[Since becoming paramount leader in 2012, Xi has sought to position the Communist Party at the heart of society and promulgate its ideology to skeptical young Chinese. He has policed speech on campuses and encouraged Communist Party cells to expand inside private corporations.]
By Gerry Shih
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A
slogan reads “Seek truth from facts” below a relief sculpture of late Communist
leader Mao
Zedong at the Central Committee Party School. (Leo Ramirez/
AFP/Getty Images)
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BEIJING
— The lecturer stood in an airy hall, clicking
through slides showing examples of how governments around the world improve
their “environmental civilization” — a concept espoused by Chinese leader Xi
Jinping.
The United States has a vast national park
system. Germans collect trash with buckets placed inside sewers, the students
are told.
Sixty gathered party members — almost all men
in their 40s and 50s in uniformly black slacks, black shoes, black hair — sat
quietly, absorbing it all.
It’s another morning at the Central Committee
Party School, the exclusive training ground for the elite apparatchiks groomed
to govern China.
Since becoming paramount leader in 2012, Xi
has sought to position the Communist Party at the heart of society and
promulgate its ideology to skeptical young Chinese. He has policed speech on
campuses and encouraged Communist Party cells to expand inside private
corporations.
His administration has rolled out slick
television propaganda about the party and plastered billboards nationwide
promoting the organization’s revolutionary socialist spirit.
Playing a crucial role in Xi’s campaign has
been nearly 3,000 training institutes like the top Communist school in
northwest Beijing, where resident researchers ponder how to boost the party’s
influence and thousands of visiting party members — or cadres — are taught how
to carry out and maintain its rule.
'Ideological
armaments'
Government officials recently led foreign
journalists on a rare and tightly controlled tour. It was designed to showcase
a campus that was sleek, open, in sync with the times — the very image the
98-year-old Communist Party wants to project about itself.
The students who circulate from lecture halls
to dorms to cafeterias do not study the same curriculum as “normal” Chinese
institutions, such as Tsinghua University down the road.
Here, school officials say, they study the
“ideological armaments” that the party relies on to run China:
Marxism-Leninism, party development theory, propaganda tactics, Xi Jinping
Thought.
As he led journalists through the school’s
dormitories, cafeterias and a cavernous indoor sports facility, Wang Jinlong,
the head of campus operations, ticked off a list of foreign delegations that
have recently visited.
“The Communist Party, you see, is now open,”
Wang said as he walked around a man-made lake where students can contemplate
quietly after a day poring over Xi’s speeches. “We are open, too.”
Inviting journalists to tour a key party
institution is part of a years-long effort by the Communist Party to
“re-brand,” said Jude Blanchette, the head of the China practice at the
Crumpton Group and author of “The New Red Guards.”
To counter widespread speculation about Xi’s
murky anti-corruption campaign, for instance, propaganda officials in 2017
released a TV cop drama, “In the Name of the People,” that depicted party
investigators pursuing crooked officials. The show became a hit.
These days, the Communist Party is trying not
only to “normalize and legitimize” itself in the eyes of everyday Chinese but
also of foreign countries, which have grown wary of the organization’s covert
global influence, Blanchette said.
Beginning
with Mao
On a recent morning, the school arranged for
reporters to sit in on a lecture where officials were learning about
environmental sustainability, a topic that just so happened to be politically
innocuous.
When asked, school officials said more
sensitive subjects that are avoided in most Chinese classrooms can be tackled
here, too.
“We discuss the Cultural Revolution and June
4 disturbance to better understand history and choose a better way forward,”
said Wang Gang, a senior school administrator, referring to the Tiananmen
Square protests in June 1989 that were brutally suppressed by the military,
leading to hundreds of deaths.
School officials said cadres eyeing promotion
to upper ranks, such as provincial-level posts, sometimes put their day jobs on
hold to study for three to six months. Those assigned to key functions, such as
organization and propaganda departments, come by the campus for week-long refresher
courses.
Officials could not immediately disclose
enrollment numbers but said figures have risen during Xi’s administration to
about 10,000 students in 2018.
Since it was founded in a rural building
during the Communist Party’s revolutionary days in 1933, the school has
occupied an influential place within the organization. Three school presidents
also have led China: Mao Zedong, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, who headed the
school until 2012, when he ascended to China’s top leadership post.
'Study
Xi'
In the seven years of Xi’s rule, Chinese
intellectuals and private business executives have often groused about the
thick ideological atmosphere returning to China.
Party members have chafed at a new, daily
requirement, such as one dictating they must study Xi’s political doctrine
every day through the smartphone app Xuexi Qiangguo — “Study Xi, Strong
Country.”
School officials tried to strike a
progressive tone — by party standards.
“There are people around me who also say we
have study a lot, it takes up too much time; it’s precisely something the
Central Committee is realizing,” said Zhang Zhongjun, the school’s deputy party
secretary.
Other administrators acknowledged that the Communist
Party needed to evolve with the times. In recent years, they said, the party
has conducted public surveys and hired outside consultants to examine whether
young Chinese still had faith in it. (They concluded: Yes, they do.)
“We have to be aware that in the current era
with the Internet and new media, the young people think differently, they’re
changing,” Wang Gang, the senior school administrator, told reporters.
But he left no doubt about the school’s
loyalties and the function it served.
“What we do here is to enhance the solidarity
of the party,” Wang said. “We have to serve the governance of the party.”
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