Much of the world is in Covid agony. But China’s Communist Party is celebrating as never before. Next Thursday, July 1, its regimented version of ecstasy will hit a new high as it vaunts its centenary from a position of unchallengeable power within China and of growing global influence that it intends to underline with a meticulously organised Winter Olympics in six months.
At the CCP’s secretive birth in Shanghai in 1921, its 13 inaugural members aimed for a second revolution, following the dethroning of the last emperor a decade earlier, by establishing “a militant and disciplined party of the proletariat”. Today, more of the party’s 92 million members are managers, professionals and officials than are proletariat, half now holding degrees.
Urban workers, farmers and fishermen comprise a third. Only a quarter are women, and no woman has ever reached the top echelon, the Politburo Standing Committee.
Revolutionary thoughts are dangerous today. The CCP instead aims to tighten control over every detail of the Chinese world – the thoughts and the behaviour of individuals and families, and the leadership and plans of every organisation, firm and club, each required to host a party branch.
The CCP has become the ultimate establishment power. To realise any ambition in today’s China, one must find a way first to join the party.
Unlike Mao Zedong’s party, which claimed it was redeeming China from an oppressive feudal and imperial caste and past, Xi Jinping’s party is the ruling class. It proclaims itself the proud bearer of continuity, realising ancient dynastic Chinese dreams and exalting traditional Han culture.
The previous reform era of Deng Xiaoping pursued change domestically and the status quo internationally. Xi’s New Era has reversed those priorities, thus the extraordinary efforts to celebrate the centenary, China’s dominant event of the year.
The party’s party also is setting the scene for next year’s big deal, the five-yearly national CCP congress that will confirm Xi’s paramountcy for a further decade.
This year ordinary Chinese people have been unable to escape, anywhere or any time, online and offline, the centennial drumbeat building towards its crescendo next Thursday. The almost-100 party-focused television dramas included The Awakening Age, a series about which one official reviewer wrote: “I love so much the scene in which young Mao Zedong first appears … He walks through the wind and rain, shining like a light.”
Last week Xi led the party leadership to Beijing’s massive new Museum of the CCP, whose exhibition includes 2600 photos and 3500 “relics”, themed “staying true to the founding mission”. Seminars are being staged in every neighbourhood, and commemorative stamps and coins are being issued.
“Red tourism” is booming despite Covid-19, with myriad party branches, work units and neighbourhood clubs travelling to the sacred sites, especially of the Long March, handily close to Mao’s birthplace in Shaoshan.
Xi has joined the pilgrims, propaganda vice-minister Shen Haixiong praising him as the “People’s Leader” for “leaving red footprints” all over China. Visiting the site of the Battle of Xiangjiang recently, Xi ascribed victory to revolutionary ideals that “soar above the clouds”, while warning that “to fully build a modern socialist country by the mid-century will be no walk in the park … To achieve the goals of (the CCP’s) second hundred years … will take more than beating drums and banging gongs.”
This year cinemas are required to screen, twice weekly, films glorifying the CCP, such as Heroic Sons and Daughters, 100 Regiments Offensive and Red Sun. Live theatres are presenting operas from the Mao years. Peking University professor Zhang Yiwu told Global Times that reviving party classics is “a charming way to give younger generations not familiar with the history a chance to feel its weight”.
Above cities, People’s Liberation Army helicopters are flying in formations in the shape of “100”. New songs of praise are being promoted across social media, often with semi-religious themes such as in Hong Kong musician Ding Ching-hoi’s lyric that “we can enjoy a wealthy and stable life/since the party shouldered the burden for us”.
Party members and others who feel guilt about a misdemeanour against the party-state, or who wish to share a concern, now can register their self-criticism or inquiry at one of many pods – similar to Catholic confessionals – installed in public places, with computer screens and video cameras.
Eighty new slogans such as “Follow the Party Forever” and “No Force Can Stop the March of the Chinese People” are plastered everywhere. Schoolchildren are required to write essays on Xi’s Chinese Dream. Adult education classes offer discounts for posting essays that combine praise for Marxism, Maoism and Xi’s Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.
Visiting elite Tsinghua to outline universities’ role in the centenary, Xi stressed the moulding of students to become “both red and professional”, saying China’s education system must train the “builders and successors of socialism” and engage in “unremitting struggle”.
Young party members recently have elevated Mao’s thought that “the work and study load for the young should not be too heavy” to challenge exhausting workplace demands, especially in the internet world, where a common work schedule comprises “996” – 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
Newly subjugated Hong Kong eagerly is joining the party’s praise. Its chief executive Carrie Lam said: “Everybody sees under the leadership of the CCP … the happy lives led by the people.”
Attempts to refute spreading concerns about the suppression of Xinjiang’s Muslim Uighurs include a musical, The Wings of Song, inspired according to Global Times by films such as La La Land. It features a clean-shaven Uighur toasting with a beer.
Sinologist Tony Saich has written: “The CCP has developed its own narrative about its right to rule, its legitimacy, and is threatened by credible alternative narratives, including those from Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong, whose inhabitants have points of reference outside Han China, and alternative histories.”
The Foreign Ministry’s party secretary Qi Yu has instructed: “Through the study of party history, we should continuously improve the ability of the diplomatic team … to fight, and be brave and good at fighting.” China’s ambassador to France Lu Shaye said recently: “Westerners accuse us of not conforming to diplomatic etiquette, but the standard for us to evaluate our work is … how people in China look at us … not whether foreigners are happy.”
Reflecting on Fudan University professor Zhang Weiwei’s insistence that the West must “understand China”, China Media Project director David Bandurski writes that at its core this is about the infallibility of the CCP: “This need to ‘understand China’ is not really about dialogue or dialectic. It is about acceptance. The West must be persuaded to see things China’s way.”
Former Indian ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale says Beijing is insisting “the 21st century isn’t an Asian century, it is solely a Chinese century, and you’d better understand your place in this hierarchy”.
Leading up to the centenary, Xi has declared “the East is rising, the West declining”, with “the rule of China” contrasting sharply with “turmoil in the West”. China’s core global aim is to make the world safe for the “invincible” party – “Nobody can beat us or choke us to death,” says Xi – just as unparalleled surveillance has made China safe for the party, which spends more on domestic security than on the externally facing PLA.
The party’s top centenary mission is to control China’s history. Xi instructs: “Use history as a mirror, use history to demonstrate one’s convictions. Know history, love the party. Know history, love the country,” adding that “a country that destroys people must first go to its history” – as he says the Soviet communists did in abjuring Joseph Stalin.
A dob-in campaign has been launched, online and offline, against “historical nihilism”. The public can report people who “distort the history of the party”, attack the party’s leadership, defame “heroes and martyrs” or “defy traditional and revolutionary cultures”. The internet regulator already has deleted more than two million posts featuring “harmful” discussion of history.
The new Brief History of the CCP has removed mention of the murderous chaos unleashed by Mao’s Cultural Revolution that earlier editions included, while Xi’s own nine years as helmsman occupy a quarter of the book.
Next Thursday CCP general secretary Xi will preside over “a grand ceremony”, almost certainly not in Shanghai where the founding members met but in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, just south of the Zhongnanhai leaders’ compound, the communist Forbidden City, where the wall beside the Xinhua Gate still urges piously “Serve the People”, written in Mao’s script.
Around China, particularly devout cadres will be awarded July 1 Medals and 50-year veterans will receive awards. All members will reprise publicly their CCP admission oaths, proclaiming: “I will never betray the party.”
The party’s true anniversary is on July 23, but that underlines the CCP’s readiness to rewrite even, or especially, its own history – as well as handily avoiding a clash with the Olympic Games’ opening in Tokyo. There will be no public parade. The party leadership remains nervous about encouraging the Chinese people to congregate.
New Era Hong Kong’s centennial centrepiece will comprise, appropriately, the launch by the PLA garrison of an exhibition centre displaying its deadly power and its unyielding party loyalty.
Leading Australian Sinologist John Fitzgerald says “China is run as a cadre nation” by officials who have mastered ideology, in whose formation ordinary folk do not participate. “Ideology separates this priesthood from the people. When Xi uses the word ‘we’, he is addressing the party, especially those faithful to the party’s founding vision 100 years ago.”
That creed incorporates Marxism, Maoism, Han nationalism and now Xi-ism, but as the party struts into its second century, its core aim is to keep on keeping on, as Xi himself intends to do – making China and the whole world safe for the CCP.
Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute and a former China correspondent for The Australian.
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