2. Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation: The Reassertion of Ideological Governance | The Xi Jinping Effect

`2` Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation The Reassertion of Ideological Governance

Timothy Cheek

Xi Jinping is the most powerful general secretary since Deng Xiaoping, some say since Mao Zedong. Chairman Xi certainly needs all that power and a good deal of luck to achieve his stated goal of saving China by saving the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since Xi took top leadership in 2012 we have seen the strongest effort at inner-Party reform since the 1980s. Back then, the leadership of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, even with the mixed support of Deng Xiaoping, set out to create a reform Leninism that would avoid the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution, but these reforms were not sufficient to enforce both political and economic reform in the teeth of sustained resistance of vested interests and political leaders committed to central planning. Ominously, it was leadership division in 1988–89 that brought a difficult situation to crisis and violent suppression of popular protests. The breakup of the Soviet Union by 1992 also reflected leadership division.¹ The lesson of Tiananmen and Mikhail Gorbachev for Xi Jinping is evident: never let the Party get that divided at the top.

Xi made this very clear at the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of reform and opening in December 2018:

Party and government, soldiers and civilians, and schools, the East, West, North, South, and Middle—the Party leads them all. It is precisely because we always adhere to the centralized and unified leadership of the Party that we can achieve a great historical turning point, and start a new period of reform and opening up, a new journey of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.… To uphold the Party’s leadership, which is a major principle that determines the future and destiny of the Party and the country, the entire Party and the whole country must without any wavering maintain a high degree of ideological consciousness, political consciousness, and consciousness of action.²

It is that lesson that informs Xi Jinping’s reforms today. His political project is to address chronic political problems in the rule of the CCP over China as well as a host of pressing political, economic, social, and environmental issues. He aims to do this by reviving the capacity of the Central CCP and state institutions at the expense of regional and local political powers, by cauterizing the financial drain of excess state-owned enterprise profits and large-scale elite pilferage and corruption, and by unifying the Party under the firm order of public service and a group élan of well-rewarded but substantive and measurable public service, which will recoup the Party’s current faltering public prestige. To do this, Xi Jinping is using a standard set of Party administrative practices employed since the 1940s to achieve these goals. The rectification campaign, trumpeted in the press today as a “mass line campaign,” is one of the three legs of this political agenda. It is a rewrite of the software that runs the other two—the military and security forces and the organizational muscle of the Party-state.

Xi Jinping’s efforts at a “counter-reformation” are set against previous reforms in CCP policy that he feels are not working. He believes only the Party can save China, and only ideological and organizational rectification under one supreme leader can save the Party. He insists on the prerequisites and the privileges and the power of the Party, but like a reforming pope, he requires financial celibacy, doctrinal faith, and obedient service from his cadres. As one old colleague of the general secretary puts it, Xi Jinping knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche; official corruption; loss of values, dignity, and self-respect; and such “moral evils” as drugs and prostitution. It is no surprise that Xi might aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.³ This concern is not limited to Xi himself, but reflects broader concerns in the Party leadership. Before coming to power, then prime minister Wen Jiabao in 2011 acknowledged the challenges of corruption and food safety scandals, and he interpreted these as a sign of the decay of public morality and social trust. “If a country lacks citizens of high quality [suzhi] with moral strength,” Wen pronounced, “we absolutely cannot call such a country a really strong one and a country respected by its people.”⁴

Xi’s campaigns have been tough on China’s intellectuals and independent lawyers, but the loyalty he is demanding of them he is already demanding, much more harshly, of Party members, as addressed by Andrew Wedeman’s chapter in this volume. To understand each, it is necessary to understand what links both: the Party’s determination to discipline itself and society. As the political scientist Thomas Heberer concludes, the road map for modernizing China by 2049 adopted by the 19th Party Congress of the CCP in 2017 determined that achieving these goals “on the one hand, would require a ‘strong’ Party and strong and competent leader. On the other hand, it would need both a disciplined contingent of cadres and a disciplined, civilized and unified people.”⁵ Thus, it is no surprise that a key pillar of Xi’s counter-reformation, cleaning up the “clergy” in the anti-corruption campaign, combines a comprehensive ideological campaign with the formidable administrative powers of a discipline campaign. Party officials from the Politburo on down are seen at study sessions. And all have seen the frightening results of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection under Wang Qishan. However, as the scholar Ling Li notes, this commission is but the head of a system of Central Inspection Teams that “are authorized to perform mandatory inspections without cause.”⁶ In terms of our metaphor, these are the inquisitors for the center. Ideological governance is not only about ideas and values, it includes a robust enforcement of orthodoxy.

Analysts inside and outside of China continue to try to figure out what Xi Jinping is really up to. Is his vaunted mass line program and anti-corruption campaign a sincere effort to reform the CCP and improve the governance of China, or is it a cynical, factional effort to eliminate competitors and entrench his own power? Political scientists have struggled to interpret the “black box” of elite politics in China, with mixed results.⁷ Lacking direct access to the thinking of leading Party committees, one must interpret public announcements and activities.

Almost all commentators conclude that Xi Jinping’s policies first and foremost are designed to secure his personal power, as well as that of the CCP.⁸ Certainly, Xi has taken into hand an impressive array of official posts—beyond his formal position as general secretary of the Party and president of the People’s Republic of China: he is chairman of the Central Military Commission and Leading Group director of a dozen top committees including those on foreign affairs, Taiwan, finances and the economy, maritime rights, Internet security, and national defense and military reform, and two widely recognized as key—the Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Leadership Group and the National Security Commission. This brings considerable bureaucratic power back to Beijing and, indeed, into the hands of Xi Jinping. Clearly, this is an effort to reverse the decentralization of Party and government decision-making that occurred under previous Party leaders.⁹ However, power-hungry individuals or structural tensions between Party center and local authorities do not explain Xi’s return to vigorous ideological governance in general and Party rectification doctrine in particular.

A historical perspective can add to social science studies of Chinese elite politics, grand strategy, and political economy. It can suggest patterns of governance and claims to legitimacy to look for based on the examples of prior Chinese regimes and leaders. Neither historical precedence of previous Chinese leaders nor recognizable patterns of policy practice alone can determine the actions of Xi Jinping or his colleagues, but they do shape their approach to problems and contribute to the tools and constraints with which Xi and his colleagues work.

Unsurprisingly, Mao Zedong himself identified the three legs of political power in Yan’an in 1939: Party building, military power, and the United Front.¹⁰ The range of political and administrative activities taken by the central CCP since Xi Jinping’s confirmation in November 2012 all make sense in the traditions of ideological governance in China in general and of CCP statecraft in particular. Along similar lines, the scholar David Lampton offered a trio to explain the rise of China’s international power in 2008 in terms of might, money, and minds. Clearly, a comprehensive leadership program must include military security, economic productivity, and popular legitimacy or a unifying national story. China has manifestly made headway on all three fronts. Other scholars have ably addressed military-security and economic aspects of the Xi Jinping effect. More difficult for many international observers to grasp is the role of ideas, national story, of ideology in (to use Mao’s terms) Party building and the United Front. Xi Jinping’s administration has revived the comprehensive package of the Yan’an rectification campaign, which claimed to address military, economic, and ideological or belief issues through ideological remolding, Party discipline, and managed public mobilization. This is the Maoist form of a long-standing practice in Chinese statecraft: ideological governance. It is also not widely recognized as such in Western media and most analyses. It is for this reason that this chapter takes a well-known example from European history, the Catholic Reformation in the early modern period, as a metaphor that might help make this political constitution more legible.

It is worthwhile to define the key term in this analysis: ideological governance asserts a role for the government as a pedagogical state that has the responsibility to provide order and prosperity through civilizing its citizens according to the superior insights of certified transformational bureaucrats learned in a body of thought that when applied properly will bring great harmony to all under its sway, and which therefore requires and deserves freedom from competition from alternate (and presumed lesser) forms of political activity. This is something that can be called China’s political constitution, in the British sense of an unwritten, working constitution.

Ideological Governance in Historical Perspective

Four phases in the history of Chinese statecraft in general and leadership in particular can help us see this “political constitution” in practice. First, there is the long-standing habitus of ideological governance in Chinese statecraft from at least the Qing emperors (1644–1911) through China’s twentieth-century leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong. Xi Jinping’s efforts make sense within this style of politics that has characterized radically different political regimes—imperial, republican, and socialist.

Second, the proximate and specific tradition from which Xi Jinping explicitly draws is rectification politics, which dates most notably from the Yan’an Rectification Movement of 1942–44 and the nearly continuous set of political campaigns under the CCP since then. Generally considered a Maoist form of governance and associated with disruptive political campaigns, rectification owes as much to Liu Shaoqi and other less chiliastic Party leaders as it does to Mao, and, more importantly, it characterizes regular politics in the Party as much as it does its many disruptive mass movements. Scholars have long since documented the norms of rectification politics that characterized the Mao period, and that same pattern has held—with important changes since.¹¹ The core of rectification politics is the primacy of the human will when it is tempered, reformed, and regulated by a superior doctrine and implemented by a capable cadre of administrators. It does not require democracy in the electoral sense; it requires a rectified political leadership.

A third phase in this story is reform Leninism after the Cultural Revolution. Leaders since Mao have continued the form of rectification politics with less and less effect since the trauma of Tiananmen in 1989. This was largely because, drawing lessons from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, leaders beginning with Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang before Tiananmen but extending to Party leaders in the decades after stressed institutionalization, science, and political regulations over mobilization or ideological remolding. By the 2000s, Party campaigns from studying Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” to a host of forgettable formulations under Hu Jintao left the ideological zeal of Party doctrine dead on arrival for most cadres. The general public largely ignored these campaigns, and the new Internet culture mocked them.

This reform Leninism generated the fourth phase, or the neo-traditional form of Chinese statecraft: Xi Jinping’s counter-reformation. This reinterpretation of Party tradition along the lines of deeply familiar patterns of ideological governance is an institutional reaction to current events and to the decline in Party norms in recent decades. The retreat from active ideological leadership of the Party under Jiang Zemin, in the name of a Marxist fundamentalism (akin to Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy [NEP]) that accepted a transitional stage of capitalism in China, is now seen by Xi as the cause of China’s current problems of corruption, pollution, and social unrest. In the face of the political reformation that Jiang’s reliance on transforming the economic base first represented, Xi’s administration constitutes a counter-reformation, a reassertion of the charismatic institution and the need for the ideological cultivation of cadres according to one orthodoxy. That orthodoxy made its official appearance in the 19th Party Congress in 2017 as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”¹²

Ideological Governance in Qing and Republican China

The first phase in this short history of Chinese statecraft in the modern era dates from the late imperial period (though textual echoes can be seen all the way back to the Confucian classics). Jürgen Osterhammel in his comparative study of the “civilizing mission” in Europe and the world concludes that such “civilizing” has been a continuous process in Chinese history: “The relentless urge of the Chinese elite to civilize others was directed at the peasantry, at non-Han Chinese (today called ‘ethnic minorities’) within the realm and at ‘barbarians’ along its borders.”¹³ Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream,” “mass line,” and reimposition of a directed public sphere (that is, extensive propaganda buttressed by robust censorship and repression of dissent) are part of an institutional reaffirmation of traditions of ideological governance. In a political version of the long durée, cultural resources from traditional texts and a continuous chain of administrative practices from Qing emperors to Sun Yat-sen to Chiang Kai-shek to Mao can be seen. These form three traditions of Chinese ideological governance in modern China.

The Qing dynasty has bequeathed to modern China expectations and tools for ideological governance of a large and diverse territory by a relatively small ruling elite, which has been enthusiastically embraced by China’s reformers and revolutionaries of varying stripes. These expectations and tools have been shaped over the twentieth century by exogenous influences (such as science and technology and the Soviet model), endogenous pressures (social disorder and elite competition), and contingent events (Japanese invasion, Cold War tensions, and the contemporary global populist moment). From traditional texts and Qing practice comes a belief in the transformative power of correct models, most notably the ancient Confucian Classic of Rites (Liji). Its constant repetition by Chinese governments and leading thinkers for the past two thousand years reflects a shared belief among China’s cultural and political elite in the educability of humans. People can be taught how to be good, and correct ways of acting, thinking, speaking, and even sitting can directly contribute to that noble goal.¹⁴ Thus role models, especially top leaders—like emperors—need to act well, or at least be seen to act as exemplars of morality.¹⁵ The goal throughout, and the term that carries this long-standing orientation in Chinese statecraft today, is jiaohua, “to transform” the subject through moral-political education.

The significance of this tradition of ideological governance is that Chinese governments from the fourteenth century consistently insisted on giving moral lectures to local communities, when all available evidence shows that locals paid next to no attention to them.¹⁶ These lectures proclaimed the “sacred edicts” (shengyu) of Ming and Qing emperors. The ritual performance of moral-political education for the people signified legitimate government regardless of whether or not anyone was paying attention. These lectures were not simply in books. Local magistrates were instructed to recite the maxims and expound upon their meaning in monthly public meetings. Handbooks, such as Li Laizhang’s Explanations of the Sacred Edict Lecture System (Shengyu xuanjiang xiangbao tiaoyue) of 1705, literally mapped out how to hold these meetings, down to diagrams showing the placement of the tablets with the maxims and altars, and the locations of where both scholars and townsfolk should stand, as well as instruction on how to hold the meeting and fill out the registers of good and bad behavior.¹⁷ The most painful signs of the continued salience of this approach to governance are the reeducation camps and efforts at “de-religious extremification” undertaken by the Party in Xinjiang to corral its largely non-Han Muslim population.¹⁸

Ideological governance continued apace in the varying regimes of twentieth-century China. The core approach shared by all governments in China down to today is political tutelage (xunzheng). This was Sun Yat-sen’s explanation for putting democracy off for another day and the primary expression of the pedagogical state under his Nationalist Party. The founding father of China’s republic, Sun came to feel by the 1920s that the Chinese people were not ready for democracy and required instead a period of political education or tutelage during which his one-party state would inculcate the masses in modern civility. This “Tutelary State,” as John Fitzgerald calls it in his study of Sun’s political model, was meant to awaken the Chinese people and teach them how to be modern citizens.¹⁹ This responsibility (or presumption, depending on one’s view) was enthusiastically embraced by his successors. Chiang Kai-shek, in China’s Destiny, quotes Sun Yat-sen to say: “When there is one purpose, and it is the purpose of the entire people, and when the people all work to achieve this purpose, it is easy to succeed.”²⁰ Chiang concludes that such unity required the complete domination of political life by the Nationalist Party to maintain order and educate the people. Chiang famously did not succeed in this unification of political wills, but, for a time, Mao did.

Rectification Politics

The next phase in this history of Chinese statecraft and the direct model of ideological governance for Xi Jinping is the one he regularly harks back to: the Yan’an Rectification. Rectification (zhengfeng) is the political education and reform process to train Party leaders and rank and file that Mao Zedong and his colleagues perfected in Yan’an in the 1940s. It is often employed in an orchestrated campaign, a rectification movement (such as in Yan’an in 1942–44 and in the other base areas in the years to follow, among intellectuals nationally in 1950–51, and on down every few years to Xi Jinping’s campaigns today). However, rectification has characterized everyday politics under the CCP as well as Mao’s famously intense campaigns.²¹ When undertaken seriously, this form of political training resembles nothing so much as Bible study in small groups run by the local police department (with officers from the intelligence service and military on hand when needed). Individual study, public confession of one’s sins, review of one’s personnel record, and public propaganda about role models (and a few negative role models to show what is to be avoided) define a CCP rectification campaign. Such campaigns always include purges, the naming and denunciation of negative models, and the removal of offending cadres and others who cross the campaign’s line. Rectification was taken to absurd and tragic extremes in the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, but it has been a staple of political life in the CCP since the 1940s.²² Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is just such a rectification effort. So, too, is the campaign announced by the Central Political-Legal Committee that is advertised as “like the Yan’an rectification movement,” which began in 2021.²³

Rectification is the political constitution that the CCP articulated in the 1940s to address urgent political and administrative problems in the face of a lack of regular institutions or sufficient military power to force its will. How does the CCP rectification system work? It works by precisely the three components Mao outlined in 1938: Party building, control of force, and welcoming cooperative non-Party political actors. Today this means:

articulation and consensus on the ideas and projects of one Party leader (the “line”)
criticism and self-criticism sessions for Party members to inculcate that line
crackdown and prosecution of corruption via Party channels to control deviance
repression of public criticism, irritating lawyers, and mouthy professors with the goal of managing the public message
welcome to and use of the skills of nongovernmental organizations and “social organizations” to implement Party policy.

This adds up to one leader, one Party, and one voice—all for one project: China’s rejuvenation under the Party.

One leader. This is one side of the concentration of power—from collective leadership to primus inter pares to an undisputed “core” leader. It is clear that the CCP leadership has agreed to let Xi Jinping serve as the single leader of this reform effort. He holds an unprecedented suite of positions, including in the newly announced National Security Council and the Leading Small Group for Comprehensive Deepening Reform. This is why the Resolution of the Third Plenum in 2013 continues to be important in conjunction with the invocation of the “mass line” tradition of public service and self- and mutual criticism.²⁴ Xi Jinping hopes to get the Party’s self-discipline working again by controlling the message and monitoring implementation. It can be done, it has been done, but usually it is not done because diverse stakeholders blunt the effort.

One Party. This is the other side of the concentration of power—from the localities back to the center. It is done ideologically through studying the thoughts and words—the policy platform and policy approach—of the leader, usually the resolutions from each Party plenum and “important speeches.” Organizationally, it is done through regular political study sessions, high and low.²⁵ It is backed up by the Central Commission on Discipline Inspection and through the proposed implementation of social welfare provisions to be handled directly by the central state. Financially, this is done by using the power of the state apparatus to claw back state-owned enterprise profits and take down wayward business leaders.

One voice. Rectification theory does not welcome quibbling and it will not tolerate dissent. The public voice of rectification is, indeed, the pieties of “the mass line”—which, after all, only promises to listen to the worries and concerns of the masses and promises to address them. In order to mobilize the public to do what the Party thinks is best for China—since no government would have the recourses to compel such a huge population—it needs to maintain a certain level of prestige and popularity. The central CCP has by and large succeeded in maintaining such prestige to date.²⁶ The widespread dissatisfaction with government in China is, as much research has reflected, directed at the local state. Much like African Americans in the US South in the 1960s—many Chinese look to the central government to correct the faults of the local state.

Xi Jinping believes, as can be seen in his comments from 2018 that opened this chapter, that rectification can address these challenges and achieve popular mobilization and official coordination for one project—bringing China to national wealth and power, the dream of Chinese reformers since the late nineteenth century—while keeping the CCP in charge.

Reform Leninism

This effort amounts to a counter-reformation in Chinese politics after the third phase in this short history: the post-Mao retreat from the excesses of rectification mobilization during the Cultural Revolution. This retreat was the “protestant reformation of the Party” started under Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s, and continued under Jiang Zemin (and ineffectually resisted under Hu Jintao). Mao’s campaigns, and particularly the Cultural Revolution, had discredited the extreme and highly emotive versions of rectification and made a mockery of mass line egalitarian claims. This led in the early post-Mao period to a search within the Party for regularization of political life by a return to the explicit organizational norms of Leninism—essentially a version of military hierarchy.²⁷ This was the work of Deng Xiaoping from 1975 and of Peng Zhen, who resuscitated “socialist legality” in the 1980s.²⁸ This protestant revolt against the institutional abuses of the “spiritual” side of rectification doctrine saw an emphasis on two things: socialist legality and technocratic leadership. Law and science. This served to expunge the wild excesses of emotional ideology (which had become divorced from administrative practicality) and produced a functional political package into the new century.²⁹

However, this reform Leninism—regulations + science—failed to address leadership competition or to control officialdom satisfactorily. This Leninist reformation since the 1980s was meant to return to the scientific side of Leninism, in which social engineers and material engineers would join forces to produce a rational society and guide China through its necessary capitalist stage under Party tutelage. However, the absence of a compelling ideology made itself felt in leadership drift and growing official corruption. Hence Wen Jiabao’s call to action in 2011 and Xi Jinping’s counter-reformation.

This reform Leninism was not democratization in the accepted sense of liberal democratic politics. The CCP reformers were loath to share power, unwilling to constrain their operation by setting any law above the Party, since this would undercut its ideological governance. Such liberal restraints on political power are nearly unthinkable in the Party’s doctrinal culture. To be sure, there have been liberal Party reformers who tried to imagine a path to constitutional democracy under the Party, from Hu Yaobang himself to Yu Keping in the 2000s to Cai Xia at the Central Party School in 2013.³⁰ Hu Yaobang, of course, was deposed in 1986, Yu Keping withdrew from government service in 2015 to take up a post at Peking University, and, most recently, Cai Xia has broken ranks and explicitly criticized Xi Jinping, resulting in her expulsion from the Party. A democratic future for the CCP is, indeed, thinkable; it simply has not taken root up to now.

Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation

Instead, Xi Jinping has chosen to employ 1940s techniques to address problems of governance in the 2010s and 2020s. Why revive rectification politics? A comparative perspective can supplement the historical perspective. Rectification is, essentially, the political constitution of the Chinese government—in the British sense of an unwritten, working constitution in national politics (as opposed to the formal paper constitution of the Chinese state). It is useful to think of a political constitution in the terms that the historian Peter Hennessy uses to describe the operation of Britain’s unwritten constitution in The Hidden Wiring—that peculiar combination of administrative measures used, powers agreed upon, and procedures deemed appropriate that tradition and practice have legitimated among top political actors.³¹

In the CCP’s case, the political constitution that rectification doctrine represents was built in Yan’an in the 1940s in the famous Yan’an Rectification Movement, which saw the confirmation of Mao’s supreme leadership, but, more importantly, the establishment of the measures, powers, and procedures that made the CCP the most effective political administration and military force in China. Other Party leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi and Chen Yun, fleshed out the organizational methods and norms, including “self-cultivation” of Party members and the proper handling of political competition (called “inner-Party struggle”).³² The historian Philip A. Kuhn has drawn attention to the significance of such an unwritten constitutional order for twentieth-century China, which has dominated the concerns of China’s politicians and thinkers. That constitutional agenda, Kuhn shows, addressed three key problems of governance: participation, competition, and control. These issues form the three dominant challenges of modern Chinese politics: (1) how political participation and public mobilization can be reconciled with enhancing the power and legitimacy of the state; (2) how political competition can be reconciled with public interest; and (3) how fiscal demands of the state can be reconciled with the needs of society.³³

The CCP’s rectification doctrine and practice address these three challenges to the modern Chinese constitutional agenda. Political scientists, particularly Frederick C. Teiwes and Franz Schurmann, have documented the centrality of the Yan’an agenda.³⁴ They focus on the formal procedures of rectification, but the one manifestation of this political constitution in the CCP is the political line, and, in this case, the mass line (qunzhong luxian). The Yan’an Rectification in the 1940s was an implementation of this mass line to address the problems of governance in modern China, questions of political participation, leadership competition, and control of finances, officialdom, and society.³⁵ The Yan’an Rectification sought to unify thought and policymaking around one leader, infuse these policies and political approach into the administration through a vigorous management-training regime (self- and mutual criticism), enforce those norms with frequent police violence against infractions, and generate a popular image for the regime in the media to mobilize public support.³⁶ It backed up all this political work with overwhelming military power, on the one hand, and relatively effective and productive administrative and economic reforms, on the other. It was by no means perfect, nor was it without drawbacks, not least the frequent use of terror. But it beat the competition.

In summary, the Yan’an Rectification addressed the challenges of modern China’s constitutional agenda by proposing a novel package of ideology and organization (hence the title of Schurmann’s classic study of CCP rule in 1966). It offered Mao Zedong Thought to explain what to do, how to do it, and why to do it; democratic centralism to implement the mobilization of cadres and citizens, the management of conflict, and the exercise of state control of economic and military resources; and self- and mutual criticism among leaders and officials to ensure effective implementation of those ideological and organizational norms. This model is the heart of Xi Jinping’s current policies, his counter-reformation.

Rectification or the mass line political order of the CCP is almost unimaginable to political theorists and politicians and the general public in the West. It is the profound acceptance of formal ideology and ideological remolding at the heart of rectification that stumps us. At root, rectification politics depends on the power of correct thought (zhengquede sixiang) and on the impact of it through a mobilized, faithful cadre of leaders. When it appears to be working, it makes the CCP look like a religious organization at best, like a cult at worst.³⁷ The mental and emotional interventions into the minds of individuals that rectification requires in order to function effectively outrages our sensibilities about individual autonomy and privacy. Our constitutional agenda is built on behavior and its consequences and not on mental states, what in Chinese political language is discussed as jingshen (spirit) and taidu (attitude).³⁸ Gerda Wielander’s chapter in this volume gives a rich account of the role of political faith in Xi’s politics. However, translate those words and Chinese political thought appears as either mendacious or menacing. What role in our political agenda do such “spiritual” (jingshen) or “attitude” (taidu) factors play? Certainly, political scientists, as well as publicists, are attentive to questions of attitudes, which bleeds into “values,” but our political constitution is explicitly agnostic on attitudes (hate speech and behaviors around multiculturalism being an exception), and certainly our political regimes do not (at least openly) use the measure and manipulation of fundamental attitudes—one’s personal thoughts and feelings—as a public political instrument.

Chinese rectification does. And Xi Jinping is currently employing this rectification politics among a Party population of some one hundred million people in order to address challenges of political participation, leadership competition, and control of the polity in China today. As the political scientist Joseph Fewsmith has commented, Xi Jinping is putting the Lenin back in Chinese Leninism.³⁹

Prospects for Rectification Politics under Xi Jinping

What can one make of Xi Jinping’s counter-reformation in Chinese politics? First, this is Maoism, but it is the institutional Maoism of Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen and not the charismatic populism of the later Mao. Put away our Quotations from Chairman Mao (the Little Red Book) and dig out our dusty copy of Liu Shaoqi’s How to Be a Good Communist.⁴⁰ There is a substantial body of governance theory and experience underwriting today’s rectification. This is a serious attempt to address the problems of governance, what Kuhn has termed modern China’s constitutional agenda, by reclaiming control over the economy and over the behavior of the leadership, by channeling political competition among elites, and by guiding popular participation to unthreatening support roles in social welfare. This is Xi Jinping making good on his promise to save China by saving the CCP. Rectification is much more than “criticism sessions” or buying steamed buns and driving a Hongqi instead of an Audi. It is a comprehensive package of ideological unification, administrative control, and police power. As scholars Kerry Brown and Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova conclude, “Ideology in Xi’s China is important because of the ways it enforces unity, creates a common purpose, and operates as a means of guiding the country, under the direction of unified CPC [Communist Party of China] rule, towards its great objective—modernization with Chinese characteristics.”⁴¹ This is the current form of ideological governance in China under Xi Jinping. And, this software is incompatible with the norms and assumptions of liberal democracy.

Second, this is political orthodoxy. Rectification talk is a public transcript for the CCP; it is the orthodoxy of the Party of Mao. As can be seen in the historical Catholic Church, and indeed within our own liberal democratic societies, the pieties of our ideals coincide with abuse of and cynicism about them. Public declaration of communist values serves as a “public transcript” to promote identity and commitment among the ruling elite. These public transcripts, as the political scientist James C. Scott has argued, have as strong a political role to play as the “hidden transcripts” of quiet dissent and resistance under authoritarian regimes.⁴² And, this orthodoxy has a robust enforcement mechanism in required Party study sessions, pressure to voice agreement with Party policies, and a fearsome Discipline Inspection Commission. It is dogma with inquisitorial support. Pointing out that Xi Jinping and his colleagues, of course, are closing their eyes to the facts of power politics does not weaken the legitimating function of a plausible political orthodoxy. Multiyear survey research by a Harvard team at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation continues to find broad-based support for the Party’s leadership, even though local leaders are often criticized.⁴³

Third, Xi’s counter-reformation probably will not work, at least not in terms of rectification goals of moral-personal transformation and the pure governance of the mass line. The leadership of the Communist Party today under Xi Jinping is embracing traditional values of the communist revolution to address very new problems. And just as Mao was not successful applying the economic policies of Yan’an mass mobilization to the challenges of industrialization in 1958, I do not think this application of the ideological wing of the Yan’an model is going to work in the 2020s. Rectification—with moral solutions for administrative problems, Party-run scriptural study sessions, and the demand for orthodoxy in public expression, all enforced through an independent inquisitorial police force—is no way to handle the challenges of an information society, a middle-income trap, or rising leadership in regional and global affairs.⁴⁴ One should understand why the rectification approach makes sense to Xi Jinping, but that does not mean it will produce good or sustainable governance. The China of the 2020s is not the China of the 1940s or 1960s. Globalization may not have made Chinese politics democratic, but it has certainly made Chinese society globalized, with international contacts and content extending to village China. As the Shanghai scholar Liu Qing has argued, this has pluralized Chinese society, and neither Chinese socialism nor Confucianism appears well equipped to deal with diversity.⁴⁵ Rectification politics requires the rigorous control of available information. Forty years of social experience since opening and reform began and over two decades of the Internet have made such propaganda control harder and harder to achieve and maintain.

Finally, the metaphor: Xi Jinping’s counter-reformation. This metaphor compares the Catholic Reformation over a century from the Council of Trent to the close of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 with the current efforts of the CCP since about 2010 and here associated with the rule of Xi Jinping. Like all metaphors, it does not work in all respects. But metaphors are as useful when they fail as when they succeed. The failures: the “Leninist reformation” of the post-Mao reforms, as I call it, is nothing like the challenge to the old order that Luther and the German princes were to Catholic Europe. However, this highlights the shared conclusion of medieval Catholic and contemporary CCP leaders: the rot comes from within their own ranks, and most, but not all, of their counter-reformation focuses on internal rot, corruption, and loss of sense of mission. Burning heretics and disappearing rights lawyers are a nasty, but secondary, part of the primary mission: institutional renovation. On the other hand, the frightening “vocational” reeducation centers in Xinjiang (really concentration camps bent on turning Uyghurs into Han) suggest an even darker side to ideological governance and rectification practice.⁴⁶ The Xinjiang ideological remolding camps tragically revive the human carnage of the Great Leap Forward that happened when a political technology from an earlier time was applied to new and different circumstances. The production campaigns of Yan’an and the civil war era may have contributed to effective governance in the 1940s, but they brought nationwide famine in the late 1950s. Likewise, today the terrible extension of rectification discipline from a closed group in a political party to a general population constitutes a violation of human rights on a mind-boggling scale. More tragically, the “vocational retraining” Uyghurs and others suffer in these camps as they are compelled to “reeducate” into Party-loving Han does not appear to work. Rather, these camps are likely to generate the sustained opposition the state so much fears.

In the end, and especially in light of outrage at the increased repression in China today, the counter-reformation metaphor draws our attention to the long-standing traditions of Chinese statecraft that inform not just Xi Jinping but a sufficient group of Party leaders to sustain the project for some time. That corpus of governance techniques is rectification doctrine. If this political software is dismissed, one will be hard-pressed to make sense of Xi Jinping’s administration or the helmsman’s place within it.

Notes

This chapter was originally published in the Journal of Contemporary China 30, no. 132 (2021), and is included here, with minor modification, with permission of Taylor & Francis.

1. The origins and consequences of the reform challenges into the Jiang Zemin era of the 2000s are well presented in Joseph Fewsmith, China since Tiananmen: From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
2. This is the seventeenth quotation from Chairman Xi given in Xi Jinping, “Zhongguo Gongchandang lingdao shi Zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi zuibenzhi de tezheng” (The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is the most essential characteristic of socialism with Chinese characteristics), Qiushi (Seeking truth), no. 14 (July 2020), http://www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2020-07/15/c_1126234524.htm.
3. See “Portrait of Vice President Xi Jinping: ‘Ambitious Survivor’ of the Cultural Revolution,” https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html, a leaked November 16, 2009, US diplomatic cable reprinted by WikiLeaks, cited in Tom Phillips, “Xi Jinping: Does China Truly Love ‘Big Daddy Xi’—or Fear Him?,” Guardian, September 19, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/19/xi-jinping-does-china-truly-love-big-daddy-xi-or-fear-him.
4. Wen Jiabao, “Jiang zhenhua ca shiqing: Tong Guowuyuan canshi he Zhongyang wenshi yanjiuguan guanyuan zuotan shi de jianghua” (Tell the truth, examine the facts: Talk at a meeting of State Council counselors and researchers at the Central Literature and History Office), People’s Daily, April 18, 2011, 2.
5. Thomas Herberer, “Disciplining of a Society: Social Disciplining and Civilizing Processes in Contemporary China” (Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA, August 2020), 43, https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/disciplining-society-social-disciplining-and-civilizing-processes-contemporary.
6. Ling Li, “Politics of Anticorruption in China: Paradigm Change of the Party’s Disciplinary Regime 2012–2017,” Journal of Contemporary China 28, no. 115 (2019): 58.
7. Frederick C. Teiwes, “The Study of Elite Political Conflict in the PRC: Politics inside the ‘Black Box,’” in Handbook of the Politics of China, ed. David S. G. Goodman (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015), 21–41.
8. Bates Gill, “Xi Jinping’s Grip on Power Is Absolute, but There Are New Threats to His ‘Chinese Dream,’” Conversation, June 27, 2019, https://theconversation.com/xi-jinpings-grip-on-power-is-absolute-but-there-are-new-threats-to-his-chinese-dream-118921. This is one part of the series “How China Maintains Its Power” on the Conversation website.
9. Sangkuk Lee, “An Institutional Analysis of Xi Jinping’s Centralization of Power,” Journal of Contemporary China 26, no. 105 (2017): 334.
10. Mao Zedong, “Introduction to The Communist,” October 4, 1939. What Mao said precisely was: “Therefore the united front, armed struggle and Party building are the three fundamental questions for our Party in the Chinese revolution.” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 2, Marxist Internet Archive, 2004, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_20.htm.
11. Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms, 1950–1965 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).
12. “Resolution of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on the Revised Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” October 24, 2017, trans. Xinhua News Service, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-10/24/c_136702726.htm.
13. Jürgen Osterhammel, Europe, the “West” and the Civilizing Mission (London: German Historical Institute London, 2006), 10, https://www.ghil.ac.uk/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/annual_lectures/AL_2005_Osterhammel.pdf.
14. A standard verse from the Liji is from the chapter “Xueji” (Record on the subject of education): “If the junzi [prince] wishes to transform the people and to perfect their manners and customs, must he not start from the lessons of the school?” See Yang Guorong, Xiankui yu Hele: Dui shengming yiyi de niliu tansuo (Xiankui and Hele: A contrarian investigation of the meaning of life) (Hong Kong: Sanlian Shudian, 2010), 272–73.
15. See David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Donald J. Munro, The Concept of Man in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977).
16. Victor Mair, “Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edicts,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 325–59.
17. Li Laizhang, “Shengyu xuanjiang xiangbao tiaoyue” (Regulations for “Community-Security” Sacred Edict Lectures), preface dated 1705, from his collected works, Li Shanyuan quanshu (Complete works of Li Shanyuan). A copy is in the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University.
18. James Leibold, “Surveillance in China’s Xinjiang Region: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement,” Journal of Contemporary China 29, no. 121 (2020): 46–60.
19. Articulated in Sun Yat-sen’s “Fundamentals of National Reconstruction” (1923); see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 79.
20. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Destiny and Chinese Economic Theory (New York: Roy Publishers, 1947), 112.
21. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China, 25–62.
22. Kirk Denton provides a fine introduction and overview in “Rectification: Party Discipline, Intellectual Remolding, and the Formation of a Political Community,” in Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution, ed. Ban Wang (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 51–63.
23. Christian Sorace, “Extracting Affect: Televised Cadre Confessions in Contemporary China,” Public Culture 31, no. 1 (2018): 145–71; Suisheng Zhao, “The Ideological Campaign in Xi’s China: Rebuilding Regime Legitimacy,” Asian Survey 56, no. 6 (2016): 1168–93. The impending political-legal rectification was announced on the WeChat group Jinri Faxue Pinglun (Today’s Legal Commentary) on July 13, 2020: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/eVPZ85CG8A_-agJjqnDw8A.
24. “CCP Central Committee Resolution concerning Some Major Issues in Comprehensively Deepening Reform (Passed at the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on November 12, 2013),” China Copyright and Media (blog), November 15, 2013, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/ccp-central-committee-resolution-concerning-some-major-issues-in-comprehensively-deepening-reform.
25. John Dotson, “The CCP Politburo Holds Its First Collective Study Session for 2020,” China Brief 20, no. 11 (June 24, 2020), https://jamestown.org/program/the-ccp-politburo-holds-its-first-collective-study-session-for-2020.
26. Edward Cunningham, Tony Saich, and Jessie Turiel, “Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion through Time” (Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA, July 2020), https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resilience-surveying-chinese-public-opinion-through-time.
27. Klaus Mühlhahn, “Reform and Opening: 1977–1989,” in The Making of Modern China: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 491–526.
28. Pitman Potter, From Leninist Discipline to Socialist Legalism: Peng Zhen on Law and Political Authority in the PRC (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
29. The protestant Party ideology came at the 12th Party Congress with Hu Yaobang; see Hu Yaobang, “Quanmian kaichuang shehuizhuyi xiandaihua jianshe de xin jumian” (Comprehensively inaugurate the new situation of socialist modernization construction), in Zhongguo gaige quanshu: Jingshen wenming jianshe juan (The encyclopedia of China’s reform: The volume of constructing spiritual civilization), ed. Zhao Yao, Hu Zhensheng, and Xu Kejun (Dalian: Dalian Chubanshe, 1992), 160–70. For an excellent analysis, see Wenjie Weng, “The Disciplinary Reform: Sanming and the Post-Mao Civilizing Project, 1978–1984” (master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, 2021), https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0413691?o=0.
30. Cai Xia, “Advancing Constitutional Democracy Should Be the Mission of the Chinese Communist Party (2013),” trans. Timothy Cheek, Joshua A. Fogel, and David Ownby, Reading the China Dream (blog), last updated October 2022, https://www.readingthechinadream.com/cai-xia-advancing-constitutional-democracy.html; Fewsmith, China since Tiananmen; Yu Keping, Democracy Is a Good Thing: Essays on Politics, Society, and Culture in Contemporary China (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).
31. Peter Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (London: Gollancz, 1995).
32. Most famously in Liu Shaoqi’s essay on cadres’ self-cultivation, translated into English as “How to Be a Good Communist,” from July 1939, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed December 23, 2023, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch01.htm, and Chen Yun, under the same title, and translated by Boyd Compton in Mao’s China: Party Reform Documents, 1942–44 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952), 88–107.
33. Philip A. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–2.
34. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China; Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
35. A detailed and sympathetic account of the Yan’an Rectification and associated campaigns for production, simplifying bureaucracy, and so forth is given by Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); a more critical, but sound, analysis of the politics is offered in Raymond Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980). Finally, a dense but powerfully detailed study of why rectification generated so much belief and solidarity among cadres and compliance among the general public is given in David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
36. Timothy Cheek, “Making Maoism: Ideology and Organization in the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1942–1944,” in Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities, ed. Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2016), 304–27.
37. Elizabeth J. Perry, “Moving the Masses: Emotion Work in the Chinese Revolution,” Mobilization: An International Journal 7, no. 2 (2002): 111–28.
38. Timothy Cheek, “Attitudes of Action: Maoism as Emotional Political Theory,” in Chinese Thought as Global Theory, ed. Leigh Jenco (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 75–100.
39. Joseph Fewsmith, personal communication with author, August 2020.
40. Liu Shaoqi, “Lun gongchandangyuan de xiuyang” (On the self-cultivation of the Party member) (July 1939), translated in Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, vol. 1, Liu Shaoqi Reference Archive, February 2004, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be.
41. Kerry Brown and Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, “Ideology in the Era of Xi Jinping,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 23, no. 3 (September 2018): 323–39.
42. James C. Scott, “The Public Transcript as Respectable Performance,” in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 45–69.
43. Cunningham, Saich, and Turiel, “Understanding CCP Resilience.”
44. Indeed, an experienced former diplomat foresees an early end to Xi’s rule. Roger Garside, China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
45. Liu Qing, “Liberalism in the Chinese Context: Potential and Predicaments,” trans. Matthew Galway and Lu Hua, in Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China, ed. Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 45–71.
46. See, for example, Sean R. Roberts, The War on Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); and related materials collected by the Xinjiang Documentation Project (Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia), accessed December 23, 2023, https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca.

3. Fundamentalism with Chinese Characteristics: Xi Jinping and Faith

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