Politics and language: decoding the CCP
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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? All political parties have a weakness for jargon and buzzwords and the Chinese Communist Party more so than most.

It's one reason I'm not a fan of reading official party documents, whether they be speeches, resolutions or reports. Sentences like the following abound. All party members should uphold historical materialism and adopt a rational outlook on the party's history. Or we need to strengthen our consciousness of the need to maintain political integrity, think in big picture terms, follow the leadership call and keep in alignment with the central party leadership.

in other words they're filled with platitudes and dense marxist terminology so what then is the purpose of official party documents can they ever reveal division within the party or say anything new at all and throughout the fusty rhetoric who is the audience who are these words designed for

On this episode, I'm joined by two guests, expert at reading the communist tea leaves. In this wide-ranging and slightly longer-than-usual Chinese Whispers, we discuss the power of political language and how the Chinese Communist Party makes the most of it, why it's important to control the historical narrative, and exactly what, if anything, does Xi Jinping's thought mean.

My guests are Professor Rana Mitter, a historian of China at the University of Oxford and author of numerous books, the latest being China's Good War, and Bill Bishop, who curates the newsletter Cynicism. Bill's newsletter is a must-have roundup of the most important political and economic China news in your inbox four times a week, very much worth every penny and frequently featuring translated party documents and articles. So welcome both.

Bill, let's start with the Sixth Plenum, which happened two months ago. At the meeting, they reviewed and published the resolution on major achievements and historical experience of the CCP's 100 years of endeavours, which is a bit of a mouthful. Can you tell us what did it say and was it a significant moment? It's a very significant moment.

First, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be on your podcast. I'm a big fan. It's a very significant moment on several levels. First, this is only the third one that the Chinese Communist Party has put forth. One was done by Mao Zedong. One was done under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. And then this was Xi Jinping. This one, the previous two were really about sort of resolving historical problems or challenges and kind of resetting the stage for the direction of the party and the leadership.

This one under Xi Jinping, this third one really is much more triumphalist and really forward-looking. It's not so much about we had all these problems in the past and we got to do all these things. This is about we're great. We've done a really good job. We've overcome lots of things. And now it's about the next era, which, of course, is really the Xi Jinping era. So my view of this resolution really was this.

It's really all about cementing Xi Jinping for a much bigger role leading the party than just two terms as a general secretary. And it ties into the other things that we see around the various forms of Xi Jinping thought, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's absolutely momentous. It's, I think, a significant sign of –

Xi Jinping's positioning and power within the party and to me is one of the clearest signals that he's going to be running the show in China as long as he's alive and there's a Communist Party running China. Rana, what did you take away from it?

Well, I think Bill's analysis is exactly right. And of course, as various senior members of the Chinese Communist Party recently told Jamie Dimon, the Chinese Communist Party is going to be running China for at least a century and possibly two or three more and longer, at least in their assumption than any Western banks. So they put their own timescale on that particular prediction.

I do think it's exactly right that it's looking forward to the future but for me one of the most interesting things about this resolution and again I'd echo Bill and saying how rare these things are one in 1945 one in 1981 and now this one this is not the kind of thing that just gets churned out on a regular basis the thing that for me is interesting is how much it is based in history and when I say history and I speak as someone who teaches history in a university

I'm not talking about what historians generally mean when they mean history, which is the kind of debate back and forth and interplay of different interpretations and the interpretation of grey nuances of how things might have been. I'm talking about the way in which the party looks at history in some ways as a sort of instrument of power, the correct interpretation of history and how it can be used to put a particular set of ideas forward. So let me just give one or two very quick specific examples to illustrate what I mean.

First of all, one event that caught my eye that's specifically name-checked in the middle part of the resolution is something that all readers of Chinese history will know something about. I think it's probably not always as familiar to Westerners who don't spend much time looking at Chinese history, and that's the rectification campaign. Now, this is name-checked as a historical event that is regarded as having had very positive effects. So what the heck was this thing? Well, between 1942 and 1944...

During the years of the Second World War, Mao Zedong, later to be formally named as Chairman Mao, probably the name under which he's still best known in the West by his title, essentially changed the way in which the Chinese Communist Party of that era, and bearing in mind we're talking about 80-something years ago,

operated in terms of the relationship between the leader of the party, the wider mass of party membership and the kind of general population beyond that, and the role of ideology in linking them.

them. Now that sounds a bit abstract. So what that means is that basically people in this rectification movement who wanted to get into the Chinese Communist Party had to start reading in detail a set of texts, many of them by Mao himself. And memorizing those and knowing what they were about was the way in which you showed that you were ascending to that higher level of party status. And if you didn't, then there was a lot of, I think, psychological pressure is the most polite way you can put it. This involves, for instance, people being placed in a circle,

and a whole variety of other senior communist cadres, officials being placed around them, basically not touching them necessarily, but shouting at them saying, why aren't you improving the way you understand ideology? And in some cases, just flat out physical coercion and torture that was also being used. But that was the last resort rather than the first.

Like the Tory whips? I think even the Tory whips might be beyond something that the Maoist rectification, even they wouldn't have gone that far, let's say that. And I think reporting it to the police probably wouldn't have done much good. But just to finish the thought, the reason that the 1940s and this rectification period is being name checked, I think, in this resolution, tucked away in the middle, is that today...

In very different political circumstances, Xi Jinping's China, the 2020s, is saying that actually going through a really fierce ringer of ideological rectitude is one of the ways in which you show that you are worthy of being in the party. But my bet is that it's not necessarily just Mao's texts that you're going to have to read this time. It is the thought of none other than Xi Jinping.

I think that's a great point and I think I will recommend one other text if you're interested in that Yan'an rectification campaign. It's Gao Hua's, was it How the Red Sun Rose? Yes. Which is hundreds of pages on the real party history and it was an incredibly bloody and brutal campaign. She actually has launched the rectification campaign in the political and legal affairs services, which are the police, the various organs of the security services.

And to your report, that is exactly – it's all about reading Xi Jinping. It's not reading Mao so much. It's all about reading Xi and professing loyalty to Xi. And it's a very interesting, I think, way that he's been using that rectification campaign to clean out the security services, to purge a whole bunch of people, to put in place his folks who are –

Really preparing the way for the next phase of, you know, the 20th Party Congress, the next few years of his rule. And so the one other thing I'd add about history, too, is, you know, when Xi Jinping was first joined the Popularity Standing Committee during the 17th Party Congress, in his portfolio was party history. Mm-hmm.

So he is, I think of all of the leadership in China, he is by far the most in command of party history and the one who understands the best why it is so important to instrumentalize, as you said, party history and how it can be so powerful to achieve all your personal as well as party political goals.

Just a very quick note off the back of that, because again, we're getting into descriptions of things that may not be familiar to all listeners. And for those who are British, in the last few weeks as we speak on this podcast, there have been a lot of ructions in the British Parliament around Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And one particularly notable event was when a senior former cabinet minister, a man called David Davis, got up and essentially threw a quote which had been first used in 1940 by

a British politician called Leo Amory about Neville Chamberlain. Now,

It immediately hit home and it was much discussed in British media. But to understand why it hit home so hard, you have to know something, not that much, but a little bit about the nature of World War II history in Britain and why it still resonates in the minds of contemporary British people such that a politician in 2022 could make it effective. If you have that in mind, you could see why references to what may seem to listeners a slightly obscure set of events from actually the same era as that, the 1940s,

don't need the lengthy explanations we've just given. They will immediately click and

and resonate in people's minds. And of course, Cindy, as someone yourself who of course has, you know, for a small number of years, but nonetheless had some Chinese educational background, I don't know if that rectification reference is something that from textbooks or from other historical knowledge would just hit you more naturally. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think my main impression from that is watching historical dramas, period dramas, which, you know, reenact the Yan'an years, you know, after the Long March. Much the best way to absorb history, I would say. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe I didn't pay enough attention in class. But Rana, I'm intrigued by what you're saying, which is just that it almost seems like understanding the texts and just taking back to the central question, understanding the texts that the party puts out is a demonstration of ideological purity or allegiance or competence. So Bill, is that the purpose of these texts? And obviously when I talk about texts, it's not just resolutions. It's also things like speeches, policy documents, op-eds in journals, etc.

Is the point that, I mean, the purpose of them, is it for cadres to better demonstrate their understanding of the party? Because surely it's not your average lao bai xing that are reading, not your average Chinese person that are reading these resolutions. No, I mean, the audiences for these kinds of official party tests are party members.

I think they have multiple uses. One is to actually set policy, right? I mean, it is the way to signal at a very high level sort of the direction of travel, where things are going. There absolutely, though, is, you know, whenever there's a big document comes out, like, for example, this historical resolution, you know, you've got many, many, many hours of study by every party member in their work units and in their organizations, right?

about these texts. And it's very much about, like you said, it's also about, you know, you have to, you know, it's a way of sort of demonstrating your loyalty, adhering to the literally the party line. You know, we sort of use that term a lot in the West, but this is actually the literal meaning of party line. But ultimately, it is creating an orthodoxy and sort of a framework around what is exceptional behavior thinking, as well as policy actions.

How does that come about then? Because you describe quite a variety of actors who are contributing to them. Is it behind the scenes when something is in draft mode? You know, are people allowed, able to say what they think about it? Because one intriguing part I thought from your newsletter was you mentioned this draft report. And you said that, you know, when it's in drafting stage, it's going out to comments from local governments and so on.

that we might see a leak that shows a lack of consensus on a certain topic. So are people able to give their true thoughts or rather, I mean, maybe they'll couch it. So that was from, that was about the work report that's going to be presented in early March at the National People's Congress. The party document, like a historical resolution or a, you know, a Communist Party plenum communique, those are, I think, held in tighter circles or the, you know, usually led by the general secretary, in this case, Xi Jinping. They'll set up a drafting group

various senior party folks and people in the sort of the party, the internal sort of think tank policy research grouping. Those, I think, are much more tightly held until it's closer towards the actual meeting. But clearly, even with the historic resolution, it was pretty clear by sort of August, September, they were getting pretty clear signals from sort of official outlets that we should expect something like this.

And Rana, I think one of the problems I have with these texts and one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode is because I find it quite difficult to read. There are a lot of platitudes and grandiose language. So, for example, stuff like the party has united and led Chinese people of all ethnic groups in working tirelessly to achieve national independence and liberation.

or the past century has been a glorious journey. So has it ever been this way with revolutionary language or is it particularly bad at the moment? No, it's always been this way. So there's a phrase, actually I'm going to lean on the two of you to see what do you think the best way is to translate it. And it's the term biauti, which can mean like headline or kind of positioning, you know, these ways in which basically a set of ideas and where you stand within the party's hierarchies

are put forward, not because you necessarily want to imbue that particular phrase with huge amounts of meaning, but because it gives you a starting point to then go on and say certain things. I mean, again, although it's not quite the same thing, if in British politics, for instance, you find yourself saying...

in the context of global Britain, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, what that means is that you're positioning yourself as someone who is either comfortable with post-Brexit Britain, or at least putting yourself in a position where you know that your interlocutor thinks that that is the position that is best started from, and that if you're going to engage with that person, you need to be there first. So you're kind of putting down a marker in that sense.

But in the case of the phraseology and language in this particular historical resolution and other sorts of documents, I think there's a couple of things at play. One is, first of all, that in any political system in the world you get flannel, you get language that is put together because it has a sonorous feel and is going to sound good when it's read out. And this is something that one shouldn't underestimate in the case of Chinese language anyway, more than you do with English or French or anything else.

But there are a couple of other things, I think, going on here as well. And again, you know, some of this is stuff that Bill is very expert on. So I'd be really keen to hear what he thinks about some of this. But in particular, it seems to me that this party resolution we're talking about, this document that just came out last November, has some elements that, despite it being called a resolution, are not yet actually entirely resolved.

So let me give you an example of something that probably comes from one of those drafting groups that Bill was talking about as the workshop, you know, somewhere in the Central Party School in Beijing or elsewhere where, you know, people are having a look. You can imagine perhaps someone like China's propaganda chief Wang Huning popping around with his cup of tea with some sort of, you know, green tea leaves on the top of it, having a look and having a chat about the phrasing. I have to say this is all entirely fictional on my

part. Arms behind his back, you know, kind of swaying around. Absolutely, but it's important to think of it as a process and probably one that's been... I think there's some whiskey in that green tea, but that's a different discussion. Bet it will surely. Well, you can depend on your superior knowledge of the Politburo's habits for that.

But as that's being done, you know, people are saying, what about this? What about that? So, for example, for a long time, probably a year or more before the resolution was put forward, when people, you know, who are sort of what the equivalent of Kremlin watchers in China, Zhongnanhai watchers, were saying, well, what's going to be in any big statement that Xi Jinping puts forward? A lot of people were saying, well, actually, they're going to do something that basically

out the negatives of the Cultural Revolution from the record. And the Cultural Revolution is probably one of the recent events in modern history that's best known to non-China specialists, this immensely violent, destructive, turbulent, horrific period in the 60s and 70s when China was turned upside down by its own leader. And

That's one of the rare examples in the past where actually the party has condemned its own leader and behavior, at least partially. And that's what the 1981 resolution was all about. And we do know more about how that was written because various people who were in the room later did put out memoirs and other documents that give us a sort of parallel for how these things are done. So a lot of people thought, well, OK, Xi Jinping, he wants to basically kind of write a new page and say we're in a new era. That's the phrase that he uses over and over again.

And we need to get past these road bumps of the past and instead talk about a kind of smooth trajectory from the party being founded way back in 1921 and its centenary in 2021.

Well, that's not what happened. And if you look at the phrasing of the resolution, when it comes to the Cultural Revolution, it's still pretty condemnatory. It talks about it as a catastrophe. It talks about it as something that Mao got partially wrong. The only person, basically, in the resolution who hasn't got anything wrong, according to them, is Xi. But Mao is still actually given a little bit of a hard time. Now, we don't know yet quite how much that was the product of debate behind the scenes. But it's certainly, I imagine, part of what would have been

I imagine a quite fierce debate about how far do you condemn elements of the past? Which bits do you put in and which bits do you leave out? One other last tiny example of an absence, which I think is interesting.

They've condemned a lot of people by name, both from the more distant parts of the party, people like Bill, remember, not personally, but the histories of the first leaders of the Communist Party like Chen Duxiu and Wang Ming back in the 20s and 30s, but not many other people think about them very much. And they've condemned some very recent purged politicians like Zhou Yongkang, the former security chief, by name.

But there's no mention of the man who was put into internal house arrest after Tiananmen Square in 1989, Zhao Ziyang, the then General Secretary of the Party, who had to live in, you know, quite comfortable, but nonetheless, house arrest for the rest of his life, for more than a decade. He's neither named nor...

nor condemned 1989 is condemned still but not by name and again the sense one gets from talking to people who know about the history of these things is that there's still a sort of ambiguity about whether or not the blame is going to be pinned on one person and quite what the meaning of this event is so in the resolution i think you have to read amidst the flannel of the language some irresolution about very real concrete things in the recent past and what that means for the future

And Bill, is that the most fruitful way to read these things from the Chinese Communist Party then just between the lines with a lot of context and understanding of its history, because it is hard to get past the grandiose language. But I guess the crux of my question is, does the party want to express to the world what it's all about?

Or is what it's presenting all about require further analysis from people like us, essentially? And how much is it possible to glean from these published things? Well, I think in the context of the historical resolution document, this is not a document for the world. This is a document for the party. From that perspective, it's important to really, I think, look at what the audience is. I would say my reading of the document, I had a little bit different take about some of the historical language. I think in some ways,

They just didn't bring up, you know, this is a forward-looking document. And so a lot like Cultural Revolution, it's resolved. And there was no reason to reopen it, is my view. I think there was no reason to fight that battle. And I'm not sure that she disagrees with the 1981 conclusion of the Cultural Revolution. It was a disaster. It was a disaster for his family. And so I'm not sure, like, I know there's a lot of commentary about sort of, oh, you know, there's sort of something going on around that. I'm not sure that that really was even had to be the focus. They just had their sort of

he had to put in. The most interesting stuff to me was really how he discussed the interregnum, the group between Mao and Mao

Xi, which really lumped Deng Xiaoping with Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, as sort of their own sort of, didn't call it an era, but their own period. And it was very clear to me, at least, what one of the things that Xi was doing, though, was basically, and you saw this in some of the propaganda beforehand, including some People's Daily commentaries right during the actual plenum in November, where

where they really looked to me like they were making the point there is a direct link between Mao to Xi. And these guys were like the caretakers. Dung a little bit more, obviously, because of the formal opening. But this is all about-- and it goes back to, again, this document and your earlier question about the audience and the world. This document is about, to me, this is proclaiming the new era for Xi. This is really the-- we've had this talk of the new era. This is really the point where you can say, OK, this is real.

And so I think, you know, one of the things that's really interesting, and I think the most important phrase that has come out of this, and I'm sorry, I don't want to bore your audience, but I do think it's important, is this concept of the two establishes. You see it all over the propaganda now. The day after the resolution came out, basically she's

kind of consigliere, this guy named Chen Yixin, who's this very senior person in the security services bureaucracy, the Political and Legal Affairs Commission, he had this 6,000-plus character article about the resolution. And he basically said the most important thing was to establish this, which are, and I'm going to read them, sorry to bore you all. It's established the core position of Comrade Xi Jinping's

Party Central Committee and the whole party and establishing the guiding position of Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. And this again goes back to when you ask it, what is the audience here? The audience is the party and saying,

She is it, we are moving forward, and there's no more, like, if anybody, you know, you had talked about the sort of mentioning some of the people like Bo Xilai, there's no more sort of infighting. You're either with the program or you're gone. And I think it's a really, it's a very sort of alpha move, a declaration of power is how I read this document.

But Rana, do people actually, even when we're talking about party members, do they actually buy this stuff? I mean, even during the rectification campaign, I appreciate all of the external force, let's put it that way, that were applied. But, you know, when we say that this is targeted at cadres, do people really get it or do they just know that they have to memorise it, repeat it and so on?

Well, I think context makes a really important difference in answering that question. And I think the short answer to your question, Cindy, is that, yes, people do get it, but they don't get it in the sense that they, you know, as if it were in 1942, they're living in a cave somewhere out in rural China and they sit there reading these things endlessly with almost no distraction.

People today who are party members, and I think Bill's absolutely right, this is a document for the inside of the party. It's not meant to be something that you kind of read on the subway as entertainment, at least I'd be surprised.

But, you know, the party is very big these days. We're up to, what is it, 100 million plus members? 95 million. 95 and counting. So it's like sort of kind of your Instagram account. Let's get it up to 100. And actually the party today, you know, it never was entirely easy to get into. But today it's actually quite tough from all accounts to get into the party. You have to do a lot of studying. You have to do a lot of tests to make sure that you fit the bill from the party's point of view. So it's not an easy gig.

So in that context, think about where people are reading these things. First of all, they're probably not literally getting a sort of bound copy in paper, which they reverently place in front of them. They're probably reading on the phone like people do read these things. They may be reading bits of it as part of the famous, at least in the Chinese world, famous study, which is all party cadres or party aspirants who want to join the party.

basically have to log in with this app, download it on their phone and get tested on their knowledge of exactly what Bill said, which is Xi Jinping thought, which is now becoming one of the core elements of the exams you essentially have to pass to get into the party. We should say in Chinese it's a pun because it can mean study, but it could also mean study Xi explicitly. So, you know, there's no great secret about who's at the center of this enterprise.

Then these are people who do the stuff that everyone else does in China. You know, they go home in the evening and they maybe watch TV. They talk to their families. You know, they're reading. There is lots of popular entertainment in China today and they're seeing that. So when they read about things like, you know, sort of a term that has been adapted many times, but spiritual pollution is a term that you hear all the way from 1980s and it keeps changing its form slightly in its phrasing. But it's one of those sort of jargon phrases that you've mentioned. Right.

Well, look at what Xi Jinping and the government in China are doing today. They're cracking down really hard. I mean, we know that they're cracking down on Xinjiang, Hong Kong. These are the things that attract a lot of attention in the West for very good reasons. It's less...

observed they're cracking down on things like for instance overly effeminate hairstyles on members of boy bands in China who have big followings on Weibo and Bilibili and various platforms and one of the reasons is that actually the kind of social norms that are being violated by boys looking too much like the way that party thinks girls should look or vice versa are

is one of those things that might come under that category of spiritual pollution. Now, you and I wouldn't phrase it that way. The spectator might have its own views on social change, sometimes progressive, sometimes that's in a different direction. But the instinct is not that different in some senses. The difference is that you have a very large ideological apparatus

honeycombed through society that means that these jargon phrases don't just sit there in a vacuum. They're used as a much, much more complex social and cultural matrix that goes from everything from social media through schools to popular entertainment. That's a very fair point. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And the other thing I would say is

I don't know if it matters if they believe it or not, because I think what's been created is you pretend like you believe it even if you don't. Because one thing that has happened in under Xi and sort of this far more vigorous enforcement of discipline, ideological as well as behavioral, is there's a lot more that can go wrong if you say the wrong thing. And so... Well, I guess regurgitation itself is an exercise of power, isn't it? Yes, exactly.

And so, I mean, I think you believe you believe it in the sense that, you know, some people, I think, believe it. And quite honestly, I mean, one thing we should not discount is how good Xi's China looks to a lot of people in China, especially over the last two years with the disasters of.

you know, COVID management here and, you know, the insurrection in DC last year. I mean, there's a lot of reasons that people may not be super happy with the sort of this increasing ideological strictures, but at the same time,

There are a lot of people who might think, well, maybe there's a lot more here than we originally thought and that there's some things that actually make a lot of sense. It's complicated. - Could I just come off the back of that? I mean, I absolutely agree with that, but I think something, I was trying to think, I was about to make a flippant comment and then I'm gonna make a non-flippant comment if I may.

So the flippant comment, I'm going to cheat by giving you the flippant comment anyway. You know, I was about to say, well, Cindy, I'm sure it's the case that every single member of parliament for all British political parties, conservative Labour, believe every single word that their leaders put out. But actually, I guess that isn't quite the point that I think makes China distinctive. I think one of the things that does go back into history, not just the history of the 20th century, but actually much longer than that, is the particular role that writing and language has as a means of formulating power.

And I think that is something quite distinctive about the way in which words, I mean, there's a great scholar based in Sweden, Michael Schoenhaus, who's written a book just called Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics. It's specifically mostly actually about Chinese communist thinkers. And I'm thinking of actually master propagandists who I think are in there, people like Hu Xiaomu, who was Mao's personal secretary and did a lot of the writing on party resolutions, history and these sorts of issues. But

But more broadly speaking, being able to control language and to be able to deploy it is actually a really important skill if you're the emperor, you know, back in the days of the empires. And certainly ownership over modernity of language and how it shapes politics has been a really continuing battle throughout much of the 20th century in China as well. So much of this sort of phraseology, if you think about the move in the early 20th century, when I'm oversimplifying massively, but...

At the beginning of the 20th century, a lot of the most powerful language politically was still written in the form of classical Chinese. And in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, you get the shift to what you have now, which is a popularized form of a more vernacular, accessible Chinese that makes it more popularized.

That expressed in part the importance of making language demotic. And while it wasn't, despite what they tell you, the communists who invented that particular process, it happened much earlier than that under other non-communist governments. It is part of the process of modernity of which communist efforts both to shape language and to increase literacy have been an important element.

Interestingly, as an aside, I've just reviewed an excellent new book on that, which is Jing Tu's Kingdom of Characters for the Spectator, which was tracing all of that journey after the Second Opium War. Wonderful book, I have to say. And if you're allowed to advertise alternative podcasts, I will be talking or I have been talking to the TLS podcast about Jing Tu's book, which I think is well worth knowing. Perhaps Bill's discussing on his podcast too. Bill, you don't have a podcast, do you? We don't like to talk about that.

Sporadic. I just got her book arrived yesterday. I have not read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. No, absolutely. It's very good. One of the things that really worries me right now is as we talk about sort of the control of history and how history is sort of created and propagated in the people's world of China.

One of the terms that's come up pretty frequently since Xi Jinping came to power is this idea of historical nihilism, which is basically defined effectively as disputing anything that the party said is its official history. And one of the things that really is worrying me is that as we go through a much more, I think,

The party's always been pretty coherent about managing history, but it's gotten much more coherent and I think much better resourced in many ways under Xi Jinping. You're getting a whole generation of young Chinese people who have only... After the Cultural Revolution, beginning to form an opening period, up into the 90s, even into the early 2000s, there was a lot of intellectual fervent around history in China where you had...

Chinese academics, Chinese historians who were actually doing history that was outside of the party orthodoxy. That's gone. And I think it's very dangerous as we're getting a whole new generation that's going to have one official, sanitized, non-neolistic history, to sort of be flippant. But I think it really sets things up for, I think, a lot of problems because there are a lot of things that people, as you know, you're a historian, it's important to understand history, right? Right.

And I think we're going to end up with a whole generation or more that has massive blind spots and no ability to fill those. I was just going to agree entirely. I mean, I think that one of the things that is most notable from, let's say the period from the 1980s,

up to perhaps the mid-2010s, is the number of really interesting books produced by Chinese scholars from within China using materials that were not actually trying to undermine or criticise the CCP. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that if people want to do it. You should have free reign. But these people were actually in many ways very positive about many aspects

of the communist revolution and the way that it had changed China on issues from gender to society. But they also pointed out the flaws. In other words, they gave a complexity to history that said that even though there'd been internal purges and horrific violence and betrayal of this, that, and the other principle, nonetheless, they managed to achieve these astonishing things.

That actually, to most people who read real history, is a much more convincing and in some ways impressive story than the idea that it's some sort of machine where you sort of switched on the tap or switched on the switch in 1921 and somehow inevitably and inexorably moved to its current position of world dominance. That's not a story that any historian, including in China, where there are many, many excellent historians, would ever actually really back up.

Yeah, of course. But I mean, as Bill, and as you say, a lot of these academics are not really doing that anymore. And Rana, we both know Professor Sun Pei Dong, who I had on the podcast last year, who is one of those academics who had a slightly different view on the Cultural Revolution. Listeners can go back to that episode as well. And

On that note, Bill, I just wanted to move on to a slightly different format of communications and texts, which is speeches. Are they intended for a more public audience? Or rather, let me rephrase that. Are there things from the party that are aimed more at the public, more at, let's say, whether it's a younger generation, all those lobbyists and these ordinary people that I mentioned? For example, when Xi Jinping celebrates the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, is that language couched to be received by the people?

Oh, I think his speech at that ceremony in July last year absolutely was. I mean, it was live broadcast on every possible channel or platform in China. And it was absolutely, you know, that was one where there were multiple audiences, but clearly the broad masses were one of the key intended targets. And again, it was to, as a very triumphalist,

And they have a lot of achievements to celebrate, right? It's a thing. You can't just say, oh, it's all propaganda. The fact is, look at China. There's a lot to celebrate, right? And they really did, I think, he did a very good job of tying that all together and presenting a very, on the one hand, very positive message

vision, but at the same time, making sure people understood that there are lots of struggles ahead and it's not easy and preparing them for some of those vicissitudes. And Rana, I guess it's in those kind of contexts where we get a slightly more colorful language. I mean, as you know from our previous conversations, one of my bugbears is

literal translations of metaphorical Chinese idioms. And obviously, you guys might disagree with me on this. But one example, for example, a few years ago, this Telegraph headline ran, China Sea warns efforts to divide China will end with crushed bodies and shattered bones. Now, for anyone who speaks Chinese, that means feng shen sui gu, which is a metaphorical idiom, meaning that you can translate it to you.

crushed bodies and shattered bones, but it would have a slightly different contextual meaning, I would think. But do you think, Rana, that, you know, how much selective hearing do we have when it comes to party words, that that kind of stuff gets picked up, but not, for example, things in a centenary speech, such as, we must raise high the flag of peace development and win-win cooperation. I mean, that doesn't make a good headline, does it?

It probably doesn't. I mean, in terms of the literalism of language, I find myself thinking, if you were a Conservative MP and your whip came up to you, we've mentioned the whips more than once and said, if you don't vote the right way, I'm going to crush your balls. Should that be taken literally or not? Perhaps that's for another part of the Spectators podcast family. We will see. But it is an illustration that political language is not always to be taken literally, although in some cases more than others. And MPs, if you're worried, don't forget you should call the police.

Now, in terms of these speeches, well, first of all, could I add one particular historical brief note, which I think is important, which is that Xi Jinping and actually perhaps more recently, just like Hu Jintao, have been a bit unusual in that their speeches, at least to those of us who have learned very standard Mandarin, Putonghua, are

quite clear and accessible because if you think about some of the people who are the most famous historical leaders of the communist party Mao Zedong Deng Xiaoping Lin Biao one thing they have in common is that when you listen to tapes of their speeches it's really really really hard to understand you need subtitles and that was

It wasn't just me. Chinese people needed subtitles. Yeah, I need subtitles. People at the Blinky Pollet Bureau needed subtitles to work out what on earth this high-pitched Hunan accent of Mao or this kind of, not rumbling actually, also quite sort of relatively high-pitched Sichuan accent that Deng Xiaoping and others had. Let's just say these guys had no difficulty in making their wishes known. That wasn't the problem. But the giving of the speech was not in and of itself about the conveying of information. And I think that's the point.

Political speeches, in the sense of public speeches in any culture, and that's true in the West as well, are not, they're not explainers. They're not there as a means of trying to convey information. They're there as a means of conveying signals about much more detailed and granular politics that's going on behind the scenes. So, in a sense, I mean, I think I take your point entirely, Cindy, I would agree, if you look at any speech in the round,

And and I've done this, actually, I think probably Bill has as well, which is to go to a speech and do a word count on it, which, of course, now electronically you can do. I mean, going back for a second, I mean, I haven't actually done this recent speech, but with the resolution we mentioned earlier, I put certain words into a word search and found that Xi Jinping had been mentioned about 30 times in this resolution. Mao Zedong only 20. So you might say, oh, well, so Xi's trying to sort of promote himself 50 percent more than Mao Zedong. But the word Party turns up about 600 times.

And I think actually that has significance too. Now in these speeches if you hit a whole bunch of words about peace and resolution and all of that and then a couple of phrases that sound more confrontational, maybe that tells you something about proportion, but it can also work the other way around as well. It's sometimes the case, not always, but sometimes the case that when you get the loudest rhetoric you're actually getting a retreat from a confrontational position.

So let's not forget that there's been a lot of really angry language around Taiwan in particular. You and I have talked about this with other guests on a previous podcast. And part of me thinks, Bill may disagree, that that's partly because I don't think the party and the Chinese government is in a position in the very, very near future to launch some kind of major attack on Taiwan, despite what some more excited commentary says. And therefore, being really fiercely rhetorical about it is helpful to that cause. The Hong Kong national security law was

was not yelled and screamed about before it happened. Just basically, it wasn't quite overnight. That's not quite fair. But it was done swiftly, quite discreetly and quietly. And then wham, 1st of July 2020, it was there. So sometimes the speech is telling you about what's on people's minds, but not necessarily what they intend to.

That's a very fair point, yeah.

And what was interesting is during his speech, at that line, at that moment, the camera panned to the audience members who were military people, and the loudest cheer from the crowd was on those lines. And so you can say it doesn't really mean what he said it means, but maybe there are multiple meanings there, right? And he's, again, he's got different audiences, and depending which audience you are, you hear it differently.

No, absolutely. One thing I wanted to ask you guys was just how much substance these intellectual theories associated with each of the presidents actually has. So for example, you've got Xi Jinping thought, with Jiang Zemin, you had a three represents and Hu Jintao, arguably the scientific outlook on development.

Are those things just as meaningless as levelling up or is there more to it when people are studying these things? Unlike you, Cindy, I would say that levelling up is an extremely substantial idea and I'm shocked, shocked to hear someone from your publications even suggest anything different.

I think that when you use the phrase political ideas associated with particular leaders, of course, that's the right thing to say, because the idea that any of these people sit individually and write these particular thoughts down is obviously, as I think we've established, not the way to think about it. This is very much a workshop of thinkers who are brought together to try and articulate a set of ideas.

But I'll go out on a limb and say, yeah, I think it does matter. Not every single idea, not all the time. But I think the following quickfire things, I think I would say do have some substance because you can find an opposite. You can find a negative in which the other could also be true. 2002, the three representations or three represents, which Jiang Zemin, the then president and general secretary, put forward. Essentially, I mean, this is very, very kind of overly...

But allowing those who made their name and the money in private entrepreneurship became one of the central tenets of that particular idea. It meant the party could represent them as well. And what that meant, in a sense, was that the class warfare, which did define an absolute core element of the Chinese Communist Party's core mission, all the way from the Nanchang uprising or, you know, even before that, the Hunan peasant uprisings of the 1920s,

all the way really through the Cultural Revolution, I suppose, technically into the 1980s. That was finally, you know, being laid to rest. It was a little bit, and I don't want to stretch too far, like Tony Blair getting rid of Clause 4 of the Labour Party Constitution back in the mid-1990s in the United Kingdom.

It's not that any previous Labour government of, frankly, ever since the Second World War had actually spent all their time deciding they were going to turn Britain into a kind of truly socialist state. But by abandoning that language and putting something else in, Blair suggested a new point of politics was going on. In a weird way, you could say that Jiang Zemin was doing something similar, although I hasten to add the similarities between them are not otherwise very, very great. Even one of the ones that's been most mocked,

Hu Jintao, who put forward harmonious society. It's like, well, what is this supposed to mean? But actually, particularly the phrasing, hu xie shu hui in Chinese, has an element of the Chinese Confucian past in it. I mean, that's where harmony comes from. Harmony is not a Maoist idea. Mao, from his earliest days, was keen on the idea of smashing the consensus, destroying the old culture, as in the Cultural Revolution.

So the idea of having a harmonious... And, you know, the idea of violence as a good in its own right is a very Maoist idea. Hu Jintao, by putting forward the idea of harmonious society, was in a sense harking back to a philosophical past and also the idea that stability over disruption

was an important part of the offer that he was putting forward in his leadership. So yes, they're kind of bland and homogenised in some ways, but I don't think they're meaningless. What do we think about Xi Jinping's thought then, Bill? Well, first, I completely agree. I completely agree with what Dr. Mitter's just said. And I think that, no, Xi Jinping thought is important. And I mean, you've got, depending on the branch, and there are multiple schools, there's economic thought, diplomatic thought, legal thought. I mean, there's

The goal is to rework China's economic model, whether it's common prosperity, which you heard about a lot last year. I think a formal plan is supposed to come out this year. On the diplomatic side, people talk about the wolf warriors and wolf warriorism. It's not just like random people on Twitter saying mean things. This is a fundamental tenet of Xi Jinping thought on diplomacy about China taking a much different role in the world and how it expresses itself, how it positions itself.

Xi Jinping legal thought is, again, I think looking at working, doing a lot to reform the legal system, not necessarily in ways that we would agree with in the US or the UK, but absolutely making China much more a rule by law country. I mean, these are real things that they're easy to sort of mock or say this is crazy, but actually, and the other thing I'd say, sorry,

You were talking about Hu Jintao trying to use this idea of harmony and hearkening back to the traditions. Xi Jinping thought has a lot of this sort of amalgamation of historical, traditional Chinese thought and values along with, obviously, the Communist Party ideology. So these are very important things, and they're very much...

Markers for where the country's going to go and where the cadres at least all what they have to hue to. And in previous Pujintal, Jiang Zemin, maybe they didn't hue as much because things were a little looser in the Xi Jinping era. These guys are bound to it very tightly.

Can I just throw in there, first of all, I know we'll have much more conversation. Bill, please do call me Rana, otherwise if you keep calling me Dr. Mitter, I feel like I'm like 150 years old. I think I'm older. You can't see us. I am older. I'm sorry. I'm such a fan of your work that I feel like I should call you doctor. Well, I'm a massive fan of yours, which is why I feel kind of emboldened to call you just Bill as if I know you, which now I do. This is the most charming conversation on Xi Jinping's thought I think there's ever been. Yeah.

Indeed, absolutely. Just to pick up on where you actually just left off. I think Bill's got that absolutely right, in particular the last bit that he's talking about, I think is one of the most interesting things, both in this historical resolution we keep coming back to, but also the wider scope of the political language that is being used by the party today. Because it has three or four elements in it that actually don't logically fit together and yet are being welded together to make something ideologically interesting.

Pretty unique. So number one is that traditional philosophy, Confucianism or perhaps legalism, this idea of the rule by law rather than the rule of law, all of which can be drawn often in a rather sort of diluted or distorted way from Chinese traditional thinking. But that's still significant because one of the things that brought the Communist Party into existence 100 years ago was a rejection by early communists, including Mao, of Chinese tradition. So in that sense, bringing it back,

is, you know, to many, many, many people who live from outside, it sounds, oh, well, it's natural. China has had these thoughts for thousands of years and the communists are just like the new emperors. No, the communists actually rejected all of this all the way into the 70s and 80s and then brought it back. So that's number one. But number two,

And head-scratchingly, they are still doubling down, if not tripling down. Is that a thing? It is now. They're tripling down on Marxism. And by Marxism, we don't in this case mean, you know, the sort of theory of surplus labor value, etc. We mean the use of particular types of language that involve dialectic, the idea that forces come up against each other and have to struggle to get to some end point.

All of these terms which, you know, anyone who'd been in a smoke-filled, possibly not necessarily from tobacco, smoke-filled student common room at, you know, a northern university in England in the 1970s would absolutely recognise. And we're talking here about terms like contradiction, right?

struggle, the idea that these are ways in which... Duality. Duality. Fantastic. Thank you, Bill. Absolutely. Duality. And these things are not being just put there as a sort of secret source to make it look a little bit, you know, convincing for people who are still true believers. They are a way of understanding real things happening in the world, like the US-China confrontation. Yeah. The difficulty of balancing economic growth and green energy development.

All of these are things that every country in the world is having to take into account. But China is choosing very explicitly to use Marxist frameworks, which has always had, but is now doubling down on, as an explanatory framework. And Xi himself has called himself and his system Marxist far more frequently than Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao ever did. I agree. I mean, I think Xi is a Marxist. I don't think there's any evidence he's not Marxist. But

But how much of that is performative? I mean, she might believe in it, but how much of it's performative for others? You know, when this kind of analysis comes out, you know, in the public sphere through documents, are other card-carrying, card-raising, thinking about things in a dialectical way? I think so. And I think that, I mean, I really, it's striking how so many of the issues, when they're discussed publicly, they're framed in all, I mean, it's, you know, people say, oh, they're not really Marxist. You know, look at how they're talking about capital.

And then the way they're going to use capital and control capital. I mean, this is, you know, I always go back to you look at Xi Jinping. What was his education? His education was the selected works of Mao and the Marxist classics. And why wouldn't he be Marxist?

And you look at the way they look at the world, global development, the international politics, I mean, it looks to me very clear that's how they're framing everything. But they're smart enough to know that they've evolved Marxism. That's why they continually talk about sinicizing Marxism. And even in their resolution, we started talking about a very key phrase where they talk about how Xi Jinping thought is the new leap in

in the cynicization of Marxism. And the only other person who got the new leap was Mao Zedong, right? A great leap even. Yeah, no, but they didn't actually use great, I don't think this time. Probably wise. But back to the original, so the conversation we're having, this language matters because it is, you know, maybe they're all fake Marxists, but I don't think they think they are. I think they see themselves as the torchbearers of Marxism as it is being evolved into the future. Right on.

OK, so a thought on this. One thing I haven't done is to go into Chinese Communist Party members' houses when they're asleep without them knowing through the window and stealing their phones and having a look at what's on there and then carefully putting them back just under the drawer. I haven't done that because it would be wrong. Just making that really clear. Hasn't GCHQ done that? You would know, Bill. You tell me. No, no, I would not know.

So I haven't done that. But what I have done recently and I found really fascinating is read the equivalent from the 1940s, which is diaries, daily diaries of personal self-development being kept by young, often very young cadres, you know, aspirant communist officials from the 1940s at the time when the revolution was finally coming to culmination, the conquest of the mainland in 1949 under Mao.

And they're extraordinary. They're very moving in many ways, actually, in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect, because you have, for instance, I mean, just to give you one example, a 23 year old woman who has been betrayed by her lover. She basically rejected other people because she thought he was going to come back. And then it turned out he married someone else.

And she writes in her diary, she's clearly hugely, hugely hurt and agonized and just writing and writing and writing. And the way that she phrases this, she said, I can't believe you've done this to me. How could you betray me like this? Don't you have proper proletarian consciousness? Shouldn't you be looking at Lenin's theory? Well, you're not. You're a very cruel person, Cindy. She was really upset about this. In fact, she married someone else and had kids. So, you know, it was fine.

Or other examples, you know, a senior cadre, and this is one of my favourite quotes, it's going in my books and no one else is allowed to have this until I've published it, but it's from a cadre, a mid-40-something man, same sort of time, 1948, talking about how he was trying to sort of sort out his thoughts to make them politically workable in the new regime as it came together. And he read a lot of Lenin and a lot of Mao and a lot of texts, and he says...

The problem I have is that my petit bourgeois sensibility is a bit like the stinkiness between my toes. It's really hard to wash away. Now Cindy is looking a little bit worried, I have to say. I can see her on this podcast. My point is, the 23-year-old woman was someone who had found herself

in a really genuinely heartbreaking situation. The 40-something man was genuinely unsure how to progress his, you know, real worry about, you know, did he get the new system? Do you understand it?

But by that stage, the way in which they naturally expressed themselves was in the Marxist language at the time. Now, I'm not suggesting that those card rates at a very ideological, revolutionary time are identical to what's happening now. But I would say that we are in an ideological time again today. And therefore, the gap which people sometimes put between political language and authentic language, which I've always thought was slightly too neat,

really, I think, is dissolving in many ways, and not just in China today, just as you can see parallels back in the 1940s when those cadres were writing their diaries about how they felt about the revolution, but also about their day-to-day lives as they were living them on a day-to-day basis and trying to clean out the stinkiness between their toes. Well,

What an image. Well, no, I think Rana, you are right. I mean, but obviously the 40s is a different time. But, you know, as you were saying that I was going through in my head, you know, all the changes that China has been under since then, and surely people are more cynical these days, or more critical, more critically thinking.

But perhaps not. I mean, you reminded me of my grandmother who still calls the communist takeover in 1949 the liberation, because that is what she was taught to call it. And if she's thinking about it as the liberation, how does she not think of it as a liberation? You know that you think you're right that that line is quite blurry. My mother-in-law still talks about liberating Taiwan. Is she trying to do it single handed, Bill? No, but she won't visit Taiwan until it's liberated.

Oh, right. All right. Well, that might be the difference between it's liberation. You know, she needs to go there. And Bill and Rana, I want to finish on, you know, the most important question in this discussion, which is something I obsess over. What is going on with numbers? By which I mean...

Bill, you talked about the two establishments. There's also the two situations, I might be translating these a bit shoddily, 两个大局, the three represents 三个代表, the four comprehensives, 四个全面,

What is going on with that naming system? I mean, Xi Jinping thought is at least slightly better than that. Do we have any either from history or from modern day answers to why they are so obsessed with numbering things in these grand ideas? Do you want to go first? Sure, I'll take a guess. You probably actually know the answer. I mean, a couple of things. One is it's always been that way. Two, you have to remember, especially earlier on, a lot of the party members were not very well educated.

Some were illiterate. And so these are ways to very, very simply crystallize the key essential concepts and slogans. And I think that had something to do with it early on. Now, why do they keep doing it? Well, you know, I mean, again, I quoted earlier this piece from this guy, you see this 60 something, 6,000 something characters, you know, not everyone wants to read that repeatedly. It's much easier to pull out the key bits and focus on the key bits. And then, you know, maybe when you're, you can go back and you, when you have to

do your study session at your work unit or wherever, you can sort of go a little deeper. But it's just the way they communicate that I think makes it, it does kind of make sense to me. But it also does kind of go fade into the background. It's like, yeah, the 442 or these other kinds of combinations. And we've had four confidences. We're now going to have a fifth. They're about to add the historical confidence, right? So it's kind of a thing that I don't think is going to change. And if you have an answer why they started this way, I'd love to hear it. That was just my guess.

It does go back a long way. One of the reasons, I think...

is to do with the nature of bureaucracy, which has existed in some form for thousands of years, but let's say during the examination system, where one of the things that got you success in China was rising up through the system as a bureaucrat. And that's very different, for instance, from medieval Japan, where actually samurai power and violence was much more important in terms of rising to power. So in a sense, becoming a sort of rational Confucian bureaucracy during the high imperial era, maybe for about

1000 CE up to the early 20th century was very important as part of that.

So categorization, in other words, putting together categories of things that you could organize, a taxonomy is an important part of it. It is something that you see well before the communists. I mean, just quickly, a couple of examples of this that came to mind in documents I've been reading from the communist predecessors, the Kuomintang or nationalists, two famous figures from there. One is Chiang Kai-shek's diaries, the kind of nationalist lead of China through much of the 20th century. He writes endless lists. I think one particular one that comes to mind had sort of, you know,

14 bullet points for things that I want to ask for from the Americans when World War II is over. And his son is doing the same thing, Jiang Jingguo, who eventually becomes a dictator, then the first sort of democratizer in Taiwan in the 1980s before he dies. But at one point, there's a negotiation going on in 1945 with the Soviets about whether or not they're going to be able to kind of get a deal between the Chinese and the Soviets in Manchuria, northeast China.

And in his diary, it's written that Zhang Jingguo, this chap, is very, very worried about what's going to happen.

So he comforts himself by going and writing down in about 14 or 15 points all the things he's going to do. This is in his private diary. I think he knew at some point someone would read it. It wasn't entirely private, but it was at the time a personal reflection. And there is a natural tendency, I think, because of that tradition, when you are looking for ways to try and organise what's often an immensely turbulent and torrid time, which the mid-20th century certainly was, and the early 21st century is pretty complicated as well, put

Putting things with numbers and working out how you're going to organise them gives you key performance indicators, a to-do list, a way of making a very messy world organised. You might want to try it sometime. Well, Rana Mehta and Bill Bishop, thank you for joining Chinese Whispers. Thanks very much, Cindy. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Great to be here. And thank you very much for listening. If you want to continue the conversation with Chinese Whispers, do check out a few of our past episodes, which we mentioned in today's, the links of which will be in the description.

On those academics in China not toeing the party line in their research, I interview the former Shanghai academic Sun Peidong about her research on the Cultural Revolution and her recent exile from China.

On the CCP's Taiwan rhetoric, Rana and I discuss why China cares so much about Taiwan in an episode from last April. And finally, you can find my review of Jing Tu's Kingdom of Characters, which is all about the changes to the Chinese language that happened in the last century and their political impact. I review the book in the latest issue of The Spectator. And Jing is someone who I hope to have on the series over the coming months. Thanks for listening. And if you enjoyed this podcast, do give us a rating or review. And please do tune in again.