ICC NOTE: Could Chinese President Xi Jinping be attempting to revitalize Mao’s Cultural Revolution? He has already begun to emphasize the importance of Chinese culture which was a focal point in Mao’s actions. He has brutally cracked down on the Christian community attempting to silence and even eliminate the supposed threat of Christianity. Foreign influence is frowned upon as being against the state and Party members, active and retired, are ordered not to be involved in any religion. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Mao’s Cultural Revolution which saw the purge of millions of Chinese, many of which were China’s leading scholars, thinkers, and artists. Their deaths have stained Chinese history much like Russia’s has been through the Czars and Josef Stalin. 

2/15/2016 Hong Kong (AsiaNews) – This year marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) (1966–76), a political and cultural watershed for China. Chinese rock star and pop culture icon Cui Jian spoke for many when he said that the Cultural Revolution is still not finished as long as Mao’s portrait continues to loom over Tiananmen Square (Hong Kong Economic Journal, February 12, 2015; VOA Chinese, February 9, 2014). Though China has undergone a massive economic and social transformation since the Cultural Revolution, recent developments are leading intellectuals and even some liberal-minded Chinese officials to reflect on whether it is possible for the Cultural Revolution to return in some form.

Even Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elders are chiming in. Last December, Yu Youjun, a former governor of Shanxi Province and party secretary of the Ministry of Culture argued that “the soil for the Cultural Revolution is still fertile, especially when the people have no reasonable and profound knowledge of it.” He added: “It may partially recur, under certain historical conditions” (South China Morning Post, December 15, 2015; Ming Pao [Hong Kong], December 14, 2015). His comments stem, in part, from the fact that China’s leaders are exerting an ever-greater influence in people’s cultural and spiritual lives. These efforts to close the Chinese mind are also linked to a feverish personality cult that is being erected around President Xi Jinping.

Reviving and Re-Envisioning Culture

Modern Chinese authoritarian figures from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping have seen “culture” as a means to impose the proverbial yiyantang (一 言堂) or “one-voice chamber” particularly on the nation’s intelligentsia and civil society. Silencing other voices means ensuring that a “monoculture” holds sway. It was not accidental that during the GPCR, untold quantities of rare and foreign books, as well as objets d’art, were burnt and destroyed. Not only disgraced cadres but world-renowned men of letters, such as the great novelist Lao Shi, committed suicide.

Since taking power three years ago, President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi has begun a campaign to “revive Chinese culture.” Inherent in Xi’s best-known mantra—the “Chinese dream”—is the concept of “the great renaissance of the Chinese people.” The cultural revival plays a big role in this super-nationalistic goal of a spectacular rebirth of Chinese values and worldviews (People’s Daily, September 25, 2014). Visiting the shrine of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong Province, Xi explicitly linked culture and national power, noting that “The strength of a country and a people is underpinned by a vigorous culture,” and “the prerequisite of the great renaissance of the Chinese people requires the development and prosperity of Chinese culture” (Xinhua, November 26, 2013).

For Xi and his colleagues working in the Ministry of Culture and the CCP Propaganda Department, culture serves the utilitarian and politically expedient purpose of boosting the people’s faith in “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—and CCP rule. As Xi has reiterated, “the most critical core of a country’s comprehensive strength is cultural soft power.” “We must firm up our self-confidence in the theory, path and institutions [of Chinese-style socialism],” he indicated. “Fundamentally, we also need to have cultural self-confidence” (Xinhua, June 25, 2015; People’s Daily, November 15, 2014). Highlighting “cultural self-confidence,” of course, presupposes that unwholesome, vulgar, and particularly Westernized culture—what Chairman Mao dismissed as “poisonous weeds”—can have no place in socialist China.

Partly to stoke the flames of nationalism and partly to justify Beijing’s rejection of Western or universal values, Xi has cast himself out as an avid champion of traditional Chinese culture. He said in a 2014 Politburo meeting that “nurturing and developing core socialist values must be anchored upon superior traditional Chinese culture.” “Giving up traditions and losing our foundations are equivalent to cutting off our spiritual lifeblood,” the supreme leader added (Xinhua, February 26, 2014). Xi’s emphasis on purifying culture has a direct impact on the party-state apparatus’s effort to banish so-called Western thoughts and ideology from campuses.

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