It's the ideology, stupid.
Hello! I hope you’re enjoying Magpie – it’s a delight to have you here. Today’s post is the first in a longer installation of writings that start to unpack the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology. It is also an example of the type of long-form pieces that paying subscribers can expect to receive on a weekly basis. If you like what you read, do consider subscribing.
I recently listened to Bari Weiss’ podcast interview with Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. In the podcast, Bari and Josh begin to unpack the behemoth that is China, and take on the Covid–19 ‘lab leak theory’ – the notion that the virus is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but originated in a virology lab in Wuhan, China. Josh is, in my view, one of the few remaining true journalists in the mainstream – the kind that follows the story rather than his own partisan preferences. He has been at the forefront of the ‘lab leak’ story since Day One, so the interview is definitely worth a listen if you’re interested.
But more than the conversation about the origins of Covid–19 and the layers upon layers of lies, cover–ups, and misinformation that surround it, it is the following, altogether simple, exchange that has stuck with me:
Bari: “People need to listen to hours and hours of podcasts just to get to the truth”
Josh: “Well, these things are complicated and it takes hours and hours to get through them correctly.”
Hours and hours to get through them correctly. Getting to the heart of a matter takes time. Fully understanding complex issues takes time. This is largely why many in the West don’t understand China. Chinese politics – the Chinese Communist Party – are remarkably labyrinthine. The CCP’s underlying mental models are also unlike the mental models that underpin politics in the US, or in Europe, or in most other parts of the world. Rather than grapple with these difficulties, however, western leaders have spent the last few decades doing the reverse. They have sought to normalize China: to graft it onto western frameworks and couch Beijing’s actions and ideas in more familiar terms. Doing otherwise was simply too alien and too onerous. No one has time for that.
But by trying to make China fit in, we missed the opportunity to build a framework with explanatory and predictive value. Given the reach that China now has into not only the US and Europe, but also Africa, Latin America, increasingly – and, very soon, the Middle East – we need to make a serious attempt to unpack the CCP. To understand its perceptions, language, and decision–making. These, not as we hope for them to be or how we think they are, but as they actually are. And for this, we need to understand the CCP’s ideology.
Have I lost you yet?
Whenever I utter the word ‘ideology’ in conversation it tends to elicit grimaces from my audience. The mood becomes oddly tense, uncomfortable. For most, ‘ideology’ evokes notions of Soviet–era power struggles or rogue regimes in distant corners of the world that have yet to fully industrialize. The pushback, I think, lies in the disbelief that in a world in which we debate autonomous vehicles and life on Mars, something as seemingly antiquated as ideology would be of essence. And perhaps that sentiment is partly right. But while it may be right for ‘us’ it is not right for ‘them.’
There is no other country in the world (perhaps with the exception of North Korea) where the government is more tightly bound to ideology than China under the CCP. We don’t even have to surmise that this is true: the CCP makes it abundantly clear through Xi Jinping’s speeches (for example, Xi’s April 2014 speech on the ‘Overall National Security Outlook’) and its policy documents (e.g. the 2013 ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,’ commonly known as ‘Document No. 9’). Document No. 9 outlines what the CCP sees as “noteworthy problems,” among them:
Western constitutional democracy – an attempt to “undermine the Party’s leadership” and “bring about a change of allegiance by bringing Western political systems to China”;
Universal values – an attempt to “weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership” and “supplant the core values of Socialism”;
Civil society – an attempt to “squeeze the Party out of leadership of the masses at the local level, even setting the Party against the masses”;
Neoliberalism – an effort to “change [China’s] basic economic infrastructure and weaken the government’s control of the national economy”;
Western journalism – a challenge to the “principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline.”
While those in Washington and Brussels continue to deliberate over whether we are in a battle of ideas with Beijing, Beijing has long ago answered this question.
And that answer did not come recently, with Xi’s ascension to power, but with the ascension of the CCP in 1949. It has been reinforced at several pivotal moments throughout the party’s history – among them, the 1989 pro–democracy protests in Tiananmen Square; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; the 2010 Arab Spring and the more recent ‘color revolutions’ that have swept through Europe and parts of the Middle East. Each was for the CCP a reminder that the international community is not (yet) favorable towards it or its distinct Marxist–Leninist–Maoist worldview, and that it must do more to make it so.
Have I lost you again? Ah, yes: Marx. Lenin. Mao. The mind boggles to think their ideas would today be of relevance. And yet.
Speaking after the 18th Party Congress in 2012 Xi observed that 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.” On another occasion he quipped that “to completely negate Mao Tse–tung would lead to the demise of the Chinese Communist Party and to great chaos in China.” Xi’s language of the “mass line;” “unity;” his assaults on “hostile Western liberalism” and other variants of ideological “subversion” – this is all Marxism–Leninism as interpreted by Mao. So too is his near obsession with seizing “discursive power” and “telling China stories well.”
An essential and much overlooked component of the CCP’s ideology is precisely this – the respect for the written word. Chinese leaders have always believed that power comes from controlling both the physical battlefield and the cultural domain. You can’t sustain the former without the latter. Language, culture, the arts – what we might call ‘soft power’ – are then weapons used to distinguish enemies from friends, and eventually overtake the former. Speaking at the 2014 Beijing Forum on Literature and Art Xi said, “art and literature is the engineering that molds the human soul; art and literary workers and the engineers of the human soul.” He has on several occasions referred to the media, to school teachers, and to academics in similar terms.
With this understanding, Beijing’s longstanding emphasis on cultural exchange should come as no surprise. Neither should its recent crackdown on China’s education sector. Nor its penetration of the American and European medias. Nor that of the media landscape in Latin America and Africa, where the CCP provides media trainings for local journalists. Upwards of 1,000 journalists from across the African continent are annually trained in the CCP’s approach to journalism, Chinese identity, and culture. Like their European, American, Latin, and other counterparts, they, too, are meant to be engineers of ideological conformity. I have written about Beijing’s discursive warfare in several other places, most recently in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. There is much more to say.
The West has avoided the CCP’s ideological underpinnings for much too long and at its own peril. And I here note the ‘West,’ specifically, as I am not quite sure that this holds true for the rest of the world. My doctoral thesis (many moons ago!) explored the role of ideology in Ethiopia’s relations with Beijing; lest we forget that the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was reading Mao’s Little Red Book long before it came to power. But more on that another time.
Western societies have avoided ideology because it is uncomfortable. It’s messy – too ‘fluffy,’ even. We have become accustomed to the world of science, technology, finance and economics. Tangible, accountable realities in place of seemingly abstract ideas from a bunch of dead philosophers. Do not misunderstand: Beijing is deeply immersed in the world of money, guns, and technology but its raison d’être is rooted in a mental model that we have here only begun to unpack. Complicated things take time to get through correctly.