Xi’s campaign to boost the Chinese party’s image fails to inspire

Masses of meetings: A campaign to boost the party’s image fails to inspire

Jul 13th 2013 | BEIJING |From the print edition

ON JULY 9th the Communist Party issued a new directive on President Xi Jinping’s campaign to clean up its act. Among the orders: “Avoid going through the motions”. Despite a blizzard of instructions in recent weeks calling on officials to get “closer to the masses”, the response has been perfunctory. Even one of the party’s own newspapers has hinted that Mr Xi’s efforts are on the wrong track.

The campaign “to study the mass line” revives a Maoist notion that the party should learn from the people (while ignoring any demands for a different party to lead them). It was announced in April and formally launched in June with a speech by Mr Xi to the Politburo calling for a “thorough clean-up” of the party to rid it of “formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance”. It is supposed to carry on until mid-2014. This month 45 teams of officials were despatched by the party leadership to make sure that provincial leaders, university principals and the managers of state-owned enterprises were paying proper attention. Mr Xi has ordered his generals to make sure the army (a bastion of privilege) listens too.Party committees around the country, well-rehearsed in such campaigns, have been going through the drill, organising “study sessions” for party members to ensure the slogans sink in. In the northern city of Cangzhou some officials showed unusual zeal by vowing to give up smoking in order to “do their personal best to combat air pollution”. In coastal Zhejiang province a township has begun inviting one resident monthly to “scold” officials.

But the stricture to “avoid going through the motions” is an acknowledgment that such campaigns have become ritualised. When Mr Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, launched a campaign a few years ago to promote “the advanced nature” of the party, some officials avoided having to write essays on the topic by downloading boilerplate ones from the internet. Similar materials are beginning to circulate again.

One of Mr Xi’s main goals is to root out corruption by locking up “tigers” along with “flies”. On July 8th a former railways minister, Liu Zhijun, a “tiger” who had been detained under Mr Hu, was given a suspended death sentence—in effect, a life term—for accepting bribes of 64.6m yuan ($10.5m). Also that day Xinhua, an official news service, said that Li Tianyi, a 17-year-old son of a high-ranking military officer, had been charged in connection with an alleged gang-rape in February. His case has been closely followed by Chinese bloggers, many of whom see it as an example of how remote from the masses officials and their families have become.

On July 9th, however, Study Times, an official newspaper under the Central Party School, questioned whether the “mass line” campaign would prove effective. In a remarkable deviation from Mr Xi’s conservative rhetoric, the article implied that the campaign was an outdated concept. Better, it argued, to have a bit more democracy.