Cadre Country: How China became the Chinese Communist Party

By John Fitzgerald

Since the founding of the Communist Party in China just over a century ago, there is much the country has achieved. But who does the heavy lifting in China? And who walks away with the spoils? Cadre Country places the spotlight on the nation's 40 million cadres the managers and government officials employed by the ruling Communist Party to protect its great enterprise. This group has captured the culture and wealth of China, excluding the voices of the common citizens of this powerful and diverse country. Award-winning historian John Fitzgerald focuses on the stories the Communist Party tells about itself, exploring how China works as an authoritarian state and revealing Beijing's monumental propaganda productions as a fragile edifice built on questionable assumptions. Cadre Country is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the workings of the Chinese Communist Party and the limits of its achievements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781742238340

John Fitzgerald

John Fitzgerald is the author of Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, awarded the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association, and Awakening China, awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the US Association for Asian Studies.

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Cover image for Cadre Country: How China became the Chinese Communist Party, by John Fitzgerald.

CADRE

COUNTRY

JOHN FITZGERALD is a China historian. He served as China Representative of The Ford Foundation in Beijing for five years (2008–2013) before heading the Asia-Pacific philanthropy studies program at Swinburne University of Technology. His books include Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, awarded the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association, and Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution, awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the US Association for Asian Studies.

‘It takes decades of patient observation, experience and study of China to produce a book like this. Cadre Country is a must read for specialists and the general public.’

ANITA CHAN, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

‘One of the most important books on China written since Xi Jinping assumed power, Cadre Country is a forensic and profound explication of the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party.’

JOHN LEE, HUDSON INSTITUTE AND UNITED STATES STUDIES CENTRE

‘Everyone interested in China today should read this incisive analysis that explains exactly what China’s own leaders mean by describing their country as a party-state. Avoiding shibboleths like totalitarian and never assuming the inevitability of the paths China has taken in the past or will take in the future, Fitzgerald gives us a much-needed clinical description of the fundamental nature of Chinese politics.’

PETER ZARROW, UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT

CADRE

COUNTRY

How China became the Chinese Communist Party

JOHN FITZGERALD

Logo: New South Publishing.

A UNSW Press book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© John Fitzgerald 2022

First published 2022

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Internal design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Akiko Chan

Cover image Topographic map of China, iStock.com/ Frank Ramspott

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1Insiders, Outsiders, cadres

2Who owns China?

3Eat up, lift up

4Four Little Tigers

5Migrant labour

6Law and planning

7Leninism and meritocracy

8China’s national imaginary

9Party history is family history

10War of Resistance or Anti-Fascist War

11Century of humiliation

12Degeneration and regeneration

13Managing a patch

14Capitalism without capitalists

15Original intentions

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

For Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021),

who reminded me that status drives everything and counts for nothing

REGIME TIMELINE

MODERN HISTORY TIMELINE

INTRODUCTION

On 28 April 2017, the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court in China’s northern port city of Tianjin announced the conviction and sentencing of lawyer Li Heping for subversion of state power.¹ Two years earlier, authorities had ordered the arrest and detention of over 300 lawyers in the infamous ‘709 crackdown’ ( July 9, 2015) targeting China’s professional legal defenders. Li was one of them. Over two years in detention pending trial he was tortured by electric shock and forcibly medicated with a drug that, by his wife’s account, caused ‘muscle pains, lethargy, and blurred vision’. One month was spent in shackles, leaving him unable to stand.²

On that same day in Tianjin’s sister city of Melbourne, former Prime Minister Paul Keating took to the stage and mocked critics of China’s human rights record for being ‘hung up’ about legal defenders in China. Speaking at a La Trobe University event, Keating dismissed concerns over the abuse of legal process in China as a trivial blip in the record of ‘the best government in the world of the last thirty years. Full stop’. Critics of China’s government in Australia, Keating said, were ‘hung up about the fact that some legal detainees don’t get legal representation’.³

A giant of the Australian Labor Party and master of the larrikin idiom, Keating spoke to an adoring audience. Packed into the Melbourne Recital Centre they laughed on cue and nodded in affirmation. To be fair, they were probably unaware of the trial underway in their sister city; but it is also unclear whether that knowledge would have made any difference to their response. A lot is forgiven the Communist Party of China (CPC) for having, in one of the more widely circulated phrases of the past half century, ‘lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty’. One outspoken lawyer might have been dismissed as a fair price to pay.

In fact, Li was one of hundreds of legal defenders who had recently been rounded up, imprisoned and tortured on charges of subversion. This assault on the legal profession was no robust rebuff of overpaid lawyers, as Keating’s sideways swipe might have suggested, but a signal to China and the world that three decades of experimentation with rule of law were over. The end was marked by the rise to power of Xi Jinping, son of senior party veteran and government leader Xi Zhongxun. Since assuming office, Xi has undertaken several measures to end the process of Reform and Opening (c. 1979–2009) that made China the most successful developing country in the world over the preceding three decades. Li’s conviction, announced early in Xi’s second term, was one of many signs that the party was no longer tolerating restraints on its exercise of power.

The crackdown on the legal profession in China should have caused more consternation in Australia than it did. Something missing from the long-running public conversation on China–Australia relations is attention to what is happening on the ground in China and an understanding of why it matters. Much attention has been paid to foreign influence and counter-interference operations in Australia, to deteriorating bilateral relations, to shifting trade and investment patterns, to the treatment of minorities, and to the changing geopolitics of the region. Less notice has been taken of what Xi Jinping is doing in China generally. A missing link in public conversations is the way the party-state works in the post-Reform Era, why it works that way, and what this means for people in China and those of us outside. The ongoing assault on the legal profession is not simply an arbitrary exercise of power by an also-ran among the world’s authoritarian regimes. It shows a party-state of unprecedented size engaged in the attempt to consume the society and economy over which it presides.

The attempt itself is not out of character for a communist party-state. Historically, on seizing power, communist parties demolish existing social orders and replace them with systems of organisation modelled on the internal structures of the parties themselves. Mao in China and, before him, Lenin in Russia and Stalin in the USSR and Eastern Europe, each seized and held power in states that had been torn apart by total war, and they rebuilt their war-torn societies and economies on what came to be called the Leninist vanguard model.⁴ In China the opportunity arose through Japanese occupation in the years 1937 to 1945; in Lenin’s Russia it was the Great War; in the case of Stalin, in Eastern Europe, it was the Second World War. Under postwar conditions each confronted what Mao called a ‘blank sheet’ on which they could inscribe whatever they pleased. They commandeered all resources in the countries they captured, and with those resources constructed command economies that all but obliged their parties and mass organisations to control every aspect of peoples’ lives. Ideology and organisation went hand in hand: Mao Zedong led a proletarian dictatorship that preached and practised class struggle, that structured economic, social and state affairs along class lines, and that merged state and society through its own party-state organisation.⁵

That description does not hold for China in the 21st century. The leadership no longer preaches class struggle, no longer organises economic and social life explicitly along class lines, and no longer manages a command economy. Far from being a war-torn country, China is a coherent and relatively cohesive national state and by some measures the world’s largest economy. The party presides over diversified and liberalised communities and a highly marketised economy.⁶ It seems paradoxical, then, that under Xi Jinping, the party leadership should propose to retrofit the country’s social, cultural and political life into the structures and personnel of the old Leninist party-state. In regard to those parts of the community that come close to generating civil society – independent women’s groups, environmental activists or professional associations, for example – the leadership team under Xi outlaws them as if the party were still presiding over Mao’s command economy and mass society. The aim is to achieve what Norwegian sociologist Stein Ringen calls a ‘perfect dictatorship’, allowing no space for political expression or public participation outside the framework of the party-state organisation. Add an ideological overlay of romantic nationalism which absorbs the individual into the collective whole, and the potential outcome for the people of China and the world, as Ringen observes, is ‘ultra-dangerous’.⁷

On the Leninist model of state organisation, ideology and organisation (including economic organisation) are supposed to match up. Marxist ideology, or in its Chinese formulation Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, is an imperfect match with the social and economic organisation of contemporary China. In the fallout of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, it was quietly allowed to fade into the background, giving way to patriotism as the core principle. Xi Jinping’s signal achievement has been to remind his countrymen of the party’s ideological foundations, its ‘original intentions’ (chuxin), and to inject that consciousness into a popular nationalism that has been steadily intensifying over the past quarter of a century. Simultaneously, his articulation of the ‘China Dream’ – the dream of the ‘Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation’ – has served as a clarion call to nationalists within and outside of the party. In grafting an old style of Leninist organisation onto the vigorous roots of Chinese nationalism, Xi has re-established congruence between ideology and organisation in highly volatile form.

This is a book about the merger of communism and nationalism in contemporary China. One consequence of that merger is that a proud, diverse and vibrant country is being absorbed into a disciplined party in spite of itself.

In Chinese, the words country and state (guojia) are identical. How to distinguish between them, how to separate them, and how to construct a proper relationship between them has preoccupied many of China’s leading thinkers over the past century.⁸ In Mao Zedong’s day, state and party also became indistinguishable under a communist party-state and a command economy. Efforts were made early in the Reform Era to tease party and state apart, particularly under Premier Zhao Ziyang and General Secretary Hu Yaobang.⁹ Their efforts were halted after the 1989 Beijing Massacre even as other reforms went ahead. The result, as Chinese philosopher Jiwei Ci points out, has been a liberalisation and even democratisation of communities in China alongside a hardening of the authoritarian regime.¹⁰

Cadre Country pays particular attention to events flowing from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) as they unfolded in Beijing between 2008 and 2013 and follows them through to the party centenary in 2021. Over this period, conservative forces in the ruling elite were emboldened to re-embrace Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and relaunch it into the world as Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.¹¹ They were quite open about it. Under Xi, the party reaffirmed its historical mission, clarified its vision and proclaimed its ideology more clearly than at any time since the rule of Mao Zedong (1949–76). The book places those events in a longer historical timeframe to tease out what party leaders mean when they speak of their original intentions (chuxin), their historical mission (shiming) and the world’s common destiny (mingyun gongtongti) to show how the party’s vision, mission and sense of destiny translate into power and privilege for the officials who run the country to the exclusion of common citizens.

Above all, the book is about the party and government officials who run the country, known as cadres, and about the system of cadre rule that grants them status and privileges not enjoyed by ordinary people. China’s cadre system is a source of pride and worry to the party’s top leadership: pride because the system is said to stand above special interests, and worry because the system is erected on authoritarian ideals of loyalty and obedience that can never be assured. ‘The Party has no special interests of its own,’ Xi Jinping declared on the CPC’s centenary in July 2021. ‘It has never represented any individual interest group, power group, or privileged stratum.’¹² At the same time, Xi frequently urges his cadres to remain loyal to the party leadership, which is to say himself.¹³

In fact, as we shall see, the party is China’s largest special interest group, and leading cadres make up a privileged stratum. The paramount role of the party leadership is to preserve the power and status of the party. From this fundamental principle all else flows. The leadership professes an interest in social equality and periodically confiscates private wealth or pressures entrepreneurs to share their profits in the name of ‘common prosperity’ (gongtong fuyu). But the CPC is not prepared to confront the deepest source of social and civic inequality in China – the privileged standing of the party and its cadres – because it associates party interests with interests of state and identifies itself with China.

Australia and China

Xi Jinping is a career politician. He started as a low-level deputy party secretary in a small county in north China early in the Reform Era. His career culminated brilliantly in November 2012 with his elevation to the position of General Secretary of the CPC and a few months later Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, succeeding in both offices the rather forgettable Hu Jintao. Since then, he has become the party’s and China’s ‘Helmsman’ and ‘Guide’, titles hitherto held only by Mao. With Xi at the helm, bilateral relations between China and Australia have become increasingly difficult to manage. Failure to acknowledge how much and yet how little has changed in Xi’s New Era makes it difficult to appreciate why.

The Reform Era was a period of transition, its experimental character summed up in a saying often attributed to former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping: ‘cross the river by feeling for the stones’. That crossing is long since complete. Through systemic economic reform, the country moved from poverty to wealth and from weakness to strength. Everyday life changed and so did the expectations of ordinary people. For a brief moment in the 1980s it seemed as though the party would change, too. That moment passed. The party arrived on the other side of the river much as it set off, as a Leninist vanguard party with a steely determination to remain in command. Thirty years into reform, during the GFC, the party leadership recalibrated where the party was coming from and where it was taking China. Instead of pushing ahead with reform it chose to double-down. An old-style Marxist-Leninist model was revived for extending party control over the country’s society and economy. These intra-party reflections and recalibrations fed into the succession struggle that brought Xi Jinping to power at the 18th Party Congress in November 2012.

That was a watershed moment. Following his appointment, Xi signalled the end of three decades of Reform and Opening by reinstating absolute party power, extending his role as head of state indefinitely, and inserting his ideological vision to build a powerful China into the party’s constitution – the only meaningful constitution in the country.¹⁴ He brought mainstream media into the Party Family (xingdang), as he calls it, and he stepped up monitoring and policing of ubiquitous social media.¹⁵ He extended electronic surveillance networks into every neighbourhood and imprisoned over one million members of minority communities in Xinjiang. He oversaw the occupation and militarisation of internationally contested islands in the South China Sea and expanded China’s claimed territorial jurisdiction by around three million square kilometres.

Australia was not too far away or too small an entity to escape his notice. He authorised cyber-attacks on Australian facilities and the use of leverage over Australia’s economic dependence on China for political and strategic advantage. He pushed the party’s United Front operations deeply into Chinese-Australian community organisations and media. In Australia, the combination of Xi’s totalitarian measures at home and expansionist policies abroad, accompanied by acts of cyber-warfare, economic coercion and covert United Front activities targeting Australia in particular, eventually prompted a re-evaluation of the principles underpinning bilateral relations. One sign of how ill-prepared Australia was for this shift was the sight of eminent public figures continuing to speak on Beijing’s behalf as if nothing had changed since the end of the Reform Era. Another was self-castigation. ‘Australia-China relations doomed to fail because of our ignorance’, announced The New Daily.¹⁶

It was not for want of local knowledge or expertise on China that bilateral relations turned sour. In some ways, Australia was ahead of others in recognising that significant shifts were under way in China. China-analysts, journalists, even some politicians in Australia saw early that hanging onto Reform Era assumptions about open engagement in Xi’s New Era had implications for institutional integrity, community cohesion and national security. China’s tabloid press argued that it was ignorance and prejudice that lay behind Australia’s faltering steps in the deteriorating bilateral relationship. Some Australians agreed – in one case reckoning there were no more than 20 people in Australia with expertise on China.¹⁷ These claims are well off target.

Despite severe restrictions on access to information, a number of the world’s finest foreign correspondents, researchers and analysts have kept fellow Australians informed about developments in the relationship, and worked with Chinese Australians and colleagues in China who don’t share Xi Jinping’s vision for the country to bring their stories to light. Others have contested these stories in turn.¹⁸ Mainstream studies aside, some of the most up-to-date Australian scholarship on contemporary China is published in specialist journals, monographs and edited volumes that rarely find their way into suburban bookshops or onto writers’ festival programs. I draw on some of them here.¹⁹ Add to these any number of specialist studies in health management, aged care, housing, the environment, urban development and transport, education, law and policing, women’s studies, development studies, media, the performing arts, philanthropy, political science, security studies, history, philosophy, languages and literature, and we find no shortage of expertise in Australia. Some of these specialist studies could be translated into more accessible formats for the general reading public, but a quick search shows they are readily available through libraries and specialist bookshops for those who want to find them.

What Australia lacks is not expertise on China but muscle memory for grappling with a Leninist party-state. Outside of former Soviet bloc countries in Europe there is little residual expertise or experience in the West for managing relations with communist regimes. Australians are poorly served in this regard. Beguiled by the promise of China’s Reform and Opening, and drawn into complacency by the collapse of communism in Europe, they show a general inclination towards explaining China’s conduct by reference to history and culture without regard to ideology and organisation. China’s Communist Party is not, as some would claim, the institutional reincarnation of 5000 years of civilisational development on Chinese soil. It is a communist party. China may have a venerable history; the CPC does not. The more it reverts to type as a Leninist vanguard party, the more it is likely to remould the country around the template of its own internal party organisation.

A subject that has received insufficient attention in Australia is the party itself: how it is reverting to form under Xi Jinping, how it is organised and disciplined, how it thinks and operates, how it regards itself, and what it is that preoccupies its leaders. Two books by Australian journalists that appeared on the cusp of Xi Jinping’s accession to power go some way to answering these questions. In The Party (Allen Lane, 2010), Richard McGregor reminded the world that China was run by a Communist Party. Curiously, this was regarded as a path-breaking revelation at the time. McGregor also showed how the party operated in the background of every business and trade deal in China. With his book Party Time (Black Inc., 2013), Rowan Callick brought this message home to Australians through a series of engaging accounts of officials and business people in China who enjoyed close connections with Australia, along with stories about the struggles and achievements of ordinary people under party rule.

Both books appeared before Xi Jinping made his presence felt.

Since then, Xi has taken the party to another level by absorbing state agencies into the party, extending party control into private enterprise and local communities, smothering a nascent civil society, and reasserting the place of ideology in national life and culture. What seems to be needed at this point, Australian China analyst John Garnaut has noted, is ‘a serious attempt to read the ideological road map that frames the language, perceptions and decisions of Chinese leaders. If we are ever going to map the Communist Party genome then we need to read the ideological DNA’.²⁰ Cadre Country takes a step in this direction.

History matters

References to history can warrant almost any claim or argument, in any language, at any time. Historical claims can be deployed to question the principles on which the international order is founded, for example, or to challenge the values underpinning those principles. China’s political leaders and diplomats routinely appeal to history to re-set the terms of conversation away from common ground in principle and law onto particular cultural and historical terrain that is open to vague ethnographic claims about national cultures and unverifiable historical ones around territory and identity. Claiming 5000 years of history opens a large case file.

During his term as US President, Donald Trump met several times with Chairman Xi Jinping and heard a lot about history because Xi and his aides spent much of their limited time with the American President talking about it. ‘During our state visit’, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster later recalled, ‘Xi and his advisers relied heavily on history to convey their intended message. They emphasised certain historical subjects. They avoided others’.²¹ Trump came away persuaded – incorrectly – that Korea had at some point been part of China and that ‘you know, you’re talking about thousands of years … it’s not so easy’.²² Getting on top of historical arguments and details is not easy but it is essential when so much hinges on historical claims of one kind and another.

In his La Trobe speech, Paul Keating reached into history to defend the Communist Party government on grounds that it ‘pulled the country together after European imperialism had ripped it apart and the Japanese had ripped it apart’. Neither claim survives historical scrutiny. The sovereignty of the old empire was severely compromised by foreign powers in the late 19th century, and the territorial integrity of the Republic of China – Asia’s first republic – was plainly undone by the Japanese invasion and occupation. But it was the Nationalist government, not a communist one, that led the resistance effort against Japanese occupation in the drawn-out war of 1937–45; that in 1942 accepted the surrender of special privileges awarded to Western powers by virtue of the Unequal Treaties signed in the previous century; that represented China at the Great Powers conference in Cairo in 1943; that reunified China’s lost territories, including Taiwan, at the close of the war; and that earned China great power status and permanent Security Council membership at the founding of the United Nations in 1945.

The fact that the Nationalist government also performed poorly on the domestic front in the post-war era, losing the support of key stakeholders in the country’s future, does not lessen the Communist Party’s responsibility in fomenting the chaos that characterised those years. In 1946, the communists seized the opportunity not to consolidate the peace but to plunge the country into war again. After toppling the Nationalist government in 1949 they tore the country apart several times over in violent mass campaigns and a state-induced famine that together took between 40 million and 50 million lives. For bad governments at that time they had serious rivals – Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, for example – but for the title of the world’s worst government in its time, China’s Communist Party had few competitors.

This is not ancient history. It was the failure of those first three decades that left China with so much catching up to do over the years that followed and triggered the social dislocation and environmental despolation that accompany haste and waste. The economic achievements of the Reform Era were grounded not in those early decades of party rule but in the institutional legacy of the government the Communists overthrew. When the People’s Republic claimed China’s seat in the UN in 1971, it inherited a permanent position on the Security Council earned through the efforts of the Nationalist government it deposed. And when the party leadership tried in the Reform era to compensate for its past mistakes, it drew on an enduring institutional legacy of Nationalist achievements, including IMF loans, World Bank advice, and entry into a global trading and investment regime the Nationalist government helped to build and sustain after the war. The world rightly looks on in awe at China’s achievements but needs to cast a sceptical eye over the Communist Party’s claims to those achievements.

Information matters

How is it that the party so often gains credit for the accomplishments of others? The party certainly claims credit for itself at home – particularly among Mao-types who imagine China’s economic achievements are the product of their own strategic acumen rather than the policy work of reformers or the efforts of China’s people.²³ More than that, the party pushes these claims abroad. Beijing sees itself engaged in a protracted information war involving intense competition to massage information about itself and to shape ideas about the regional and international order. China is engaged in long-term ‘public opinion war’, in the words of the country’s Ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, and needs to plan for the long term much as Mao Zedong planned for ‘protracted war’ to secure power in China.²⁴ Nadège Rolland at the National Bureau of Asian Research has plotted the long-standing information stratagem the party has put in place to shape the way people think and talk about it. Rolland draws attention to the weight placed on ‘discourse power’ in party thinking, ‘the ability to exert influence over the formulations and ideas that underpin the international order’.²⁵

Reading Xi Jinping’s pronouncements to his cadres, it is difficult to see how China could possibly emerge the winner from such an information war. He calls time and again for ‘consolidating the guiding position of Marxism in the ideological arena and consolidating a common ideological basis for the united struggle of the entire party, the entire country and all the people’.²⁶ Put this way, China has already lost the information battle.

And yet, out in the wider world, China’s story is told in plain language by highly placed foreigners. Across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Beijing outsources its communications and messaging to local elites and retired government figures who are feted on orchestrated tours of China, offered handsome retainers, and encouraged on their return to reproduce its propaganda messages in their own patois, through their own media platforms, in their own countries.²⁷ In China the party can get away with ‘consolidating the guiding position of Marxism in the ideological arena’, but outside the country it draws on foreign journalists, business leaders and retired political figures to tread lightly around Marxism-Leninism and ‘tell China stories well’ (jianghao zhongguo gushi).

This strategy works. In schools and universities around the world, thousands of centres funded directly through China’s propaganda and education system tell the party’s stories in local idiom to all who care to listen. Hollywood directors frame their sets and censor their plots to comply with Beijing’s wishes. Senior political figures, business leaders and retired officials and political leaders not only talk up China’s achievements but attribute them to the Communist Party government.²⁸

In its domestic communications, the party is able to depend on a wide familiarity with party-speak on the part of China’s citizens.

Internationally, it has identified key terms that match or dovetail with an established international vocabulary used in talking about the contemporary world and its recent past. These terms include ‘strategic trust’ and China’s ‘leadership for the world’, freely used by retired Australian officials and political leaders. Foreign elites who utter these favoured party expressions are active participants in Xi Jinping’s forward-leaning effort to reshape the norms and power dynamics of the international system by furnishing ideas and phrases that advance its cause abroad. Often the speaker might not even notice that they are using terms invented for them in Beijing.²⁹

Welcome, we might say, to the mad bad world of competitive advertising and strategic communications. What is new? Australian media engage every day of the week in civil wars of their own across rival networks, platforms and mastheads, with competing media personalities, political factions, business interests, social groups and irate citizens all vying for public attention. Yet battles of this kind, characteristic of a competitive free press, are not what the party has in mind when it speaks of ‘discourse power’. It is intent, rather, on ensuring that no rival discourse can flourish. Hence its furious responses to foreign media reports in which it catches, as in a mirror, a much less pleasing sight of itself than offered by China Daily or Global Times. Accustomed as they are to the unilateral and unrivalled exercise of power, party leaders find it difficult to accommodate alternative views that reflect poorly on themselves.

A need to project a particular image of itself for consumption at home, and impact abroad, has dictated mass investment in information technology that gives the party powers of communication, surveillance and coercion that are without parallel in the world.³⁰ The stories the party tells about itself are manufactured on an industrial scale and distributed under a national propaganda strategy designed to ensure that party cadres tell them with straight faces and without fear of challenge. During the Reform Era, both before and after the Tiananmen massacre, occasional cracks in the edifice of party control allowed scholars and experts to air divergent views on subjects ranging from the legacy of Mao to civil society and economic liberalism. In the New Era, that has ceased to be the case. Dissenting voices have not disappeared from the face of China, but they are more likely to be inside than outside of prison.³¹

Domestically, the most important feature of China’s propaganda apparatus is not what it says or persuades others to believe but its capacity to control and suppress what subjects of the regime know and what they can say and write in public. People go to their graves bitter in the knowledge that the truth will never emerge because