How the CCP is tightening it's ideological grip on Chinese people

[sygn]

So these few weeks there were many discussions about CCP's imperialistic strivings - as seen in Africa, South China Sea, Europe.
--- A recent article in The Atlantic also gives an interesting account of how Trump and the first lady were given a lengthy -telling tour through the Forbidden city built by the Ming dynasty ("the golden age in terms of China’s economic might, territorial control, and cultural achievements")
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/mcmaster-china-strategy/609088/

There were also discussions about CCP's totalitarianism - censorship, surveillance, social credit, disappearance of journalists, doctors and dissidents.

The articles below describe the strategies through which CCP
is trying to make its ideology ego-syntonic to the thinking of a modernised population.



I'm hoping that this thread might ignite further debates around these three issues.

 

[sygn]

*it's a LONG article, so the excerpt is definitely less than 20%*



The Tenacity of Chinese Communism - How the party revived an ancient philosophy to extol order and compel obedience.Sept. 28, 2019

"During Mao's cultural Revolution, it is believed that up to two million people were murdered.And yet, Mao’s feat of unifying the country and restoring national pride is still a reason for many people in China to respect his legacy, and for the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) to justify its continued monopoly on power.
---There are, however, other reasons the C.C.P. is still in power in China, even after Communist rule has collapsed almost everywhere else.

Ⅰ. The party has adapted extremely well to capitalism.
Seeing what happened to the Soviet Union after Mikhail Gorbachev’s democratic reforms, China’s rulers refused to follow his example. After the Chinese who demanded similar reforms were brutally crushed during the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, the C.C.P. made a tacit deal with the educated urban class from which most of the protesters came. One-party rule would create the orderly conditions for people to become wealthy, in exchange for which they would refrain from political protest. In this sense, China is not so different from Singapore, where a similar deal has been struck, if in a somewhat less oppressive manner.


Ⅱ. But there is a deeper historical reason for the success of Communist Party rule in China. Imperial power in China was always backed by a quasi-religious dogma.
Confucianism became an ideology imposed to instill obedience to authority
-- Confucius was more interested in the cultivation of virtue in scholar-officials and the proper observance of ethical rules: But rulers have used Confucianism, today no less than a thousand years ago, to support social hierarchy and autocratic rule.

Many Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth generation were attracted to Marxism for that very reason. It filled the post-Confucian vacuum with an alternative, modern political and scientific orthodoxy with a strong moral component.

After Mao died, and especially after Deng’s capitalist reforms, Maoism and Marxism began to lose their potency. Nationalism, and even bits of warmed-over Confucianism, began to replace the old Communist dogma. This, too, created a “spiritual vacuum.”
---One way of filling the void has been conversion to Christianity, or joining spiritual groups like the Falun Gong, which party leaders view with great dismay. The reason the government tries so hard to crush religious organizations that operate independently from party control is precisely because dogmas that compete with the state orthodoxy are by definition subversive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/...munist-party-confucianism-70-anniversary.html

 

[sygn]

Is China headed for a clash of cultures as Xi Jinping fuses Confucius and Marx?

"Soon after becoming general secretary of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping has strongly encouraged a renaissance of Confucianism in China.
Yet Marxism – a European import – remains the ideological framework of the government.
It would seem, then, that China is headed for an internal clash of cultures.

Xi's cultural tack is diametrically opposed to that of Mao Zedong, who dismissed Confucianism as a retrograde social philosophy that could only dampen the revolutionary fire. Mao’s contempt for Confucianism was consistent with the materialist conception of history, which lies at the core of Marxist thought.

By this logic, Xi is now reversing the course of history.
Xi praised Confucianism as “the cultural soil that nourishes the Chinese people”. “Confucianism,” he said, is the key to “understanding the national characteristics of the Chinese as well as the historical roots of the spiritual world of the present-day Chinese”.

Xi’s vision for an ideological fusion of Communism and Confucianism does not seem likely, given the sharp differences between the two systems."

july 2019 https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinio...-cultures-xi-jinping-fuses-confucius-and-marx

 

[Rightguide]

Understand the Communist Party controls everything in China, everything.

 

[sircumvent]

^this