The Coercive Control Party
August 31, 2021
DOMINATING the conversation in China in recent days is a sinister ultra-nationalist commentary circulated by social media, saying that the country’s recent crackdowns on celebrity culture and whatnot reflect a profound political “transformation”, and that China no longer needs foreigners to worship or “sissy celebrities” to fawn over on TV.
This is a “return to the essence of socialism,” says the vituperative author, who goes by the name of Li Guangman.
It is also a reflection of the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing Gleichschaltung.
This latest power surge from the Party, and its efforts to infiltrate and dominate every aspect of society and culture, could also be a sign of insecurity. Imagine the Party as an abusive husband imposing “coercive control” on his wife for her own good, haunted by the persistent feeling that the ungrateful bitch would piss off and shack up with someone else as soon as the chains are removed.
All governments want our consent and our money, but this one wants our hearts and minds as well. Cracking down on online celebrity culture, that most trivial and inadvertent challenge to its monopoly on public attention, might not be the most effective way of making the country learn to fall in love with Xi Jinping Thought. Thus, it is now launching a new indoctrination campaign against innocent schoolchildren.
According to a government notice, primary school teachers are now instructed to “plant the seeds of loving the Party, the country, and socialism” in the poor little blighters, who have already been banned from playing their online games for more than three hours a week.
In every public document and nearly every news report these days, there are dozens of references to Xi’s important “thought” and “guidance” and “instructions”. We are led to believe that there is simply no end to his virtuosity in every single field of expertise. Somehow, the collective wisdom of an extraordinarily complex, economically multifarious and culturally diverse nation of around 1.4 billion people has manifested itself in a portly 68-year old who missed a vital part of his education because of the Cultural Revolution.
Are there any counterveiling pressures on Xi? Does Xi personally buy into his own genius, or does he understand that “Xi” is merely a symbol of the might of the Chinese Communist Party? In either case, the contempt for truth and the free flow of ideas is utterly repulsive.
There is something that needs to be said about the corrupting influence of absolute power on the sanity of our rulers: it seems clear that you already have to be mad to seek power, and the acquisition of power adds its own supplemental madness into the mix. And the relationship between power and madness is exponential: the more you have, the more the madness multiplies.
As Aung San Suu Kyi once said, it isn’t power that corrupts, but the fear of losing it.
As Douglas Adams once said, “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
Will China’s Gleichschaltung work? I am reminded of an essay by Umberto Eco where he noted that one of the most culturally and politically conservative education systems in history - Catholic Italy in the 1950s - somehow produced a generation of Red Brigade revolutionaries who ended up abducting and assassinating Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Any good semiologist knows that it isn’t the content of the message that matters, but how you interpret it.
