The New York Times reports on a memo, “Document No. 9,” that
has circulated in China, bearing the “unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping,
China’s new top leader.” It identifies “seven subversive currents coursing through
Chinese society” that, unless arrested, could lead party leaders to lose their
grip:
* * *
The first was “Western
constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of
human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic
participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms
of the party’s traumatic past.
Even as Mr. Xi has sought to
prepare some reforms to expose China’s economy to stronger market forces, he
has undertaken a “mass line” campaign to enforce party authority that goes
beyond the party’s periodic calls for discipline. The internal warnings to
cadres show that Mr. Xi’s confident public face has been accompanied by fears that
the party is vulnerable to an economic slowdown, public anger about corruption
and challenges from liberals impatient for political change.
“Western forces hostile to China
and dissidents within the country are still constantly infiltrating the ideological
sphere,” says Document No. 9, the number given to it by the central party
office that issued it in April. It has not been openly published, but a version
was shown to The New York Times and was verified by four sources close to
senior officials, including an editor with a party newspaper.
Opponents of one-party rule, it
says, “have stirred up trouble about disclosing officials’ assets, using the
Internet to fight corruption, media controls and other sensitive topics, to
provoke discontent with the party and government.”
The warnings were not idle. Since
the circular was issued, party-run publications and Web sites have vehemently
denounced constitutionalism and civil society, notions that were not considered
off limits in recent years. Officials have intensified efforts to block access
to critical views on the Internet. Two prominent rights advocates have been
detained in the past few weeks, in what their supporters have called a blow to
the “rights defense movement,” which was already beleaguered under Mr. Xi’s
predecessor, Hu Jintao.
Mr. Xi’s hard line has disappointed
Chinese liberals, some of whom once hailed his rise to power as an opportunity
to push for political change after a long period of stagnation. Instead, Mr. Xi
has signaled a shift to a more conservative, traditional leftist stance with
his “rectification” campaign to ensure discipline and conspicuous attempts to
defend the legacy of Mao Zedong. That has included a visit to a historic site
where Mao undertook one of his own attempts to remake the ruling party in the
1950s. . . .
“Promotion of Western constitutional democracy
is an attempt to negate the party’s leadership,” Cheng Xinping, a deputy head
of propaganda for Hengyang, a city in Hunan, told a gathering of mining
industry officials. Human rights advocates, he continued, want “ultimately to
form a force for political confrontation.” . . .
Condemnations of constitutional
government have prompted dismayed opposition from liberal intellectuals and
even some moderate-minded former officials. The campaign has also exhilarated
leftist defenders of party orthodoxy, many of whom pointedly oppose the sort of
market reforms that Mr. Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang have said are needed.
The consequent rifts are unusually
open, and they could widen and bog down Mr. Xi, said Xiao Gongqin, a professor
of history at Shanghai Normal University who is also a prominent proponent of
gradual, party-guided reform.
“Now the leftists feel very excited
and elated, while the liberals feel very discouraged and discontented,” said
Professor Xiao, who said he was generally sympathetic to Mr. Xi’s aims. “The
ramifications are very serious, because this seriously hurts the broad middle
class and moderate reformers — entrepreneurs and intellectuals. It’s possible
that this situation will get out of control, and that won’t help the political
stability that the central leadership stresses.”
The pressures that prompted the
party’s ideological counteroffensive spilled onto the streets of Guangzhou, a
city in southern China, early this year. Staff members at the Southern Weekend
newspaper there protested after a propaganda official rewrote an editorial
celebrating constitutionalism — the idea that state and party power should be
subject to a supreme law that prevents abuses and protects citizens’ rights.
The confrontation at the newspaper
and campaign demanding that officials disclose their wealth alarmed leaders and
helped galvanize them into issuing Document No. 9, said Professor Xiao, the
historian. Indeed, senior central propaganda officials met to discuss the
newspaper protest, among other issues, and called it a plot to subvert the
party, according to a speech on a party Web site of Lianyungang, a port city in
eastern China.
“Western anti-China forces led by
the United States have joined in one after the other, and colluded with
dissidents within the country to make slanderous attacks on us in the name of
so-called press freedom and constitutional democracy,” said Zhang Guangdong, a
propaganda official in Lianyungang, citing the conclusions from the meeting of
central propaganda officials. “They are trying to break through our political
system, and this was a classic example,” he said of the newspaper protest. . .
.
Since the document was issued, the
campaign for ideological orthodoxy has prompted a torrent of commentary and
articles in party-run periodicals. Many of them have invoked Maoist talk of
class war rarely seen in official publications in recent years. Some have said
that constitutionalism and similar ideas were tools of Western subversion that
helped topple the former Soviet Union — and that a similar threat faces China.
“Constitutionalism belongs only to
capitalism,” said one commentary in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily.
Constitutionalism “is a weapon for information and psychological warfare used
by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to
subvert China’s socialist system,” said another commentary in the paper. . . .
* * *
Chris Buckley, “China
Takes Aim at Western Ideas,” New York Times, August 19, 2013
