Party was only back in the rear experimenting with land reform).
Even bombarded again and again with these things, distinguished and obedient young students and cadres though we were, it was only about learning things that had to be on your tongue, and nothing ever entered into our hearts. Why? Because these things were so remote from our lives compared to the other work we had, and in our actual lives we never felt any sense of the new China and the new lives that was being drummed into us [in these classes]. As for our parents, they paid a lot of attention to our Chinese language and mathematics work, but they were noncommittal or even cold about this ostensibly important coursework in patriotic education.
In middle school these classes on ideas and morals became classes on ideas and politics, but the content differed only slightly.
We now had a class director who would often hold on to us for a while after class was dismissed and carry out various forms of ideological education. But for rebellious middle school students these things only elicited greater annoyance, whether over stuff we had to memorize or the babbling nonsense of “Old Woman Marxism-Leninism” (马列老太). Because we, who were just beginning to understand the adult world, were very clear that the class director detained us and forced us to listen to this patriotic education stuff not because she really believed the things she insisted were so important, but because if we did well her credits as a class director would result in a better assessment from the principal, and if the principal had more excellent class directors he could earn political credits with the local educational authorities, and naturally he could then advance as an official and make more money, and then someone in the local education office could then . . . [the pause implies that everyone on up the chain of command benefits] . . . So all the things we were being inculcated with were really about nothing more than our teachers enabling themselves to earn points.
When it came to university, we no longer just had education in ideology and politics — we now had education in situations and policy, serial blasts of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory. But within the university the teachers we most looked down on were the ones who taught these courses. We skipped class, or giggled and chattered all the way through. We ate snack food and watched movies [on our mobiles], or just napped. And when it came to discussion time, when certain students earnestly answer [the teacher’s] questions, we heckled them. But there was nothing these teachers could do, because long before they had lost their dignity as teachers they had lost the students’ respect. We knew only too well that only those with no academic ability would be called upon to teach such things, and their only way was to kiss ass and massage their connections so they could earn such a place in the university.
Having said all this, do I think national education it successful? It could be called a failure, because it even after 16 years . . . not a single person will believe any of it. But it could also be said to be a great success as rarely seen on this earth, because even though everyone knows it’s all a bunch of lies from head to tail, it has managed to persist all these years, repeated from generation to generation.
Is national education something to fear? Actually, all that language written out so clear isn’t really scary, fundamentally speaking. The more extreme they get in propagating it, the funnier it seems. But it is also frightening in another way, because the whole nation is willing to lap up all of these lies. How many students, knowing their fates could be decided on this basis, have answered the topics earnestly, numbly writing all of those pretty words they don’t mean, knowing full well it is all a lie? And how many teachers, knowing these are all lies, have had to teach this as the truth, and even us it to assess students ideologically and morally?
This is the most frightful thing about national education!
Its most frightful aspect isn’t about the words themselves, or about the praising of the Communist Party, rather it’s that it has drummed lying into the very nature of our students, our teachers and our entire educational sphere!

The following post by Chow Po Chung (周保松), a professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 10:40 a.m. today, September 5, 2012. Chow currently has more than 32,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

Because of what has recently been going on in Hong Kong, a mainland friend took to Facebook to write her thoughts about receiving 16 years of ideological and political education. Every word brings tears to the eye. I don’t know how long this [post] will survive, so if you want to read it be quick about it..”

The post shares a text-as-image file of the essay on national education purportedly written by a mainland student. We’ve translated the opening, which is below the file:

Here is a translation of the first paragraph of the essay:

Why do I oppose national education? This question is perhaps not a real question, but it nevertheless prompted me to consider it at some length. As an ordinary person without power or money, my parents had no opportunity to send me to an international school or pack me off overseas. Therefore, from primary school all the way to university, like the vast majority of ordinary Chinese students, I spent 16 years in a public school. National education was a shadow that followed me throughout those 16 years. Nevertheless, it had no affect on me or on my fellows. Among my classmates, not a single person cares about the Chinese Communist Party, not a single person believes that the Chinese Communist Party is supremely great or correct. It seems our 16 years of national education were an utter failure. Well then, is there any real need to oppose national education? The following is my attempt to offer my thoughts on this question from the standpoint of someone who spent 16 years alongside a “great, glorious and correct Party,” educated with the idea of loving the Party and loving the country.

Chow’s original Chinese-language post follows:

因為香港最近發生的事，一位內地朋友在Facebook寫下她對身受的十六年思想政治教育的反思，讀來一字一淚。不知道它能存活太久，所以想讀的要快。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.