An image of Chinese President Xi Jinping is projected in a large screen in Shanghai on April 21. The country is currently undergoing a renewed crackdown on corruption at all levels of the CCP, with the effects felt everywhere from banking to soccer.Ng Han Guan/The Associated Press
Xi Jinping is nothing if not prolific. Since becoming China’s leader in 2012 he has published more than 40 books: treatises on Communist theory, volumes of history and collections of speeches.
For the 97 million Communist Party members around the country, each additional publication brings with it a responsibility to study and learn Mr. Xi’s newly codified musings, be they “important dissertations on resisting formalism and bureaucracy,” a discourse on “respecting and safeguarding human rights” or the latest edition of Mr. Xi’s so-far-four-volume-opus, The Governance of China.
“To be a party member has become a real burden,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, an expert on Chinese politics at Hong Kong Baptist University. He added that many cadres have let their party memberships lapse for this very reason. But for those employed within the state bureaucracy, “there is no way out. You’ve got to use your tablet all the time to read endless boring speeches and tick all the boxes related to Xi’s thought.”
Mr. Xi’s immediate predecessors had their own slightly incomprehensible official doctrines – Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” and Hu Jintao’s “Scientific Outlook on Development” – but Prof. Cabestan said Mr. Xi’s works are “a real great leap backward in terms of ideology.”
“Xi’s thought is very hollow; no one can explain to me its real content except parroting a few well-known and worn-out slogans: ‘The common destiny of mankind’ and ‘The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’ ”
Party members are currently studying hard. With new works by Mr. Xi out this month, the Central Committee launched a “party-wide thematic education campaign” to help cadres “develop a deep understanding of the decisive significance of establishing Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position … in the party as a whole and establishing the guiding role” of his ideology.
This is more than an exercise in swotting-up or learning a few new buzzwords. The official announcement said the latest round of studies would help cadres “concentrate thoughts and efforts and forge their soul.”
Such study campaigns serve two main purposes: They underline party control over all aspects of policy making and, in the case of the latest push, Mr. Xi’s own centrality to everything and anything.
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“With his personnel placements at the 20th Party Congress, Xi is finally in full control of the top levels of all the key Party and state bodies,” Bill Bishop, author of the Sinocism newsletter, wrote this month.
“Now he wants to intensify the hardening of all systems in the face of growing risks foreign and domestic, remove any remnants of support for former leaders … and ‘unify thinking’ under the banner of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, with one likely outcome that the unwieldy term is finally and officially truncated to Xi Jinping Thought.”
Added to the Chinese constitution in 2019, Mr. Xi’s is the only official ideology since Mao Zedong’s to have the denominator “thought,” as opposed to the “theories” of other leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu, albeit currently with a lengthy coda that analysts have long predicted will be shorn away as Mr. Xi has consolidated more and more power.
There are indications the current campaign could be building up to that. As well as its focus on Mr. Xi himself, state media coverage has tied it to the “Yan’an rectification movement” of the 1940s, when Mao carried out intense purges of rivals and doubters, leading to the adoption of a constitution endorsing Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the party’s guiding ideologies.
China is currently undergoing a renewed crackdown on corruption at all levels of the party, with the effects felt everywhere from banking to soccer.
The study campaign is being overseen by Cai Qi, the recently appointed head of party ideology and long-time ally of Mr. Xi’s. On the ground, it is being led by Luo Huining, Beijing’s former top representative in Hong Kong, with dozens of “central leading groups” dispatched around the country to make sure lessons are being properly learned.
While Hong Kong itself is largely spared from this, as the territory’s bureaucrats are not members of the Communist Party, Chinese officials in the city have nevertheless encouraged their counterparts to utilize the party’s “innovative theories … to study and resolve new problems in Hong Kong.”
Nor is Mr. Xi’s wisdom intended solely for Chinese audiences.
This year, he put forward the Global Civilization Initiative, which Gao Xiang, head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said this week was a counterpoint to perceptions of “Western civilization as the endpoint of human history,” and an alternative to the current global order, one that will offer “intellectual guidance and action guidelines for the development and progress of human civilization.”