Those Hard-Worked Chinese Ideologists
Poor Chinese Communist leaders! It’s not enough to rise to the top of the largest political party in the world, the Communist Party of China (66 million members in 2002) and rule the world’s most populous nation (1.3 billion). Chinese Communist leaders seem predestined to become brilliant ideological innovators in the opaque mists of Marxism.
It all started with Mao Zedong, the man who led Chinese Communists to power in 1949 and ruled the country until his death in 1976. It became a sort of catechism of Chinese officials that, because of Mao’s alleged ideological brilliance, China was a country not just governed by Marxism-Leninism, as in the case of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was governed by Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Chairman Mao. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, Chinese teenagers toured the country by the millions waving the “little red book,” Quotations from Chairman Mao, chanting entire paragraphs from the book at times as a sort of mantra for ideological correctness.
After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 and turned China in a decidedly capitalist direction, his new policies were described as “Deng Xiaoping Thought,” and came to be associated with a strange, oxymoronic phrase, “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Deng engineered his own succession for two generations, his selected successor being Jiang Zemin, a somewhat goofy leader who combined the skills of reciting the Gettysburg address in English and playing the ukulele.
Jiang, following in Deng’s footsteps, was not to be overshadowed ideologically. His doctrinal legacy, supposedly, was the “Three Represents.” Nobody quite knows what was “represented” by the Three Represents, but it was generally thought to have something to do with culture, political development, and Chinese society.
Jiang bowed out to Hu Jintao. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in Beijing in October 2007, Hu designed a major leadership shakeup in the ruling Politburo in order to engineer a smooth political succession when he himself bows out in a few years.
The Communist Party must have gotten a fit of ideological shivers, however, for it conferred on Hu accolades for his own supposedly unique contribution to Communist Party ideology, namely “Scientific Development.” What might this sophisticated ideological innovation be? Well, it turns out Scientific Development amounts to Hu’s emphasis on trying to deal with the imbalances caused by China’s locomotive-like economic growth, imbalances such as growing income disparities, corruption, and various social problems connected with that. While most people in the world might consider such policy revisions plain common sense, Chinese Communism prefers to call them “Scientific Development.”
It’s one of the great paradoxes of China that the Chinese in general are the least theory-driven and most pragmatic people in the world. They are famed for their practicality. But when it comes to Communist Party ideology, they aren’t really practical at all. They are totally ideological. One yearns for a small boy to cry out, “‘Scientific Development?’ I thought it was common sense.”
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Global Culture, Society, Fri 11 Jan 2008
