China's Dream

The Culture of Chinese Communism and the Secret Sources of its Power

Kerry Brown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509524600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Mondialisation

The Communist Party of China (CPC) is one of the great political forces of modern times. In charge of the destiny of a fifth of humanity, it survives despite the collapse of similar systems elsewhere. Few, however, understand the sources of this resilience, or, for that matter, what the Party itself stands for. China's Dream is the first book to explore the Communist Party as a cultural, rather than a political, entity. It looks at the narratives the Party has created to recount its own history, with the moral story about national rejuvenation and renaissance that these encode. It does not shy away from the thorny issue of how a Party under Mao Zedong, one associated with self-sacrifice, collectivist effort, and anti-individualism, came to pragmatically embrace market capitalism and a new ethics. The tensions to which this gives rise have resulted in a crisis of values, which is now being addressed – with very mixed results – by the CPC. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of contemporary China, Kerry Brown takes us on a unique and fascinating journey through the least understood aspect of China today – not the great economic revolution in the material world, but the deep cultural revolution already underway in Chinese people's daily lives.

1
Redemption from the Dark Past

History matters to the CPC. Interest in historic narratives has been one of the constants about its behaviour since the very earliest era. It is almost as though both the Party's elite leadership and its members were telling themselves a story as events unfolded, then ordering and reordering events in hindsight, seeking to make a tale that was compelling, and that could then help them control the present and the future. But it was, as I will argue in this chapter, always a tale with a very specific ordering meta-narrative – and that was one of justice and retribution, and the workings out of a new political order based on this.

Of course, the Party is not alone in this addiction to searching in the past for information that can shape its current identity and give clues to its future development. Nations, communities, companies, and individuals are all in the business of seeking a coherent narrative that arises from how they came into being, grew, and developed. These can be the basis for helping them move into some kind of clearer future which is at least approximately shaped by contours created in the past. Such narrativizations of the past have been staples of human society since the start of recorded history, and reach back before, into the vast era of human existence in which anthropologists tell us it was oral, rather than written, stories that were told to link, integrate, and create meaning. In the structures and patterns about pasts we find materials for interpretation, from which arise meaning and significance – identifiers, keywords, subliminal or sometimes open and explicit messages. From the time of Herodotus and Homer onwards, stories have been the source of history, and history has been the source of identity and of ordering world-views.

For the CPC in the twenty-first century, there are two issues that give this question of the narratives, of the story it draws from history, a real sharpness. The first is the ways in which it has a dual, contrasting story about itself, with one strand running up to 1978, when the post-Mao economic reforms started, and one subsequent to this. These widely divergent stories, as we shall see, have involved a large amount of work for the Party in reinventing itself, in imposing wholly new objectives, but also, more flagrantly, sometimes, in the words of British journalist Louise Lim, employing amnesia about difficult parts like the Cultural Revolution, the great famines of the early 1960s, or (the particular focus of Lim's work) the 1989 revolt.¹ Forgetfulness was, as we will see, a reliable part of the Party's armoury as it created dynamic new narratives throughout the last nine decades since its foundation in 1921, rearranging and renegotiating its relationship to this past. The second issue is the ways in which the Party, in coming to power, and moving from a revolutionary to a governing force, had to present itself as the forger of a new history not just for itself but for the nation it now had custodianship over. For this reason, from 1949 there is little daylight between the CPC story and the national one. The two became intimately linked. Till recent times, again as I will argue later, the Party argued it had achieved the salvation of the country. It was the entity that helped China throw off the heavy burden of its imperial pasts. Over the last decade or so since the mid-2000s, however, the question has become more how the country is now saving the Party – and how the CPC has become parasitical on nationalist messages and missions that make it clear its justification is in delivering these rather than Marxist objectives.

These complex issues of self-definition and self-understanding are not helped by the fact that the Communist Party came to existence in China with a confused mission right from the first day it had members in the country, during the very earliest era of the Republican period from 1911 onwards. In essence, its early leaders knew what they didn't want, and what they disliked about the China they were living in and experiencing in their day-to-day lives. But there was widespread disagreement about what they were actually aiming for, and what sort of new China they were trying to promote. What was attractive about the creed of Communism as an international movement, particularly after its victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution, was the way it offered a body of ideas like dialectics and Marxist-Hegelian views of history, which asserted that there was such a thing as perpetual progress. History had a purpose. It was heading in a positive direction. The future was eventually going to be better than the past. In the abstract, at least, that offered hope to Chinese potential adherents of the new doctrine.

A whole series of terms were invented by which to make sense of how this positive history would develop and what sort of teleology it might have. The introduction of this set of ideas into China through translated works and word of mouth (the first Chinese students started to go to study in Russia around about the time of the revolutionary ferment there from 1911) had a momentous impact. It appealed to a very specific frustration that Chinese people experienced with their own history. The 1917 October Revolution in Russia vividly offered the example of a country breaking the heavy burden of the interminable, stifling past and bringing about modernization. The weight of conservatism and tradition was something that many young Chinese passionately felt was also suffocating their own culture and politics. The USSR therefore offered a viable blueprint for what they could do.

British sinologist William Jenner wrote in the early 1990s of the particularly tragic, constrictive burden of these layers of Chinese histories.² Communists, through their early existence in China, could provide concepts and frameworks that at least promised to start to shatter this and offer one route to liberation, showing that by dialectical progress this history would one day end. In the Communists’ world-view, China's feudal, Confucian, imperial, highly conservative pasts, stretching right back into mythical and semi-mythical times like the Xia and the Shang over a thousand years before the Christian era, were not an object of pride and a source of confidence, but a prison. With the implementation of dialectical materialism, class theory, and the whole menu of other Marxist-Leninist ideas, the Party was able to claim the role of a potential saviour, one which held a key to breaking the pattern of the narratives which had dominated till then, leading Chinese into a more flexible, future-orientated, liberating story.

In the years in which the Party fought for power and tried to gain adherents, this was a powerful source of mobilization and incentive. It offered hope, the most potent and illusive quality of all. The new structure of history and its meaning derived from this interpretive framework was something that gifted the Party through its foundational years with a dynamic, inspirational vision of China, an ancient country freeing itself of the huge weight of this long past. The tragedy is that this was a noble ambition which became the source of a whole raft of new challenges once the Party came to power and could actually bring this dream about. Its implementation created divisions in society and often bloody conflict, uprooting people from the familiar with violent social movements instigated by leaders who knew what they didn't want, but offered only the haziest idea of what they were trying to replace the old world with. Getting rid of the burden of history proved to be like trying to rid people of their shadows while they stood under the sun. It undermined something fundamental about Chinese people in general – that their history was a constitutive element making them what they were, encoded in the language they used, and the family structures and societies they lived in. Its contestation was to prove profoundly painful and disorientating. In the end, it proved impossible without burying the very notion of what it was to be Chinese. The restoration of language about pride in the country's long past and its traditions under Xi Jinping from 2012, which will be attended to later, testifies to this failure.

Reappraisals of History: The Two Iterations

The importance of the CPC's attitude towards China's history and its role within that is proved by the privileged place grand statements about these issues occupy in both the current state constitution of the People's Republic of China (PRC), and that of the Party. They figure as brave attempts to settle an issue which, it is clear, is still unresolved and possibly will always remain so. The state constitution, agreed at the National People's Congress in 1982, and subsequently (but not comprehensively) revised several times since, places one specific narrative right at the start, in the preamble:

After waging protracted and arduous struggles, armed and otherwise, along a zigzag course, the Chinese people of all nationalities led by the Communist Party of China with Chairman Mao Zedong as its leader ultimately, in 1949, overthrew the rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism, won a great victory in the New-Democratic Revolution and founded the People's Republic of China. Since then the Chinese people have taken control of state power and become masters of the country.³

This distils many of the issues that will be addressed later: the notion of the Party as an entity that was engaged in struggle and what this meant; the forces it struggled against; and the specific role it had and continues to have as an actor in a history which is purposefully moving forward to a positive denouement. Curiously, the Party constitution also has a parallel narrative, what we might call a shadow one, which echoes, albeit incompletely, that of the state:

Under the guidance of Mao Zedong Thought, the Communist Party of China led the people of all ethnic groups in the country in their prolonged revolutionary struggle against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism, winning victory in the new-democratic revolution and founding the People's Republic of China, a people's democratic dictatorship. After the founding of the People's Republic, it led them in carrying out socialist transformation successfully, completing the transition from New Democracy to socialism, establishing the basic system of socialism and developing socialism economically, politically and culturally.⁴

These two statements, in documents that have a highly privileged political and administrative status in modern China, stand as the end results of a long period of consensus seeking, arising from internal and external debate by the CPC and the government. Their production involved a high degree of management of contention. But for all their surface simplicity and clarity there is an immense amount of complexity, as though there were vast spaces underneath the ...