As Vietnam concluded its Tenth Party Congress, discussion among media in the Asia-Pacific region turned to the country’s progress in the area of political liberalization. Mainland media, however, tersely avoided the topic, focusing instead on the country’s economic goals. This is demonstration once again of China’s determination to push economic reforms while it keeps political […]
On the front page of the September 25 edition of the Chinese Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper, a “double lead headline” (双头条) was used to emphasize two high-level events held in Beijing the previous day. The first was a meeting of the Politburo, the inner circle of 25 Party leaders; the second was a […]
A win for China in the Best Novella category at the 2023 Hugo Awards for science fiction has been lauded by state media amid global controversy over authors being shut out of the Chengdu-hosted event. But many Chinese readers have panned the winning work — and some suspect that its victory is politically too convenient.
In CMP’s latest 20th CCP Congress analysis, David Bandurski reviews some of the misunderstandings and pitfalls that arise from analyzing the keynote reports emerging every five years.
“Ideological and political education,” or sixiang zhengzhi jiaoyu (思想政治教育), often shortened as sizheng (思政), is a subject taught in high schools and universities in China as part of the country’s Patriotic Education Campaign (爱国主义教育) since the early 1990s. While modules for “civic education” (公民教育) exist in other countries, these focus on the preparation and empowerment of citizens to participate in democratic processes. The focus of sizheng is quite different – ensuring that students’ ideas align with the political line, values and discipline of the Chinese Communist Party.
In 2019, the most important change we saw in the political discourse of the Chinese Communist Party was the complete abandonment of the phrase “political system reform,” or zhengzhi tizhi gaige (政治体制改革). The process of political reform in China was jump-started in the 1980s by Deng Xiaoping (邓小平), Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦) and Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳) […]
It was a quiet day yesterday in the pages of the People’s Daily. So quiet, in fact, that the space to the right of the masthead — generally reserved for the Chinese Communist Party’s most stolid commentaries and policy announcements — featured a piece of relative trivia: the release in Brazil of the Portuguese edition of Xi Jinping’s Governance […]
For generations in China, the status of self-effacing soldier Lei Feng as the pre-eminent model of the ideal citizen has seemed unassailable. The myth of Lei Feng has been dusted off and recycled periodically over the decades, the last peak coming in 2013 to mark fifty years since Mao Zedong’s formal launch of the “Learn […]
There were no surprises in Xi Jinping’s speech today commemorating the 40th anniversary of “reform and opening” in China. Many observers closely following the live broadcast of the speech on state television were in agreement that its main points closely tracked Xi’s political report to the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party last […]
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the political meeting that marked the start of China’s long journey of “reform and opening.” For most, change was not immediately evident in the months following this important meeting. Even the term […]
