China?s Culture Wars

I spent time yesterday with a professor at China?s Central Party School, the training ground for senior Communist cadres, once headed by the incoming Chinese president Xi Jinping. When I asked the professor if his peers had paused much to take note of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, his eyes widened. ?Oh yes,? he said. ?Everyone is talking about it.?

When Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, and declared his office extinct, on December 25, 1991, it was the final confluence of forces that had been gathering for years, but it was also a reflection of his particular political and cultural chemistry. Even as a young man with a promising Communist future, Gorbachev had been prone to questioning. ?Respected professor,? he once said, in 1952, challenging a lecturer who was leading the class through a mindless recitation. ?What is your interpretation of the reading, and why don?t we discuss it?? He ended up in the dean?s office?and, decades later, echoes of that skepticism, rippling across the country, would signal the unravelling of the empire.

This week also happens to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Czech human-rights declaration known as Charter 77. China takes its anniversaries seriously, so perhaps it?s no coincidence that Chinese leaders have opened 2012 with a warning: ?We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China,? president Hu Jintao wrote in an essay and speech. ?And ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.? He went on, ?We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond.?

It?s tempting to take the vitriol on its face, as directed at the West. But there is another reading: Party hard-liners know that the more potent threat lies within its own borders, in the race to maintain support around a hollowing ideology. As Damian Ma of the Eurasia Group puts it in a smart post at The Atlantic: ?The ?culture war? is not truly meant to be waged against nefarious U.S. cultural encroachments. It is instead part of a battle to sustain the confidence of its own people?via nationalism, Confucian tenets, wealth, cultural renaissance, or whatever substitute that can be dreamed up?or risk the consequences. The war is, and has always been, about defining the soul of the modern Chinese nation.?

China?s culture wars have been joined from all sides. One wing to watch is a strain of tolerant thinking coming out of the South, where Guangdong party chief Wang Yang recently succeeded in resolving a village standoff without bloodshed and now proposes that as a template for other crises. ?People?s democratic awareness is increasing significantly in this changing society,? Wang said in a speech delivered to the provincial party congress on Tuesday. ?When their appeals for rights aren?t getting enough attention, that?s when mass incidents happen.?

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/01/chinas-culture-wars.html

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