Thoughts from the WSJ on Xi’s apparent Maoist turn.
…these Party editorials are intended for cadres, not citizens. The idea is for officials to sit up, take notice of their shortcomings and start working differently. Citizens aren’t being coerced or prepared for disappointment; it’s cadres who are being told to change.
– To believe that a set of instructions would serve its dominant hegemonic purpose with full fidelity is a huge overstep. The range of publicly available party literature can be staggering, just rock up to any of the Xinhua bookstores. This was taken in Chongqing earlier in 2013.
Additionally, mass line in the English language does not carry the semantic gravitas of 群众路线. For more on the 群众路线 mass line , see 人民日报评论部:群众路线是“执政生命线” People’s Daily, June 18, 2013
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What to Make of Xi Jinping’s Maoist Turn
By Russell Leigh Moses
Source – Wall Street Journal China Realtime Report, published June 21, 2013
by Tim O’brien
Is Xi Jinping lurching towards a Maoist revival?
With a number of Mao-like pronouncements emanating from Beijing in recent months, some observers of Chinese politics think he might be.
The most recent example is an editorial published earlier this week in the authoritative People’s Daily (in Chinese), which argues that the “mass line is the ruling lifeline” for the Communist Party.
In the days since, that phrase has proliferated through state media, with the official Xinhua news agency announcing on Thursday that the Communist Party had published, not one, but two new books on interpretations of “mass line” by everyone from Friederich Engels to Jiang Zemin.
The concept of a mass line harkens directly back to the Maoist era. It denotes the need for officials to get close to the masses, and to know their needs and demands intimately. References to “taking the mass line” have reappeared only sporadically in the years since reform took hold, as revolutionary visions were largely supplanted by slogans emphasizing China’s need for scientific development.
Xi himself took this new campaign high-profile in a videoconference meeting Tuesday (in Chinese), outlining the need for a crusade to educate Party members about the evils of the “Four Winds,” namely “formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and waste.” He argued that cadres “should focus on self-purification, self-improvement, self-innovation, self-awareness”—or, as he put it in a folksy way, “”watching from the mirror, grooming oneself, taking a bath and seeking remedies.”
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