Regimenting the Public Mind

Abstract

Lecturer in Political Science, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. The research for this article was begun on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and completed with the help of a research grant from the University of Canterbury.CCP[Symbol Not Transcribed] [copyright]China in the 21st century is a post-communist society with a communist government. How does the Chinese Communist party (CCP) maintain its political acceptability as it goes about dismantling the socialist system? How can the government maintain popular support when the uniting force of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology is spent and discredited? And what has taken the place of communist ideology? Since the two major political watersheds of the last ten years of the Mao era and the dramatic events of 1989, the CCP has undergone a repackaging, similar to the re-invention of the British Labour party under Tony Blair.(1) The CCP would like to extend its rule over China indefinitely; to do so, it is attempting to move from a revolutionary party to a political party. In the post-1989 era the outward symbols and the all-important name brand CCP[Symbol Not Transcribed] [copyright] remain, but the content and meaning of the party's activities have changed significantly.Rather than the revolutionary romanticism of the Mao period, 'scientific guidance' is the new theme of CCP rule. Party strategists now acknowledge the collapse of faith in Marxist revolution and in the dictatorship of the proletariat and Marxist economics, but they have yet to find another means to justify the one-party state in China. The new economic and political goals of the post-Mao era are symbolized by the Four Cardinal Principles and the Four Modernizations of Deng Xiaoping. In practice this has meant adopting marketization and other capitalist style systems - but never calling them that - while maintaining the CCP dictatorship. Post-1989 and throughout the 1990s, Prime Minister Jiang Zemin attempted to forge a new consensus in China, a logic for continuing CCP rule indefinitely. The party leadership is determined that the CCP will avoid the fate of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and that it will learn from its mistakes.(2) Party thinktanks are also studying the fate of other long-term one-party states, such as Mexico, and trying to learn from their mistakes and successes. In 1999 Jiang Zemin announced the 'three represents,' which called for the party to represent the 'advanced social productive forces, the forward direction for China's cultural advancement, and the truest representative of the fundamental interests of China's vast population.'(3) Now party leaders are refining notions of turning the CCP into a 'party for all the people' (quanmin dang). At meetings for senior leaders at the resort of Beidaihe in September 2001, Jiang hinted that the CCP's long-standing goal of class struggle had been abandoned. He said that the party had to open its door to the 'new classes' of private business people and professionals and that in the current era business people and professionals had displaced workers and peasants as the 'vanguard' of society.(4)Propaganda is playing a central role in the repackaging of the CCP. Propaganda - publicizing the government's activities and educating the population - has always been an essential element of the CCP hold on power. The Central Propaganda Department (Zhongyang xuanchuanbu) of the CCP sets guidelines for the Chinese media, film, drama, art, news, literature, and education and disciplines those who break the rules on what can and cannot be presented in those media.(5) The propaganda system (xuanjiao xitong) remains one of the key groupings of bureaucracies within the Chinese political system.(6) This article surveys the modernization of the propaganda system in China and examines continuities and new developments in the system, particularly attempts to manufacture consent for the re-invention of the CCP. …