A bad wind blows over China again which reminds older people of the difficult times of the cultural revolution, with the difference that today there is no violence. For several months, a series of apparently isolated measures have been drawing a new political and economic orientation and above all an ideological recovery of the country by the number one of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping.
As always happens in the Asian country, political signals take indirect routes. This week there is only talk of an intervention on a blog that would be insignificant if it had not been relaunched by the main media of the party, starting with the highly official People’s Daily. The blogger in question, Li Guangman, announces a “profound revolution” and warns that all those who oppose it will be “discarded”. Guangman denounces Western culture, the stars who deprive the youth of virility and the capitalists who get rich overnight.
This rhetoric is similar to that of neo-Maoist small groups, and today returns to the center of the official discourse. President Xi has announced a new course, “common prosperity”, which should reduce the considerable inequalities that have emerged over the past forty years and favor China’s rapid development.
Call to order
There is a double goal in this new line, which has already begun to manifest itself a few months ago when the best-known Chinese entrepreneur, Jack Ma, founder of the online commerce giant Alibaba, first “disappeared” for several weeks and then reappeared, but just to be marginalized.
The first objective, laudable and consistent, is to respond to popular discontent, especially that of the middle classes. The themes are many, from the excessive price of real estate (the subject of massive speculation also by numerous party cadres) to the cost of school fees, key to the reproduction of the elite in China. The digital giants are the main target of criticism. Finally, power has certainly given parents a gift by limiting the time that young people can spend on video games to three hours a week.
But these popular measures also have another objective: to reaffirm the authority of the Communist Party over everything, including the private economy. The call to order is brutal. There is only one master in China, and that is Xi.
This “rectification campaign”, as it was called in the past in China, comes at a delicate moment, first of all at the international level, with the increasingly bitter confrontation with the United States. It is significant that the much-discussed blog post talks about the threat of “color revolutions” in China, a reference to the uprisings in the former Soviet republics attributed by Beijing to US intelligence.
But the moment is also delicate at the political level, with the twentieth congress of the Chinese Communist Party expected in just over a year. On that occasion, Xi is expected to get his third term, after eliminating the two-term limit set by Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s main successor.
Xi is undoubtedly the most powerful man in the world, also because he does not have to deal with any counterpower. The Chinese president has recently imposed the study of his thinking in Chinese schools to complete his hold on a country that hasn’t seen anything like it since Mao’s time. China has experienced an incredible economic expansion in recent years, but today this momentum is accompanied by a true political regression. It seemed impossible for this to happen, yet Xi managed to do it.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)
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