Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China, by John Garnaut
Newsletter publishedon February 7, 2020
Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China by John Garnaut
Bill Bishop
Jan 17, 2019
Regular Sinocism readers are no doubt familiar with John Garnaut, one of
the top journalists covering China before he joined the Australian
government, first as a speech writer for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
and then as a China policy advisor. John led the Australian government's
analysis of and response to PRC/CCP interference and influence efforts
in the country, and his work has since had significant influence in
other Western capitals.
John is now out of government and has allowed me to share with you a
speech he gave at an internal Australian government seminar in August 2017.
I knew John a little in Beijing and besides having tremendous respect
for his work, and especially his access to Princelings at a level I am
not sure any other foreign correspondent has ever had, I always found
him to be a reasoned and thoughtful chronicler of the PRC.
Some now say he has become a China hawk, but I see it as more the
evolution of a sophisticated China watcher who believes in seeking truth
from facts, no matter how difficult it may be to accept the reality of
the direction Xi and the CCP appear to be taking China. This is a
trajectory I have found myself on, along with many of the most
experienced foreign China watchers I know.
I wish I could say I find John's arguments unconvincing, but in fact
they only seem more accurate now, over a year after the 19th Party
Congress, than they did when he gave this talk in 2017. ==
Engineers of the Soul: what Australia needs to know about ideology in Xi
Jinping's China
by John Garnaut
As some of you know I've just spent the past eight months as a model
public servant on my very best behaviour: biding time, concealing
opinions and strictly respecting the bureaucratic order.
Now I get to go unplugged.
Before doing so however I want to thank you very much for coming today
and particularly Paul and Sam for giving me this opportunity. It's an
honour to be here at the creation of what promises to be an important
seminar series.
This seminar series is itself an audacious act of social engineering.
The idea is that by placing economists and security strategists in the
same room we could promote dialogue and maybe even peace between the
tribes of Canberra - with the long term aim of integrated policy making.
We'll see about that.
But in the meantime I'm here as someone who was born into the economics
tribe and has been forced to gradually concede ground to the security
camp. This retreat has taken place over the course of a decade, one
story at a time, as I've had to accept that economic openness does not
inevitably lead to political openness. Not when you have a political
regime that is both capable and committed to ensuring it doesn't happen.
Politics isn't everything but there's no country on earth where it is
more omnipresent, with the exception of North Korea. And there is no
political system that is as tightly bound to ideology.
In the work I was doing upstairs in this building I went out of my way
to remove ideology from my analysis of how China is impacting on
Australia and our region. It was simply too alien and too difficult to
digest. In order to make sense to time-poor leaders it was easier to
"normalise" events, actions and concepts by framing them in more
familiar terms.
This approach of "normalising" China also served to sidestep painful
normative debates about what China is, where it is going and what it
wants. It was a way of avoiding a food fight about who is pro-or-anti
China. Taking the "Communist Party" out of "China" was a way of
de-activating the autoimmune response that can otherwise kill productive
conversation.
This pragmatism has worked pretty well. We've taken the China
conversation to a new level of sophistication over the past year or so.
But by stripping out ideology we are giving up on building a framework
which has explanatory and predictive value.
At some point, given the reach that China has into Australia, we will
have to make a serious attempt to read the ideological road map that
frames the language, perceptions and decisions of Chinese leaders. If we
are ever going to map the Communist Party genome then we need to read
the ideological DNA.
So today I'm stepping into the food fight.
I want to make these broad points about the historical foundations of
CCP ideology, beyond the fact that it is important:
Communism did not enjoy an immaculate conception in China. Rather, it
was grafted onto an existing ideological system - the classical Chinese
dynastic system.
China had an unusual veneration for the written word and acceptance of
its didactic value.
Marxism-Leninism was interpreted to Mao and his fellow revolutionaries
by a crucial intermediary: Joseph Stalin.
Communism - as interpreted by Lenin, Stalin and Mao - is a total
ideology. At the risk of being politically insensitive, it is totalitarian.
Xi Jinping has reinvigorated ideology to an extent we have not seen
since the Cultural Revolution.
I'll hold off on the practical contemporary implications of all this
until we get to the subsequent discussion.
A Dynastic Cosmology
It was clear from my work as a journalist and writer in New China - to
use the party speak - that the formal ideology of communism coexists
with an unofficial ideology of old China. The Founding Fathers of the
PRC came to power on a promise to repudiate and destroy everything about
the dark imperial past, but they never really changed the mental wallpaper.
Mao and his comrades grew up with tales of imperial China. They never
stopped reading them. The Dream of Red Mansions, The Three Kingdoms -
the Chinese classics are all about the rise and decay of dynasties. This
is the metanarrative of Chinese literature and historiography, even today.
Mao in particular was obsessed, as Mao's one-time secretary Li Rui
explained to me. He told me: "He only slept on one third of the bed and
the other two thirds of his bed was covered by books, all of which were
thread-bound Chinese books, Chinese ancient books. His research was the
strategies of emperors. That was how to govern this country. That was
what he was most interested in."
And the Founding Revolutionaries passed these same tales down to their
children. The daughter of Mao's leading propagandist, Hu Qiaomu, told me
that her father raised his voice to her only once: when she confessed
that she hadn't finished the Dream of Red Mansions (which by the way
runs to a million characters). Hu Qiaomu was furious. He told her
Chairman Mao had read the book 25 times.
So this is my first observation about ideology - ideology in the
broadest sense, as a coherent system of ideas and ideals: the founding
families of the PRC are steeped in the Dynastic System.
Admittedly, communism and feudal imperialism are uneasy bedfellows. But
they are not irreconcilable. The formula for dynastic communism was
perfected by Chen Yun: their children had to inherit power not because
of privilege but because they could be counted upon to be loyal to the
revolutionary cause. Or, as he put it: "at least our children will not
dig up our graves".
Xi Jinping has exercised an unwritten aristocratic claim to power which
derives from his father's proximity to the founder of the Red Dynasty:
Chairman Mao. He is the compromise representative of all the great
founding families. This is the starting point for understanding the
worldview of Xi Jinping and his Princeling cohort.
In the view of China's princelings - or "Revolutionary Successors", as
they prefer to be known - China is still trapped in the cycle which had
created and destroyed every dynasty that had gone before. In this
tradition, when you lose political power you don't just lost your job
(while keeping your super) as you might in our rather gentrified
arrangement. You lose your wealth, you lose your freedom, you probably
lose your life and possibly your entire extended family. You are
literally erased from history. Winners take all and losers lose everything.
With these stakes, the English idiom "life-and-death-struggle" is far
too passive. In the Chinese formulation it is "You-Die, I-Live". I must
kill preemptively in order to live. Xi and his comrades in the red
dynasty believe they will go the same way as the Manchus and the Mings
the moment they forget.
China's veneration of the written word
A second point, related to the first, is that China has an extraordinary
veneration of the written word. Stories, histories and teachers have
great moral authority. Greater than anywhere I can think of with the
exception of Tsarist Russia. This may have made Russia and China
culturally receptive to propaganda and the ideology transmitted by
propaganda. What is more certain is that China was particularly
receptive to Soviet ideology because Chinese intellectuals found meaning
in Russian literature and texts earlier and more readily than they did
with other Western sources. "Russian literature was our guide (daoshi)
and friend," said Lu Xun.
In classical Chinese statecraft there are two tools for gaining and
maintaining control over "the mountains and the rivers": The first is wu
(weapons, violence - ?) and the second is wen (language, culture - ?).
Chinese leaders have always believed that power derives from controlling
both the physical battlefield and the cultural domain. You can't sustain
physical power without discursive power. Wu and wen go hand-in-hand.
The key to understanding the allure of the Soviet Commintern in Shanghai
and Guangzhou in the 1920s is that their (admittedly brilliant) agents
told a compelling story. They came with money, guns and organisational
technology but their greatest selling point was a narrative which
promised a linear escape from the dynastic cycle.
(Actually, according to the Soviet rendering of Marxism, the course of
history wasn't exactly linear. Rather, history was said to move along
the trajectory of a corkscrew - shaped by "dialectical" rounds of
struggle, destruction and renewal).
Mao's discursive advantage was Marxist-Leninist ideology. Language was
not just a tool of moral judgment. It was an instrument for shaping
acceptable behaviour and a weapon for distinguishing enemies and
friends. This is the subtext of Mao's most famous poem, Snow. Communist
ideology enabled him to "weaponise" culture in a way his imperial
predecessors had never managed.
And it's important to remember who was the leader of the Communist world
during the entire quarter of a century in which Mao rose to absolute power.
The "Great Genius" Comrade Stalin.
Mao knew Marxist Leninist dogma was absolutely crucial to his enterprise
but he personally lacked the patience to wade through it. He found a
shortcut to ideological proficiency with Joseph Stalin's Short Course on
the History of the Bolsheviks, published at the end of Stalin's Great
Terror, in 1938. According to Li Rui, when interviewed by historian Li
Huayu, Mao thought he'd found an "encyclopaedia of Marxism" and "acted
as if he'd discovered a treasure".
At the time of Stalin's death, in March 1953, The Short Course on the
History of the Bolsheviks had become the third-most printed book in
human history. After Stalin's death - when Stalin was eulogised as "the
Great Genius" on the front page of the People's Daily - the Chinese
printers redoubled their efforts. It became the closest thing in China
to a religious text.
The Short Course is hard reading but it offers us the same shortcut to
understanding Communist ideology as it did for Mao.
Stalin's problem was different to Lenin's. Lenin had to win a revolution
but Stalin had to sustain it.
Stalin's great ideological challenge was to explain that they'd won the
revolution but the long-promised Utopia of perfect equality had to be
postponed. He had to rationalise kicking the utopian destination over
the horizon and subordinating that ever-receding objective to the
imperative of inner party warfare.
Stalin's Short Course is a manual for perpetual struggle against a roll
call of imagined dastardly enemies who are collaborating with imagined
Western agents to restore bourgeois capitalism and liberalism. It is
written as a chronicle of victories by Lenin and then Stalin's "correct
line" over an endless succession of ideological villains. It is perhaps
instructive that many of the most "vile" internal enemies were said to
have cloaked their subversive intentions in the guise of "reform".
The practical utility of the book is that it prescribes an antidote to
the calcification and putrefaction that inevitably corrodes and degrades
every dictatorship.
The most original insight in Stalin's Short Course on the History of the
Bolsheviks is that the path to socialist utopia will always be
obstructed by enemies who want to restore bourgeois capitalism from
inside the party. These internal enemies grow more desperate and more
dangerous as they grow increasingly imperilled - and as they collaborate
with the spies and agents of Western liberalism.
The most important lines in the book:
"As the revolution deepens, class struggle intensifies."
"The Party becomes strong by purging itself."
You can imagine how this formulation was revelatory to a ruthless
Chinese leader like Mao who had mastered the "You Die, I Live" world
into which he had been born - a world in which you choose to either kill
or be killed - and who was obsessed with how to prevent the decay which
had destroyed every imperial dynasty before.
What Stalin offered Mao was not only a manual for purging his peers but
also an explanation of why it was necessary. Purging his rivals was the
only way a vanguard party could "purify" itself, remain true to its
revolutionary nature and prevent a capitalist restoration.
Purging was the mechanism for the Chinese Communist Party to achieve
ever greater "unity" with revolutionary "truth" as interpreted by Mao.
It is the mechanism for preventing the process of corruption and
putrefaction which inevitably sets in after the founding leaders of each
dynasty leave the scene.
Crucially, Mao split with Kruschev because Kruschev split with Stalin
and everything he stood for. The Sino-Soviet split was ideological - it
was Mao's claim to ideological leadership over the communist world.
Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao. It was Mao's claim to being Stalin's true
successor.
We hear a lot about how Xi and his peers blame Gorbachev for the
collapse of the Soviet state but actually their grievances go much
further back. They blame Kruschev. They blame Kruschev for breaking with
Stalin. And they vow that they will never do to Mao what Kruschev did to
Stalin.
Now, sixty years on, we're seeing Xi making his claim to be the true
Revolutionary Successor of Mao.
Xi's language of "party purity"; "criticism and self-criticism"; "the
mass line"; his obsession with "unity"; his attacks on elements of
"hostile Western liberalism", "constitutionalism" and other variants of
ideological "subversion" - this is all Marxism-Leninism as interpreted
by Stalin as interpreted by Mao.
This is the language that the Deep Red princelings spoke when they got
together and occasionally when I interviewed them and crashed their
gatherings in the lead up to the 18th Party Congress.
And this was how Xi spoke after the 18th Party Congress:
''To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist
Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to
engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines
the party's organizations on all levels.''
Today, the utopian destination has to be maintained, however absurd it
seems, in order to justify the brutal means of getting there. Xi has
inserted a couple of interim goals - for those who lack revolutionary
patience - but the underlying Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist logic
remains the same.
This is the logic of his ever-deepening purge of peers who keep getting
in the way.
The purge of the princeling challenger Bo Xilai; the security chief Zhou
Yongkang; the two vice chairs of the PLA Central Military Commission Xu
Caihou and Guo Boxiong; the Youth League fixer Ling Jihua; the potential
successor Sun Zhengcai just a fortnight ago.
None of this is personal. It's dialectical. And inevitable.
It's pushing and accelerating China's journey along the inexorable
corkscrew-shaped course of history.
"History needs to pushed along its dialectical course," said Xi, in his
speech to mark the party's 95th birthday in 2015. "History always moves
forward and it never waits for all those who hesitate."
The same logic applies outside the party as within.
"The decadent culture of the capitalist class and feudalistic society
must be opposed," said the authoritative Guangming Daily, expanding on
another of Xi's speeches.
The essence of Maoism and Stalinism is perpetual struggle. This is the
antidote to the calcification and putrefaction that has destroyed every
previous dynasty, dictatorship and empire. This is why Xi and his Red
Successor peers believe that Maoism and Stalinism is still highly
relevant today. Not just relevant, but existential.
Xi has set in motion a purification project - a war against the forces
of counter-revolution - that has no end point because the notional
utopian destination of perfect communism will always be kicked a little
further down the road.
There is no policy objective in the sense that a Wall Street banker or
Canberran public servant might understand it - as a little more energy
market efficiency here, or compression of the Gini coefficient there.
Rather, this is how you restore dynastic vigour and vitality. Politics
is the ends.
This is what Mao and Stalin understood better than any of their peers.
This is what Xi Jinping's Deep Red Restoration is all about. And why the
process of extreme politics will not stop at the 19th Party Congress.
Which brings us to the title of this seminar.
Engineers of the human soul
At my first team bonding session in this building I asked who was the
world leader who described artists and authors as "engineers of the
human soul".
Was this word image the creation of Stalin, Mao or someone else?
If you're thinking Joseph Stalin, then you're right:
"The production of souls is more important than the production of
tanks.... And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers
of the human soul".
To me this is one of the great totalitarian metaphors: a machine
designed to forge complete unity between state, society and individual.
The totalitarian machine works to a predetermined path. It denies the
existence of free will and rejects "abstract" values like "truth", love
and empathy. It repudiates God, submits to no law and seeks nothing less
than to remould the human soul.
The quote is from Stalin's famous speech at the home of the writer Maxim
Gorky in preparation for the first Congress of the Union of Soviet
Writers in October 1932. This marked the end of Stalin's Great Famine
and Cultural Revolution - the prototype for Mao's Great Famine and
Cultural Revolution - in the lead up to Stalin's Great Terror.
For Stalin, Lenin and the proto-Leninists of 19th Century Russia, the
value of literature and art was purely instrumental. There was no such
thing as "art for art's sake". In their ideology, poetry has no
intrinsic value beyond its purpose of indoctrinating the masses and
advancing the cause of revolution.
Or, to use the engineering language of the original Man of Steel -
Joseph Stalin - literature and art are nothing more nor less than cogs
in the revolutionary machine.
But, if you think the answer is Chairman Mao, then you're also right.
Mao extended Stalin's metaphor a decade later at his famous Yan'an Forum
on Literature and Art delivered in two parts in October 1942, and
published (in heavily doctored form) one year later:
"[Our purpose is] to ensure that literature and art fit well into the
whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as
powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking
and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy
with one heart and one mind."
This is when Mao made plain that there is no such thing as truth, love
or artistic merit except in so far as these abstract concepts can be
pressed into the practical service of politics.
Importantly, with contemporary significance, Mao's talks on literature
and art was his way of introducing the Yan'an Rectification Campaign -
the first great systematic purge of the Chinese Communist Party. This
was a project of orchestrated peer pressure and torture designed first
to purge Mao's peers and then to instil communist ideology deep within
the minds of the hundreds of thousands of idealistic students and
intellectuals who had flocked to Yan'an during the anti-Japanese war.
Importantly, the Communist Party never sought to "persuade" so much as
"condition". By creating a fully enclosed system, controlling all
incentives and disincentives, and "breaking" individuals physically,
socially and psychologically, they found they could condition the human
mind in the same way that Pavlov had learned to condition dogs in a
Moscow laboratory a few years earlier.
This is when Mao's men first coined the term "brainwashing" - it's a
literal translation of the Maoist term xinao, literally "washing the
brain". Mao himself preferred Stalin's metallurgical metaphor. He called
it "tempering":
"If you want to be one with the masses, you must make up your mind to
undergo a long and even painful process of tempering."
Mao's Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art vanished and were then
resurrected and republished everywhere at the onset of the Cultural
Revolution - the most audacious and successful act of social engineering
that the world has ever seen.
And, most relevant to all of us today, if you are thinking President Xi
Jinping, then you're also right.
President Xi, or Chairman Xi to use a more direct translation, was
speaking at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art, in October 2014.
Xi's Forum on Literature and Art was convened on the 72nd anniversary of
the young Chairman Mao's Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art.
Xi was arguing for a return to the Stalinist-Maoist principle that art
and literature should only exist to serve politics. Not politics as we
know it - the straightforward exercise of organisational and
decision-making power - but the totalitarian project of creating unity
of language, knowledge, thought and behaviour in pursuit of a utopian
destination.
"Art and literature is the engineering that moulds the human soul; art
and literary workers are the engineers of the human soul."
Like Mao's version, Xi's art and literature forum speech was not
published until one year later.
Like Mao's speech, the published version made no acknowledgment that
large chunks had been added, deleted and revised - to reflect the
political imperatives of the times.
Like Stalin and Mao, Xi's speech marked a Communist Party rectification
campaign which included an all-out effort to elevate the respective
leaders to cult status. Nothing in Communist Party choreography happens
by accident.
It should be noted here that when Mao was rallying the country in 1942
he did so under the banner of ""patriotism" - because the idea of
communism had absolutely no pulling power.
It's no different today. Xi:
"Among the core values of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the
deepest, most basic and most enduring is patriotism. Our modern art and
literature needs to take patriotism as its muse, guiding the people to
establish and adhere to correct views of history, the nation, the
country and culture."
And the old warnings against subversive western liberalism haven't
changed either.
For Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Xi, words are not vehicles of reason and
persuasion. They are bullets. Words are weapons for defining, isolating
and destroying opponents. And the task of destroying enemies can never
end. (This deserves a stand alone discussion of United Front strategy -
but I'll leave this for another day).
For Xi, as with Stalin and Mao, there is no endpoint in the perpetual
quest for unity and regime preservation.
Xi uses the same ideological template to describe the role of "media
workers". And school teachers. And university scholars. They are all
engineers of ideological conformity and cogs in the revolutionary machine.
Among the many things that China's modern leaders did – including
overseeing the greatest burst of market liberalisation and poverty
alleviation the world has ever seen – those who won the internal
political battles have retained the totalitarian aspiration of
engineering the human soul in order to lead them towards the
ever-receding and ever-changing utopian destination.
This is not to say that China could not have turned out differently.
Elite politics from Mao's death to the Tiananmen massacres was a genuine
contest of ideas.
But ideology won that contest.
Today the PRC is the only ruling communist party that has never split
with Stalin, with the partial exception of North Korea. Stalin's
portrait stood alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin in Tiananmen Square -
six metres tall - right up to the early 1980s, at which point the
portraits were moved indoors.
For a long time we all took comfort in thinking that this ideological
aspiration existed only on paper, an object of lip service, while
China's 1.4 billion citizens got on with the job of building families
and communities and seeking knowledge and prosperity.
But it has been much more than lip service. Since 1989 the party has
been rebuilding itself around what the draft National Security Law calls
"ideological security" including defending itself against "negative
cultural infiltration".
Propaganda and security - wen and wu, the book and the sword, the pen
and the gun - are once again inseparable. Party leaders must "dare to
show their swords'' to ensure that "politicians run newspapers", said
Xi, at his first National Propaganda Work Conference, on August 9, 2013.
Xi has now pushed ideology to the forefront because it provides a
framework for "purifying" and regaining control over the vanguard party
and thereby the country.
In Xi's view, shared by many in his Red Princeling cohort, the cost of
straying too far from the Maoist and Stalinist path is dynastic decay
and eventually collapse.
Everything Xi Jinping says as leader, and everything I can piece
together from his background, tells me that he is deadly serious about
this totalising project.
In retrospect we might have anticipated this from the Maoist and
Stalinist references that Xi sprinkled through his opening remarks as
president, in November 2012.
It was made clearer during Xi Jinping's first Southern Tour as General
Secretary, in December 2012, when he laid a wreath at Deng's shrine in
Shenzhen but inverted Deng's message. He blamed the collapse of the
Soviet Union on nobody being "man enough" to stand up to Gorbachev and
this, in turn, was because party members had neglected ideology. This is
when he gave his warning that we must not forget Mao, Lenin or Stalin.
In April 2013 the General Office of the Central Committee, run by Xi's
princeling right hand man, Li Zhanshu, sent this now infamous political
instruction down to all high level party organisations.
This Document No. 9, "Communique on the Current State of the Ideological
Sphere", set "disseminating thought on the cultural front as the most
important political task." It required cadres to arouse "mass fervour"
and wage "intense struggle" against the following "false trends":
Western constitutional democracy - "an attempt to undermine the current
leadership";
Universal values of human rights - an attempt to weaken the theoretical
foundations of party leadership.
Civil Society - a "political tool" of the "Western anti-China forces"
dismantle the ruling party's social foundation.
Neoliberalism - US-led efforts to "change China's basic economic system".
The West's idea of journalism - attacking the Marxist view of news,
attempting to "gouge an opening through which to infiltrate our ideology".
Historical nihilism - trying to undermine party history, "denying the
inevitability" of Chinese socialism.
Questioning Reform and Opening - No more arguing about whether reform
needs to go further.
There is no ambiguity in this document. The Western conspiracy to
infiltrate, subvert and overthrow the People's Party is not contingent
on what any particular Western country thinks or does. It is an
equation, a mathematical identity: the CCP exists and therefore it is
under attack. No amount of accommodation and reassurance can ever be
enough - it can only ever be a tactic, a ruse.
Without the conspiracy of Western liberalism the CCP loses its reason
for existence. There would be no need to maintain a vanguard party. Mr
Xi might as well let his party peacefully evolve.
We know this document is authentic because the Chinese journalist who
publicised it on the internet, Gao Yu, was arrested and her child was
threatened with unimaginable things. The threats to her son led her to
make the first Cultural Revolution-style confession of the television era.
In November 2013 Xi appointed himself head of a new Central State
Security Commission in part to counter "extremist forces and ideological
challenges to culture posed by Western nations".
Today, however, the Internet is the primary battle domain. It's all
about cyber sovereignty.
Conclusion
The key point about Communist Party ideology - the unbroken thread that
runs from Lenin through Stalin, Mao and Xi - is that the party is and
always has defined itself as being in perpetual struggle with the
"hostile" forces of Western liberalism.
Xi is talking seriously and acting decisively to progress a project of
total ideological control wherever it is possible for him to do so. His
vision "requires all the Chinese people to be unified with a single will
like a strong city wall", as he told "the broad masses of youth" in his
Labor Day speech of May 2015. They need to "temper their characters",
said Xi, using a metaphor favoured by both Stalin and Mao.
There is no ambiguity in Xi's project. We see in everything he does and
- even in a system designed to be opaque and deceptive - we can see it
in his words.
Mr Xi did not invent this ideological project but he has hugely
reinvigorated it. For the first time since Mao we have a leader who
talks and acts like he really means it.
And he is pushing communist ideology at a time when the idea of
"communism" is as unattractive as it has been at any time in the past
100 years. All that remains is an ideology of power, dressed up as
patriotism, but that doesn't mean it cannot work.
Already, Xi has shown that the subversive promise of the internet can be
inverted. In the space of five years, with the assistance of Big Data
science and Artificial Intelligence, he has been bending the Internet
from an instrument of democratisation into a tool of omniscient control.
The journey to Utopia is still in progress but first we must pass
through a cyber-enabled dystopia in order to defeat the forces of
counter-revolution.
The audacity of this project is breathtaking. And so too are the
implications.
The challenge for us is that Xi's project of total ideological control
does not stop at China's borders. It is packaged to travel with Chinese
students, tourists, migrants and especially money. It flows through the
channels of the Chinese language internet, pushes into all the world's
major media and cultural spaces and generally keeps pace with and even
anticipates China's increasingly global interests.
In my opinion, if you're in the business of intelligence, defence or
international relations; or trade, economic policy or market regulation;
or arts, higher education or preserving the integrity of our democratic
system - in other words, just about any substantial policy question
whatsoever - then you will need a working knowledge of Marxism-Leninism
Mao Zedong Thought. And maybe, after the 19th Party Congress, you'll
need "Xi Jinping Thought" too.
END
Reading:
Li Huayu, STALIN'S "SHORT COURSE" AND MAO'S SOCIALIST ECONOMIC
TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA IN THE EARLY 1950s
Document No. 9
Suisheng Zhao, The Ideological Campaign in Xi's China: Rebuilding Regime
Legitimacy
Matt Johnson, Securitizing Culture in Post-Deng China: An Evolving
National Strategic Paradigm, 1994–2014
Willy Lam - Beijing Harnesses Big Data & AI to Perfect the Police State
John Fitzgerald: Human dignity and its enemies
Samantha Hoffman: Managing the State: Social Credit, Surveillance and
the CCP's Plan for China
Maya Wang: China's dystopian push to revolutionize surveillance
Subscriber comments
Tim Clissold
Jan 21, 2019 Liked by Bill Bishop
John Garnaut's speech 'Engineers of the Soul' published recently on Bill
Bishop's Sinocism deserves the greatest attention. It addresses the core
problem faced by all serious China watchers; how to 'map the Communist
Party genome' through reading its 'ideological DNA.'
His speech comes against a backdrop of almost universal hostility
towards China in the Western press and academia. The Financial Times,
for example, wrote recently that China 'looks more and more like a
dictatorship,' and that China's 'race-based ideas of national
rejuvenation and manifest destiny have deep and uncomfortable echoes in
20-century history.' This passage was seized by Deepak Lal, James
Coleman Professor of International Development at UCLA, to justify an
article headed, 'As China's leaders morph from Stalin to Hitler, the US
and other democracies must confront it.' Mr Garnaut is not alone in
fearing that China is 'totalitarian.'
This commentary cuts directly to the core question that we all wrestle
with; what is China's true intent? The answer matters not only to
ourselves – who wants to be on the wrong side of history – but also to
progressive Chinese, because uncritical Western commentary undermines
their hopes for a more liberal 'Westernised' society. So when someone
with as much experience in China as Mr Garnaut shares his thoughts, we
should listen very carefully.
Mr Garnaut's speech was based on three tenets:
1. Communism in China was grafted onto the existing ideological
system of the Chinese dynastic system,
2. China had an unusual veneration for the written word, and,
3. Communist founding ideology in China was interpreted by a
crucial intermediary – Joseph Stalin – and Xi Jinping is going back to
that ideology.
The truth of the first idea can be seen from an exhibit at the tomb of
the third Han emperor near Xi'an, which explains the government in the
second century BCE by comparing it closely to the functional departments
of the State Council today. Chinese leaders pepper their speeches with
literary and historical idioms, so there is little doubt that Mr Garnaut
is right about the connection to the imperial system. His second point
reinforces the first; written characters do not change across the
centuries and provide a direct link to the thoughts and actions of
China's earliest governors. Compare Huang Tingjian's eleventh century
calligraphy, still readily legible today, with the Doomsday Book, which
was written about the same time in England but is only accessible to
scholars. Finally, there is little doubt that Mao was immensely
influenced by Stalin as, after Khruschev's famous denunciation, he
complained "I think that out of Stalin's ten finger's, only three were
rotten."
So whilst there will be a broad consensus supporting Mr Garnaut's three
tenets, there is room for debate about their relative importance.
In 1300 CE, the principality of Moscow covered an area about the size of
present day Israel. For 1,500 years, China had already been a unified
state with roughly similar territory and governed by a sophisticated,
literate bureaucracy. Before the reign of Peter the Great at the end of
the seventeenth century, Russia had few schools and its landlord ruling
class was overwhelmingly illiterate with only 'a nodding acquaintance
with the alphabet.' This lack of ideological hinterland was a critical
factor in the collapse of Soviet communism. Sure, the USSR did not
deliver economic growth over the long term; it could not innovate; it
coerced different ethnic groups into false alliances that had not been
glued together over the centuries. But its basic problem was that it had
no civilizational bedrock; and thus it had to perish.
In China, for more that two thousand years, the state has marshalled
huge resources into infrastructure and sought a pragmatic balance
between the invisible hand of the market and the more visible hand of
regulation. The Han dynasty nationalised the salt and iron industries in
187 BCE. More than a thousand years later, the Song Chancellor Wang
Anshi wrote, "The State should take the entire management of commerce,
industry and agriculture into its own hands with a view to succouring
the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust
by the rich." These are the thoughts and deeds of politicians worried
about inequality caused by unregulated capitalism. The immense state
sponsored infrastructure projects of today are underpinned by the same
thinking behind the Great Wall, the Grand Canal and the Dujiangyan water
system, built around 256 BCE, that still provides irrigation over a huge
area of the Sichuan basin and makes it the most productive farmland in
China.
The officials who administered this sophisticated state were able to
draw on a vast body of philosophical writings and policy precedent.
Thought, even in those times, was unified by the imperial exam system
that ran in an almost unbroken chain from the first century CE until
1905. The core ideal of traditional Chinese governance is 'benevolence'
– the requirement to put the interests of ordinary people above all
else. "Be the first to bear the world's hardship, and the last to enjoy
its comfort," wrote Fan Zhongyan in the early eleventh century. Huang
Liuhong noted six hundred years later that Mencius believed, "All men
have a mind which cannot bear to see the suffering of others. The
ancient kings had this commiserating mind, and, likewise, as a matter of
course, they had a commiserating government." I can't help thinking that
as Mao lay in his bed, he spent more time reading the Song classic, the
'General Mirror in Aid of Governance' published in 1084 CE, than he did
reading Stalin. The modern incarnation of this ideal of benevolence is
reflected in 'tian xia wei gong' and 'wei renmin fuwu' and this too
infuses Party ideology and Xi's speeches. How else could the Chinese
leadership have achieved so much for their people over the past forty
years, especially those trapped in poverty?
Due to the lack of a comparable foundational ideology, Stalin had to
rely almost exclusively on the instruments of violence to create the
terror needed to unify thought. Compare this with China where, last
week, a television documentary revealed that officials in Shaanxi had
repeatedly ignored Xi's personal instructions to tear down some villas
built in a nature park. Would the governor of a Russian region have
dared to defy serial written instructions from Stalin over a period of
six years? I doubt it. Where Stalin would have sent in the NKVD, Xi had
to rely on a couple of slots on primetime television.
The Chinese don't need to spread terror through society because of the
unifying nature of their collective historical experience and its
relevance in solving problems of today. Early in the Warring States,
philosophical discourse about the purpose of the state had broadly
coalesced around 'stability through unity'; the remaining debate was
just about how to achieve it. Mencius proposed ruling by moral example,
whilst Shang Yang thought that was hopelessly naïve and advocated 'doing
what the enemy would be ashamed to do.' But the objective was the same.
This yearning for peace and stability was intensified by China's
dynastic cycles, which oscillated between periods of unity and times of
complete system collapse characterised by war, famine, mass migration
and disease. Nowhere is this desire for unity more on display than in
Shaanxi at the newly restored mausoleum of the legendary Yellow Emperor,
founding ancestor of the Chinese nation. Four impressive stone steles
line the entrance, each carved with calligraphy. From the left, we have
Deng, just four characters in his stubby writing; next is Mao with his
wild, fluid characters. A surprise awaits with the two steles facing
those of Mao and Deng; they bear the calligraphy of Chiang Kai-shek and
Sun Yat-sen. The message is clear; 'Mao and Chiang may have spent their
whole lives trying to kill each other, but in the end they were both
Chinese.'
It is perhaps most problematic to equate Xi's and Stalin's basic intent.
Stalin craved nothing but total domination. Xi must know that following
a Stalinist Marxist path, a path that was such a colossal failure in the
20th century, will certainly fail in a global world of the 21st century.
He wants China to succeed. Sun Yat-sen observed that China is but a
sheet of loose sand. If Xi's true intent is to try bind it together more
tightly to preserve the hard won achievements of the past forty years
and avoid another episode of comprehensive system collapse, he might
deserve a little more sympathy.
Anyone who really cares about China's future and what it might have to
offer the world struggles with these imponderables. I do every day, but
I still come back to the same shaky conclusions. There seems to be too
much historical evidence against any convincing parallel between Xi
Jinping and Stalin, but only time will tell.
Tim Clissold
www.timclissold.net ==
12 replies
Justin O'Connor
Jan 19, 2019
Without getting too portentous, I'd use this to mark the full
announcement of a new Cold War. Sinocism has been at it for some time
now, but of course it is not alone. The US has been leaning on Australia
(where I am) for a year or so and it is paying off in the media. Lots of
journalists are now 'woke' to the threat of the totalitarian power up
north. John Garnaut's speech distills a lot of this, channelling Hegel
in 1828 through the spirit of senator Joe McCarthy. Utterly without any
self-knowledge, as Western Liberal Democracy's fatal bargain with
Capitalism is unravelling, taking us all down with it, he thinks it is
time to revive our war with Communism in order to protect it. Protect it
from itself I think might be the first step. China might not help in
this, but I can say that there are certain aspect of China - not tied to
Xi - that might point the way. At the very least some sense that there
are other 'civilisations' or cultures or trajectories on this planet
other than those of liberal capitalism. Any slight hint that there are
problems here, or possibilities there? Nope. Black. White. ==
lei zhou
Jan 22, 2019
Well, liberal capitalism had/has its problems, which was manifested 90
years ago as the Great Depression. But should the world embrace the Nazi
or USSR ideology as a solution to problems of liberal capitalism? I
think for people who has never REALLY lived in such a society (a 6 month
sabbatical does not suffice), it is easy to fantasize about a utopia
solution that can solve the ills of liberal capitalism/democracy. But
for those who truly experienced it, it's a fantasy that flourishes a
while before leading to hell.
The perception and understanding of "other civilisations or cultures" is
exactly what the CCP want to prevent, and has done rather successfully
through all the brain-washing education and media censoring. Without any
exaggeration, open discussion of "other trajectories" such as liberal
democracy in a chinese university today can cost the professor's
livelihood if not personal freedom. It's amusing to see that those with
the liberty to discuss "any trajectory" often fail to sense what might
happen to them if the society they live in followed the other trajectory
they admire. ==
2Reply
Justin O'Connor
Jan 22, 2019
Well, before we even get to China, the idea that the only alternative
to liberal capitalism is fascism or totalitarian communism is simply not
correct. As in the 1930s (which produced the New Deal, European
Socialism and Social Democracy, the Welfare state in the UK etc.) there
are many people trying to think beyond a capitalism that is killing us.
There is no liberty on a dead planet. A similar dead end is represented
by the choice accept the reality of liberal capitalism or indulge in
utopian fantasy. I simply reject both of these either/ ors. As to China,
it is a socialist system. Perhaps in name only, though I think more than
that. It made a Faustian pact with 'the market' and the Devil is now
coming to ask for payment. The market maybe two thousand years old (Tim
Clissold in comments above, though more likely 500 years) but Capitalism
is only 200 years old. They are not the same thing. Everyone in the West
saw the introduction of market reforms in 1978 as leading to some form
of western democracy. This has not been the case, and yet China is going
from strength to strength (yes, economic problems abound). The US above
all (see Sinocism) sees socialism as 'cheating', the State Owned
Enterprises as somehow using the state to distort the market, and of
course, to keep US capital out of the 'commanding heights'. So what we
are seeing is a concerted attempt to break China's economic and
political system (let's leave aside whether this is a good or bad system
for the time) as a direct threat to US global hegemony. The US has not
problem with authoritarian states, as long as they allow US capital in.
China is the wrong sort of authoritarian - it is determined to keep out
US capital from key areas of its social and economic system, and sees
the state as somehow a benevolent force (Tim Clissold's Iron and Salt)
representing a collective force that overrules capital. This is anathema
to the US. China is under assault now by a US that has no interest in
democracy and human rights except as where it follows their direct
interest (Iraq/ Saudi Arabia/ Brazil etc.). Whilst this light on the
hill could gain wide assent from 1945 to even the mid-1980s, it has
gone. The US now represents naked force and people have to bow down to
it, but they no longer acknowledge its legitimacy. Does all this mean
China is a socialist (or whatever) utopian? No of course not. There are
aspects of China that should be celebrated. I find it amusing that the
"40 million people out of poverty" line is claimed for capitalism, but
all the rest, the bad bits, are left as legacies of socialism. The
reforms and the poverty alleviated (plus all the social dislocations
that went with it) were delivered by the Chinese communist party in
collaboration with its people. Very very broad brush, and workers still
throw themselves of buildings, but it is, in the main true. Would we
really want China to become capitalist? Where an oligarchy takes control
and it given free reign over 1 billion people in the name of
Enrichez-vous? It would be an utter disaster for the globe. So other
trajectories. See the possibility of these is simply to look to new
systems and new solutions. Is China that solution? No. Can and should it
contribute to that solution, might its history and its system represent
something that could provide some knowledge and insight into how we
might move forward? Yes. Does the demonisation of China, at a moment of
deep crisis for capitalism and democracy, help us see through to
something new. No, it is fear, and war, and the Big Other at work.
Garnaut's characterisations are banal. The veneration for the written
word? Well maybe, but the Revolution is not a dinner party. Oh hang on,
that's Mao. This (as I said before) is Hegel, the essentialising of
Chinese history. And what, might I ask, is the problem with the written
word? Are we saying that this is the book not scientific or practical
reality? That Euro-America modernity is practical and scientific rather
than weighed down by centuries of useless learning? If so spell this
out. The Chinese state solved a problem that Rome Byzantium did not -
how to create an empire at scale. The written word was part of this. But
this does not mean the written word is imperial (Dream of Red Mansion)
nor that the Empire was only about the written word. Garnaut has
introduced what, here in Australia, we call a Furphy. It means nothing,
or much more that he intends. Stalin - now, read the historical
evidence, Mao explicitly rejected soviet style communist as well as
re-inventing the Leninist party with the Mass Line. And communism was
grafted onto chinese history - wow, what an insight. This is Cold War 2.0 ==
6Reply
William D. Markle
Jan 22, 2019
John Garnaut's speech seems accurate and frightening. Tim Clissold adds
background to a complex story. Both certainly have more understanding of
Stalin that I can claim. Andrew Batson has some comments on Xi v Stalin
at Andrew Batson's Blog. But it feels to me that Stalin not only craved
domination, but was able to act from a position of strength to the end.
Mr. Xi is in a very different position, both within China and in the
world. Mr. Xi is in a tough spot. He inherited an economic system, and
conditions, that were beginning to run on empty. The run-up in debt post
2008 has slowed, but new financing continues to outpace GDP growth. More
and more, the new debt will come to resemble pushing on a string. There
remains uncertainty about the real size of local government debt via
local government financing vehicles, and pretensions to clarity about
local finances, sufficient to induce foreigners to buy bonds, are not
adequate. The anti-corruption crackdown has allowed Mr. Xi to put
loyalists into nearly all provincial level jobs; but for every loyalist
in, there is at least one disgruntled official denied. My government
friends in Hangzhou should be pretty sanguine about Mr. Xi, since he was
Party boss in Zhejiang for a few years, and no cronies of his have
suffered in the anti-corruption campaign. But they have been (privately)
dismayed or upset about the campaign. What was standard operating
procedure a couple of years ago is now subject to discipline. It is not
always possible to know which high level official or powerful backer is
behind which deal. When guanxi and informal agreements count for more
than law or regulation, how is one to know what to do and not do?
Approve and not approve? No government official, no academic that I know
of in China is happy with the situation now.
These are Mr. Xi's base conditions. To those, he has added a wealth of
unforced errors home and abroad. In 2012, the world was wishing China
well as it grew and matured. There were problems – IP theft and
mercurial business practices among them – but China was riding an
international wave of good will.
Mr. Xi has squandered that completely. It took him a couple more years
than it took our own dear leader, but the China actions have tended to
confirm international worst suspicions, rather than degrade a power with
some long term good will, at least with allies.
Run down the list – the diaoyudao/sekaku dispute, fanned as needs be for
patriotic support; the South China Sea; debt peonage for OBOR countries;
major investments in foreign countries without concern for
environmental, community, or local fiscal concerns; threats to foreign
academic researchers in foreign countries who have displeased CCP;
monitoring of Chinese business people abroad; monitoring and harassment
of Chinese students in the US; threats to families of Chinese in China
or abroad for free expression by Chinese abroad; further squeezing of
free expression in Hong Kong via kidnappings of booksellers and changes
in the law; and the now-infamous concentration camps for Uighurs, and
threats to their families abroad. Quite a list of accomplishments in six
years.
With the tariffs and inevitable slowdown from more and more new debt,
inability to pay off old debt, stock market doldrums, citizens unhappy
about information crackdowns, student unable to get jobs for which they
thought they were suited, and uncertainty about the future in every
respect, Mr. Xi has just about a perfect storm with which to deal.
Greater authoritarianism, perhaps totalitarianism, is the only available
response. He has exposed his hand too often, beginning probably with the
infamous Document No. 9 and continuing into Made in China 2025, a dog
whistle if ever there was one.
Isaiah Berlin told us that there are two ways to deal with change in
complex situations – be a fox, who knows many things and can adapt; or
be a hedgehog, and do more of what worked in the past. CCP has been a
fox for a long time, since Deng. Mr. Xi is a new species of leadership
for CCP. A greater role for ideology is the reversion to the mean.
I don't think conditions for Stalin were ever quite so complex. Mr. Xi
certainly does live in more interesting times.
Bill Markle
chinareflections.com ==
2Reply
Ken Wren
Jan 24, 2019
I find Garnaut's speech Chicomesque (probably because of his famous
close connections to the princelings?). A mao era 'anaylsis' of the
capitslist chief demon USA would almost exactly parallel the wording,
tone and line of logic of that speech. That kind of analysis didnt work
for them (in terms of defeating USA).and i doubt it d work for Australia
and its friends.
Instead of repeating detailed arguments that no one has time for. Let s
Look AT it this Way:
Take all the ernest, heart-wrenching, hair-raising, indignant,
impassioned accusations and characterisations of Chicom/China as
sincerely believed truth, then what are we doing negotiating on this and
that with them, taking cues from Wallstreet, fretting over a few percent
and a few hundreds Billions?
Shouldnt there already be a crusading army and amada assembled? War
declared? Safehavens/protected status/passage instated, for all those
persecuted reglious Chinese, ethnic Chinese, Marxist Chinese students,
hongkongers, taiwanese etc.? Or short of violent actions, which are
ampfully justified given the scale of their crimes and ambitions, at
least cut off economic relationships to start with?
As a parting food for thought, i d like to point out that the various
wars in the 19th century, starting with the Opium, were conducted under
solid legal basis and justified by totally unreasnable and illegal
actions taken by the Chinese government and Chinese themselves. If u
read the details, u d be throughly forgiven to think that the Chinese
thoroughly deserved what they d got mid-1800s to early-1900s. As did the
natives of australia and America and Africa. OK cheap shots. All am
trying to say here is be careful getting carried away with legalistic
moralistic narratives and one-sided '"look at these devious bastards!
They did this?!". All of those can seem watertight from one vantage
point. And yet looking back, and looking at the outcome, wiht the
advantage of hindsight and fuller information. ... ==
Stalin and Mao the key as Xi engineers China's soul
Paul Kelly
JANUARY 30, 2019
In June 2017 former China correspondent, former Turnbull staffer and
then principal international adviser in Prime Minister and Cabinet, John
Garnaut, delivered within the department the analysis he had long
contemplated — Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China.
If you have anything to do with China, personal or professional, you
need to read it. The brief was transmitted to HR McMaster when he was
national security adviser to President Donald Trump and circulated to
the US National Security Council team.
Garnaut says that in initially advising the Australian government on
China "it was simply too alien and difficult" to include the vital
component of ideology, hence his practice was to "normalise" China
simply because people were not ready to grasp the ideological DNA of the
regime.
Now he wanted to describe that ideology. It begins with the recognition
communism was grafted on to the classical Chinese dynastic system, and
the leaders of the People's Republic "never really changed the mental
wallpaper".
"Xi Jinping has exercised an unwritten aristocratic claim to power which
derives from his father's proximity to the founder of the red dynasty:
Chairman Mao," Garnaut says. "He is the compromise representative of all
the great founding families. This is the starting point for
understanding the world view of Xi Jinping and his princeling cohort.
"In the view of China's princelings, or 'revolutionary successors' as
they prefer to be known, China is still trapped in the cycle which
created and destroyed every dynasty that had gone before. In this
tradition, when you lose political power you don't just lose your job.
You lose your wealth, your freedom, probably your life and possibly your
entire extended family. You are literally erased from history. Winners
take all and losers lose everything.
"In the Chinese formulation it is 'you die, I live'. I must kill
pre-emptively in order to live. Xi and his comrades in the red dynasty
believe they will go the same way as the Manchus and the Mings the
moment they forget."
Garnaut says Marxism-Leninism was interpreted to Mao by a critical
intermediary: Stalin. Mao found his ideological treasure in Stalin's
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short
Course that, at the time of Stalin's 1953 death, was the third most
printed book in history and "the closest thing in China to a religious
text".
The book, Garnaut says, "is a manual for perpetual struggle against a
roll call of imagined dastardly enemies who are collaborating with
imagined Western agents to restore bourgeois capitalism and liberalism.
You can imagine how this formulation was revelatory to a ruthless
Chinese leader like Mao who had mastered the 'you die, I live' world and
was obsessed with how to prevent the decay which had destroyed every
imperial dynasty before.
"What Stalin offered Mao was not only a manual for purging his peers but
also an explanation of why it was necessary. Purging his rivals was the
only way a vanguard party could 'purify' itself, remain true to its
revolutionary nature and prevent capitalist restoration.
"Crucially, Mao split with Khrushchev because Khrushchev split with
Stalin and everything he stood for. We hear a lot about how Xi and his
peers blame Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet state but actually
their grievances go back much further. They blame Khrushchev for
breaking with Stalin. And they vow they will never do to Mao what
Khrushchev did to Stalin. Now, 60 years on, we're seeing Xi making his
claim to be the true revolutionary successor of Mao. This is the
language the deep red princelings spoke when together and occasionally
when I interviewed them and crashed their gatherings in the lead-up to
the 18th party congress."
Garnaut quotes from Xi's speech: "To dismiss the history of the Soviet
Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and
to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it
confuses our thoughts and undermines the party's organisations on all
levels."
This is the logic driving Xi's "ever-deepening purge of peers": of
challenger Bo Xilai, security chief Zhou Yongkang, two vice-chairs of
the PLA Central Military Commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, Youth
League fixer Ling Jihua, and potential successor, Sun Zhengcai. "None of
this is personal," Garnaut said. "It's dialectical. And inevitable.''
"History needs to be pushed along its dialectical course," said Xi in
his speech marking the party's 95th birthday in 2015. "History always
moves forward and it never waits for all those who hesitate."
Garnaut says: "The essence of Maoism and Stalinism is perpetual
struggle. This is the antidote to the calcification and putrefaction
that has destroyed every dynasty, dictatorship and empire. This is why
Xi and his peers believe Maoism and Stalinism is still highly relevant.
Not just relevant, but existential. Xi has set in motion a purification
project, a war against the counter-revolution, that has no end point
because the notional utopian destination of perfect communism will
always be kicked a little further down the road." It is why extreme
politics cannot stop at the 19th party congress.
Garnaut asks: "Who was the world leader who described artists and
authors as 'engineers of the human soul' and said 'the production of
souls is more important than the production of tanks'?"
The quote comes from Stalin's speech at the home of writer Maxim Gorky,
at the end of the great famine. The message is that art and literature
are to be instrumental. Their job is to indoctrinate the masses and
advance the revolution. Garnaut quotes Mao extending the Stalin formula:
truth, love and art have no purpose but that of politics. "Mao's talk on
literature and art was his way of introducing the Yan'an Rectification
Campaign, the first great systematic purge of the Chinese Communist
Party," Garnaut said. It was a project of "orchestrated peer pressure
and torture"; by breaking people "physically, socially and
psychologically", the human mind could be conditioned "in the same way
Pavlov conditioned dogs".
When Xi spoke at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art in 2014, he
argued for a return to Stalinist/Maoist principles: "Art and literature
is the engineering that moulds the human soul." In short, the arts must
serve politics, meaning, as Garnaut said, "the totalitarian project" of
unity language, knowledge and behaviour. "Xi uses the same ideological
template to describe the role of 'media workers', teachers and
university scholars. They are all engineers of ideological conformity."
Could China have turned out differently? There was a contest internally
from Mao's death to the Tiananmen massacres but, Garnaut argues,
"ideology won that contest". "Everything Xi says as leader, and
everything I can piece together from his background, tells me he is
deadly serious about the totalising project," Garnaut said. "The
unbroken thread that runs from Lenin through Stalin, Mao and Xi is the
party is and always has defined itself as being in perpetual struggle
with the 'hostile' forces of Western liberalism.
"Xi did not invent this ideological project but he has highly
reinvigorated it. And he is pushing communist ideology at a time when
the idea of 'communism' is as unattractive as it has been at any time in
the past 100 years. In the space of five years, with the assistance of
big data and artificial intelligence, he has been bending the internet
from an instrument of democratisation into a tool of omniscient control.
The challenge for us is that Xi's project of total control does not stop
at China's borders. It is packaged to travel with Chinese students,
tourists, migrants and especially money. It flows through the channels
of the Chinese language internet, pushes into all the world's major
media and cultural spaces."
Garnaut calls his address "the bit we forgot to study". It was designed
to bust the notion of China as a normal country. This is how the Western
educated mind is trained to think, and it is false. He says if you're in
the business of dealing with China in intelligence, defence, higher
education, trade, economics or whatever, then you need to understand the
ideology of Lenin-Stalin-Mao and Xi.
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