China Taking a Leap Back to Maoist-Era Discipline

Over the last several months, China’s Communist regime has been engaged in a propaganda campaign reminiscent of the bad old days of the People’s Republic, when Marxism ruled and proper political thinking was the primary test of loyalty and fitness.

Ideological “study sessions” and indoctrination classes for cadres are back in force. So is harsher treatment of suspected liberal elements, particularly scholars who advocate political reform. From the shop floor to the countryside, Beijing is trying to reexert its authority and reestablish party discipline, using old-fashioned tactics increasingly at odds with China’s go-go society.

Their revival, analysts say, stems from a growing fear among leaders here that, unless the Communist rank and file rein in rampant corruption and pay more heed to the top, the party may be over--along with the bosses’ jobs heading the world’s most populous nation.

“Barring a return to the ideological discipline . . . of the Maoist era, the party is in serious danger of being marginalized--or worse,” said Richard Baum, a political science professor and China expert at UCLA.

But whether such an old-style political campaign can succeed in today’s China is an open question.

As free markets take root, as the Internet opens doors to the outside, as more people take jobs in foreign-owned companies and as the Chinese themselves become more sophisticated, the old rules no longer apply.

Attempts to strengthen state control through old Communist tricks, such as forcing cadres at state enterprises to sit around discussing political theory, feel outdated and irrelevant.

“It’s all a bunch of nonsense,” scoffed a party member who is required to spend one day each week in study sessions at his factory, during which cadres discuss Beijing’s decrees or give halfhearted testimonials to the efficacy of Communist Party thought.

Newscasts feature almost daily spots of farmers, workers or officials recounting how President Jiang Zemin’s newest theory, known as the “Three Represents,” helped them improve their attitudes and increase production.

Outlined in a 74-page booklet praised by the official media, the theory calls for the party to remain at the vanguard of social production and to continue to “represent” the development needs, cultural progress and fundamental interests of the Chinese people. Only in this way can the party ensure “an unassailable position in the new century,” said a May editorial in the People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece.

Most Chinese are familiar with such propaganda drives--throwbacks to the Mao era--and ignore them.

“The campaigns seem quaintly anachronistic in this freewheeling age of unabashed cronyism and cowboy capitalism,” Baum said. “But what else can a vanguard party do when its ‘heavenly mandate’ [to rule China] has all but disappeared?”

Analysts trace the renewed emphasis on party discipline and political correctness to Jiang.

While he has largely pressed ahead with the economic reforms of the late “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping, Jiang also has watched the Communist machine grow bloated with corruption and lax in its supervision of local cadres. Anti-corruption probes have netted officials at higher and higher reaches of the party, confirming the suspicions of ordinary people, who are becoming more restive and angry over official malfeasance.

Last year, top leaders, including Jiang, also were shocked to discover that a large number of party members were adherents of Falun Gong, the meditation movement whose members mounted a massive protest in April 1999 at central government headquarters. The group was banned last summer and its leaders charged with subversion.

Since then, the regime has moved to regain some of the primacy and legitimacy it lost in China’s push toward market reforms and decentralization over the past two decades.

It has tried to silence some of its most prominent critics, among them journalists who report on sensitive topics and scholars who argue the need for political pluralism.

Other dissidents also have been targeted, including poet Bei Ling, a legal U.S. resident in Boston who was arrested here two weeks ago on a visit to China. Copies of Bei’s literary journal, which had circulated among writers and students, were confiscated by police. The U.S. Embassy and international intellectuals have expressed concern over Bei’s detention.

And in another clear sign of a crackdown, central authorities recently issued an unprecedented order to China’s more than 2,000 county-level party secretaries to come to Beijing for political education.

Starting next month, groups of 200 county cadres will begin six-month rotations through the Chinese capital over a five-year period--the first time in the history of the People’s Republic that such low-level officials have been summoned to Beijing en masse for indoctrination.

“All these efforts . . . are a general tightening of controls over the population and centralizing of authority in Beijing, specifically with Jiang Zemin,” said Merle Goldman, a professor of Chinese history at Boston University. “The fear of the leadership [is] that it is losing control.”

Despite this alarm, no one is writing off the Communist regime, which still has a vast security and social-control apparatus at its disposal.

Yet its powers to enforce its will are seriously diminished from what they were at the height of the Mao era, especially with the growth of the private sector, which has allowed residents to escape the tyranny of their former state “work units” by getting jobs at private Chinese and foreign firms.

Even the current propaganda campaign has been only fitfully implemented by lower-level cadres. At one state-owned enterprise in western Beijing, managers cut corners by choosing a subordinate to write reports on study sessions they did not have time to convene.

Not that there aren’t diligent doers of the Communist Party’s will.

At the Beijing Engine Factory, company leaders meet every Tuesday afternoon for ideological training, which they then somehow try to apply to overhauling their ailing firm.

“The more we do to reform, the harder we should study theory,” said Li Jiyan, a spokeswoman for the company.

A third of the factory’s 6,000 workers engage in some kind of political study every other week--time that might otherwise have been spent on production. But it’s an old habit at the factory, one of Beijing’s biggest and oldest government-owned businesses.

“We’re accustomed to regularly studying state policy,” Li said. “It would be impossible to get rid of it.”