[Communist Party schools and
academies are inculcating Chinese officials in Xi Jinping Thought as the
country shifts in a more authoritarian direction.]
By Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher
The Communist Party of China just
celebrated 100 years since its founding, and for much of that time the
Central Party School and similar academies have been “red cradles.” In these
schools, cadres are immersed in the party’s beliefs, which trace back to its
early decades as a revolutionary movement. Mr. Xi has preached that
re-energized party rule is essential for China’s ascent, and he has urged the
schools to produce officials who are proudly and vocally loyal to
that cause.
“Our party relied on struggle to
get where it is today, and will surely rely on struggle to win the future,” Mr.
Xi in March told hundreds of younger officials at the Central
Party School, who wrote his words down like attentive pupils. “The dangers and
tests ahead will be no less than in the past.”
No audience would seem more receptive
to Mr. Xi’s message than the students at China’s thousands of Communist
Party-run schools, which train tens of thousands of officials every year. They
teach political doctrine, party history, economics and other policy subjects,
and Mr. Xi’s ideas are now core to their curriculums.
Mr. Xi offers the “policy
principles guiding contemporary China,” Wang Shiquan, a professor at another
elite party school, the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong in Shanghai,
said during a recent visit. The school has more than 120 courses using Mr. Xi’s
theories, officials at the academy said.
As Mr. Xi has taken an increasingly
authoritarian grip on China, the party schools have followed. The Central Party
School once tolerated, even supported, reformist scholars who have been
dismayed by Mr. Xi’s centralization of power, hard-line policies and abolition
of term limits. Younger officials are now emerging from the schools stamped
by this pugnacious spirit.
One attendee in 2019, Hua
Chunying, the Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, disdainfully swipes at
criticisms from Western governments. “China’s success story is the success
story of the Chinese Communist Party,” Ms. Hua wrote
in a paper for her party school class, which was published in 2019.
That story, she wrote, was a “lighthouse pointing to the bright future of the
socialist endeavor.”
The Communist Party has run courses
to train members almost since its founding. Generations of Chinese leaders have
used them to nurture cadres in their own image: revolutionary at first, then
embracing economic and political reform in the 1980s, and with a technocratic
sheen in more recent decades.
Mao Zedong was a president at the
Central Party School. Mr. Xi was president there for five years before becoming
the national leader in late 2012. During the 1980s, reformist leaders like Hu
Yaobang encouraged the school to produce ideas for an era of opening and
political relaxation.
These days, they offer courses on
the practicalities of managing a town, county, city or province: how to defuse
protests, or how to select officials for promotion. One party school
class, described in a recent study, reminded officials visiting
flood-stricken areas to wear mud-covered rubber boots as a vivid sign that they
were sharing the suffering of residents.
“The party schools cultivate this
culture of what it is to be a cadre,” said John Fitzgerald, an Australian researcher writing a study
of China’s officialdom. “The party school is part of this process of creating
this separate elite with its own language, culture and networks.”
The China Executive Leadership
Academy recently showcased its efforts to provide a modernized curriculum: part
political boot camp, part business school.
“A leader is very busy and comes
here for a week or two,” said Professor Wang, the teacher at the academy. “It’s
mainly about solving their problems, like how to be a mayor or a party
secretary.”
In one course, the
student-officials study how to
handle crises like riots and natural disasters, such as floods
and mudslides.
In another, they practice handling media interviews and foreign guests. The
academy invites tycoons and officials to teach classes, school officials said.
“We believe in boxing skills being
taught by boxers,” said Jiang Junjie, a professor at the academy.
But classes here and at other party
schools are still heavy on political scripture, including Marx and Mao. In
recent years, instruction has increasingly centered on Mr. Xi. Flat-panel
screens at the Shanghai academy flashed his somber image between announcements.
Study programs for officials
include pilgrimages to venerated sites like the Jinggang Mountains, a former
base of the revolution where another cadre academy is located.
At the Shanghai academy, a
professor rejected the idea that officials received a falsely romantic view of
the revolutionary past. The Communist Party has learned from its errors,
including the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, said the professor, Zhang
Shengxin.
“We have always treated our
mistakes squarely,” she told reporters.
But to Cai Xia, a former party
school professor, Mr. Xi has presided over a dangerous eradication of political
openness, including at the famous Beijing campus where she once taught.
Her career at the Central Party
School followed China’s arc from a period of relative political openness to Mr.
Xi’s authoritarianism. She arrived at the school in 1992, when Deng Xiaoping
was loosening the ideological freeze imposed after the bloody June 4, 1989,
crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests. It was a prestigious transfer for
Ms. Cai, who had been teaching at a local party school in eastern China.
Over the next two decades, some
academics at the school argued for gradual political liberalization, starting
inside the party to rid it of corruption and abuses of power, Ms. Cai said.
Reform-minded scholars generally kept their ideas within bounds acceptable to
leaders. The payoff was that they could carefully advocate change to rising
officials.
“The Chinese Communist Party
actually puts itself above the country, so if the party doesn’t democratize,
the country can’t take the step toward democracy,” Ms. Cai said. “We could only
try to see if that worked.”
In 2008, a group of researchers at
the school issued a blueprint for “comprehensive” political
reform to win the party greater public support, cut corruption and increase
efficiency. “Freedom of the press is an inevitable trend,” the report said.
Professors at the Central Party
School gave hard-hitting lectures on the disasters under Mao, such as the
famine brought on by his failed Great Leap Forward. In one course, Ms. Cai
said, she pointedly compared countries that generally pursued gradual political
change, such as Britain, with those that went through violent revolutions, like
Russia.
“I hadn’t even reached the
conclusion and one of the students came up to tell me, ‘Teacher Cai, I get
it,’” she said.
Minxin Pei, now a professor of
political science at Claremont McKenna College in California, said he once
helped arrange lectures at the party school by Roderick
MacFarquhar, a Harvard professor known for his research on the Cultural
Revolution.
“The first words that Rod said
were, ‘Today I want to talk about June Fourth,’” Professor Pei said in a
telephone interview, referring to the 1989 crackdown. “You could hear a pin
drop. Rod basically launched into a lecture about why democracy is needed for
China.”
Not even the Central Party School,
though, was walled off from the corruption that ate into China’s political elite
in recent decades.
School officials struggled to
discipline officials studying there who would slip away for nighttime revelry
with cronies. Some spirited in mistresses to stay at hotels near the school,
Ms. Cai said. A vice mayor from northeast China used his time at the school to
slip off to Macau, the gambling enclave on the southern coast, where he bet and
lost a fortune in corrupt money.
As president of the Central Party
School, Mr. Xi had chided academics who criticized the party. But Ms. Cai
waited to see what he would do in power, hoping he would overhaul the political
hierarchy.
Nine years later, Ms. Cai is an
outspoken critic of China’s authoritarian turn, living in the United States.
Last year, the Central Party School expelled
her from the party and halted her retirement benefits.
But she said Mr. Xi’s drive for
conformity would not change everyone’s thinking, even at the school.
“Outwardly the party appears
unified, but underneath there are turbulent undercurrents,” Ms. Cai said.
“Inside the party school, some have turned against their former liberal ideas
to embrace Xi Jinping; some just say as little as possible.”
Liu Yi contributed research.
