1/4/15, "Maoists in China, Given New Life, Attack Dissent," NY Times, Chris Buckley, Andrew Jacobs, Hong Kong, Beijing, 1/5 print ed.
"They pounce on bloggers who dare mock their beloved Chairman Mao. They scour the nation’s classrooms and newspapers for strains of Western-inspired liberal heresies. And they have taken down professors, journalists and others deemed disloyal to Communist Party orthodoxy.
China's Maoist ideologues are resurgent after languishing in the political desert, buoyed by President Xi Jinping’s
traditionalist tilt and emboldened by internal party decrees that have
declared open season on Chinese academics, artists and party cadres seen
as insufficiently red.
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Ideological
vigilantes have played a pivotal role in the downfall of Wang
Congsheng, a law professor in Beijing who was detained and then
suspended from teaching after posting online criticisms of the party.
Another target was Wang Yaofeng, a newspaper columnist who voiced
support for the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and then
found himself without a job. “Since
Xi came to power, the pressure and control over freethinkers has become
really tight,” said Qiao Mu, a Beijing journalism professor who was
demoted this fall, in part for publicly espousing multiparty elections
and free speech. “More and more of my friends and colleagues are
experiencing fear and harassment.
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Two
years into a sweeping offensive against dissent, Mr. Xi has been
intensifying his focus on perceived ideological opponents, sending
ripples through universities, publishing houses and the news media and
emboldening hard-liners who have hailed him as a worthy successor to Mao
Zedong.
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In instructions published last week,
Mr. Xi urged universities to “enhance guidance over thinking and keep a
tight grip on leading ideological work in higher education,” Xinhua,
the official news agency, reported.
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In
internal decrees, he has been blunter, attacking liberal thinking as a
pernicious threat that has contaminated the Communist Party’s ranks, and
calling on officials to purge the nation of ideas that run counter to
modern China’s Marxist-Leninist foundations.
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“Never allow singing to a tune contrary to the party center,” he wrote in comments that began to appear on party and university websites in October. “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.” The latter-day Maoists, whose influence had faltered before Mr. Xi came to power, have also been encouraged by another internal document, Document No. 30, which reinforces warnings that Western-inspired notions of media independence, “universal values” and criticism of Mao threaten the party’s survival.
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“Never allow singing to a tune contrary to the party center,” he wrote in comments that began to appear on party and university websites in October. “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.” The latter-day Maoists, whose influence had faltered before Mr. Xi came to power, have also been encouraged by another internal document, Document No. 30, which reinforces warnings that Western-inspired notions of media independence, “universal values” and criticism of Mao threaten the party’s survival.
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“It’s
a golden period to be a leftist in China,” Zhang Hongliang, a prominent
neo-Maoist, said in an interview. “Xi Jinping has ushered in a
fundamental change to the status quo, shattering the sky.”
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China’s
old guard leftists are a loose network of officials and former
officials, sons and daughters of party veterans, and ardently
anti-Western academics and journalists. They look back to the precepts
of Marx, Lenin and especially Mao to try to reverse the effects of
China’s free-market policies and the spread of values anathema to party
tradition. And while their direct influence on the party leadership has
been circumscribed, they have served as the party’s eager ideological
inquisitors.
Their
favorite enemies are almost always members of China’s beleaguered
liberal circles: academics, journalists and rights activists who believe
that liberal democracy, with its accompanying ideas of civil society
and rule of law, offers the country the best way forward.
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Mr.
Xi’s recent orders and the accompanying surge of pressure on political
foes further dispelled initial suspicions that his ideological hardening
was a feint to establish his credibility with traditionalists as he
settled into power. Instead, his continuing campaign against
Western-inspired ideas has emboldened traditional party leftists.
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“China watchers all need to stop saying this is all for show or that he’s turning left to turn right,” said Christopher K. Johnson,
an expert on China at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, who formerly worked as a senior China analyst at the C.I.A.
“This is a core part of the guy’s personality. The leftists certainly
feel he’s their guy.”
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In November, after Mr. Wang, the newspaper columnist, was dismissed from his job, the nationalist tabloid Global Times celebrated his downfall
in a commentary. “In the future, the system will take a harder line
towards the ‘pot-smashing party’,” it said, referring obliquely to Mr.
Xi’s remarks about those who live off the party and then criticize it.
“They will have a choice: change their ways or get out of the system.”
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The
latest directive, Document No. 30, demands cleansing Western-inspired
liberal ideas from universities and other cultural institutions,
according to Song Fangmin, a retired major-general, who discussed it
with dozens of veteran party officials and hard-left activists at a
meeting in Beijing in November. The directive formed a sequel to
Document No. 9, which Mr. Xi authorized in April 2013, launching an
offensive against ideas such as “civil society,” General Song said.
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“These two documents are extremely important, and both summarize speeches by the general secretary,” he said, referring to Mr. Xi by his party title. “They identify targets so we can train our eyes on the targets of struggle.”
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“These two documents are extremely important, and both summarize speeches by the general secretary,” he said, referring to Mr. Xi by his party title. “They identify targets so we can train our eyes on the targets of struggle.”
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Unlike
Document No. 9, which was widely circulated online, to the
consternation of party leaders, No. 30 has not been openly published.
But some of Mr. Xi’s comments have appeared in party publications, and
references to it have surfaced on the websites of universities, party
organizations and leftist groups, illuminating how the directive has
coursed through the government to amplify pressure on dissent.
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One political scientist from a prestigious Beijing university said that senior leaders had tried to keep the document confidential by transmitting it orally through the ranks. “This time it’s being kept top secret,” he said, “because last time things were far too public.”
One political scientist from a prestigious Beijing university said that senior leaders had tried to keep the document confidential by transmitting it orally through the ranks. “This time it’s being kept top secret,” he said, “because last time things were far too public.”
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But its effects have been apparent. Newspapers have accused universities of serving as incubators for antiparty thought, and campus party committees have been ordered to sharpen ideological controls. In June, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences revealed that a party investigator had accused the academy of harboring ideological deviants. The investigator, Zhang Yingwei, said in a speech that the academy had been infiltrated by foreign subversion, and researchers were “wearing their scholarship as a disguise to create a smokescreen.”
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But its effects have been apparent. Newspapers have accused universities of serving as incubators for antiparty thought, and campus party committees have been ordered to sharpen ideological controls. In June, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences revealed that a party investigator had accused the academy of harboring ideological deviants. The investigator, Zhang Yingwei, said in a speech that the academy had been infiltrated by foreign subversion, and researchers were “wearing their scholarship as a disguise to create a smokescreen.”
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The
campaign has alarmed liberal academics, who fear that Mr. Xi is
reviving the kind of incendiary denunciations of internal foes that have
been rare since Chairman Mao convulsed the nation with his jeremiads
against bourgeois thinking. Some, like Wu Si, a well-regarded liberal
historian, take a longer view, and argue that realpolitik will
eventually force Mr. Xi to adopt a more moderate position. “It’s a self-defensive strategy against those who might try to call him a neoliberal,” Mr. Wu said in an interview.
.
Before
Mr. Xi came to power in late 2012, few foresaw such a sharp and
extended ideological turn. China’s leaders were then consumed with
purging Bo Xilai, the ambitious politician who had courted party
traditionalists by evoking Mao and the rhetoric of the revolutionary
past. When Mr. Bo fell, his leftist followers came under official suspicion and some of their websites and publications were shut down.
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Now, however, leftist voices are back in vogue. Analysts say it is unlikely Mr. Xi wants to take China back to Mao’s puritanical era, but doctrinaire Communists see him as a useful ally, and his directives as a license to attack liberal critics of the party.
Now, however, leftist voices are back in vogue. Analysts say it is unlikely Mr. Xi wants to take China back to Mao’s puritanical era, but doctrinaire Communists see him as a useful ally, and his directives as a license to attack liberal critics of the party.
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“The leftists were under pressure for a while but now they are very active again,” said Chongyi Feng, an associate professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, who follows China’s intellectual and political developments. “Xi Jinping has used these people to attack.”
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“The leftists were under pressure for a while but now they are very active again,” said Chongyi Feng, an associate professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, who follows China’s intellectual and political developments. “Xi Jinping has used these people to attack.”
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At a meeting in October, party secretaries of universities and colleges were summoned
to discuss Mr. Xi’s instructions and urged to “enhance their sense of
dangers and resolutely safeguard political security and ideological
security.”
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In November, The Liaoning Daily, a party newspaper in northeast China, drew nationwide attention with a report that said universities were troubled by ideological laxity. Chinese academics, it complained, were comparing Mao Zedong to an emperor, praising Western notions such as a separation of powers, and “believing that China should take the path of the West,” it said.
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In November, The Liaoning Daily, a party newspaper in northeast China, drew nationwide attention with a report that said universities were troubled by ideological laxity. Chinese academics, it complained, were comparing Mao Zedong to an emperor, praising Western notions such as a separation of powers, and “believing that China should take the path of the West,” it said.
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“It has become fashionable in university lecture halls to talk down China and malign this society,” said the report.
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The
ideological policing has sent a chill through China’s liberal
intelligentsia. Several academics declined to be interviewed, saying
they were lying low for the time being. Others said they had already
experienced what they liken to an ideological purge.
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Since October, Qiao Mu, the journalism professor and director of the Center for International Communications Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, has been relegated to clerical drudgery, summarizing English-language books in the school library, as retribution, he says, for his advocacy of Western-style journalism and a long affiliation with liberal civil society groups in China.
Since October, Qiao Mu, the journalism professor and director of the Center for International Communications Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, has been relegated to clerical drudgery, summarizing English-language books in the school library, as retribution, he says, for his advocacy of Western-style journalism and a long affiliation with liberal civil society groups in China.
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In addition to barring him from the classroom, administrators slashed his salary by a third, he said, removed his name from the department’s website and forced his students to find other thesis advisers.
In addition to barring him from the classroom, administrators slashed his salary by a third, he said, removed his name from the department’s website and forced his students to find other thesis advisers.
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“It’s meant to be a kind of humiliation,” he said, adding that he was told his demotion could last for years..
“It’s meant to be a kind of humiliation,” he said, adding that he was told his demotion could last for years..
Officially,
he is being punished for defying superiors who had withheld permission
for him to travel abroad for conferences and other academic pursuits.
But privately, school officials acknowledge growing pressure from above.
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As he whiles away his days in the library, Mr. Qiao, 44, has become despondent. Some friends have suggested that he leave China, or at least compromise his values and do as he is told.
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As he whiles away his days in the library, Mr. Qiao, 44, has become despondent. Some friends have suggested that he leave China, or at least compromise his values and do as he is told.
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